When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3) (6 page)

“Nobody got in trouble at all?”

“No. They got the same treatment I got when I stepped over the line. It all just went away. Who was gonna care? The kid was a killer. Better yet, he was a killer with no money who wasn’t white.”

“Why did that make you quit?”

“Because it was murder, and I couldn’t say a thing, because these guys were only getting the same benefit I’d been getting. And they really weren’t any worse than I was. It was only dumb luck that I never killed anybody when I lost my temper.”

“So you just walked?”

“No. I’m not that principled. I wasn’t about to put myself out of a job over it. But the job just didn’t feel the same. I was taking a lot of time off, showing up late, stuff like that. They counseled me that I’d better get it together, and I realized I didn’t really want to get it together.”

“Did you ever think about going to the press with what happened that night?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know damn well. The old blue wall. I’m not going to snitch on a cop, ever, even a bad cop. Hell, I was a bad cop, and these are guys who always had my back. Anyway, if I had snitched, there was plenty that I’d done that would’ve come back on me.”

David didn’t say anything.

“You think I’m a jerk.”

He considered it. “No, I don’t. I’m trying to, but it’s not happening.”

“I can’t believe I’m telling you this shit.”

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T
wo hours later, they were still in the restaurant. He was answering her questions now.

“You like your job?”

“Not much. The profession attracts idiots. And it’s a crummy paper, and the pay sucks.”

“Why don’t you go to another paper?”

“I tried. I applied to both the dailies. They won’t hire me.”

“How come?”

“Because I haven’t been to journalism school.”

“But you’ve won a shitload of awards. Your paper’s always bragging about it.”

“Doesn’t matter. All they care about is if you’ve got a degree. Doesn’t matter if you’re any good.”

“Don’t you need a degree to get hired at your paper?”

“Sure you do. Everybody there has one, except me.”

“So how did you get the job?”

“I lied. I told them I’d been to j-school, and by the time they found out I was lying I was breaking stories none of them could have handled.”

“What were you doing before that?”

“Mowing lawns. My lawn-mower broke, I needed a job, so I applied to the paper and pretended to be a reporter.”

“You have got to be messing with me.”

“Nope, it’s true.” He tried to get back to being the one asking the questions. “You were born in Phoenix, right?”

“Yeah, I’m one of the few natives. How about you?”

“I came here from Texas six years ago.”

“Is your family here or in Texas?”

“Don’t have any.”

“Ah, don’t want to talk about it? Okay.”

But he did talk about it.

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H
is parents had five kids, and didn’t care about any of them. He sometimes thought they liked him the least, and sometimes thought it might have something to do with his being the eldest, but he couldn’t say for sure if that was true.

What his parents did care about, had a deep and loving commitment to, was alcohol. It was the center of the life they shared in San Antonio when he was growing up. The welfare checks, the money from his father’s occasional jobs, the money from the regular tricks his mother turned – all went for booze, with only a cursory nod in the direction of food and rent. By the time David reached his teens, the family had been evicted from so many cheap apartments he had lost count.

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“Y
our accent’s kind of white trashy,” Laura said.

“Yeah. I don’t try to hide it anymore.”

“I just realized that was a real asshole thing to say. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know you didn’t. Don’t worry. Besides, I know I’m white trash, and I’m perfectly happy about it. When I think about the country club idiots I have to interview all the time, I get even happier about it.”

“So, how did you get from there to here?”

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H
e didn’t know why he walked when he did, why it was then and not earlier or later. He was seventeen, nearly eighteen, had quit high school and was working in a fast food place that paid slightly less than welfare. His parents took most of it in exchange for allowing him to live there and eat canned food.

He saved what little money he could, and it was towards a purpose. There was a girl who sometimes stopped in at the corporate taco joint where he worked. She was a year younger than him, and more beautiful than any girl he’d seen in real life and not in the movies. He didn’t think she’d ever want to go out with him, because she was still in school and planning to go to college and so he thought she must be smarter than him. But she always talked to him, and she seemed to like him, and so, when she mentioned that this cheesy boy band she liked was coming to town soon, David told her he could get tickets and asked if she’d like to go with him. When she said yes, he hoped it wasn’t just about the band.

But he never got to find out.

After buying the tickets and a new shirt, pants and shoes, he had about forty dollars left. It was a Saturday night, and he was in the bathroom applying some cologne, thinking about what he would say to her first when he arrived at the diner where they were to meet, what they would do after the concert, whether everything or nothing might happen.

He went into his bedroom, picked up the jeans he’d been wearing earlier, reached into a pocket and got his keys, reached into another pocket to get his money. It wasn’t there.

He knew what had happened, but he didn’t want it to be true. So he tried to make it not be true. He searched the other pockets, then searched his coat pockets, even though he never kept money in his coat. He looked all around his bed, then under the bed, and then, with his stomach jumping and his eyes getting wet, he went to where his money was.

“Give me my money back,” he told his mother. She was sitting in the living room with his father.

“What money?” she said, and he knew he was right.

“Did she go out of this room in the last ten minutes?” he asked his father.

“I went to the bathroom,” she said.

“No, you didn’t. I was in the bathroom.” His voice was quavering.
“Give it back to me,”
he screamed so hard it made his ears hum.

