by Lou Berney
Crowley dropped the woman off at her car, in the parking lot of the Double R Ranch. The lot was still almost full. Julianna guessed Crowley would park and go inside again for a drink. Instead he pulled back onto Reno and then caught I-44 at Tenth Street. He took it north, away from his house. Julianna followed. She had come this far, had she not?
Crowley broke off I-44 and onto the Lake Hefner Parkway. North. The shittier parts of northwest Oklahoma City fell away. The nicer parts rose up to meet them. Nichols Hills was just to the east. Quail Creek was farther north. Julianna lived in between, in the Village, not as ritzy as the other two neighborhoods but nice enough and well situated. There were parts of the Village that were nicer than others: Julianna’s house was on the border between two such parts. She felt a moment of irrational alarm when Crowley took the Britton Road exit—her exit—but then he turned left instead of right and headed toward the lake.
The lake. Why? Julianna had to be very careful now. It was almost midnight, and once they passed the cluster of restaurants at East Wharf, there were only a few cars on the dark lake road. She stayed far back, occasionally losing the truck’s lights and then picking them up again when the trees thinned. The landscape around the lake, a reservoir, had been flat and featureless when Julianna was a girl. But in recent years money had been spent, improvements had been made. There was a boathouse now, walking and jogging trails, lots of trees. At the right time of year, at the right time of day—sunset, when the water reflected back an even deeper, richer version of the sky—the lake could be beautiful. But the trees, at the moment, were a pain in Julianna’s ass.
Crowley stayed right at the fork and curled around the southern fringe of the lake. Julianna really didn’t know where he was going now. And then he was gone. She lost his lights and couldn’t find them again. She braked in the middle of the road—there were no cars behind her—and looked back. The only place Crowley could have turned off was Stars and Stripes Park. But the park entrance was gated after dark. Wasn’t it?
The road was too narrow to make a clean U-turn, and there wasn’t much of a shoulder to work with here. Julianna had to ease her car carefully up onto an incline bordered by heavy brush. She nosed against the brush, testing the give, then shifted into reverse when she’d created enough space.
Headlights snapped on—brights—right behind her. Crowley pulled his truck tight against the back bumper of her car, pinning her in. Julianna thought her heart was going to punch its way out of her chest. She opened her door and got out. Gnats churned in the blaze of Crowley’s brights. Julianna had to shield her eyes.
“Turn those off, please,” she called.
After a few seconds, Crowley killed his lights. The night went black again. There were no streetlamps out here, and the nearest house was a quarter of a mile away. Crowley had picked the perfect spot. The only light was the moon—half full or half empty, Julianna didn’t know which. The lake road here was so quiet, just the crickets and the wind, that she could hear the whistle of a train crossing Britton, miles away to the east.
Crowley climbed out of his truck and walked over, heavily, a boulder rolling slowly toward her. All night Julianna had been a spectator—now she was part of the scene. She had to keep herself from taking a step backward. Crowley stopped a few feet away and folded his arms over his chest.
“You been following me for how long?” he said. “Since at the bar?”
He moved to his left. She turned to keep him in front of her.
“I told you to leave me alone,” he said.
“I just want to talk to you.”
“Didn’t I?”
“You did.”
He moved to his left again and took a step closer.
“What you got there?” he said. He smiled a little. “Behind your back there. Pepper spray.”
She was holding her cell phone behind her back. She’d already dialed 911. All she had to do, if she needed to do it, was hit the SEND button.
“Yes,” she said.
“Bullshit.”
Another step to his left, another step toward her. He looked down at her. He smelled like the bar. Julianna supposed she did, too. Stale smoke and beer. But Crowley smelled of something else as well, sharp but faint, musky. Or maybe that was just Julianna’s imagination, since she knew what he’d been doing half an hour ago.
He saw the phone she was holding.
“They can’t track with a cell phone,” he said. “You gotta tell ’em where you’re at. Is that what you was gonna say? ‘Hurry, please, I’m out by the lake somewhere.’ ”
He was so close now that Julianna could feel the heat coming off him. She realized, too late, that he’d been shading left and turning her on purpose, so he could back her up against her car. She had nowhere to go now.
“I’m not scared of you,” Julianna said.
“I didn’t ask if you were.”
“I just want to talk to you.”
“Listen to me,” he said. “Listen to me good, now. Your sister?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what happened to her. I was in jail that night. How would I know what happened to her?”
“Before you were arrested,” Julianna said.
“That was . . . shit, almost thirty years ago. I told the police everything.”
“Everything?”
He studied her and then lifted a hand. Julianna flinched. Crowley smiled again. He brought his index finger close to her lips, as close as he could get without touching them.
“Shush, now,” he said.
Julianna saw the headlights before he did. The car came up behind him and then slowed to a stop. The passenger-side window slid down, and the driver, a man with glasses, leaned over.
“Y’all all right?” he said.
“Just fine,” Crowley said.
Julianna could see the driver peering at her, waiting for her to answer.
