Confessed

by Nicola Rendell

  The thunderstorm passes over us. We leave the house again and wander back to a locked shed. I remember my mom saying my dad rode a motorcycle.

  I bust the lock off with a shovel. Inside, the first thing I see is an ancient pickup truck.

  “They call that a 505 special,” I tell her. She’s right beside me, and she peers into the dark. “A Ford cab, a Chevy bed. A chop-shop masterpiece.”

  She wipes dust off the driver’s side window and peers inside. “It doesn’t have a key,” she giggles. “There’s a screwdriver.”

  “Very traditional,” I say, heading to the back of the garage, where I’ve spotted a tarp. I pull it off. Underneath, a goddamned Vincent Black Shadow, black and lean and fantastic. The keys are right there on the seat. I walk it out of the garage slowly and once outside, I put the keys in and try the ignition. It rumbles to life, spewing fumes at first. “I’ll be goddamned.”

  Lucy looks over the bike at me with her hands to her mouth. “You know how to ride?”

  I take the helmet off the back and put it over her head. “Yeah, beautiful. I know how to ride.”

  She paws around on the front of the helmet until she figures out how to open the visor. Fuck, she looks hot. In all black with a motorcycle helmet. I can still smell her on my stubble. Man oh fucking man.

  Johnny Cash’s God can go ahead and strike me down dead right here because nothing will ever get any better than this. I hand her an old backpack from a nail on a post nearby and she slips it over her shoulders.

  “Where’s your helmet?” she asks.

  “Put it on the shopping list.” I sling my leg over the bike, and she climbs on behind me.

  “I’ve never ridden before.”

  I reach back and bring her knees close to my body. “If you can ride a horse, you’ll be just fucking fine.” Her chest presses against my back, and I feel her purse there between us too. Then I hear the visor click shut. I kick the pedal and the old bike roars to life, rumbling underneath us and giving me that old vibration that makes me feel higher than any cocaine on the planet.

  “Put your arms around me.”

  Her breasts compress against my back. I rev the engine, and she squeals. I put her in gear, press on the gas, and like bats out of hell, we’re off.

  We head south on the County Line Road. I don’t know this part of the north that well, but well enough. About a mile down Route 6, we start passing old women on pilgrimage. I feel her arms tighten around me. She probably thinks she’s on a different fucking planet. Might as well be. Where else can a guy ride a Black Shadow down a dirt road and be blessed by ladies walking ten miles to pray to the Santo Niño de Atocha? No place but here.

  We roar up to a place called the Valdez County Store, just an old shack with about ten thousand old Fanta posters stuck to the front. Outside, an old Native lady is sitting on a cooler with jewelry spread out on black velvet on the sidewalk.

  I say to Lucy, “I’m just going to check the fluids. You go in and start stocking up.”

  “Okey-dokey,” she says, all muffled behind the helmet. I help her pull it off. Her hair comes out a little staticky, but she smooths it with a swipe of her hand.

  I watch her take a basket from inside the front door and head for the aisles.

  The native lady is reading a Kindle and glances up at me. “It’s good work. My sister does the earrings. I do the necklaces.”

  It is good work, no doubt about it. Silver and turquoise. Birds and flowers, all sorts of things. But in the middle is exactly the thing I need to put around her neck. “That one, there,” I point. “How much?”

  She sets down the Kindle and picks it up gently between her fingers. “Fifty.”

  I lift an eyebrow. “Do I look like a tourist?”

  “Forty-five.”

  I pull my wallet from my pocket and give her the cash.

  “Want me to wrap it up?” she asks. She’s got that Tewa sing-song voice. I haven’t heard that since I was a kid. “No need,” I say. I hold out my palm, and she places it inside carefully. Then she gives me a silver polishing cloth, with a logo of a running horse, and the words BURNING HORSE JEWELRY underneath. “Better than a business card,” she says, smiling, and goes back to reading.

  Inside, with the necklace in my palm, I find Lucy in the dairy section. She’s got milk and eggs already and is considering some yogurts. From a display rack, I pick up a six-pack of Marble Brewery Red Ale.

  “Fluids okay?” she asks. She puts three yogurts in the basket.

