New River Blues (15 page)

Now he was burning all over from road rash. A few pebbles fell out of him every time he moved. He wanted to shower but he knew it would hurt too much. He had a soothing ointment he was rubbing on himself, and some gauze he was going to wrap around his torn elbow as soon as the Tylenol kicked in enough to mask the pain a little.

He had found his van just where he'd expected to find it, parked in the lot by the Greyhound bus depot. He had called an army buddy who left his auto-repair shop and brought a kid with him so there'd be enough drivers to make the shuttle. By the time all the vehicles and drivers were back where they belonged and he had bought the ultra-healing lotion at a drugstore and fetched the bottle of liquor out of the cupboard in the basement, he was almost too exhausted to climb the two sets of stairs to his room.

There was plenty of food in the coolers downstairs too, but he hadn't thought to bring any up when he came and now he was too tired to go after it. Anyway, he thought, if he kept on drinking on an empty stomach he would be drunk soon, and maybe he would pass out and stay unconscious till morning, which seemed like an excellent plan.

First thing in the morning, though, he had to figure out what to do about that fucking gun.

And then find Madge, and tell him to get his ass in gear and move the money, so they could get this squirrelly actress out of town. He had to have his warrior face on when he said it, too, because Madge had an uncanny antenna that would pick up the slightest twinge of uncertainty about the fact that he had let Nino get away.

But Nino would stay gone, he was sure of that. So Nino was just as good as dead.

Almost.

SEVEN

P
ulling into traffic on her street Tuesday morning, Sarah glanced up and saw a contrail, high aloft in full sunshine, shining brilliantly white against a royal-blue sky.

Hey, too good a day to go inside, better call in sick.
The antic thought came unbidden, a relic emotion from other glorious mornings like this one, shared with Janine years ago. They used to argue half-humorously, on the bus ride to town, about whether it would be a wretched waste of perfect weather to go in through the doors of the schools they were headed for. More and more often, as they got older, Sarah went in and Janine stayed out. Perversely, now, the memory made her both furious at her sister and longing to talk to her. To tell her, among many other things, that caring for her bright, interesting child wasn't getting any easier.

The half-hour after Denny's first crying fit had been loud and damp and confusing. The kid was so panicked by the prospect of having her life trashed again that she collapsed repeatedly into sobs. In the process of convincing her it wasn't going to happen, Sarah realized later, she had finally convinced herself.

Until she sat down on Denny's little iron bed and said it half a dozen times, she had not been so sure that she was anything more than she'd always been for Denny, the fall-back caretaker who took over whenever Janine melted down. But the more ways she said it, the truer it got – she was never again going to let Janine take Denny out of her house and put her through the jittery hell of living with an addict. Why had she ever even considered it?

‘I'll nail the door shut before I let her take you away from me again,' she finally said, getting a laugh from Denny at last. But the child's emotions were so hair-trigger by then that the laugh turned into a hiccup that triggered a fresh burst of weeping.

‘I think we need cocoa,' Sarah said. School night be damned, she had to find a way to shut the waterworks down.

They went back out to the kitchen, got out cups, warmed milk in a pan. ‘You know, Denny,' Sarah said, as she poured two big cups of glorious-smelling hot chocolate and dumped a handful of marshmallows on top, ‘when you were with me before, I wasn't sure . . . I thought maybe you'd rather be back with your mom. But this time . . . it feels like we've always lived together. I looked in through the window tonight when I came home, you and Aggie and Will Dietz in here, all so busy and peaceful, and I thought, Wow, it's neat to come home to a family.'

Probably the word family did it. Denice Lynch, for whom dubious reserve was the default expression, threw herself into Sarah's arms with a great cry that Sarah thought she would remember to her grave. ‘Yes!' she wailed. ‘Oh, yes, I like it too!'

Unfortunately that heart-warming moment upset the cup of hot chocolate that Sarah had just poured out in front of her, so they warmed up the dining table and Denny's nightgown and a big patch of rug. While they cleaned up the mess, Denny got the rest of the story out.

