RECKLESS — Bad Boy Criminal Romance (11 page)

              Ariel held off our mother.

              I reached down to the man on our floor and checked his pockets.  He had no wallet.  No identification.  He had six dollars in bills and change, which I took.  I grabbed his feet and dragged him out of the kitchen, through the living room, and out the front door.  I dragged him through our lawn and down the sidewalk a ways.  Only streetlamps illuminating the night, I dragged him out into the middle of the street where I left him.  I stared at him a moment before walking back home.  He was much older than me, probably nearing sixty.  His clothes were dirty.  His face leathery and worn, he smelled of cheap alcohol.  I stiffly kicked him in the ribs a few times.  Back at home I comforted my mother and sister, recounting what had happened.  Ariel helped me clean myself up.  She also mopped the blood from the kitchen floor.  I washed my face and looked at my bruised nose and applied some Neosporin and a Band-Aid to the nasty cut below my eye.  I returned to the living room couch and unsuccessfully tried to fall back asleep.

             
Chapter Seven

Angela and I spend a morning wandering the French Quarter.  We visit a used book store and then a family-owned music store called Peaches Records.  At lunchtime we eat deep-fried oyster Po' boy sandwiches slathered with spicy remoulade.  Afterward we run across a tea room on Chartres Street offering psychic readings.

“Let’s do it,” Angela says cheerfully, turning to me.  “I’ve always wanted to.”

Inside we look at the menu and Angela pays thirty dollars for a palm reading.  They serve each of us a cup of mint-flavored green tea and we enter a back room with a psychic named Charlene.  She looks like a normal fifty-something woman, no head scarf or theatrics, wearing a plain white blouse and long black skirt.

She examines Angela’s left hand.  “You can be an impatient, headstrong woman,” Charlene says.  “This can be your biggest weakness or your greatest strength, depending on how you use it.  Within the coming months, you’re going to be faced with decisions that could change the course of your life.  Trust your instincts when making these choices.”

Amused by her predictions, Angela flashes me a quick smile.  Charlene notices and tells Angela, “You’re in an important relationship with someone right now.  This relationship will be threatened in the near future.  You should persevere through these problems.  Because if you do, your relationship will emerge renewed and stronger than it’s ever been before.”

The reading soon ends and Charlene lets go of Angela’s hand.

“How accurate are your predictions?” I ask her.

“Very much so,” she says.  “I have a very sharp psychic capability.”

“When did you realize you had this gift?”

“When I was about seven,” she says.  “I used to read the palms of my classmates.  The teachers didn’t like it though.  They told me I was channeling evil forces and they weren’t above using physical abuse to try to make me stop.”

“Really?  For some reason it doesn’t surprise me there’s a correlation between being abused as a child and growing up to believe you have supernatural abilities.”

Charlene looks at me and says, “I sense you don’t believe in what I do.”

“Do I have to pay for that reading?”

“Let me read your palm,” she says.

“I’m really not interested.”

“Maybe you’re scared of what you’ll hear.”

“I am scared.  Not of my future, but of money magically disappearing from my wallet.”

I pick up a copy of today’s newspaper and Angela and I walk to Jackson Square.  The sky turns overcast, quickly darkening, and appears as if it will rain soon.  I sit on a metal bench in front of some bushes in which I see a grey cat sleeping.  Angela walks in the square and talks to some artists who display their work for sale, though they now pack up because of the impending weather.

I browse the newspaper.  I look up and see a young man in his mid-twenties riding a bicycle.  He has close-cropped hair and tattoos down his arms.  He stops and asks Angela a question.  They talk a moment and I look back at the paper.  I flip to the second page and see the headline “Teenage Girl Goes Missing in Florida.”

My heart quickens as I read, “Angela Selby, age 17 … vanished after quarrel with parents … feared kidnapped … ‘Angela is a model teenager and the best daughter anyone could ask for,’ her parents said.  ‘Anytime we and Angela have ever disagreed, we’ve always talked things out.  She would never run away.  Whoever is responsible for her disappearance needs to come forward immediately.  We will not rest until we have our daughter back.’”

I feel like I can hardly breathe.  I stand, fold the newspaper, and look up to see Angela trying to nonchalantly speed-walk over to me.

“I think we should go,” she says.  “Some guy said he recognized me.”

We start walking quickly back to our hotel.  It starts drizzling.  “From where?” I ask.

“He said he saw a picture in the paper.  It said I was missing.”

“What did you say?”

“I just laughed and said that it wasn’t me.  I said I live here in New Orleans and I must just look like whoever he saw.”

“Did he believe you?”

“Yeah, he seemed to.  He just shrugged and biked away.”

“Okay.  We need to leave right now.”

I take Angela to my car.  I tell her to put on a pair of sunglasses.  I find a baseball cap in my trunk which I also give her. 

In the hotel I pack up both her and my stuff and carry it down to the lobby.  I check out and haul our luggage to the car and load it and we leave.

SHREVEPORT, La. – “How should I change my look?”

I enter the lobby of the David Motel alone and check into a room.  Under a clearance, confined by the building, the parking lot is sparsely populated.  I make sure no one is watching before I whisk Angela from my car into our room.

She stands and stares at herself in the mirror over the sink.

“Probably start with the hair,” I tell her.  “Cut it.  Change the color.”

              “That’s what I was thinking.  I was thinking of going darker, closer to what my natural color is.  I’ve been blond for, like, three or four years now.  There are no pictures of me with dark hair except when I was much younger.”

              “How about cutting it shorter?”

              “Who would cut it?  I can’t cut my own hair.”

              “I could help you.”

              “Are you a trained hair stylist?”

