Dinner with the Family
I sat in my car outside the Greyson residence. The usual atrocious periwinkle blue color of the house was nowhere to be seen. Richard had hired some painters to put on a new coat of a different color. He chose peach, which wasn’t great, but significantly easier on the eyes.
After turning off my engine and removing the keys, I got out of my car. I walked across the lawn to the front door. Without a knock or doorbell ring, I let myself in. It was unlocked.
There was a lot of activity in the kitchen. I could hear Sam and Richard talking, or rather arguing. Both of their voices were raised. I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
I quietly hid behind the wall by the entrance of the kitchen. Neither of them noticed my presence. There was something about the tone of their arguing that piqued my curiosity. It wasn’t unusual for them to come into conflict with each other, but never before had I heard it so intense.
“Then explain it to me! You must have a good reason, or an excuse.” Sam was on the offensive. “Tell me that it was Pritchard who made these calls. Tell me it’s all a mistake. Jesus, tell me anything. But don’t stand there and try and deny the obvious. Do not insult my intelligence!”
“What’s going on in here?” I asked, as I purposefully interrupted their argument. Both of them were surprised to see me.
“Hey, Riley. I’m just telling this bonehead that if he doesn’t turn the temperature down, he’s gonna burn the potatoes.” Richard was referring to the pan full of sliced potato, garlic and small pieces of bacon. I could smell it as soon as I opened the front door. But it was a lie.
“I’m not gonna burn anything. Worry about your pork,” said Sam as he stirred the potatoes.
“There’s nothing to worry about. It’s in the slow cooker!”
“Well … then find something else to worry about and leave me alone.”
“So …” It was a little awkward in the kitchen. I figured I’d try to break it up a bit. “When are we going to eat?” That was all I could think of.
“In a couple of minutes,” replied Sam.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Yeah, honey, you could set the table,” requested Richard.
I felt like a teenager again. No matter how old you get, those older have a way of making you feel young. In their eyes, I guess you are. That form of rational thinking doesn’t change how annoying how it is and was. But I was in no mood to argue.
I wanted to leave Stone Harbor on a good note. Especially when I knew that when I told Richard, he’d act like he was happy for me. In reality he’d be a little hurt. But he had the right to know.
There was a part of Richard that wanted to see himself as my father. He wasn’t, though. I was, and still am, very grateful for everything he’d done for me. Richard took me in when I was desperate, abandoned. When I needed shelter, he gave it. When I needed food, he provided it. None of that changed the fact that I wasn’t his flesh and blood. I wasn’t his daughter.
I went into one of the cupboards and got out a small stack of plates, three to be exact. They went on top of the kitchen table, one at the head and then the two remainders were placed on either side. Then I went back to the kitchen to get the silverware.
Sam and Richard were finishing up. Richard was breaking up the pork with a large serving fork on top of a platter. The detective scooped the potatoes slices out of the pan and into a bowl. I made my way around both men to the drawer with the forks and knives.
“What are you guys having to drink?” I asked. Sam and Richard were already sitting at the table. I was going to get a bottle of water for myself. The polite thing to do was see if they wanted anything.
“A beer,” replied Sam.
“Better make that two,” added Richard.
When I returned to the table, we started to eat. Something seemed a little off. There was tension when I arrived, but that was petty arguing between father and son. Something thicker hung over the table. And most of it came from Sam. Why was he upset with Richard?
“Have you two gotten any closer to finding out who was behind all that mess you got into that last couple months?” asked Richard out of the blue.
Sam didn’t answer. He glanced up from his plate for a moment, then he kept on eating. So I answered the old man’s question.
“Maybe. I think we got a break.”
“Really, and what’s that?”
“Well, we went to go see Pastor Pritchard a couple of days ago.”
Richard appeared interested. And his questions matched the look on his face. “The pastor? It’s a tragedy what he became, what he is. He was always such a good man.” My adoptive father went a bit too far with his compliments. Why shower the pastor with praise? The man was a murderer and a liar.
“Yes, it’s horrible.”
“So, what did he have to say?”
“Not much.” I loaded my fork with a mix of potato and pork. “He told us nothing we didn’t know.”
I didn’t want to reveal too much. Richard’s sudden interest in what Pastor Pritchard may or may not have confessed was worrying. Dark thoughts entered my mind. There was a possibility that he knew something about the drug ring. After all, he was the second most powerful man in the Stone Harbor Police for thirty years. If Pritchard was telling the truth, two people in that very department were crooked. Until I figured out who, there would be no sharing of information with anyone other than Sam.
“Hmm.” Richard knew I was lying. He, too, was once a detective. But he didn’t push the subject. That, perhaps, was more telling than if he had. My adoptive father knew something. And I was too much of a coward to look into it any further.
As our meal drew to an end, I decided to tell Sam and Richard about my upcoming trip. I waited until it was almost time to clear the table. That was so I could escape with a full stomach in case things went sour.
“I’m going to be out of town for a few days, maybe a week.” I tried to say it as casually as possible.