Janine had been standing by the row of yellow buses, ‘smiling that creepy smile she gets from dope and beer,' when Denny came out of school. Making promises like, ‘Soon we'll be together again,' she grappled Denny into a smelly hug, and held on so long Denny nearly missed her ride home.

‘The last I saw of her,' Denny said, ‘she was hanging on to a light post, waving at the wrong bus.' Halfway between laughing and crying, Sarah and Denny held each other while fresh cocoa warmed on the stove.

‘So I figured, “Here we go again,”' Denny said. ‘Just when I was getting my grades up, she comes back and it all starts over.' She looked sideways at her aunt. ‘It
would
be better for you if I went back to living with mom, wouldn't it? I mean, you and Will . . .'

‘Will Dietz doesn't change anything between you and me, Denny,' Sarah said, and got the Dubious-Denny look. ‘No, listen, Will doesn't want to get between us and I wouldn't let him if he did. Whatever we decide to do about our . . . relationship' – she hated that word, but it would have to do for now – ‘you still live with me. Period. Nothing's ever going to change that again.' They hugged some more, careful to turn the handle of the cocoa pan away first.

‘Maybe this is opportunity knocking,' Sarah said when they were finally settled at the table. ‘I'll try to find out where Janine is staying and get her to sign off on a . . . waiver . . . or whatever it is. Things are going to come up, decisions about schools and dentists and things like that. We need to make it official that I'm your guardian.' On that note, planning in a matter-of-fact way how to make Denny's situation more settled, Sarah finally got her calmed down enough to sleep.

Mornings, there was no time to talk. Denny stood patiently to get her hair braided. As she buckled on her loaded backpack Sarah said, for the umpteenth time, ‘I'm afraid you're going to ruin your back with that thing,' and Denny rolled her eyes to the ceiling in the universal kid's expression that meant, fifth grade is all about homework, whaddya gonna do?

Now, in the car, Sarah told herself to put personal problems behind. She tried making phone calls to jump-start the day, but nobody else was at work yet. She called her mother, who amazingly was already out of the house. She left a message on the tape saying, ‘Janine's back in town, call me if you can,' hating to do it but not wanting Aggie to get a phone call with no warning.

Press on.
She left messages with Delaney and Judge Geisler, then gave up on the phone and drove to an automotive security store called The Specialists, where she picked up brochures and a contact number for the GPS tracker on Henderson's car. Feeling energized then by her early start, she sprinted for the elevator at 270 South Stone, hung her jacket on the back of her chair and grabbed the already-ringing phone.

‘Judge Geisler is returning your call,' a clerk's voice said, ‘hold on, please.'

Some thumping followed, and the end of a shouted greeting, before the judge rasped in her ear, ‘If I have to talk to you every damn morning, Sarah, I'm afraid the magic may go out of our relationship.'

‘Well, I'm sorry to take up your time before court, Judge, but I've got a question only you can answer.'

‘My kind of a query,' he said, pleased. ‘Shoot.' He made little humming, ruminative noises as she described what she wanted. Then he nit-picked her probable cause – going after the man's tracker looked suspiciously like a fishing expedition to him. ‘All right, a crime was committed. But how does that get you to needing to know where he's been every minute? Out of town is out of town, isn't it?'

She went over the crime scene again, the rich wife murdered and the husband with the troubled business. He agreed, the crime was egregious, discretion appeared to have merit, delay was contraindicated. The judge enjoyed words like ‘contraindicated.'

‘I might be able to get what I need with just the warrant you already signed for me,' she said. ‘That included all the cars. But I thought . . . in case I have trouble piercing the corporate shield at Accu-Trak . . .' The judge liked expressions like ‘piercing the corporate shield,' too.

Finally he said, ‘Yeah, you better have a separate instrument just for the tracker.' They agreed on the wording together and he authorized it over the phone as of a half-hour earlier, to keep it out of hours so she wouldn't have to come all the way to the courthouse for his signature.

‘'Preciate it, sir,' she said.

‘My pleasure. Go fight crime, kid.' She hung up smiling, feeling the warmth of his approval. Geisler liked scrappers.

