by George Wier
Hank hit the number and held the phone up to his ear.
“No,” Jennifer said. “Hit the speaker phone button. We want to hear who it is.”
“Oh.” Hank looked down at the phone and complied. After a few seconds the ringing sound of the other end of the phone line permeated the air.
“Sam!” a feminine voice exclaimed. “Where the hell are you?”
Hank looked at me quizzically. I leaned toward the phone in his hand and spoke. “This isn’t Sam. This is his friend Bill.”
“And Jennifer,” Jenn raised her voice.
“Yes,” I said. “And Jennifer. We’re awfully worried about Sam. We can’t find him but we found his phone.”
Nothing but silence, lasting about ten seconds.
“Hello?” Jennifer said.
“I’m here. Who are you people? Sam doesn’t have any friends. I never heard of a Bill or a Jennifer. I think I’m going to hang up now.”
Before I could speak, Jennifer blurted out, “Wait! I’m really worried about him. I’ve been trying to call him all week. I went by his condo but he’s been gone. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. Please, can you help me find him?”
Hank began fiddling with the phone as quickly as he could while we waited for her response. I had a hunch that what he was doing was of utmost importance. In the meantime, there is nothing like the pleading voice of an eight-year-old to get a grownup to cave on something. Ask any decent parent. There is always, at the very least, a moment of doubt.
“Hmm,” the woman audibly considered. “I promise you that I don’t know where he is. He’s about five days late with the...he’s five days late, and I’m afraid that’s far too late. They may be coming...I mean—” Then her voice began to change. In it I heard many things at once: doubt, anxiety, fear, and not a little exasperation. “Look, kid, I’m sorry but I don’t think I can help you. And right now, I’m the one who needs the help. Oh God, what am I thinking? I’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
“Ma’am,” I said. “Tell us where you are and we can come get you. We’ll make sure you’re safe.”
“No time,” she said. “I’m sorry. Goodbye.” She hung up. I noted then the interesting sound that follows when someone hangs up. It’s the sound of nothing at all.
CHAPTER THREE
“We know his real first name,” Jennifer said. “It’s Sam.”
I nodded. “You did that very well.”
“Thanks, daddy.”
“What’d you get?” I asked Hank.
“I’ve got her location. That is, until and unless she leaves.”
“Where is it?” Jennifer asked.
Hank looked up at her, then turned to me. “You’re not going to like this, either.”
*****
It wasn’t until we were on the highway out of town that I realized that Jennifer had brought Morgan Freeman with her. M.F. is her pet ferret, a little whirling dervish chockfull of devilment and keenly attuned to anything that will get under my skin, such as trying to climb up my pants leg while I’m driving down the road.
“What the—? Is that M.F.?”
“Oh, sorry dad.” She reached over toward my right leg as I brought it off the gas, and for a second I thought she was going to try to fish him out of there. Instead she snapped her fingers and squirrelly little Morgan thrust his little nails through my socks and did a lightning fast about face and ran first behind the gas pedal, then under the brake. I pulled over into the breakdown lane, still wincing. Two seconds later he was curled behind my neck, where Jennifer coaxed him to let go of my collar.
I checked my sideview mirror and eased back onto the highway.
“Just great,” I said.
From the back seat, Hank had to add in his two cents worth, “Easy, Bill. Little feller ain’t hurtin’ nothin’.”
“Let him climb up your leg sometime, then.”
Jennifer cooed to M.F., making the kind of unintelligible little sounds that only pet ferrets can understand. I did catch one thing, though: “He didn’t mean it, Morgy Porgy.”
Elysium, Texas, is approximately eighty miles due west of Austin. We made good time—a series of recent highway projects had widened the highway and added extra lanes until about the halfway point in the trip, but even through the rolling hills of the Edwards Escarpment the travelling was fine.
“We just lost cell phone reception,” Hank said after we passed the Highway 281 cutoff to Marble Falls.
I nodded.
“You mind turning on the radio?” Hank asked.
“No Johnny Cash, Mr. Sterling,” Jennifer said.
“Who said anything about Johnny Cash?”
“We know you,” she said, and looked up to me for approval. I nodded.
“I don’t care what you play. Riding with you two is like being on the dark side of the moon.”
For some reason this made Jennifer smile. I always did think she was more like me than she was Julie.
Just past the halfway point, with the soft and not unpleasant tones of country music wafting through my speakers, Jennifer stated, “I have a question for you that you can’t possibly answer.”
“Oh really? I gotta hear this.”
“Uh oh,” Hank said. “She’s setting you up.”
“Okay,” Jennifer said. “If guys are Saints and Sans, like St. Louis and St. Paul and San Antonio and San Fernando, and girls are Santas, like Santa Monica, Santa Fe, and Santa Barbara, then the actual Santa Claus was...what?”
“She’s got you!” Hank said.
“No she doesn’t,” I said. Then to Jennifer I said, “Santa Claus must have originally been a cross-dresser.”
“Bill!” Hank admonished me.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense, given what Jennifer just said.”