  I nod. I take the basket out of her hands, and she looks confused. I see goose bumps on her arm from the yogurt cooler, and close the door.

  “Close your eyes,” I say.

  She presses her pretty, dark eyebrows together. What she doesn’t do, of course, is shut her eyes.

  “Come on. Trust me.”

  She smiles a little and closes them. I move behind her and sweep her hair to one side. Then I fasten the necklace around her neck. I hear her gasp as I do. She feels for what it might be, patting her chest with her palm. “Hang on,” I tell her, and bring the tiny hook and clasp. “There you go.”

  She looks down her nose, pressing her chin back into her neck. “Oh, Vince. It’s beautiful!” she says.

  It looks just perfect on her. A tiny silver horseshoe, no bigger than a dime, in the hollow of her neck.

  I adjust it a little to straighten out the chain.

  “There. It’s not a peanut, but…”

  She gets up on her tiptoes and gives me a sweet, close-lipped kiss, square on the mouth. I can’t help but take her in my arms.

  “Thank you,” she says, “So much.” She pats it again and straightens her shoulders. “I just love it.”

  “Now, let’s get back to work.”

  And we do. Sugar, flour, all the basics. Tortillas. Chiles. Pork chops.

  We go round the corner by the bags of cornmeal, and her eyes lift up to an old donkey piñata hanging from the ceiling and spinning gently in the air of a box fan in the window. She glances at the news stand. Week-old papers from Chihuahua and not a Forbes magazine to be seen anywhere. “I like it here. A lot.”

  “I knew you would.”

  And she nestles in next to me, in a way that absolutely ruins me.

  We stand in line at the register, behind an old lady paying for a bag of flour with spare change. I forgot how the pace of everything here is so slow. Slow enough to need to recalibrate my sense of how long a minute takes to pass. The cashier looks like she’s had about enough of old Mrs. Whatever and her spare change. But Lucy—sweet little Lucy—steps forward and places one hand gently on the old lady’s bony shoulder. With this sweet, lovely voice, she says, “Let’s see…” and helps her count out her dimes and nickels. The old lady makes grateful noises and says she’s getting old, too old, but Lucy says, “Oh no, not at all. If only we could all age so well.” The old lady touches Lucy’s smooth forearm with her gnarled fingers, saying, “Thank you mijita, thank you. May God and the Virgin bless you.”

  Which is when the cashier, who’s exactly like every no-nonsense New Mexican woman between here and Carlsbad, down to the way her jeans are a little too tight and her hair a little too big, raises her painted eyebrows at me to say, Not too bad for a gringa.

  I nod back, Right?

  The old woman hobbles off, and I step up to the counter, unloading the basket by the register. I unzip the backpack and the checker puts the beer in first.

  Lucy says, “Oh, wait. I forgot apples.” I give her ass a little pat and off she goes.

  The cashier rings up the pork, the bread, the milk. We talk about the rain. We talk about the drought. There’s no hurry. I don’t mind it.

  Then, I hear a sudden screech of tires, that grating, grinding spinning of wheels out on the dirt and gravel outside. I turn to look at the little produce section. She’s not by the apples. I hustle back towards a rack of bananas; I look for her behind a stack of pineapples. I double-check the candy aisle.

  But her
purse is on the floor by the avocados.

  And Lucy is gone.

  26

  I am handcuffed to the door of what looks like it used to be a cop car but isn’t anymore. It still has that spotlight over the driver’s side mirror, but it all just feels kind of sad inside. The dash is dusty, and there’s a gap where the police radio must’ve been. I once read about how cops offload their old vehicles at police auctions. Seems about right. There’s a Glade air freshener stuck into one of the vents. Ocean Breeze. It’s empty.

  The guy driving is all khaki. He’s got khaki skin and a khaki dye job, wearing all khaki clothes. I can even see his socks, also khaki. He’s an explosion of beige. When he snatched me up from behind the bananas, he put one hand over my mouth and the other around my waist, dragging me out to his cop car as I kicked him. I take some satisfaction in the fact that the only thing on him that isn’t khaki is the little droplet of blood oozing through his cheap polyester pants, right in the middle of his shin, about the size of a penny now, and growing. He spits a sunflower seed into a paper cup.