“Fine,” she said. “Thank you.”
The window slid up, the car pulled away. Crowley took a step backward. Realizing, maybe, that he hadn’t picked the perfect spot after all.
“I just want to talk to you,” she said. “Let me buy you a drink. Talk to me for five minutes and tell me anything you remember. Anything.”
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Crowley said. “You understand?”
Julianna shook her head. “No. I won’t.”
He turned and started walking back to his truck. “You’re a crazy bitch.”
“Please,” she said. She didn’t know what else to say. “Please. I know.”
He’d been about to swing himself up into the cab of the truck. After a second he reached into the cab and popped the brights back on. Julianna closed her eyes. She could feel the gnats churning around her.
“I can buy myself a drink,” Crowley said. He turned the headlights off.
“What do you want?” Julianna said.
“I told the police everything. So we’re clear on that. I told ’em way back when.”
“What do you want?”
“Can you cook?”
“Cook?” Julianna said, surprised.
“Turkey and stuffing. Cornbread stuffing. Mashed potatoes and gravy. I know it ain’t Thanksgiving yet.”
“You want me to make you dinner?”
“Way to a man’s heart,” he said. “I ain’t had a home-cooked meal since I don’t know when.”
Julianna tried to read him. A glimmer of pity? Weary resignation? Or had she just been turned again without realizing it, positioned right where he wanted her? It was laughable, how impossible it was to read Crowley. Julianna felt bad for the people over the years who’d tried to read her.
Another pair of headlights crawled up the lake road toward them. The driver slowed. Julianna waved him on.
“Tomorrow night,” Crow
ley said. “Tell me your address.”
Julianna knew that an evening of small bad decisions had led to the precipice of this monumentally terrible one. She no longer heard DeMars’s voice in her head. That voice had given up long ago.
“And pie,” Crowley said. He was watching to see which way she would break, enjoying the moment. “Whatever kind, so long as it’s sweet.”
Wyatt
CHAPTER 12
Candace had told Wyatt on the phone that someone broke into the Land Run during the night and turned it upside down. Wyatt realized, when he stepped inside and looked around, that she’d meant it literally.
Everything in the Land Run really had been turned upside down. Everything: the tables, the chairs and the barstools, the amps on the stage, the cash register, and the flat-screen TV. Each and every one of the framed show bills—there must have been fifty of them covering the walls—had been flipped. The pour spouts had been removed from the bottles behind the bar and the bottles balanced on their necks. Jars of olives and cocktail cherries, napkin holders. Even the cutout metal silhouettes on the restroom doors, a cowboy and a cowgirl, were now heels over head.
Candace came out from behind the bar with a mop. Wyatt saw that the floor back there beneath the rubber-tread mat was wet with spilled liquor. He could smell it now.
“Don’t step there!” she said.
“I’m standing still,” Wyatt pointed out.
“I don’t care. I just mopped there. You were getting ready to step.”
“You know me so well.”
The Land Run’s overhead lights and wall sconces hadn’t been turned on yet. The primary source of illumination was the skylight above—a shaft of early-morning peach and gold and dust that slanted down like a toppled Roman column. It fell on Candace and made the scene look like something from a Rembrandt. Well, if Rembrandt had ever painted a furious Thai-American woman with a pair of plastic butterflies holding her hair back.
“Do you believe me now?” she said. “Do you?”
“Did you call the police yet?” Wyatt said.
“Ha,” she said, just as a cop emerged from the back.
“Looks like somebody used a pry bar to jimmy your back door,” the cop said. “Between the door and the frame? Popped that sucker right open.”
“Really?” Candace said. “You sure?”
The cop either missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. He had the tranquil expression of a man this close to retirement.
“Anything stolen?” Wyatt asked Candace. “Damaged?”
Candace shook her head. “I told him already. I don’t keep cash here overnight. Nothing damaged unless you mean like three or four hundred bucks’ worth of booze spilled all over the floor. Unless you mean my time, which I don’t have enough of to start with, when I have to spend all day today turning those stupid posters right side up.”
The spilled booze, Wyatt considered, hadn’t been the point. The bottles wouldn’t balance unless the pour spouts were removed. The spilled booze was just a secondary consequence.
So what, Wyatt wondered, was the point? Steal nothing, destroy nothing. Just turn the place upside down.
The cop had walked over to the nearest wall and was looking up at the upside-down show bills.
“Might’ve been a buncha kids,” he said. “Fooling around? Who else’d do something like this? I never seen anything like it.”
Wyatt considered how long it must have taken somebody to turn all those show bills upside down. To flip all the barstools and chairs. To yank the pour spouts from two dozen bottles of booze. To unbolt the flat-screen TV from its brackets and then find a way to bolt it back in. To do a grid search afterward and make sure nothing that could be flipped had not been flipped.
Unless there had been more than one somebody. But even then.
“Seems like an awful lot of effort,” Wyatt said. “For a bunch of kids. When I was kid, Officer, and maybe your experience was the same, effort was the least of all possible temptations.”