Richard and Sam both looked up at me. Neither had seen that coming. Rarely did I ever venture outside of the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia. It was unusual.
“Where are you going?” asked Richard, as he leaned back in his chair in an attempt to relieve the pressure building in his belly.
“Yeah, Riley, where are you going?” asked Sam, with an added tone of anger. He had every right to be upset. I was leaving right when our most promising clue in busting the drug ring was revealed to us.
“I’m going to the address you gave me, Richard. I’m going to and try to find my dad.”
“You’re going to Richmond?” My words were like nails on a chalk board to Richard. He was a good man, though, and tried to fight how uncomfortable they made him. That was done by asking me the question.
“For starters. Then I’m going to see where the trail takes me.”
Sam didn’t say anything else. Instead, he got up from the table and went upstairs to the bathroom. I could tell he was mad at me. I just hoped he got over it quickly.
“You going alone?” asked Richard.
“Yes.”
“I suppose it needs to be that way.”
“It does.”
Richard got up. I could hear some creaking bones as he rose. The broken down former detective waddled over to me. Before I could get up, he leaned over and hugged me around the shoulders and collar. I returned his affection the best I could.
“I hope you find him,” said Richard as he embraced me. “I really do.” No, he did not hope I found my father. But it was nice to hear the white lie.
“Thank you. That means a lot.”
Richard stood up straight. He yawned. “Well, I’m going to turn in. Please call me in a couple days. Just so I can be sure that you’re all right. Can you do that for a worrying old man?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Okay then, be safe.” Richard slowly walked towards the staircase. As he went up, Sam came down.
I started to clea
n up. Sam helped me. Through the clearing of the dinner table, no words were spoken. It wasn’t until I prepared to wash the dishes in the sink that he talked.
“Do you really need to find him right now?” asked Sam. He was in the kitchen with me, putting away food.
“I’m sorry, are you saying I shouldn’t try and go find my father?”
“Of course not! I’m just wondering, why now? We are so close to breaking our case. I can feel it in my bones. One more month, one month, and it’ll be solved!” There was passion in Sam’s plea. It was heartfelt. And I knew he didn’t want me to go on not knowing where my father was. But it was more important to him to find out who was behind the drug ring. That, he could not hide.
“How can you be so sure?” I turned from the sink to face Sam. “We’ve been at this for several months. How can you be sure that we need only one more?”
“What Pastor Pritchard told us…”
“Was a dead end! We don’t even know if what he said was true.” I was pretty sure what Pritchard had said was true. But I was and still am the sort of person who would say anything to win an argument. I’m not proud of it.
“I looked into it, Riley.”
“What did you look into?”
“There has to be a link between Fresh Horizons and the drug ring in town, something beyond Prichard and the doctor, someone in charge. It took me a little while to figure it out. Then I remembered he number one rule for finding corruption”
Both Sam and I said in unison, “Follow the money!”
“How did you get access?” I suddenly found myself ignoring the dishes in the sink. Sam had my full attention.
“It wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to let anyone know what I was looking at, so I had to lie to Chief Owens. I told him that I wanted to look over Fresh Horizon’s financial records for Medicaid fraud.”
I raised one eye brow. “He believed you?”
“Apparently, he did. I got full access to all the records.”
“Don’t leave me hanging. What’d you find?” I asked.
“Did you know Jimmy worked for Fresh Horizons?”
“No, Amy never mentioned that. Neither did he.”
“Well, he did. I don’t know exactly what he did there, but he was well paid. In fact, he was suspiciously well paid. So I delved into his phone records.” In that moment, I really wished I was a cop, to be able to have access to those kinds of records. No case of mine would go unsolved. Sam continued. “He called Pastor Pritchard a couple of hours before we got to the Branch’s house. There were numerous calls to Dr. Janice Wen in and out of prison. And there was one more person he called and got called by on a regular basis.”
“Who?”
“I don’t want to speculate on who yet, but I will say where the calls came from. They came from right here, from this house.”
I heard Sam’s words, but I didn’t want to believe them. There were implications within them that I dared not even consider.
“Are you saying…?”
Sam cut me off. “I’m not saying my dad made those calls. But the Pastor and dad were good friends. I wouldn’t put it past that fake man of god prick to make those calls from here.”
“And if it wasn’t him?”
“In the highly unlikely case that my dad made those calls? We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Sunny View
I spent the night after having dinner at Richard’s house in mental turmoil. Sam had told me that someone had made calls from the house to Jimmy Alvarez. It brought up some terrible possibilities.
Maybe those calls were made by Pastor Pritchard. He was over at Richard’s house quite a bit. That was what I hoped. After all, he and my adoptive father were close. And he was always coming over. That would make sense, too, if the pastor wanted to cover his tracks.
If anyone pulled the pastor’s phone records, they’d find no connections. But if someone pulled up Richard’s phone records, suspicion would shift to him. It would’ve been a smart move. There was no solid proof that it was the case, though.
There was no sleep that night. I just laid in bed, staring at my ceiling fan. A couple of times, I got up and tried to distract myself, hoping that fatigue would catch up and put me to sleep.
