by Mike Knowles
Call me, Jones. It’s important.
Melissa’s voice instinctively sent Jones’ thumb to his contacts icon, but he paused before tapping the screen. She was probably calling to set up an appointment with a client; Jones didn’t want to lie to Melissa and he didn’t want to tell her the truth, so he decided on telling her nothing. He swiped up on the phone and put his thumb down on the play button. The music erupted from the speakers and made it impossible to do anything other than drive.
It was close to dinnertime when Jones got back to Toronto and parked up the block from Brew. Sheena and two other employees were behind the counter, working their asses off. The coffee place made all kinds of sandwiches, and, for some reason, waffles, and people were eagerly after both during the dinner rush. Jones waited for his turn and ordered a coffee and grilled cheese. He was hungry and figured the grilled cheese was the simplest thing he could order from the already swamped baristas.
After Sheena took the order, she said, “No time to talk.”
Jones said, “Sure,” and waited for his food. He took his order to a vacant stool along the window facing the street. He had expected bread and cheese; he got both, but they brought friends. The bread was as much seed as bread, and the cheese was not at all orange, or alone. Sheena had used Brie and had slipped apple slices under the bread before pressing it in a panini machine. Jones drank some of his coffee while he considered the sandwich. He decided he was too hungry to wait in line for something else, so he ventured a bite. Jones took a few seconds to decide he liked the different textures and flavours. He ate the sandwich fast, but took his time with the coffee while he waited out the dinner rush.
After about an hour of watching cars drive by, Jones looked at the reflection in the mirror and saw that the line was a quarter of its former size and there were now only two people working; Sheena was one of them. Jones got off the stool and deposited his plate and mug on the counter on his way to the washroom.
The bathroom was occupied and Jones could hear someone inside. The guy who opened the door smiled regretfully to Jones, but that was nowhere near enough of an apology for what he had left behind. The smell was earthy and rank and contained no traces of the air freshener left next to the sink. Jones closed the door and fogged the room with Lysol. The spray didn’t kill the smell, but it put up a fight. Jones put the can down and examined the door. His paint job had already been defaced with a swastika drawn in shaky ballpoint pen. Jones ignored the tag and pulled the Sharpie out of his pocket. The drive had given him time to think, and Norah had given him something he was happy to think about. He had a plan by the time he reached Kingston and supplies after he got into Toronto.
Jones moved to the left of the door and bent down to write his message over the spot Lauren had chosen for hers. In clear letters, Jones wrote: Lost kitten. Answers to Lauren. Under the message, he wrote his phone number and the words: Ask for Norah.
Jones took a step back and evaluated his work. His handwriting was nowhere near as fancy as Lauren’s, but it was easy to read and the right audience would understand the message. In the back seat of the Jeep were one hundred flyers with the same message and a tape gun he had bought at an office supply store. Jones figured he would start taping up posters in a widening circle around Brew. He would also stop into every bathroom he could find and leave a message behind for her. If Lauren was local, she’d see the flyers and make the call.
Jones finished up in the bathroom and found a line three deep waiting outside the door. He dodged the glares of what looked to have the makings of a lynch mob and found his stool still unoccupied. Sheena had taken the next seat and saved it for him.
“How’d you like the grilled cheese?”
“That was not grilled cheese,” Jones said.
“You didn’t like it?”
“It was good.”
Sheena smiled. “I hate it. I like mine with regular bread and orange cheese.” Jones noticed the familiar colour peeking out from under the bread on the plate in front of her.
She caught him looking. “Want half?”
Jones accepted the triangle. After he took a bite, he said, “I went there.”
“You drove to Cartwright?”
Jones answered with his head while he took another bite of the grilled cheese.
Sheena watched him chew for a second before she punched him in the arm. “So?” The punch was solid and she fed it with her hips. She had trained somewhere. The pain in his shoulder did not diminish the glorious taste of the sandwich.
“This is good,” he said.
“I used double cheese. Quit stalling and tell me what happened.”
Jones told her everything.
“She has a name,” Sheena said after Jones had finished. She was looking out the window, but she was seeing something else. “She’s out there and she has a name.” She looked at Jones. “What are we going to do? I mean there has to be, what—a few thousand Laurens in this city. It’s not like we can just walk around asking every short sixteen-year-old girl if her name is Lauren and if she ran away from Cartwright two years ago?”
Jones liked that she said we. “You’re not far off.”
He told her about the posters in the Jeep and the note he left in the bathroom.
Sheena did not seem impressed. “You’re going to put up flyers. That’s your plan?”
“You got a better one?”
“No, but I’m not a professional private detective. Flyers is the kind of thing a kid would do. I mean it’s not like she’s a dog.”
Jones laughed.
“What?”
“I said the same thing to someone yesterday.”
“So you agree with me.”
“The only move in this game is forward.”
Sheena, suddenly no longer interested in her sandwich, pushed her plate away. “Still seems stupid.”
