by David Drake
"No," Greg said. "The suit provides for my nutritional needs."
I headed for the kitchen. As the door into the rest of the gym was shutting and locking, I yelled, "Stay there, and you'll be fine. I'll be back in about an hour."
* * *
Louise Mason entered our lives in the second semester of our junior year of high school, a mid-year transfer whose father's business had brought her family from North Carolina to St. Pete for a three-year stint. Jim and I were in a lot of the same classes, and Louise was in every one we shared: AP math, AP English, third-year programming, marine biology, and creative writing. She was bit of a geek—barely over five feet tall, rail-thin, glasses, a tendency to laugh too loudly and too easily—but she had a brilliant smile and an always tangled mane of shoulder-length curly brown hair that drew your attention and made you smile every time you saw her bounce into a room. Every smart guy in the school noticed her and, if the hallway chatter was any indicator, wanted her.
Earlier that year, Jim had broken through the dating wall, and he was now going out regularly with a girl named Margie who was also in most of our shared classes. Margie befriended Louise, and I used that friendship as a way to meet and then, with Margie's nudging, ask Louise to join the three of us for dinner and a movie at the mall. To my surprise, Louise accepted.
In the course of the evening we discovered we had none of the usual things in common. She came from a rich Raleigh family and was determined to go back to North Carolina to college so she could be near them. My mother and I were poor, and I wanted to go to college somewhere else, anywhere else, that I could make a fresh start. Louise hated sports, and basketball and the gym provided the best moments of most of my days. She was an ovo-lacto vegetarian, and I loved red meat and ate it every chance I got.
A dumb comment of Jim's brought Louise and me to our first piece of common ground. We were sitting on benches outside the theater, people-watching while we waited for the previous film to end. A mother and father were taking turns pushing their young son, a kid who couldn't have been more than six or seven, along the main walkway of the mall. The boy was crying, but they kept pushing him. Every now and then his father would slap the back of his head and whisper angrily at him.
"Some people shouldn't have kids," Margie said.
We all nodded in agreement.
"We shouldn't allow them to have kids," Jim said.
"What do you mean?" Louise asked.
"Just what I said," Jim answered. "We should not allow people who aren't competent to have kids to breed. We should sterilize them."
Louise looked at him and shook her head. "Who's going to decide who's competent to have kids and who's not?" she said.
"I have to agree with Louise," I said. "I'm with you, Jim, in not wanting people like that to have kids, but I can only wish those people would make that choice. I sure don't want somebody else having that much control over anybody."
"Well, I do," Jim said. "I think the people who are smart enough should make the choice." He waved his arm to take in the four of us. "People like us."
"No way," I said. "I don't want that kind of power over anybody else, and I sure don't want other people having that kind of power over me. I'd be happy just being able to make my own decisions."
"Definitely," Louise said. "People have to make their own decisions, and as long as those decisions don't interfere with the rights of others, we have to respect them."
"I don't," Jim said. "I don't respect them at all. If they aren't going to be decent parents, we shouldn't let 'em breed. It's just that simple."
We all knew there was no point in arguing further, so we dropped the topic and moved on.
After the movie, I gave Louise a ride home. On the way we ended up talking about individual rights, the limits of personal freedom and responsibility, what we each thought good governments should do, and on and on. We kept talking in her living room, long into the night, and when our hands accidentally touched around two a.m., we held them tightly. I had never known how much power could come from one small hand until that moment. I was on fire, almost giddy from that small touch. Louise's mother came down and kicked me out a little while later.
Louise and I didn't kiss that night, but as I looked her in the eyes at the door, I knew one day we would. It took a whole month more for me to work up the courage, a month in which I found an excuse to sit alone with her for at least a few minutes almost every day. By the time we kissed, we knew we belonged together.
* * *
After my shower, I threw a few days' worth of clothes into my duffel bag, which by default I kept loaded with my toiletries kit, a specially encrypted cell phone, a leather indoor/outdoor basketball, and some workout clothes in a smaller gym bag that fit inside the duffel. I added some color printouts of photos of Jim the papers had run in the days right before the execution. Last to go in was an old favorite, an over-and-under, sawed-off Winchester shotgun I hoped I wouldn't need. R.C. was already gone. I gathered up Greg, and we headed out.