For once, being two time zones behind New York was an advantage. All the customer service phones at Accu-Trak were manned and eager to help. And, when they heard what she wanted, equally prepared to argue. An hour and fifteen minutes and several long phone conversations later, she blew hair out of her eyes, peered out into the support-staff area, and dialed an inside number.

The harmonically challenged voice that answered bristled with the disruptive energy of youth. Tracy Scott, working his way toward a degree in criminology at Pima Community College, rattled the walls of the second floor whenever he put in a shift on the support staff.

‘Tracy, where are you?'

‘In the bullpen with the rest of the sweated labor.' His voice tried hard for baritone these days and occasionally made it. ‘Where else would I be?'

‘Under your desk? I can't see you out there.'

‘Oh, my desk got moved up in the north-east corner behind the file cabinet. The alien life form who runs this section has decided I'm too disruptive to be in the middle of the room.'

‘What did you do?' The support-staff supervisor was an earnest perfect-margins striver named Elsie Dobbs. Sarah could well imagine the hopeless chasm of misunderstanding that must yawn between her and this relentlessly antic kid.

‘I said something so brilliantly funny that even the janitor laughed. Witticisms are not allowed on Planet Dobbs. They cause too much noise.'

‘I see. Well, if you tiptoed soberly across the room, do you think she'd let you come in here for a minute and help me?'

‘And they said there was no God. I'll be there in a nanosecond.' His phone crashed into its cradle. Sarah was still massaging her ear when he appeared by her desk with all his acne scars aglow. ‘Tell me you've got something hideously difficult that will take all day. I've been checking crime stats since shortly after the disappearance of the woolly mammoth.' Always somewhat theatrical, his speech became more grandiose when he talked to Sarah because she could not disguise how much she enjoyed it.

‘Sit.' She hooked her spare chair with her foot and dragged it next to her desk ‘You ready to live up to your hype? I'm going to give you a chance to justify some of those titles you keep awarding yourself.'

‘Fear not, madam.' He stood up and raised an imaginary torch aloft. ‘Genius Geek does not quail in the face of challenges. Where have I left my cape?'

‘Tracy, sit.' Sometimes she sympathized with Elsie Dobbs. ‘This brochure,' she laid a colorful folder on the desk between them, ‘describes a GPS tracking system. It's used for—'

‘I know what it's used for.' Tracy Scott's pale eyes, vaguely afloat behind Coke-bottle glasses, ogled the jolly looking little brochure the way a coyote eyes a rabbit. ‘I've read all the ads.' Behind the covers of the department manuals he was supposed to be compiling, Tracy read the specs of high-end electronic devices as avidly as other young males read porn, apparently with equal titillation. ‘You got a GPS tracker involved in this double murder down in El Encanto? That's what you're working on today, isn't it?' The metal braces on his teeth gleamed in the morning sun. ‘You want me to tell you where the big-time rich husband's been all weekend?'

‘What's this, a teenager who reads newspapers? Wonders never cease.'

‘Newspapers? What are they? The blogosphere is alight with speculation.'

‘You add one syllable to that speculation and you're outa here, you understand? I'm not really even at liberty to discuss this case with you. But – here's the short version of this part of the story. I wormed my way into the bowels of this company –' as often happened when she worked with Tracy Scott, she was beginning to talk like him – ‘and found the number of the person who guards the database. One of his jobs is to keep me from getting the access code. I told him about the warrant just authorized by Judge Geisler that says he has to give it to me, told him I was faxing the warrant, gave him to understand that he had exactly a quarter-hour after the fax arrived in his office to send me the access code. Described all the dreadful things I could make happen if he tried to stall me—'

‘Sarah.' Tracy took off his glasses, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I'm ready to stipulate that you're the staff specialist at mental waterboarding—'

‘Actually I'm just blowing smoke while my throat muscles relax,' Sarah said, pushing her hair back. ‘I wasn't sure I could make this work without bringing in bigger muscle, and I was trying to give Delaney a break for once. To my intense delight, the corporate geek believed me. Look, here's the access code by return fax.'