by Jess Walter
Rae-Lynn stepped luxuriously away from the bar. She stretched her hands over her head like a dancer and then let them fall to her sides, looking demurely at the men. “You guys wanna see me dance?”
The men all smiled.
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll be right back.” She went toward the bathroom in the back, but kept walking out the back door, into the alley. She was beautiful.
She emerged from the alley onto the dark side street and was surprised to find the cabdriver parked there, waiting.
“Hey!” she said. “I know you!” She doubled over in laughter.
“What the fuck,” he said. “You runnin’ away from your fare?”
“No,” Rae-Lynn said. “I was coming back around front. Those guys in there were all coming on to me and I had to get away. I was coming back.”
But the cabbie was angry. Rae-Lynn could see it. Why did guys have to get so angry all the time?
“You owe me fourteen bucks,” the cabbie said.
“For two miles?”
“I had the meter running while you were inside.” He took a step toward her.
“I don’t got fourteen bucks. I told you, we could mess around.”
He grabbed her wrist and she swung at him with her other hand, but it grazed off his shoulder. He punched her in the face, right in the eye where Michael had backhanded her. She fell down, and the guy went through her pockets until he found Timmy’s eight bucks. He threw two cards back on her, the punch card for the free latte and the business card she’d gotten months ago from the lady cop. Rae-Lynn put the cards back in her pocket. She thought, I am beautiful. I am. Her eyes were bleary and she felt like she was going to throw up. “Timmy,” she whimpered
“Fuckin’ whore,” the cabdriver said. He drove off.
Rae-Lynn stood up, dusted herself off, nearly lost her balance, and then walked back down the side street toward Sprague.
Her arms hung at her sides and she didn’t feel like she was flying anymore. Timmy used to have such good smack. But either she was that much tougher to junk up or Timmy had some weak shit, because she could already feel the hunger, the itch at the center of herself. And she didn’t even have her eight bucks anymore.
She felt the headlights from a car and turned to show the driver her good side, but the car didn’t even slow down. Rae-Lynn continued down the sidewalk, weaving.
She crossed the street, stopped, and leaned her face against the chain-link fence of the boat dealership. When her swollen cheek touched the fence, she jumped back at the tenderness. “Hey!” she yelled. “Are you in there?”
The old security guard came out of the showroom, a look of disbelief on his face. He looked right at Rae-Lynn, then up and down the street, to her right and her left. “Jesus, girlie,” he said. “Where have you been?”
And Rae-Lynn started crying then, remembering when she and Shelly and Chloe had used the boats as their own personal apartments, how untouchable they’d felt in the boat yard, sitting on top of the big yachts talking about everything they wanted to be. Back then Rae-Lynn thought her boobs were nice and she would have rolled her eyes at anyone who suggested she needed implants. It wasn’t fair that your boobs shrank when you lost weight, that even good things could be undone like that.
The old security guard fumbled with his keys, looked both ways, up and down the street. Then he unlocked the gate, swung it open, and Rae-Lynn stepped inside.
She paused at the construction project on the other side of the showroom, steel girders rising up four stories, exposed on one side like bones, the other side partly covered with gray stucco at the bottom and white at the top, as if it were half ringed with snow. A floodlight shone on the whole thing, throwing its huge shadow across the parking lot and exposing the girder. “What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a mountain,” the old security guard said, and Rae-Lynn felt better, imagining that when it was complete, she and Shelly and Risa could climb it with a bottle of wine and look out over the city; they would be above everything, then, afraid of nothing. And even though she knew it was impossible, Rae-Lynn found that she couldn’t stop picturing it.
“I’ve never climbed a mountain before,” she said quietly.
“It’s not real,” the security guard said. “It’s a building that looks like a mountain.” He brushed her hair away from her bruised eye. “What happened to you?”
“Do you think I need a boob job?”
He put his arm around her shoulder. “No. Of course not.”
“Can I sleep here? I’m real tired.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m gonna take you someplace where you can sleep as long as you want. Okay, girlie?”