The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina had for decades been merging into a single population center, and today almost every major link between the cities showed the typical artifacts of modern American suburban sprawl: well-maintained roads, clumps of fast-food restaurants yelling for your attention, malls spaced so you were never far from one, and the occasional outlet stores claiming unheard-of bargains. Every such sprawl also has its darker arteries, where everything takes a step down and the businesses cater to the appetites that every such area inevitably both has and feels obliged to deny. The center of the run along the top of the triangle between Durham and Raleigh was one such route. Here you could still find car lots that would accept cash and forget to report the transaction, restaurants with truly cheap food for those brave enough to eat it, discount gas you'd put only in cars you didn't plan to keep long, check-cashing places with rates that would embarrass loan sharks and a shotgun always in sight behind the wire mesh, and older ranch homes set back from the road with neon signs noting they were open until two a.m. and offered all-girl companionship.
When we stopped at the first one, a white clapboard joint with no name I'd ever known and simply a red neon "Massage" sign out front, Greg asked, "Why are we stopping at this place?"
"What's the first thing a man will want when he gets out of jail?" I said.
"I do not know. We fed Peterson and provided him shelter."
"Have you ever dealt with large groups of males stuck with only males for long periods of time?"
"Of course," Greg said. "Sex. We failed to provide it. We take care of this appetite between engagements with the legions we use on other planets, but we failed to do so with Peterson."
"Exactly. Jim wouldn't want to show his face to anyone who might turn him in, but he would want to get laid."
Unfortunately, he hadn't been at the first place I tried, so we moved down the road to the next one. It was also a bust.
The third was an old brick ranch with a sputtering orange neon sign that showed an outline of a cat and the words "The Cat House" below it. Small ceramic cats filled the interior space between the windows and the blackout curtains behind them. A woman named Shirley ran the business for the Durham biker gang that controlled the low-rent half of the prostitution business in the area. I had done some work for her when she lived in a monstrosity of a house on a golf course in Cary with a husband who was a bigger monster than the house. R.C. and I had found their teenage daughter and returned her before we learned why she ran away. The next time they called us to find their daughter, we never called back. The time after that it was just the husband calling, and this time he was seeking Shirley. For her, not for him, we went looking and found her at Duke Medical, tubes down her throat to help her breathe while she healed from the repairs to her shattered cheekbones and broken nose. We never told him where she was, but we didn't have to; she went back on her own. When she grew old enough and damaged enough, he left her and she ended up here. Nothing new
about the story, but nothing good about it, either.
"How are you, Shirley?" I asked after they buzzed me in and she took me back to the office, a smoke-filled room where a TV always ran and the women dozed or doped between visitors.
"You know, Stark," she said. "Same old thing." She plopped into an overstuffed chair that had last been comfortable around the time I was born. She lit up a cigarette. "That Beemer you're driving tells me you haven't sunken low enough to be shopping here, so what can I do for you?"
I showed her the picture of Jim. "Has he been here in the last week or so?"
She didn't even look at it. "You know I don't care about stuff like that. They're all just men. The faces don't matter."
I walked to her and bent over her chair so I could whisper. With my right hand I held the picture in front of her face, and with my left I fanned out five hundreds. "I can afford to be generous here, Shirley. Have you seen this guy?"
She stared at the money longer than she looked at the picture, but she did finally look at it. "Yeah," she said as she grabbed the half of the bills not in my hand, "he was here."
I held onto my half as our hands touched. Her hand was cool and dry. "When?"
"A week ago today. He bought a couple of sessions, one with two girls. Generous." She looked up at me. "Like you, right?"
I let go of the bills and she quickly tucked them into a pocket in her grayish housedress. "Right," I said. "Now, I need one more thing."
"What's that?"
"I need to see your parking lot videos for that day." The bikers who ran the place didn't invest much in the girls or the building, but the steelwork over the doors and the surveillance gear that ringed the building and sat in some of the nearby trees were both solid. Their places were never successfully raided, because by the time the cops could get inside everyone was just watching dirty movies and talking.
"You know I'm not supposed to even look at those, Stark."
I held out five more hundreds. "I know. But I need to spend some time with those videos. I'll do it here so the disks never even need to leave the building."
She grabbed the money. "You know, Stark, with this and maybe a little more, I could get out of here, start over, maybe even find that daughter of mine again."
I knew it would never happen, but what the hell, Greg and his friends were paying. "Show me the videos, and I'll give you another grand when I'm done with them."
