by Giles Blunt
“Nope. Haven’t had one of those in years, and I don’t want one. Boys are just too … too everything. Personally, I find females a lot easier to take. Which is why I’m a total lesbian.”
“Get outta here,” Owen said. “You are not.”
“How the hell would you know?” A sudden deep furrow between her eyebrows hinted at an as yet unexpressed temper.
“Because there’s nothing about you that says lesbian. Everything about you says guys, guys, guys.”
“Oh, really. Here you are driving across country in a trailer with an old man who’s not your father, you want to be onstage, and you’ve got no girlfriend. Do you ever have just the tiniest suspicion that you might be gay?”
“No, actually, I don’t.”
“Uh-huh. And tell me how exactly it is you know you’re not gay?”
“Very simple.” Owen sat up straight and looked out at the highway. He cleared his throat, thinking how best to put this. Finally he said, “I know I’m not gay, Sabrina, and I’ll tell you exactly why: if you were to disappear right now, this instant-if I was to never see you again for the rest of my life, never hear from you, never again have any contact with you whatsoever-no matter how many girls-women-I might meet and be friends with over the years, no matter how pretty they might be, how smart or how sexy, I will never, ever forget how you look in that red tank top right now.”
Sabrina looked down and shook her head slowly from side to side, but Owen could see the dimple of a smile in her cheek.
“I’m not exaggerating, Sabrina. You and your red tank top are in my head for all eternity.”
“And that’s how you know you’re not gay.”
“That’s how I know I’m not gay.”
“Well,” Sabrina said, “despite how I may or may not look to you, I personally find women a whole lot more attractive than men. Men are such lunks, so completely insensitive. All they want to do is drink beer and watch sports. And let me tell you, despite what the movies might have you believe, they are perfectly terrible in bed.”
“And how’d old Preacher Bill take the lesbian news? Bible-thumpers aren’t usually too forgiving when it comes to loving your gay neighbour.”
“I never discussed my sexual preferences with Bill.”
“Good choice. Not worth getting stoned to death.”
“The reason I didn’t tell him was because he was so obsessed with me, and obsession just gets worse the more obstacles you put in the way-or didn’t you ever notice that?”
“I have to tell you the honest truth,” he said.
“What’s the honest truth, Owen?”
“I’ve always had a real soft spot for lesbians.”
“Yes, sir,” Sabrina said. “I bet you have.”
Bill Bullard stood in the dining room of his compact little bungalow and read the note for the fourteenth time.Dear Bill,I’m sorry to leave you like this, especially with such a nasty bump on your head, but it’s time for me to go. You’ve been kind, but you’re just too nuts about me, too nuts in general, and too fond of hitting people.Please don’t try to find me. Let’s just remember the good times, okay?I wish you nothing but the best,Sabrina
Bill set the note down on the dining room table. He was a security man, for Pete’s sake, he carried a gun, he was good at hitting people, he used to be a cop. In short, he wasn’t supposed to cry. But he wanted to, he wanted to bawl like a baby. He rubbed a hand over his scalp and felt the gauze taped around his skull. In the mirror he didn’t look as bad as he felt. The bandage sat at an almost jaunty angle, and it made his eyes look bigger and more sensitive. Noble even. The total effect was kind of war veteran, though he had never been in the armed forces.
Feeling dizzy, he went over to his blue leather couch and lay down, the TV remote digging into his back until he pulled it out and tossed it onto a matching blue leather armchair. His head throbbed and a wave of nausea travelled up to his throat; the room, blue and white as a china plate, spun around him until the white bits stretched and thinned into cirrus. Lying on his back provided no comfort. He turned, ever so slowly, onto his side and curled up with his hands pressed between his knees like a child.
That reminded him to pray. He hoped that Jesus would forgive his not getting onto his knees in his current state. He wanted to avoid the likely blasphemy of vomiting in mid-prayer.