She nodded. “That would be nice.”
He grabbed his jacket and put it over her narrow shoulders. She felt inside the breast pocket for a wallet but there wasn’t one. “Thank you,” she said.
They walked out the front gate and he turned and padlocked it from the outside.
“You’re so nice,” Rae-Lynn said, but he didn’t answer. He had a Ford Taurus and she climbed in on the passenger side. He reached over and buckled her seat belt and she rubbed his cheek, his gray whiskers.
A few minutes later her eyes snapped open, and she said, “A mountain is a mountain. It doesn’t matter why you build it, if it looks like a mountain…”
She looked around. The security guard was parking the car in a driveway in a part of town she didn’t recognize, or maybe even out of town. It was getting dark. The house was carved into a down-slope, and there were only a couple of other houses built on this hillside. He unbuckled her seat belt and she climbed out. There was an ache between her eyes and neck and Rae-Lynn knew it would get worse, and she would get sick if she didn’t get hooked up at some point tonight. “Whose house?” she asked.
“My son’s,” the old security guard said. It was dark and newer, a one-story ranch with a daylight basement. There wasn’t even any grass, just dirt in the front yard along with a wheelbarrow and a couple of shovels.
She followed the old man around the side until they came to the back of the house, perched on a steep bank overlooking the river, a mile downstream from the falls. The backyard had been terraced into the riverbank; beyond that was a five-foot ledge and at the bottom of that, the ground began sloping at a forty-degree angle to the water.
“It’s beautiful,” Rae-Lynn said. With the sun fading, the river beneath them was like some dark crease in the world, a river of darkness. Across the river were the restored miners’ shacks and brownstones of the Peaceful Valley neighborhood, where Rae-Lynn had been to a party once. Downstream were vacant fields of wild grass and scrub trees, and the river made a sharp turn, and the city ended. Beyond that was Moses Lake and Kelly. Rae-Lynn felt sad thinking about him and how he’d fucked up her last chance.
She looked back at the house. There were only a handful of houses on this bank of the river, probably because it was so steep and because it was cut off by a railroad trestle behind the house. “I didn’t even know there were any houses down here,” she said.
“Ain’t many,” said the old security guard. “Just us and Mrs. Amend down the way.” He smiled at her and fished in his pocket for the back door key.
Rae-Lynn followed the river upstream, toward the falls and the line of bridges that crossed the river into downtown. Beyond the bridges, the city’s skyline rested against the darkening sky. She’d never really seen a whole city before, not like this, where you could see the edges of it, where you could put your hands out and contain all of it.
“You coming?” asked the old security guard.
Rae-Lynn felt a shudder and knew she wasn’t strong enough to withstand the shakes and the sickness tonight. Maybe earlier, with Kelly, but now she was tiny and weak and she wasn’t beautiful the way people said. She was tired, but sleep only made the itch stronger. For a moment she thought about giving him back his coat and telling him that he shouldn’t leave her alone in this house, that she would steal
from it. She could see inside the picture window that overlooked the river. From outside, it looked like a huge TV screen. The old man stood on that screen, in front of a big shelf of books, holding a telephone. He seemed so frail, this old man, but she knew that even the frail ones were strong, stronger than she was. They were all so fucking strong.
She could hear her own breathing as she watched the old man speak into the telephone in the huge picture window of the house etched into the bank of the river. At one time such a sight would have sent Rae-Lynn daydreaming about dinner parties and babies and waking up in her husband’s shirt, but now she just took a deep breath, pulled the old man’s jacket tight around her shoulders, and walked into the house.
49
Kevin Verloc’s shoulders were carved and sculpted, and he had the big-veined, round arms of a serious body builder. His neck seemed an extension of his shoulders, and the entire effect was to make it seem as if his weight had all been shifted into his upper body, as if someone had taken him by the legs and squeezed. His hair was short and dark, combed perfectly straight onto his forehead, and he wore small, rectangular-shaped glasses that he removed and slid into his shirt pocket as he came outside. But the thing that surprised Dupree the most was that Kevin Verloc walked.