“Huh,” Jennifer stated. “I think it was a big fat lie made up by someone too stupid not to know the difference, that’s what I think.”
“And how old are you again?” I asked.
The conversation continued like that—segueing into various subjects and then safely back out again—and I learned to nod wisely, watch the road and do my job.
We rolled into Elysium. The traffic was slight, which wasn’t odd for a hot Saturday afternoon. We passed the town square and rolled over the narrow, steel-girdered suspension bridge over the Llano River with its blue lake to the west of us and the wide, rocky bed to the east. Past the river, the roadway dipped back down past antique shops and emporiums, the obligatory hamburger stand and a donut shop.
“I’ve got a good signal,” Hank said. “She hasn’t moved.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Slow down.”
I complied with a gentle tap on the brakes.
“Coming up on the left.”
I slowed us to a crawl.
“There. That hotel.”
“That’s not a hotel,” Jennifer said. “It’s a bed and breakfast.”
“She’s right, Hank,” I said. “Used to be closed. I didn’t know it had re-opened.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” he stated. “She’s in there. Pull in.”
I’d already begun making the turn. It’s the kind of thing that gets under my skin—being told to do something I was already going to do or planning to do. I bit my tongue.
“Good luck finding out what room she’s in,” I said. “These kinds of places protect their patrons’ privacy. Usually whoever runs the house can cut you down with a well-placed word.”
“I can cut with words, too,” Hank stated.
I pulled us into the most convenient parking slot to the front door, noting the absence of other vehicles about. “You’re sure they’re open?”
“I’m not sure of anything.”
“They’re open,” Jennifer said.
I looked down at her. “You and I are going to sit here and allow Mr. Sterling to go in there and make a complete donkey’s behind out of himself.”
“You say the silliest things, dad. Th
e word is ‘ass.’”
I considered this rather deliberately, and nodded.
“Be right back,” Hank said.
And he was. He wasn’t gone more than a few minutes when he came back out shaking his head.
“The owner says that their patron cleared out about an hour ago. She took everything except her cell phone, which is why mine says she’s still here.”
“Did you find out where she was going?” Jennifer asked before I could.
“The lady said that she didn’t know because she didn’t ask, but wouldn’t tell me if she had. She’s wondering whether the lady is gonna come back for her phone. And no, she wouldn’t let me see it.”
I smiled. “Well, it looks like a dead end here. I suppose we’ll have to head back home now.” I was looking at the front of the bed and breakfast in front of me, silently appraising how much it must have cost to restore the place. The last time Julie and I had come through, Julie had looked at the building and had said it was the kind of place she could fix-up and do something with. I had vetoed that thought out of hand, but not before having my own look. Suddenly my ears were burning, and it didn’t take long for me to realize why. Jennifer was glaring a hole into the side of my head.
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head and pursed her lips. Morgan Freeman climbed up her shirt and nuzzled around the back of her neck beneath her ponytail.
“Look, honey,” I said. “I know you want to find Todd—or Sam, or whatever his real name is—but this was a thin lead in the first place. The lady on the phone told us before we left Austin that she had no idea where he was, that there was some kind of danger and that he was late. The chances are that Todd—okay, Toddy—knew about the danger and did the smart thing and went somewhere where he couldn’t be found. And also, he’s probably protecting his friends—friends like his piano students—by not talking to them for awhile.”
“Weeks,” Jennifer said.
“Okay, weeks.”
“It’s three o’clock,” Hank said.
“So?”
“If you had just checked out of a bed and breakfast around two o’clock in the afternoon...what would that mean?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. That would mean that I paid for the room for that night in advance, and then later changed my mind, for some reason, and left. At a loss.”
“Yeah. What else?”
“Hell, how should I know?”
“What about something to eat, or supplies or something like that?”
“Maybe. Yeah, maybe I’d go for something like that. Do we start stalking shoppers at all the local marts?”
“Hold on. I’ll be right back,” he said, and got back out of the car.
“Great,” I said.
“Give him a chance, dad. He means well.”
“Okay, kiddo,” I said.
I watched Hank in my rearview mirror as he crossed the highway. There was what looked like a used bookstore over that way, with a broad plate-glass window lined with old books. I knew what the place would smell like inside just by looking at a reflection of the exterior.
Hank returned two minutes later, got in and closed the door behind him.
“One of those little electric cars,” he said. “The lady who runs the bookstore has seen it parked over here for the past two weeks. She looked up about an hour ago and it was gone.”
“So? How does that help us?” I asked.
“Hold on. Let me check my phone. I’m going to see if there’s a charging station in this one-horse town. I’ll bet there is. Those electric cars typically have a range of no more than about seventy or eighty miles. If she’s going to get out of town, she’s got to go top off with a good charge. That could take hours.”
“Way to go, Mr. Sterling!” Jennifer said.
She reached back and fist-bumped the old man. I looked in the rearview to see a huge grin painted across Hank’s face as he peered down into his phone.
“Hank,” I said. “Mr. Landry did pay you your fee in advance, right?”
He looked up and his eyes met mine in the rearview. He demurred comment, but instead returned his attention to his phone. To my way of thinking, no answer was the same as “no.”