“Oh, Jesus, who suffered for my sins and the sins of mankind and who bought with your blood our everlasting redemption and salvation, I beg you, please bring Sabrina back unto me. Please bring her back, and I will do anything, anything at all, you may see fit to demand of your lowliest, most miserable servant.”
Servant.
He was so tired of being a servant. Fifteen years a cop, five of those a detective with the LVPD, and he was still a servant. He’d been working for Baxter Secure Solutions for four years now, making hardly more than half what he had earned as a detective. Between alimony and child support for kids he got to see twice a year, his financial future filled him with dread.
His plan had been to stay a cop for twenty years, then take his pension and open a private business-possibly as a PI, possibly in security-and hire a bunch of guys to do the actual dirty work. But the chief and the mayor had apparently had different plans for him. They didn’t like his methods, even though his methods got results-great results, in fact.
There is an essential truth about working Robbery: you can’t be a nice guy. Nice guyism is a definite no-no. You work Robbery, you’re trucking with scum from daybreak to nightfall. Yes, there are victims to deal with, and yes, they are upset, but once you’ve extracted descriptions of the stolen items and ruled out insurance fraud, an investigator doesn’t have a lot to do with the victims. In Homicide you have to hold hands, you have to walk on eggs, you have to be half social worker. Not in Robbery.
Bill Bullard modelled his detective work after the foreign policy of the presidents he loved, Reagan, Bush I and the much-misunderstood, much-maligned George Bush II. You are merciless with your enemies, generous to your allies, and if you have to befriend a bad guy to get a worse guy, you do it. And so he had developed a stable of very dependable, very helpful hard cases as his CIs. You didn’t want to have dinner with them, you didn’t necessarily want them in your home, but you did want them on your side when it came to catching bigger fish. That entailed ignoring a lot of crimes not directly relevant to your investigation. You don’t nail the guy for what you have on him-you get him to give you information on other, badder asses, guys on whom you had nothing, nada, zip.
Thus it was that Bill had cultivated certain relationships that in the cold light of civilian life looked pretty questionable. In the course of trying to bring down Sammy Gibbons-an evil bastard who had been running a team of kids who robbed patrons of ATMs-he had relied on one Artie Doyle, known as Conan, who had a history of rape, robbery and aggravated assault. When it came out in court that he had let Conan get away with numerous frightening activities in order to bring down Gibbons, not only did the case against Gibbons go up in smoke, but Bill lost his job.
Five years later he still couldn’t believe it. Conan was not that bad an actor, not compared to Gibbons, but this is the justice system we are stuck with-a system that sees fit to dispense with the services of its finest investigators.
Oh, the blackness of the pit into which he tumbled after that! Looking back, it was amazing to Bill that he survived it. Then his wife had left him-for weeks he had stayed in his house with the shades pulled, hardly getting out of bed, barely able to eat. No one came knocking on his door to see if he was all right, and several guys from work wouldn’t even return his calls.
If daytime television had been any better, he might still be lying in bed to this day, but finally Oprah and Dr. Phil just drove him out of the house. He began to look for things to do, physical things, like painting his porch and repairing the picket fence that ran around the perimeter of his property.
But the fence was hardly worth painting, the way it kept til
ting closer and closer to the ground. The gate was totally unusable and had to remain open at all times as an additional prop. So he set about repairing the thing-a big mistake, since he’d never worked on a fence before and was unprepared for certain difficulties. Just removing the old fence posts proved a formidable task, involving the digging of holes even bigger than the concrete base of the posts. Then you had to haul them out of there.
The result was he had to dig all new postholes, and that proved all but impossible, the desert soil was so rocky. One day he was toiling away at this in ninety-degree heat, blinded by sweat and rage, when a cheerful voice said from behind, “Looks like you’ve got kind of a tough job there.”
Bill rubbed the sweat from his eyes and looked at the bleary image before him: a diminutive man in a short-sleeved shirt and necktie wearing the kind of glasses that had gone out of style sometime in the sixties.