He leaned on a tripod cane and had to swing his hips heavily to start each leg in motion, but there was no other way to describe it: Kevin Verloc walked. He moved with great concentration as he emerged from the All-Safe Security building—which Dupree recognized by the stucco walls and Spanish style as a former Taco Time. Verloc turned and locked the glass door, and it was only when he was a few steps from the building that he looked up and saw the police car in his parking lot. If he was surprised to see the patrol car he didn’t reveal it, walking over with that double hitch, like someone limping on both legs. Dupree stepped out of the car then and stuck out his hand. Verloc stopped, leaned on his cane, and shook Dupree’s hand. They were about the same height, but Verloc had a way of tilting his head back, exposing his tree trunk of a neck, so that he seemed to look down on Dupree.
“Something I can help you with, Officer?” Verloc asked.
“Actually, we spoke on the phone a couple of months ago. I’m Alan Dupree. I talked to you a little about the prostitute murders?”
“Sure,” Verloc said and his expression didn’t change at all. “Dupree.”
Dupree laughed. “Yeah. I got that crazy tip from your neighbor and I called you. Remember?”
“Mmm-hmm, it’s coming back to me,” Verloc said. “You ever catch that guy in the paper? From California? Right? Guy sounded like a real piece of work.”
“Lenny Ryan,” Dupree said. “No. I guess he’s still out there somewhere.”
“I’ll bet he’s back in California again.” Dupree didn’t answer and Verloc glanced down at Dupree’s uniform. “I understand you have two FBI profilers working on the case. That must be fascinating, working with them so closely.”
“Actually, I’m not on the case anymore.” Dupree ran his hand along the seam of his uniform pants. “I’m…uh…taking early retirement, finishing up on patrol. That’s why I came to see you.”
“Oh?” Verloc asked.
“Did I catch you at a bad time? You look like you’re racing off somewhere.”
Verloc shrugged. “Me? No, I was just going to get a bite to eat. Little dinner break.” Then he smiled. “What can I do for you?”
“Well,” Dupree began, “yeah, like I was saying, I’m taking early retirement and I’ll get a decent pension, but you know what it’s like when you get out. I just think I’m gonna need another source of income, not to mention I’d go nuts without something to occupy my time. And I heard that you hire old badges sometimes.”
“Sure,” Verloc said, “I hire ex-cops. They’re the best.”
“Yeah, I know some guys who work as private detectives, but I don’t think I could stomach that shit.”
“Working for sleaze-bucket lawyers.” Verloc shook his head. “Hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, man. I couldn’t do it.”
“Right,” Dupree said.
“Come on,” Verloc said. “Let’s get you an application.” He shifted his weight onto the cane and turned back toward the office.
“Are you sure I’m not keeping you from something?”
“No,” Verloc said. “It’s pretty slow around here right now.”
“Because you could just mail it to me if you like.”
“No need,” Verloc said, “as long as you’re here.”
Dupree was surprised at how quickly he could move, scuttling across the parking lot. As he walked behind Verloc, Dupree’s shoulder radio squawked and he could hear Teague on the other end. “Dupree? Where are you?”
After talking to Caroline, he had planned to go back to John Landers’s house, but he’d gotten to thinking about the empty files marked “Security” and his mistaken phone call to Kevin Verloc three months ago. It was probably nothing, but Teague would have to wait at the house while he indulged the nagging little voice in his head one last time. Dupree reached up and switched his radio off. Verloc turned and smiled at him.
He unlocked the door, and Dupree followed him into a small lobby, where a love seat and matching chair sat across from an unmanned desk. Behind the desk was a narrow door that Verloc opened and entered, turning sideways to fit his wide shoulders through the doorway.