“I’ll tell you what I think.” The cop turned back to them. “Get you a security system. Or a big old dog.”
“Ms. Kilkenny told you about the other incidents?” Wyatt said.
“Yes, of course I told him,” Candace said. “And stop calling me that.”
“She did,” the cop said. “About the birds and such.”
He kept a straight face, but the way people do when they want to make clear they’re keeping a straight face. Wyatt could feel Candace vibrating next to him at a frequency that was about to blow out the glass in the Art Deco skylight above them.
Wyatt didn’t think the cop was dumb. The cop, like everyone, was just keeping a finger on the pulse of his own self-interest. He had real crimes to solve, real criminals to catch, so he saw the evidence in front of him the way he wanted to see it. Humans, by nature, did this all the time. They wanted something, so they found reasons to support that desire. And then they convinced themselves that the reasons came first, that the reasons led to the desire and not the other way around.
Wyatt tried not to do that. He always tried to listen to the evidence, no matter how much he didn’t like what it was saying.
“I’m gonna go out to the car and write up the report, ma’am,” the cop told Candace. “You can send a copy to your insurance, and they’ll pay for any damages, after the deductible and all.”
“Wait,” Candace said. “What? Wait! Aren’t you going to check for, like . . . DNA or whatever?”
The cop did the thing with his face again, straight but not straight. He glanced at Wyatt to see if Wyatt was in on the joke.
“No, ma’am,” the cop said. “Not in this instance.”
Candace was about to have a stroke. “So that’s all?” she said. “A report?”
Wyatt set a hand lightly on her shoulder before she could say anything else. One way or another, the cop was walking out the door of the Land Run in the next thirty seconds. Wyatt figured he might as well walk out friendly, not pissed.
“Thanks very much, Officer,” Wyatt said. “We appreciate all your help.”
“You betcha,” the cop said. He appreciated being appreciated. Who didn’t?
After the cop left, Candace turned and punched Wyatt in the ribs with a small brown fist.
“All his help?” she said. “All his help?”
“DNA?” he said.
“I know. That was stupid.” She went back behind the bar and started mopping again. “You didn’t have to, like, grab me. I wasn’t going to go all batshit on him.”
“That wasn’t blindingly obvious to me.”
“So do you have any ideas yet? About who’s doing this to me?”
Wyatt told her what he’d found out about the new tax initiative.
“There’s a good chance the Land Run is going to be worth a lot more than it is now,” he said.
“I don’t care! I’m not selling!”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m just letting you know why Jeff Eddy wants to get his hands on it now.”
Candace wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. She flung the sweat away. “So that’s all?” she said. “All day yesterday, and that’s all you’ve found out?”
Wyatt really wished he didn’t like her as much as he did. If he didn’t like her as much as he did, he was pretty sure he’d already be back in Las Vegas by now.
He realized that Candace’s daughter, Lily, was up in the balcony again, pale and luminous in the shadows, watching him. He waved at her. After much deliberation she waved back. One finger only, though, the absolute bare-minimum requirement for a wave. And then she melted away.
“I’m going to check the door,” Wyatt said. He walked past the restrooms, down the short corridor to the back exit. He stepped outside and took a look at the door. Definitely jimmied. Wyatt saw where
the wood of the frame had been gouged and splintered. He used his thumb to measure. Maybe a pry bar, but maybe a tire iron. The distinction might matter. It might not.
He took a photo of the door with his phone and then looked out across the back parking lot. The eight-foot stockade fence ran the full length of the property line, from the street to the east all the way to Land Run’s next-door neighbor on the west, a boarded-up body shop. Wyatt doubted that whoever wanted to turn Candace’s life upside down had entered the back lot from the street side—it was too exposed, even late at night, with a streetlight only a few yards away.
One of Wyatt’s favorite quotes from college was from Flannery O’Connor. She said, or at least this is how Wyatt remembered it, that the writer should never be ashamed of staring—that there is nothing that does not require the writer’s attention.
Or the detective’s. So he stared. After a minute he noticed that one of the flat six-inch cedar planks in the stockade fence—the plank farthest to the west, flush against the wall of the body shop, seemed to be very slightly lower than the others.
Wyatt walked over. He reached up and gave the plank a shake. It came free. So did the one next to it. The nails that connected the planks to the horizontal rails, Wyatt saw, had been pried out, and the lower rail itself had been sawed away—the planks had been leaning against the upper rail.
Crouching, sucking in his breath, Wyatt squeezed through the opening that someone had made in the fence. On the other side, a narrow alley—not even an alley, really, just a dirt track—cut past the old warehouse directly behind the Land Run. The dirt track appeared to be freshly scuffed.
Wyatt thought about how the Land Run had been turned upside down. There was an element of humor to the delivery, but he suspected that the message itself was earnest. Whoever broke into the bar last night wanted to show Candace, literally and figuratively, how easy it was to turn her life upside down.