“Ronnie Deist,” he said, pointing to the east. “I live half a block up.”
Bill introduced himself, leaning on his posthole digger.
“I could help you with that. I used to be a contractor and I still have the tools.”
“Oh, yeah? And how much would that cost?”
“Nothing,” Deist said. “I’m a neighbour. I’d be happy to help.”
“Well, if you know how to dig a posthole and set a fence, I could sure use you.”
First Deist told him where to rent a gas-powered posthole digger. Bill hadn’t even realized such things existed. When he got back from the rental place, Deist had returned dressed in serious contractor’s clothes and with a pickup full of tools. They spent the rest of that morning pulling out the old posts using the truck, and then Deist produced a picnic hamper packed with sandwiches and lemonade.
“Man, you come prepared, don’t you?” Bill said.
“Oh, that’s my wife. She’s one of those people who always makes sure other people eat. I’d probably forget lunch myself, or grab a McDonald’s or something. I’m not as smart as she is.”
Bill found he simultaneously really liked Deist and didn’t trust him. He was the most cheerfully self-denigrating person he had ever met. Also the most relentlessly happy. Deist whistled, he told dumb jokes, he commented on anything that passed by, always in a positive way. As they sat in the shade eating turkey sandwiches, he praised Bill’s choice of house and location, admired Bill’s strength in how he handled the posts. You couldn’t get him to say a bad word about anybody-the Congress, the mayor, you name it, he had a kind word for them all.
The mayor had just been convicted of influence peddling, and all Deist said was, “I’ve done things I’ve been ashamed of. I’m sure the mayor has done lots of good things, and he’ll find ways to do more.”
By the end of the afternoon the fence was fixed.
“Are you sure I can’t pay you something?” Bill said. “I’ve taken your whole day, and I now have a good-looking fence, thanks to you.”
“You don’t owe me a thing,” Deist said. He mopped at his brow delicately, and wiped sweat from his glasses. “I enjoyed working with you.”
“But why’d you do it?”
Deist shrugged. “It was quite selfish, actually. I knew it would be good for me.”
“I gotta say, you strike me as about the happiest guy I ever met, short of a retard or two.”
“I’ll try to take that as a compliment.”
“How do you do it? Are you on tranks or something?”
“No, no. It’s Jesus who makes me happy. Some years ago I put my life in the care of the Lord, and nothing but good has flowed to me from that decision.”
“You’re kidding. You’re born again?”
“I don’t use that expression myself-it has political overtones I’d rather not be associated with. But I am a Christian, yes. I believe that Jesus Christ was God made man, and I should model my life in all ways possible after him.”
“I don’t recall any fence-fixing in the Bible.”
“Jesus was kind. I try to be kind. But I didn’t come here to convert you, I just couldn’t stand to see a man wrestle with a fence post all alone on such a hot day.” Deist grinned. He had a sizable gap between his front teeth. “And now I better skedaddle or my wife will have my hide.”
Bill wiped his hand on his pants and put it out to shake. “Ronnie, I can’t thank you enough.”
“You’re welcome. I enjoyed it.”
“You’re weird, you know that, right?”
Deist smiled, flashing that gap again. “My wife says the same thing.” He climbed into his truck and backed out onto the street.
“Hey, Ronnie,” Bill called out. “Which church you go to?”
And that was how he’d turned his life around. He attended the local Baptist church that weekend, had himself dunked a couple of weeks later, and he had never wavered in his faith since. It didn’t take him long to realize that most born-again Christians were not as cheerful as Ronnie Deist. But they were solid people, they had a fallback position, they had a bedrock belief in God’s wisdom that could not be shaken, and once Bill introduced that belief into his own life, that life began to improve.
He got the job with Baxter Secure Solutions, he started taking night courses in computer security and forensics, and the Bible became his constant solace. Now that he knew there was a purpose to every little bit of suffering he had to go through, it became easier to endure. Being fired, being alone, well, God wanted him that way, obviously. Being fired was what had led him to God in the first place, and being alone was what left room in his heart for God to take up residence there.
