This Is What I Want

by Craig Lancaster

  “What are they doing?” Gabe whispered.

  “Shhh. Let’s get closer. Stay with me.”

  “Omar, no.”

  “Yes.”

  Omar crawled on his hands and knees through the ditch, first alone, and then with Gabe trailing him. The residue from the recent burning clung to their hands and the smell of charcoal leavings filled their lungs. At the intersection with the alley, Omar popped his head up and took inventory of things. They were behind Rexford and his friends now, facing their backs, and considerably closer. Omar figured they could chance creeping up just a bit. He moved forward, low to the ground like a soldier climbing under the concertina wire, and he motioned for Gabe to fall in. They pressed up against the chain-link fence. Night had dropped fully in, and Omar wasn’t sure he could pinpoint the individual positions of Rexford and all his buddies. He’d managed to peg them all once he got a second look at the car—Rexford, Jimmy Nolan, Allan Terhune, Robert Sizemore. These guys were the heart of the football team, and the situation had quite the makings of a scandal if they were up to no good. Given the hour and where they were, Omar didn’t see how it could be otherwise.

  Rexford did the bulk of the talking.

  “He’s on the other side of the fence.”

  Terhune: “John, no.”

  Rexford: “Nobody will miss him. He’s a fucking yard dog.”

  Sizemore: “Don’t be a pussy, Allan.”

  Nolan: “I’ll get him.”

  Omar leaned into Gabe and whispered in his ear. “Go get somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Sakota. LaMer. They’re both down there. Just go.”

  Gabe quietly shuffled backward to the ditch, while Omar flattened himself on the ground, hidden by weeds. Unease spread through him like an advancing tide. He felt like he wanted to retch.

  Rexford retreated to the car and popped the trunk. He reached in and fished out four aluminum cans, which he passed around.

  “A little liquid courage, fellas.”

  Omar hunkered down. Truth was, he’d begun to feel the same kind of creeping fear Gabe must have sensed. He didn’t have much truck with these boys. He didn’t play football—hated everything about it, in fact, and had clear back to eighth grade when the coach looked at him and had visions of a star flanker—and that was these guys’ specialty. Rexford, Terhune, and Nolan were on the basketball team with Omar, but it was a different dynamic there. Omar was the unquestioned star of the team and had been elevated to a status where he rated his own story line. He’d developed the sense that the town’s interest in him—indeed, his teammates’ interest—lay only in whether he could deliver a state championship. If he did, he belonged. If he didn’t, he could go off to LA and never be heard from again, for all they cared.

  Terhune was talking again. “It’s somebody’s pet, man.”

  “So what?” Rexford said.

  Asshole, Omar threw in silently.

  “Stuff is getting insane. My dad said there was a fight downtown about the stupid Chihuahua.”

  “You really are a pussy, Allan.” Sizemore, again.

  “I’m not doing this.”

  “Gimme a P. Gimme a U. Gimme an S—”

  Terhune made like he was walking away, and he came right toward Omar there in the weeds. At the moment Omar decided he’d have to make his presence known, a pair of headlights swept over the other boys from the side. They dropped their beers.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Nolan said.

  Rexford grabbed him by the arm. “Relax. We haven’t done anything.”

  Officer Sakota stopped the cruiser and climbed out. Omar craned his neck to his left and found Gabe sitting in the front seat of the police car.

  “What are you boys doing?” Sakota said. He cast his flashlight beam on each of their faces.

  “Nothing, Officer,” Rexford said.

  Sakota pivoted the beam downward, picking up a glint off one of the beer cans. “You been drinking?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Looks like you have.”

  “Those aren’t ours, Officer,” Nolan tossed in. “Lots of people drink here, though.”

  “I see. So you’re not up to anything?”

  “No, sir,” Terhune said.

  “So you won’t mind moving along, will you?”

  “No, sir,” they all said.

  Omar kept his face down.

  “OK, move along,” Sakota said. “Don’t let me find you out here again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sakota ducked back into the cruiser and made a three-point turnaround, then waited for the other boys to get back in the Mustang and clear out. Once the lights and the noise receded and blackness fell again on Omar, he pushed himself up and ran like hell back toward downtown.

  THE CHIEF

  Adair was behind her desk, winnowing her e-mail, when Sakota came in.

  “Hey, Phil, listen to this.” She tugged her glasses down her nose until she had the right angle.

  Chief Underwood: We’ve had a look at the dog your man fished out of the river. We dug two .22-caliber bullets out of the carcass. Looks like we have a different problem. Will advise when we know more. Please pass on our condolences to the owner.

  “Somebody shot that dog, Phil.”

  She looked up. Sakota’s face looked as if he’d swallowed sour milk.

  “What?” she said.

  Sakota walked closer.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything about it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I was just up by the old Zelnov place—you know, up by the irrigation canal?”

  “Yeah,” Adair said.

  “I was making rounds through the neighborhood and Gabe Bowman comes running up, flagging me down,” he said. “He said there were some kids up there looking to steal a dog.”

  “Who? What kids?”

  “Wait a second,” Sakota said.

  “Where are they now?”