Dupree didn’t have to turn to follow him into this interior office, which was set up like a small police command center, with a map of the city on one wall and a telephone dispatch panel right in front of the map. Small flags were tacked to the map, apparently marking clients. The desk in front of the map appeared rigidly organized, a can of pencils sharpened to razor points, files stacked so that their edges lined up perfectly with the edge of the desk. “So, mostly you’re looking for security guards?”
“That’s certainly what we try to do,” Verloc said. “That’s why I started the business. But a lot of people don’t want to bother with guards with all the computerized systems out there—video cameras and fancy lasers and stuff.”
“Just like the police department,” Dupree said. “Thank God there are still jobs that we can do better than computers, huh?”
Verloc was looking through a cabinet. He turned and smiled weakly at Dupree, then resumed his search in the cabinet. “Anyway, it’s awful slow right now, so I can’t promise anything. We do a lot of concerts, special event stuff earlier in the summer, and we have a contract with a couple of school districts, so we do some of their events. We had a mall for a few years, but I got underbid last year.”
“That’s tough. Must be great to have an account like that boat place. Good, steady client, huh? You do any other security work for Landers?”
Verloc straightened up from the cabinet. “Where the hell did she put that stuff? New receptionist. I like things a certain way.” He rolled his eyes and stuck his cane out. “I’ll check my office.”
He disappeared behind an unmarked door at the end of the dispatch room. Dupree picked up a log book and leafed through it. He walked toward the open door and he could see Verloc’s cane in the middle of the room, but not Verloc himself. “I know it’s here somewhere,” he heard Verloc say.
Dupree reached to his belt and unsnapped his holster.
“Ah, here we go.” Verloc emerged with a single sheet of paper, his face red. He leaned heavily on the cane and handed the application to Dupree. Then he took the log book from Dupree and set it down, carefully lining it up with the edge of the desk.
“That’s great,” Dupree said as he looked over the application. “Hey, I met your father the other day. Did he tell you about that?”
For the first time Verloc seemed to flinch, but only slightly. “I don’t…think so.”
“I saw him down there at Landers’ Cove. How many guards you got down there?”
“Just my father. How did you…come to meet him?”
Dupree reached up and rubbed his own shoulder. �
��The big wrestling match with the drunks down there, couple weeks ago. I was the cop who got stabbed.”
“It wasn’t serious, I hope.” Verloc looked behind himself for a chair and then eased himself into it, sighing as soon as he was seated.
“It was nothing. Couple of stitches. It changes you a little, though. Most of the time, the bastards are just out there and they can beat each other up and steal from each other and you see it, but it doesn’t really touch you, doesn’t get to you. But when it’s you they’re coming after, it’s different. It changes you, makes you feel harder, less forgiving…But I guess I don’t need to tell you that.”
“No,” Verloc said simply.
“Yeah, I remember when you got shot. Jesus. It affected every cop in the state…you know. It’s great that you’re walking now.”
Verloc just stared at him, no expression on his face.
“It must’ve been hard,” Dupree said. “You’ve made quite a recovery.”
“Eight years of physical therapy,” Verloc said quietly.
“You still use a chair, then?” Dupree asked. “’Cause when I called you that day, you made this great joke about a wheelchair.”
“Sometimes I use a chair. I get tired.”
“Yeah,” Dupree said. “That’s something. So you’re pretty well recovered. I mean, as much as they expect?”
Verloc eased himself up out of his chair. “I really should get my dinner.”
Dupree stepped aside. “Oh, of course. Sure.”
Verloc nodded to the application. “Why don’t you fill out that form and bring it in on Monday, and I’ll see what my staffing looks like for the fall.”
“Yeah, that’d be great.”
As they walked toward the glass front door, Dupree walked ahead of Verloc and watched his reflection in the glass. In the window, he could see Verloc staring at his back. Outside, Verloc locked the door again and made his way to a dark red pickup parked in the corner of the lot. Dupree made a note of the license plate, then nodded to Verloc.
“Thanks a bunch. I really look forward to working with you,” Dupree said.