And then He had brought him Sabrina. All right, it was not a conventional romance. A wedding date had never looked in the least likely. And physical comforts? Well, God didn’t want you to be plucking that particular fruit unless you were married, so clearly right now he wanted Bill Bullard celibate for reasons that might or might not become clear in time.
But poor Sabrina. That girl was so lost. She’d had such disadvantages. Raised by a criminal, for one-hard to imagine a bigger handicap than that. How could you develop a moral code when your old man was a professional thief?
They had met at work. Bill was covering the day shift at the Flamingo, and he’d caught her coming out of a twelfth-floor corner suite in a maid’s outfit. It was only a matter of luck, really. He’d been up on the floor because a female guest was complaining that one of her many suitcases had been stolen. It had taken Bill all of about five minutes to determine the real story. She had complained the previous day about elevator noise in her tenth-floor room, so they’d moved her. Somehow they missed a suitcase that had been tucked in the back of her closet, and it had remained behind in the other room.
As Bill was coming out of her room, he saw this very attractive maid emerging from the suite at the end of the hall. Bill happened to know that the twelfth floor had already been cleaned, so he went to ask her a thing or two.
“Sorry,” she’d said. “I’m new here.”
He’d then asked for her hotel ID, which was clipped to her belt. It turned out to belong to someone else entirely. The only thing she had in common with the photo was dark hair. He cuffed her right there in the hall while he looked through her maid’s cart.
“Well, if that don’t beat all,” he’d said, pulling two purses out of the cart. “You always wheel cash and valuables around in a cleaning trolley?”
“I have no idea how that stuff got in there,” she said.
He took her down in the freight elevator to the security office, sending his junior to go work the lobby. The normal routine was to get a name and take a photograph, and then call the police to send a car. A security man was essentially just a witness. She had told him her name-phony as it turned out-and he had taken the picture. He had even had his hand on the phone, ready to dial.
Then she said, “Please don’t call the cops.” Normally, of course, he would have ignored such a request. He had arrested more than a few women in his time on the force, most of whom broke
down in tears right away, and he had always found it easy to ignore. Some had hinted at the possibility of sexual favours in exchange for freedom, and he’d ignored that too. He booked them all. But that was before Jesus had come into his life.
Sabrina hadn’t burst into tears. She had just explained, pretty accurately, how things would go if she was arraigned on a break-and-enter charge: the bail, the trial, the last-minute guilty plea and-since this was a first offence-the suspended sentence. “I just don’t see it doing me or the owners of that property any good, do you?”
“And where in creation did you get the idea that I’m here to do you good, young lady?”
“I don’t know. Something in your face, I guess. Something tells me there’s more to you than your job.”
He knew, despite the evident sincerity in those green eyes, that this girl was fast-talking him, but somehow it didn’t matter. Las Vegas was full of beautiful women, and sex was readily available; it wasn’t that. Something about Sabrina got to him in a way that was new, and for the first time he sensed what Ronnie Deist called “the touch of the Lord’s guiding hand.” Bill Bullard was being called off the bench to help with the Lord’s game plan.
“If I were to let you go, there would be certain conditions,” he had said, amazed at himself even as the words left his lips.
“Such as?”
“Well, you’d have to come to church with me for one.”
“Are you serious?”
“And not just once. You’d have to come once a week for a couple of months.”
“That’s possible. I’m not saying I’ll do it yet. What else?”
“You’d have to let me help you.”
“What, you’re a priest now? A social worker?”
“No, I’m just a man who sees a person in trouble. You tell me you got no money and your landlord’s kicking you out end of the month. You’d have to let me help you find a job and a place to stay.”
“Okay, fine,” she said. “But if you think I’m going to sleep with you, you can dial the cops right now.”