              “No.”

              “Then no way.  No one’s cutting my hair who hasn’t gone to school for it and knows what they’re doing.”

              “We could just shorten it a little.”

              “I don’t want to.  I like long hair,” she says.  “Short hair doesn’t look feminine to me.  And besides, we just decided I’m going to dye my hair a totally different color.  So there’s really no need to cut it.”

              “Alright.  I’ll go buy some dye right now so we can get this done and you can leave this room.”

              “Wait, do you know what to get?”

              “Black?” I ask.

              “No, I’ve thinking of dyeing my hair a while now.  I know exactly what I want.  Get me the Color Me Vivacious Dark Brown Chocolate Warm Velvet No. 66.”

              I stare at her, blink twice.

              “What?  You can remember that, right?”

              I drive to a Walgreens on Airline Drive.  I spend several minutes in the hair section, confused, until I eventually find the exact hair color Angela asked for.

              Back at the motel I toss the shopping bag to Angela on the bed.  “Good,” she says, taking out the hair color.  “You actually got the right thing.”

              From the television on the news I hear, “And the story of a missing teen in Pensacola, Florida …”

              “Oh, shit, listen,” Angela says, grabbing the remote control and turning up the volume.

              “Police are baffled by the sudden disappearance of seventeen-year old Angela Selby who was on a Labor Day weekend vacation with her parents and older brother,” a news reporter says, a sunny beach as his backdrop.  Some photographs of Angela flash across the screen.  “Her parents say late one afternoon, after a brief argument with their daughter, she left their condo and never came back.  Almost one-hundred people have volunteered to help comb the beaches as police have been tirelessly searching the shoreline.  Parents of the girl remain resolute that their daughter is alive and will be found.  The case has shaken the town and police urge anyone who may have seen Angela or who may have any information to contact them immediately.”

              “Wow,” Angela says.  “Can you believe those pictures they showed of me?  Those were awful.  I know my parents have pictures of me where I look way better than that … Well, fuck it, right?  At least they don’t seem to have a clue where we are.”  She takes the hair color, enters the bathroom, and shuts the door.  After about forty-five minutes she re-emerges, her blond hair turned a very dark brown.  “What do you think?”

              “It worked,” I say.  “You look way different.”

              She stares at me.

              I stand there a moment before adding, “And you look pretty too.  Much hotter than before actually.”

              She smiles and hops on the bed and says, “That’s what I was thinking.  I don’t know why I didn’t go back to my natural color sooner.  I think I just had the idea in my head that blond hair is better for some reason. Or that guys like blondes better, or something like that.  But so many girls are blond now that it’s bland.  I think it’s better to be more unique.”

              In the evening I order take-out from a Tex-Mex restaurant and bring it back to the motel.  Angela and I eat beef fajitas on the bed and intently watch the national news, waiting for any updates on the story, wanting to know if the police have learned anything more, wanting to see if any witnesses who may have seen us have come forward.

              Angela picks at her fajita and tries to talk to me.

              I’m mostly unresponsive, casually nodding at whatever she says.

              That night I toss and turn, unable to sleep.  At three o’clock I get up and sit on the dresser beside the television in the dark room.  I stare a while at Angela who sleeps easily.  Suddenly I feel the urge to leave, to just abandon her here.  I wonder how she would react.  If unable to fend for herself she’d go to the police and claim being kidnapped.  If she’d give them my description and what little she knows about me.

              Then I think about her upside.  Her ability to take direction, act, improvise, and con without regret.  Her desire to make money, her thrill-seeking attitude, and her fearlessness.             

I struggle over what to do.  I walk over and find Angela’s purse on the floor near the bathroom.  It’s a cheap metal-colored mesh handbag from Wal-Mart.  Inside she has only a small amount of cash, all of which I’ve given her.  I drop it back on the floor and decide to stay with her at least the night until I’m sure of what to do next.

              I oversleep and Angela wakes me at noon.  She pushes me and says, “Hey, look at this.”

              From the television I hear, “… And a couple new updates on the case of a missing teen in Pensacola.”

              I sit up in bed.

              “Two witnesses have come forward, both claiming to have seen what they believed to be missing seventeen year-old Angela Selby,” the anchorwoman says.  “However the girl, whose parents feared she was kidnapped after leaving their Pensacola condo late one afternoon, was seen not in Florida but in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Police have said two separate witnesses have claimed to have seen a girl resembling Angela in the French Quarter.  One witness said it appeared Angela was alone, the other saw her talking to a man who looked to be in his twenties.  Both witnesses said the girl they saw appeared to be under no duress.”

              Angela looks at me and says, “Shit.  What do you think?”

              “Hold on,” I tell her.

              “And another development in the case,” the anchorwoman continues.  “Parents of the missing girl, following her disappearance, claimed Angela was a model daughter and a model student who rarely got in trouble.  However, Angela’s older brother, a nineteen year-old college student who joined the family on their Labor Day vacation told reporters late last night his sister had another side.”

              They cut to a video clip of Angela’s brother talking.  “She definitely has her problems,” he says to a reporter off-camera.  “She’s smart and does well in the school when she wants to.  But on the other hand, the police have driven her home more than once when she’s intoxicated.  And she fights constantly with our parents.  She can be pretty nasty when she wants.”

              “Do you think her problems stem from her drinking?” the reporter asks.

              “It makes things worse.  But she can be hard to deal with when she’s perfectly sober too.  I mean, she really has two totally different sides to her.  Plenty of times she can be normal and nice and really sweet.  But she also has a real rebellious streak and she’ll just snap on you and be impossible to talk to.  She’ll have total disregard for anyone.  She won’t care.”