  “Adair, wait.” Sakota mopped his forehead with the back of his hand. “I went up there. They weren’t doing anything. I mean, I think they were drinking, but I couldn’t have cited them for anything. I just, you know, tried to throw a little scare into them and told them to clear out of there. Which they did.”

  “Who?” Adair said.

  Sakota spat out the names.

  Adair came around the desk. “So what’s this Bowman kid’s story? What was he doing up there?”

  “He said he was just sneaking around, you know, having some fun, and he overheard these kids talking about grabbing the dog.”

  “He was sneaking around alone?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “You believe that?” she asked.

  Sakota shrunk a bit at the question. “Well, shit, Adair, I didn’t really think about whether I believed it or not.”

  “Maybe he has something against these boys.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Bowman’s pretty well liked, from what I understand.”

  “You know,” Adair said, “I see him running around with Omar Smothers a good little bit.”

  “There wasn’t anybody up there but me, Bowman, and those four boys,” Sakota said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Adair paced the floor, looking for answers in the ceiling blocks. “I don’t have a good feeling about this. What about you?”

  “I’m sweating like a whore in church, Adair. You know I don’t feel good about it.”

  She liked the answer. On the general subject of Officer Sakota and his readiness to cop to fear and unease, she remained undecided. That could be a real liability for a police officer. But it made him a good, forthright person. She’d take that, for now.

  “I want to talk to that Rexford kid,” she said.

  Sakota shook his head as though he were tryi
ng to clear water from his ears. “No. Come on. On what basis?”

  Adair had to give him that one, although she suspected it fell more in the area of concern about who Rexford’s daddy was than it did her lack of probable cause.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll talk to Bowman.”

  Sakota exhaled in a short blast. “Well, good luck. He was pissed. I drove him home and he was all, ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have minded my own business.’ ”

  Adair sat across from Gabe Bowman in his basement. His mother and father stood in the doorway, observing. Adair ran her eyes along the walls, noting the Marvel Comics posters. In the corner, by the TV, sat three kinds of game consoles. On the other side of the room, an electric guitar stood lonely in its stand. The tools of exquisite distraction. At once, she felt all of her thirty-four years and the crushing quaintness of how she’d filled her own teenage hours with sports and visits to the public library.

  She’d already gone round and round with the boy. He’d said maybe he was mistaken, maybe he only thought he heard what he’d reported to Officer Sakota. She’d coaxed him, pressed at the soft spots of his story—“Are you sure you were alone, Gabe?”—but he’d held steady. Only once had he shown some indication of where his fear might lie. “You know, those guys saw me in the car. They know who turned them in.” That stung her. Dumb move by Sakota. He should have just sent Gabe on his way.

  “OK,” Adair said. “I’m going to let you get back to it. If you think of anything else, let me know, OK?”

  “Yeah, OK,” Gabe said.

  The Bowmans walked her upstairs to the front door. Fred stepped outside onto the porch with her.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think he’s scared.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think there’s probably not much more I can do than keep an eye on the Rexford kid.”

  “He’s holding something back,” Fred said. “But you have to understand. Gabe is a good kid—”

  “I don’t doubt that, Mr. Bowman.”

  “Let me finish. He’s a good kid, but he’s a little out of step here, and that’s hard in such a small place. There were almost three thousand kids at my high school. It was impersonal, yeah, but you could find your crowd. Gabe doesn’t really have a crowd. And there’s this other thing.”

  “He’s black,” she said.

  “Yeah. I’m not the kind of guy to hide behind that—can’t change it, wouldn’t want to, gotta deal with it. But I hear things. I see things. You can bet Gabe does, too.”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “If some kid is killing dogs, I hope you can stop him. I’m just saying that it’s asking too much of my son to help you. Understand?”

  Adair made the loops in town, looking for Rexford and his hot new Mustang, a show of his old man’s ostentatious ways if there ever was one. Grandview’s leaders had made the decision long ago to outsource legal matters, and Pete Rexford had been there to pick up those nuggets at his usual rate, plus anything else he could drum up through his private practice. By Adair’s reckoning, that gave him a pretty sweet deal. On most matters, Pete Rexford held the only opinion about whether he was in conflict between his public and private duties and so far, she’d observed, he’d found in his own favor.

  This alignment of players put her in a particularly delicate spot now. She supposed that if additional information emerged and she could put more attention on John Rexford, she’d have to go down to Sidney and see the county attorney. In the meantime, she figured, she’d send a subtle yet unmistakable message: she was watching.

  Sakota’s voice broke in over the radio.

  “Adair, you better come down to Clancy Park.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Somebody’s beat the hell out of Alfonso.”

  She pulled into the dirt driveway at the Kelvig farm, backed out, and pointed the nose of the cruiser toward town. She tore out of there, pushing sixty on the back roads.

  “I’ll be there in a second,” she said.

  NORBY (SAMUEL)

  Samuel and Megan were carrying Indian tacos across Main Street toward the Double Musky when Alfonso Medeiros staggered out of the shadows of Everly’s Welding Service and leaned against the streetlamp.