My favorite distraction in the middle of the night could be found on my laptop. On that night, I went on the internet to find more information on the trailer park I was going to travel to when the sun rose.
Trailer parks often had pleasant names that betrayed their true nature. For example, I’d been to a trailer park that was in the middle of the woods and called, “Lakeview”. My personal favorite was a depressing little park near a garbage dump called, “Paradise Isle.”
The trailer park I was destined to visit was Sunny View. It had decent reviews online. There were no five star reviews, but a lot of solid threes. From pictures I saw, it looked nice enough. It was the kind of place that the old went to retire. If the reviews were to be believed, there was even a little pond, deep enough to swim in.
I also discovered some worrisome things about Sunny View. Crime statistics can be easily found online. Some of them are even presented on maps or in graphs. And around the trailer park, I saw a whole lot of red markers. Three stars or not, it was clearly not a safe place.
As I packed, I made sure to put a box of .38 caliber bullets in my bag. The accompanying revolver went in my purse. If the previous spring and fall had taught me anything, it was that I should always be prepared for the worst. Even if it meant killing again, I would be no victim.
When the sun rose, I found myself nervous. It wasn’t the type of nerves that one might have before giving a big speech or before they play in an important game. No, they were the type of nerves that came hand-in-hand with anticipation, not dread.
I waited ‘til the afternoon to begin my trip. When I tried to call the phone number associated with the address in Sunny view, I got no answer. So to increase my chances that someone would be there, I chose to go a little later in the day.
As I left, I had an uncomfortable feeling. It felt like someone was watching me. I had the same feeling months before when someone tried to run me off the road after leaving my office. Carol’s tip that someone was asking about me didn’t help.
When I looked around, I saw no one. There wasn’t a single person in the Briar Gardens parking lot. It was just me and a handful of empty cars.
Still feeling unsafe, but unable to do anything about it, I got in my car. My engine hiccupped a few times before starting. I turned on my GPS, and then I was off to find my father.
Richmond wasn’t too far. It was in the same state. Getting there was as easy as getting on Interstate 64 and heading northwest. It took about forty-five minutes to an hour to reach the city limits. And it took another ten to fifteen to find Sunny View.
In big, yellow letters against an orange background, I saw the sign for the trailer park. I almost passed it. It didn’t look like any kind of entrance. Instead, it looked more like a long driveway. Only one car would be able to go up or down it at a time. But it was freshly paved and unblemished.
I pulled into the Sunny View driveway. There was an open field that ended with what looked like an administration building and then a row of permanent trailers. They weren’t the variety that was on wheels. Whoever lived in them had put down stakes.
Before I could enter the trailer park proper, I had to pass a security gate. Like Fairfax County Prison, there was a booth with a guard. When I got close to it, the gate opened up. I took a glance inside the tiny structure next to it. Rather than a red-faced, heavily armed redneck, there was a pimple-faced teen on his phone, not paying attention to me.
There were rows and rows of trailer parks. Each had their own numbers. All of them were on little roads with “Lane” incorporated into the names.
I saw a lot of plastic flowers. Nearly every unit had at least a couple. They came in a variety of colors. Some were red, others were blue. All of them were ta
cky and unsightly.
Cheap lawn ornaments were also very popular in Sunny View. I saw a couple of gnomes. There were some flamingos. A couple of them even had those creepy fake dogs that, at a quick look, appear alive.
On wooden stoops, white plastic chairs and lawn furniture were the residents of Sunny View. People lived in trailer parks for one of a variety of reasons. The most common were those who simply couldn’t afford traditional housing. Another were those who wanted something different out of life, outsiders. Probably the smallest percentage were those who were on the run. Either the law, or worse, were after them.
I knew that the chances were that only a small percentage of people in Sunny View were criminals. That didn’t change the fact that I saw bad intentions in every stare that followed my car. And there were many stares. They saw me as a threat, a stranger, and a foreigner in their little country.
When I found the trailer I was looking for, there was an abandoned car out front. I’m not much of a car person, but it looked like an old Stingray to me. With all the rust and missing parts, it was hard to say for sure. Whoever lived inside the unit next to it must’ve been some kind of old sports car or muscle car fanatic. They must’ve been the type of person who would buy a 1978 Pontiac Trans Am.
As I parked my car across from the trailer, the front screen door creaked open. Out came a short, hairy and overweight Hispanic man. He had a tall can of cheap beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Paying me no mind, the man sat down on his front steps.
“Hello?” I asked as I got out of my car. I walked towards the hairy man on the porch.
“You talking to me?” asked the hairy man.
I looked around. Besides me and the hairy man, there was only one other person and that was a little girl on a pink bicycle.
“My name is Riley Reid,” I said as I got close. I held out my hand for the hairy man to shake. He wiped his appendage off on his stained wife beater, then shook mine.
“Marco, Marco Abreu. What can I help you with, Mrs. Reid?” The way he said “Mrs. Reid” was a little creepy. I think he was trying to see if I was married or available.
Jamie Garrett - Riley Reid 03 - Ends and Beginnings Page 3