17
Jones started outside Brew and worked his way away from the coffee shop along the busiest streets. He put the flyers on poles, bulletin boards, and walls; it took hours and by the time he had finished it was late. He went back for the Jeep and saw Sheena still working as he walked past Brew. Jones thought about going back in, but he didn’t want any more coffee and he wasn’t looking for a new friend. At best, he had only four days left with the ones he already had.
The late hour meant all the parking spaces near his place had been taken. Jones circled the block, looking for the scraps. He found a spot three blocks away in front of a vacant home that, if the neighbourhood gossip was true, had previously been rented by a group of college kids. Word on the street was the kids were paying their tuition by dealing prescription medication. They probably started small and sold off their extra Adderall one pill at a time. The kids either got too greedy or too sloppy because they soon got themselves evicted; their moving trucks were black and white and they were in the back seat. The house sat empty for months and eventually some of the neighbourhood kids took advantage and started sneaking in to have parties. Someone at the last party got careless with a cigarette butt and the drapes went up in flames. The fire department got there fast and they were able to put out the blaze before it got up the stairs. The house was left with all of its curb appeal intact and none of its contents.
Jones checked his phone before he got out of the car, opened the mail app, and saw Norah’s name. The email had four words and three attachments. Jones paused on the words Please bring her back before he scrolled down and saw Lauren for the first time. She was just a kid. The first picture was of Lauren at Christmas. She was holding up a stocking and it looked like she had just finished laughing about something. The second shot was from the summertime. Lauren’s dark hair was a little longer and the sun had made her skin a little darker, but she was still smiling. The last picture was taken while Lauren was on stage playing guitar in front of a small audience. Lauren was singing, and although she wasn’t sm
iling like she had been in the previous pictures, you could tell that she was happy on stage. It was a good picture.
When Jones turned onto his street, he heard a familiar sound coming from an open garage. He nodded at the group of men watching a game of cricket on an old television that had been set up next to the central vac.
“Hey, Kumail.”
Jones got a noncommittal nod from Kumail, his neighbour from three doors down, and nothing from the other four men standing around lawn chairs. The nod was unusual; usually Jones got an invite for a beer. Jones had agreed more often than he turned the man down, and he had a passable understanding of cricket to show for it. There was something else about the nod that was strange, and it took Jones a few seconds to pick up on it. Kumail hadn’t nodded—he had jerked his head to the right too much for it to be a nod. He had also said nothing back—a decision as calculated as the nod. Kumail had given him a warning, and Jones thanked him by taking it. He changed course and started across the street, aiming for the house that had not yet put up a fence and offered a path to the street behind it. Jones put a foot on the street and then he heard his name.
“Mr. Jones.”
He stopped and turned to see that the group watching the game in the garage had lost one member. The man who had said his name had been standing farther back from the street and Jones hadn’t seen him, until he stepped into the street light. His wrinkled suit set him apart from the other men in sweatshirts and identified him as a cop as well as any badge ever could. He took a swig from a beer bottle that was the same rich brown as his skin and pointed the neck toward Jones. “You’re a hard man to get a hold of.”
“Do I know you?”
“Not yet.”
Jones glanced over the cop’s shoulder, and saw Kumail watching them out of the corner of his eye. “I thought there was a rule about drinking on the job.”
The cop considered the beer before taking a swig. “What tipped you off?”
“The suit.”
The cop looked over his shoulder and Kumail quickly turned his head toward the TV. “You sure it wasn’t Mr. Haddad?”
“I don’t follow.”
The cop smiled. “Really? You were just crossing the street so you could appreciate your house from the other side of the road?”
Jones jutted his chin toward the end of the street. “Just realized that I was out of milk and thought I would walk over to the corner store , Officer—”
“Detective. Detective Scopes.” The cop’s age was hard to pin down. His thin body didn’t have enough flesh to spare for wrinkles and there was no sign of grey creeping into his hairline. Jones thought about the number of years it would take a decent cop to make detective and came up with mid-forties.
Scopes didn’t mind Jones looking him over; he was doing the same. He finished a second behind, but he spoke first. “I hear you were in the army. I guess this is where I thank you for your service.”
It wasn’t a question, so Jones didn’t answer. It didn’t matter because Scopes wasn’t waiting for one.
“I looked you up, but the records were vague about the details. Purposefully vague, if you know what I mean. Like most police departments, we have some ex-military on the job, so I ran what I found by them. Some of them thought maybe you got into some trouble. A few others went the other way. They thought you might have been some kind of badass.” Scopes tilted his head to the right and glanced down. “So which is it?”
“Bit of both,” Jones said.
“That how you lost the appendage?”
If Scopes was trying to rattle Jones, it wasn’t working. “I didn’t lose it. I know exactly where it is.”
Scopes barked out a laugh that drew stares from everyone in the garage. “And where is that?”
“Iraq.”