She nodded and took me back to the camera room. It had once been a nice-sized closet, but now it was so crowded with gear and supplies that my shoulders touched the shelves on either side when I sat in its lone chair. Shirley grabbed a box of disks off a shelf, rifled through them, and handed me one. She pointed to the only empty player. "Knock yourself out."
I started the disk and the little monitor above the player came to life with a soundless image of the rear parking area. I hit fast forward and watched long stretches of empty ground broken occasionally by cars speeding up and men jumping out of them and running out of this camera's view and to the rear door of the house. Finally, one of the men was Jim. I reversed and took it slowly until I had the moment when he drove up. I paused on the best shot of his vehicle coming down the drive. It was an old yellow panel truck, the paint doing a good enough job of covering whatever its sides had once said that I couldn't read the words but a bad enough job that I was sure there had been words. I moved the images forward slowly until I got a clear shot of the rear of the truck as Jim parked it and was getting out, then paused the image.
Jim had been careful, careful enough to throw off almost anyone who would be looking for him, but he was not so careful that I couldn't get what I wanted. Mud covered the license plate numbers, but not completely, so you couldn't read the numbers but the mud would still look like a legitimate accident should anyone stop him. Clearly visible, however, was the state name and symbol: Florida. I knew he would steal plates from where he wanted to be, because the theft would get reported here in North Carolina but take a while to find its way to the local cops, and in the meantime the vehicle would blend in where he was headed.
He was going home.
I ejected the disk and took it back to Shirley. I handed it to her with another ten hundreds sitting on top of it. "Thanks, Shirley."
She put the money into the pocket along with the earlier bills. "No problem, Stark."
I stopped in the doorway of the office as I was heading out. "You could get out, Shirley. You know that, don't you?"
"Yeah, I know. This might be what it takes."
I looked at her and knew that her head might know what she could do but that her spirit had never known, would never know. I didn't mind the money, though; I'd love to be wrong, to see a miracle one day. "Sure thing, Shirley."
Out in the car I called R.C. He picked up on the first ring but said nothing; had he spoken, I would have known something was wrong. I told him to look for warehouse rentals in St. Pete and gave him the description of the truck.
"What is St. Pete?" Greg asked.
"A city in Florida," I said. "Where Jim and I grew up. Where I believe Jim is now. And, where we're going."
* * *
Louise and I were in the second to last month of our senior year at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill when we got the news about Jim's parents. Jim and I had kept in touch by e-mail since he went to Florida State and I followed Louise to UNC, but we had visited rarely. Louise was staying over at my apartment—she wasn't willing to upset her parents by actually living with me—so we were both caught off-guard when he showed up at my place.
When I let him in, Jim collapsed onto some pillows on the floor in my small living room. "Have you heard?" he said.
I looked at Louise to see if she knew something I didn't, but she shook her head. She still had the same mass of hair I'd noticed in high school, and I still loved the way it danced when she shook her head.
"No," I said. "Heard what?"
"My Mom and Dad are dead," Jim said.
I knelt down beside him. "What happened?"
He wouldn't look at me. He just kept staring straight ahead. "The funeral was this morning, and then I drove all day to get here. I didn't want to be there anymore."
"What happened, Jim?" I asked again.
He finally looked at me. "I was in Tallahassee when the police there found me. They pulled me out of class. I thought I was in trouble, but I couldn't figure out for what. Other than spending too much after-hours time with the 'scope and the other lab gear messing around with my own nano-machine projects, I couldn't think of anything I'd done even remotely wrong." He looked away again, off into the space in front of him.
Louise moved to his other side and reached to touch him, but I shook my head no and she backed off.
"As near as they can tell, he beat her to death, Matt." He balled his hands and hit the sides of his head a couple of times. "He hit her too hard or too many times or something—I don't know—but something broke inside her. They might have been able to save her if he'd just called for help, but the jerk shot himself first. One bullet from a pistol right through the brain; he got that right." He looked at me. "No one called the police for days. I was at school, Matt. If I'd been home I could have stopped him, or at least gotten her to a doctor. I could have saved her."
"You can't blame yourself for that, Jim," I said. "There's no way you could have known to pick that particular time to drive all the way home from Tallahassee. No way. He did it, and it's his fault."
Matt stood. "Yeah, right!" he yelled. "I couldn't have known that he was going to beat her to death that particular day. But what I could have known is that it was going to happen someday, that he was going to go too far one day and kill her! I could have taken him out first. I could have, and I should have."
"No, Jim, you shouldn't have. That would have been murder, and that would have been wrong."