  For the fifth time, I say, “Who the hell are you?” I squirm in my seat and feel the shell of a sunflower seed poke me in the tush. It’s like a flock of blackbirds have been in here eating sunflower seeds for days. They’re everywhere.

  He doesn’t answer.

  I yank hard on the cuffs. The air conditioning blows in my face. He’s going 90 easily, roaring down the dirt road and heading for the highway. He leans forward and turns on the radio. The whack of a bat hitting a ball fills the air, followed by the painfully hollow noises of AM sports radio.

  I try to calm myself. Fighting against Captain Khaki isn’t going to do me any good. I’m not sure I can talk my way out of this one, and I know from experience that these cuffs will only get tighter the harder I fight against them.

  “Please. Tell me who you are,” I ask. “I do have a right to know that.”

  He turns and glances at me. “Name’s Mitch” Progress! “Mitch. Hello. I’m Lucy. But I think you probably know that already.”

  No answer. Swing and a miss on the radio too.

  “Do you have a last name, maybe? A profession?”

  All my chattering seems to be annoying him, distracting him from the game. That’s the idea, after all. I have an entire lifetime of experience getting my dad to agree to things he didn’t even know he agreed to while he tried to watch golf on television.

  “Hobbies? Family? Allergies? Pets?”

  “Christ,” he mutters. Then he reaches into his shirt pocket stuffed with receipts, a little notebook, and a pen. He produces a business card and places it on my leg.

  * * *

  MITCH MORRIS

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

  MISSING PERSONS, CHEATING SPOUSES, ETC.

  203-I-FIND-EM

  * * *

  That’s a Connecticut number. God damn it. “So my dad hired you then?” Without even thinking, just purely reacting, I yank against the chains and kick one leg like a spoiled child in time out.

  He takes the card back and puts it in his pocket. “I’m not at liberty to say.” The crowd roars at a home run. “Just listen to the game, Ms. Burchett. We’ve got a hell of a drive ahead of us.”

  I’m fuming. I’m beyond mad. I’m also freaking heartbroken. I had a whiff of real contented happiness earlier today, at Vince’s ranch, in a place where we could start over. I look down at my lovely necklace. We had the dream in our hands, and now what? It’s being ripped away at 90 miles an hour in a Crown Victoria.

  I have no way to get in touch with Vince—it’s not like we’ve even had time to be apart to talk on the phone. I have no way to find him. I glance in the side view mirror just praying that I see the motorcycle trailing us, but I don’t. Because of course not. He’s got better things to do than come after the Lunchmeat Heiress. He’s probably realizing what I can’t bring myself to: This was a crazy idea from the start. The real world had to step in sometime. I just didn’t think it would be in the shape of Mitch Morris, PI and Khaki King.

  “Listen, these are totally unnecessary,” I tell him, jingling the cuffs.

  “Not from what I’ve heard.”

  I flop back against the seat. “So, what? You followed me all the way here from Connecticut?” As I say it, my heart drops. That means he knows exactly where Vince’s ranch is.

  “Yes, I did, Miss Burchett. Your friend, he’s good at losing a tail. Fortunately, I’m better at keeping one. I have a feeling he might’ve been distracted.”

  And then Captain Khaki has the balls to look me up and down in a slow, creepy way. Gross, just so fucking gross. But, on the upside, he doesn’t seem to know Vince’s name. Your friend, he said. “And what, just decided to nab me today, of all days?” The day I felt happiest?

  “It was a matter of my fee. Your father had to…” He coughs. “…pay me half up front. Took him a while to get the cash together.”

  Well that’s par for the freaking course, isn’t it? Dad probably had to empty my checking account to pay this guy for my kidnapping. Wouldn’t that just figure? “I’ve got a feeling you’re not exactly five stars on Yelp, are you? It’s not every PI that does abductions.”

  He looks offended and turns up the radio. Pop fly to left field.