Scopes took another drink and changed the subject. “Did you know that you are the first PI I have ever met? Twenty-five years on the job and I have never met one. That’s saying something. I met a Nobel Prize winner once, but not a PI. Do you know what a Nobel Prize is?”
Jones didn’t have time to answer.
“It’s this big award. This guy, he won for science, but you can win them for all kinds of things. They give out six a year. Just six, and I met a guy who got one of those before I met a PI.”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
Scopes smiled again and Jones saw white teeth that were just a bit crooked. “What?”
“Meeting.”
“Have we met before?” Scopes asked.
“No,” Jones said.
“Then I guess that is exactly what this is.”
“Feels more like playing,” Jones said.
“Playing what?”
“Good cop,” Jones said.
“For that, I’d need a partner to be bad cop.”
“A cop can pull off both if he knows what he’s doing,” Jones said.
Scopes rubbed his chin with his free hand. Jones could hear the stubble scrape against his palm. “I wanted to be a PI when I was a kid, but then when I got older I decided I wanted to be a real detective.” Scopes squinted at Jones again. “Did you ever want to be a real detective, Mr. Jones?”
And just like that Scopes was done with good cop. The change to bad cop didn’t scare Jones—he knew how things were going to end for him. What he didn’t know was how close he was to the credits. He was sure he could get the answer out of good cop, or bad cop, if he could just keep them talking.
“Sure,” Jones said. “I wanted to be Serpico.”
“That’s a movie detective. The real job is nothing like that. A real detective is busy every minute of the day.” Scopes tapped Jones’ chest with the lip of the bottle. “I mean it. You need a goddamn daytimer to make sure that you get everywhere you’re supposed to go. I don’t suppose it works like that for you.”
“Nope,” Jones said.
“That’s too bad. Because it’s your calendar that I’m interested in, so a daytimer would have been helpful.” Scopes smiled. “But you have the next best thing. You have a secretary. I bet she knows your schedule.”
“I don’t have a secretary, Detective. I employ a service to answers my calls and book meetings for me.”
“That sounds a lot like a secretary to me.”
“Someone calls her and she calls me. I take it from there.”
“Still sounds like a secretary.”
“’Fraid not.”
“I guess we will just have to rely on your memory. If you’re any kind of detective, you must have a decent memory.”
“Sure,” Jones said.
“Mind using that great memory to tell me where you were two days ago, between the hours of three p.m. and seven p.m.?”
“Meeting with a client,” Jones said.
“The whole time?”
“No. Some of it was spent driving there and some driving back.”
“Can I get the name of this client?”
“That’s not the way it works,” Jones said.
Scopes smiled again, but it was all teeth. “I’m sorry. Like I said, you’re the first PI I ever met, so I’m not exactly familiar with the way it works. The way it works for me is I ask questions and people give me answers. You know what I do with those?”
Jones lifted an eyebrow.
Scopes lifted his arms and turned his palms to the night sky. “I weigh those answers,” he lifted his right hand, “against a big pile of bullshit.” He shook the left hand and mimed holding an incredible weight. “Whenever one of those answers sends that bullshit up in the air, I ask more questions in a room down at the station.”
“I didn’t give you an answer.”
Scopes let his hands drop and stepped in closer to Jones. “What’s that now?”
Jones could smell beer on the cop’s hot breath and sweat on his clothes. Jones had
at least fifty pounds and five inches on the cop, yet Scopes somehow appeared menacing. Jones wasn’t put off by the proximity or authority—that cherry had been popped overseas by far more powerful men who answered to far fewer people. Besides, he didn’t think Scopes would take a swing at him in the middle of the street in front of a garage full of witnesses. That would be stupid, and Scopes didn’t seem stupid. Jones also didn’t think Scopes had any plans to bring him in, not tonight anyway. If he wanted to make an arrest, he wouldn’t have come alone and he wouldn’t have accepted the beer. This was something else.
“Seriously, tell me that again.”
“I told you that wasn’t how things worked. That was not an answer to your question.”
“Let me ask you again then, and let me preface the question with the fact that I don’t give a shit how things work for a detective who has a business card instead of a badge. Two days ago, late afternoon, where were you?”
“Can’t say.”
Scopes stood chest to chest with Jones. “Can’t or won’t?”
“Won’t.”
Scopes smiled ugly again. “Another answer that isn’t really an answer at all. So, let me ask you a question that is most definitely a question. How did I find you so fast?” Scopes took a step back so he could watch Jones think about it. “Interesting question isn’t it? Got an answer?”
“No.”
Scopes showed Jones his crooked teeth. “Because you can’t give me one or because you won’t?”
“Can’t. I have no idea what this is about, Detective.”
Scopes drained what was left in the bottle. “Hard way it is, then, Mr. Jones. You won’t tell me where you were two days ago between the hours of three and seven. Fine. Where will you be tomorrow at one o’clock?”
“Not sure.”