Maybe Hank wanted his money, but I wasn’t so sure about that. Hank needed more money about as much as a rancher needs more gopher holes, so that wasn’t it.
I turned to look at Jennifer, who petted little M.F., and I suddenly knew the reason. It wasn’t about the money, about his client, or anything else. I suppose at that moment, I knew we would be going all the way with this thing, whatever it was.
The things old men will do for do for the benefit of little children. Myself included.
“I need to pee,” Jennifer said.
CHAPTER FOUR
The charging station was on the town square, less than a mile away. By the time we arrived, a small powder blue electric car was being loaded onto a wrecker.
I pulled us into a diagonal parking space close by, left the motor running and told Jennifer to stay put. Hank and I got out.
We approached the wrecker driver, a tall, thoroughly grungy fellow with what had once been a blue work shirt and pants, but which were now both a dingy gray. He had long, uncut hair and a goatee shot through with silver. I judged him to be in his early forties.
“Where’s the driver?” Hank asked.
The fellow kept one hand on the control knob that levered the flatbed trailer into place behind the cab of the truck, on top of which was the electric car. He gave us both a look, sort of shrugged with his eyes and hocked a free thumb back over his shoulder toward the courthouse.
“Huh?” I asked.
“She’s been arrested.”
“Any idea what for?” Hank asked.
“How should I know? I’m just the rotation wrecker. They tell me to hook-up and yank, that’s what I do.” His work coveralls bore the name “Harley” in stitched monogram.
“All right,” I said. “Was it the local police or the sheriff?”
“Sheriff’s deputy. The jail ain’t in the Courthouse anymore. It’s a block west of here.”
“Much obliged,” Hank said. “That where you’re taking it?”
“Yep.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Something about it being evidence. I’m not to let anyone so much as touch the car.”
I nodded.
We got back in the car and I backed us up and got us aimed at the Corinth County Criminal Justice complex, which at first blush, wasn’t. Complex, that is.
“Where is she?” Jennifer asked.
“She’s been arrested, honey,” I said.
“Can we go talk to her?”
“Maybe one of us can. I don’t know, but I’m going to try.”
“I still need to pee.”
“I’ll make sure you get the chance,” I said.
*****
All three of us went into the Criminal Justice Center. On the chance that my car wouldn’t be stolen from right outside the Sheriff’s Office, I left the engine running and the air conditioner going so that Morgan Freeman wouldn’t roast. Then again, anyone stealing a car with an insane ferret in it had whatever was coming to them.
Inside, it was far cooler. There wasn’t a whole lot of action going on, and the large lobby area was mostly wasted space. The three of us walked up to the one lit window. The glass was an inch thick, probably bullet-proofed. The truth of the matter is, there’s really no such thing as “bullet-proof” glass, there is only thickened or otherwise “reinforced” glass. This was a combination of both—an inch of transparent material, probably an admixture of silicone and high-impact plastic, and a hexagonal web-work of steel strands to keep it from caving in should someone like The Terminator attempt to pass through the thing blazing with special effects.
There was no one within view on the other side of the glass.
Hank reached out and rapped on the glass, about the time I pointed out the small buzzer button close by.
Someone heard, because a shadow moved across the far wall, which bore evidence of the ghosts of criminal justice past—a line of dark plaques bearing the black outlines of cowboy hatted figures; the Sheriffs of a bygone age. After a moment a woman appeared.
“Help you?” she asked. She was seventy if she was a day. She appeared stiff-backed, yet she appeared to flow into view. Her hair was a gray and her lipstick was hot pink, yet she wore a lime-green camisole around her shoulders and over her black shirt and pants, as if the place was perpetually too cold to suit her.
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “First of all, is there a restroom for my daughter?”
Jennifer waved to her.
The woman pointed. “That door over there. This is a new building and the signs go up tomorrow. But that’s the little girl’s room.”
“Thank you,” Jennifer said, then bolted to the door.
The woman smiled. “Now, what can I do for you gents?”
“I’d like to talk to either a deputy or the Sheriff about a missing persons case.”
Hank slapped me mildly on the arm.
“What?”
“The woman? The car?” he said.
“What are you two talking about?” the lady asked.
“Um...you’ll have to excuse me. My assistant can’t keep his mouth shut for two minutes.”
“This about the mayhem?”
“What mayhem?” Hank asked, pushing himself to the window close beside me. I tried to hold my position, but Hank, despite his age, is a force to be reckoned with.
“If it’s about the car that’s going through the parking lot right now...”
We turned to look and saw the cab of the wrecker disappear from view just outside the front doors, followed by the electric car, piggy-backed behind it.
“...then it's the mayhem case. I think Brand has this one. Gimme a minute.”
The woman flowed out of view again. She had likely been practicing that particular sashay since she was a teenager, the better part of a century. I looked down to see a nameplate on the desk, half obscured by some papers. It read “Gwendolyn.”
“Assistant?” Hank said. “That’ll be the day.”
“Hush up,” I said. “I’m better at this than you are.”