  There is no way Mom knows about this, I’m positive. It’s got Dad’s greasy fingerprints all over it. His and the accountant. I’ll bet Dad’s made a deal with the feds or the SEC. Me for him, or some totally unscrupulous, immoral thing like that. I’ve seen him in duress, and he has exactly zero paternal instincts. We were once on a whitewater rafting trip, and he used my body as a life raft when we went overboard.

  I don’t even want to know the details. I refuse to know. I want nothing at all to do with him ever, ever again. May his E. coli eat him whole.

  Except barreling, as we are, in the general direction of Connecticut at 90 miles an hour, covering about a mile per pitch, I know I’m going to have to deal with him and the whole mess that is Charles Burchett a lot sooner than later.

  But I stay calm. That’s what Vince would do. Vince would stay incredibly, unnervingly calm. And so, calmly, I listen to the Yankees wallop the Rockies. Mile after mile, and I swear I can feel my heart bleeding. For Vince. For that magical slice of heaven that I almost had, but don’t anymore. For screwing up everything, me and my god-awful meddlesome father.

  “I have to pee,” I say, at the seventh inning stretch.

  Mitch looks at me suspiciously.

  “What? You think I’m going to run?” I stare out at the vast expanse of absolute nothingness. “Where?”

  I glance in the rearview. No motorcycle behind us. No roar of a bike revving. He’s not coming. I’m seven innings away from him, and he’s not coming. Why would he, after all? We’ve known each other a handful of days, gotten into nothing but disaster after catastrophe, and know pretty much zero about each other. Only that isn’t true. That isn’t true at all. I feel like I know him because the time we have spent together has been condensed and intense. At light speed, I’ve gotten to know him and adore him. I want this adventure with him. I want just to be near him, to hear his voice, to be beside him. And I just know he wants the same. It may be madness, but there’s nothing insignificant about any of this. There is nothing small about Vince Russo and me.

  After another inning, Mitch pulls off at a Valero station and edges his sedan up alongside one of the pumps. I see that the needle is near “E” on the dash. He gets out and swipes his card in the machine. Then he leans in and takes his keys from the ignition. “I’ll piss first, then I’ll escort you in, Miss Burchett.”

  “If I pee on your seat, you’ve got nobody but yourself to blame,” I say.

  He slams the door.

  To the empty Glade stick in the vent, I whisper, “Asshole.”

  I am not going back to Connecticut. I am not becoming a trending hashtag. I am not losing my life to my dad’s mistakes. No way. I’ve come this far, and I’m not turning back n
ow.

  I scoot forward towards the cuffs. I take a bobby pin from my hair, and a lock of hair falls onto my face. I blow it away and part the ends of the pin around the pad of my thumb. It’s incredibly awkward, with both hands cuffed. But just like Vince did, I remove the rubber end from the straight side of the pin, and then I jam it into the lock. I force the edge into the mechanism and twist this way and that. Somehow, I expected it would just pop open—Vince made it look so easy—but it doesn’t.

  “Come on, come on, you little bastard,” I say to the lock. Wiggling, jamming, shaking. Nothing. I glance up at the Valero station and see Captain Khaki waiting in line behind a lady with a child pulling on her face.

  I bite the rubber off the other end and try that. I feel it catch, and my stomach leaps up into my chest. Something’s happened, but then the pin pops back out. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  So I try to channel my inner Vince. Cool. Calm. Elegantly brutish.

  It’s a lot harder than he makes it look.

  As if from a dream, I suddenly hear the wild roar of an engine. I turn my head, and oh my God.

  Black motorcycle, black helmet. M.C. Escher. He flips up the visor. I can’t see his mouth, but I can see the smile in his eyes.

  My heart soars. I hook my finger over the door handle and pop it open. It drags my arms with it and I plant my feet on the pavement. He puts his thumb and forefinger together, to make the sign for You okay?

  Except for this! I yank at the chain.

  He hits the kickstand on the gets off the bike. It’s still running, and he’s staying low, protected on this side by the sedan.

  “It’s that guy in the khaki,” I say, close into the helmet.

  His glances at the little store, and then refocuses on me. With the bobby pin he makes a couple of gentle turns, and the right cuff pops open. The left one stays on my wrist and clatters on the door handle as I slip out of the car and get on the bike. But he hasn’t joined me. He’s got a knife in his hand.