  “Holy shit,” Samuel said. He handed his food to Megan and sprinted across the street to Alfonso, who’d slipped down the lamp pole and dropped his ass onto the sidewalk. Someone had pounded Alfonso’s face into misshapen rawness. Both eyebrows had been split, spilling blood that stained his T-shirt. His left eye was like an eight ball, and his nose bent right at an impossible angle.

  “Jesus,” Samuel said. “What happened?”

  “Fell down.” A bloody bubble formed on the outside of Alfonso’s nostril and popped.

  “Bullshit.” Samuel knelt and looped Alfonso’s arm over his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get up. We’ll get you across the street.”

  Samuel bent his knees sharply, then extended his legs like pistons, driving the heavier man up. He struggled with the dead weight of Alfonso, inching him across the street in haphazard lurches.

  “Go tell Dea,” he said to Megan, who set down the food and ran toward the taco truck on the other side of the park.

  A murmuring enveloped them, and Samuel for the first time saw that some of the crowd had peeled off from the festivities down the street to check on the commotion. He spotted Steve Simic, still in sunglasses this deep into the night.

  “Come on, man,” Samuel said to him. “Give me a hand.”

  Simic handed his drink to a buddy and loped over. He slipped under Alfonso’s right shoulder, and together the long-ago friends found a pace and hoofed him across the park. A few others fell in, following them.

  “What happened?” Simic said between grunting breaths.

  “Somebody beat the hell out of him.”

  “Fell down,” Alfonso said.

  “Nobody’s going to buy that,” Samuel said.

  Simic looked down at his own shirt. “He’s getting blood all over me.”

  “Just hold him. We’re almost there.”

  Dea was out of the truck, waiting for them, her wails of “Dios mío, Dios mío” growing louder as they approached.

  Samuel and Simic turned Alfonso around and gently sat him on the steps leading into the truck. His head seesawed on his neck, and Dea let out a cry. “Querido Dios en el cielo, mi marido.”

  Samuel looked at Megan. “You have your cell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call the cops.”

  “They’re coming,” said somebody in the pack of onlookers.

  “Alfonso,” Samuel said. “What happened?”

  “Fell down.”

  Dea dabbed at his brow with a towel that came back bloody. In the better light, Samuel found welts all along Alfonso’s jawline.

  “Don’t give me that. What happened?”

  “Fell down.”

  Dea dropped her head onto her husband’s shoulder, sobbing.

  Samuel looked up at Megan, as if he could find an answer there.

  Officer Sakota arrived first, and after staggering around a bit and letting loose with “oh, shit, man,” he put out the radio call for Chief Underwood and the ambulance crew, which would have to come in from Sidney.

  Dea’s quick work had her man less bloody, at least, but the sweeping away of the plasma brought the full extent of his injuries to greater light. Samuel’s amateur assessment had Alfonso fitted for plenty of stitches and a heroic dose of morphine to keep the pain at bay.

  “Joe, you out there?” Sakota said into his radio.

  Feedback shot through Sakota’s speaker. “Yeah.”

  “You gonna come down here and take a look?”

  Chief Underwood’s voice broke in. “Hold your position, Joe. I’m almost there. Keep an e
ye on things around the concert, OK?”

  “Roger that.”

  Seconds later, the lights on Chief Underwood’s cruiser sprinkled the park in alternating surges of blue and red. Alfonso had lain down in the grass outside the truck while Dea beat back the insurgent blood. Sakota knelt beside Alfonso and held his hand as he waited for the chief to get there.

  “Ambulance is on the way, Adair,” Sakota said.

  Underwood also went to bended knee beside Alfonso and took hold of his arm. “Who did this to you?”

  “He’s not going to say, Chief,” Samuel said.

  “Come on now, Alfonso.”

  “Fell down.”

  “Baby, please.” Dea looked at her man, tears streaking her cheeks.

  Alfonso looked up at her, his features jumbled and mournful. “Fell down.”

  Adair rocketed to her feet. “What is with this fucking town?”

  They huddled around Alfonso and his crying wife for fifteen minutes or so, waiting for the Sidney ambulance. When it at last arrived, Sakota waved the driver onto the grass so the technicians could get at Alfonso more easily. While the crew bundled Alfonso up and put him on a stretcher, Dea micromanaging the entire affair, Samuel broke off from the group and found Chief Underwood.

  “Tough night, I guess,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Sam’s son.”

  Chief Underwood shook his hand. “How’s your dad doing?”

  “OK, I guess. Sleeping, Mom says.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it.”

  “Anyway, I just wanted to introduce myself,” he said. “I found Alfonso over by Tut Everly’s place. Be happy to talk to you for your report, if you need me.”

  “Not going to be much of a report if he’s not talking.”

  “I guess not.”

  She turned to him. “You think he fell down?”

  Samuel blurted a laugh, which he quickly smothered out of respect for the gravity of the situation. “I was born at night. But not this night.”

  By the time the chaos cleared and folks migrated back to the downtown scene, Megan looked as though she’d had enough many times over. She said she’d just as soon go home, and Samuel offered to walk her the three blocks before cutting across town to his folks’ place.