He never figured out whether his father was in on it with his mother. It was possible, but he didn’t think it was likely, because his mother wouldn’t have wanted to share the money was his father.

His parents looked at each other, and his father said, “Give him his money.”

“I don’t have his fucking money. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“She took it,” he said to his father.

“I know she did,” his father said.

“I did not!”

“I’ll search her,” his father said. “Come back in five minutes.”

He stood outside the living room door and heard his mother yell,
“Get off of me, you fucking bastard.”
When his father called to him, he went back in and found his mother, red-faced, straightening her clothes.

“She don’t have it,” his father said. “She must have hid it.”

He knew there was no use in arguing. His parents were now united. His father had found the money on his mother, and if she kept quiet about it they would both be going to the liquor store that evening.

“I fucking hate you both.” He walked out before they could see him cry.

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“S
hit,” Laura said. “Did you go meet the girl?”

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H
e couldn’t. In years to come he would wish that he had, that he’d explained that he’d lost his money and taken her to the concert anyway, but he couldn’t. As a man, he would know that she’d probably have been so excited about that concert that she wouldn’t have cared about his not being able to pay for anything else. But, as a boy, he didn’t know that. He only knew that something good had been taken away from him, and he had never felt so bad.

He went out and walked around, but he didn’t show up to meet the girl. He knew he couldn’t go back to his job again, or she might come in.

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“S
hit,” Laura said again. “Did you ever see her?”

“No.”

“I’ll bet she still wonders what happened.”

He laughed, very harshly. “I know. I sometimes imagine tracking her down and telling her.”

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H
e found a job on a construction site, and saved some money. He had packed some clothes and other things, left without saying anything to his parents, and was staying in a shelter for the homeless. He was afraid of some of the other occupants, most of whom had mental problems that made them dangerous, but he preferred them to his parents. When one of the guys on the construction site announced that he was moving to Corpus Christi, David asked if he wanted company. He went to Corpus Christi, and never went back to San Antonio except to use the airport.

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“D
id you ever see your parents again?”

“No. Never even talked to them.”

“Do you hate them?”

“I’ve never figured that out, but I don’t think so. They’re both dead anyway, so it wouldn’t matter.”

“It would matter to you,” Laura said.

“Yeah, true. You know, I never cared when they died. My dad died first, and as far as I know he never tried to contact me. But a couple years later, I was talking on the phone with my sister on Christmas Day –“

“You kept in touch with your siblings?”

“Yeah... well, really only my sister Lonna. She’s the only one I’m close to. So... I’d just moved to Phoenix, and it was Christmas Day, and I was depressed as all hell...”

“I know the feeling.”

“Yeah. So I’m talking to my sister on the phone, really just to talk to somebody, since I didn’t know anybody in Phoenix... So I’m talking to her, and her husband and kids are there, and it turns out my mother’s there with her too. And Lonna tells me my mom wants to talk to me, and do I want to talk to her.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. It was right out of the blue. You know, I’m talking to Lonna, then I hear my mom’s voice in the background, then Lonna’s asking me to talk to her.”

“Did you?”

“No. I just said, ‘I don’t have anything to say to her.’ And Lonna told her, she just repeated it. And when my mom died –“

“When was that?”

“About a year later. And when that happened, Lonna called right after the funeral, and she told me that my mom sat there and bawled when I wouldn’t talk to her.”

“Why did Lonna tell you that? Was she mad at you?”

“I don’t know. But when she told me my mom cried like that... It kind of ended things, you know? It made things kind of even. She was never my mother when I was a kid, and now that she wanted a son, I wasn’t. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah. Christ, David.”

“I know. I just told myself, that was the end of it. I wasn’t sorry she was so hurt – hell, I wish I could be, but I wasn’t – but, if I hated her, that was gonna be the end of it. I just wasn’t gonna hate anybody again.”

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L
aura thought about her mother. Her father. How she had no one but Frank. Nearly told David, but didn’t. He thought about asking, but didn’t.

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“I
live over on Encanto,” David said. “It’s not that far.”

“You’re asking me to go home with you?”

He smiled. “Yeah.”

“Why would I?”

“I don’t know. Because you want to?”

“Are you sure I want to?”

“No. And if you don’t want anything to happen, you know, you’re still welcome to come over and hang out. We can just talk...”

“Yeah,” she said. “Or we could always just fuck.”

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H
e kissed her as soon as they were inside his house, before he’d even turned a light on. He kissed her hard, pushing her against the front door he’d just closed. As they kissed, he reached a hand between her legs and felt her wetness seeping through her jeans. He had never known anyone to get so wet so quickly.

“I touched myself while I was driving here,” she said into his mouth between kisses.

He stepped back, took her by the hand and led her to his bedroom, flicking on the light as they went in. He pushed her down on the bed and began to undress her. She was excited by his aggressiveness; she was always turned off by shy men. When she was naked, he tried to go down on her, but as his tongue started to push into her cunt she said, “Take your clothes off and fuck me.”

He stood up and undressed so fast that he tripped and almost fell over as he was taking his pants off. They both tried to laugh at that, but they were too excited. She liked the sight of him naked – he looked like he was in good shape, and his cock was very hard.

“You’re beautiful,” he said as he looked at her.

“Come here.”

As he got on the bed, she took his cock in her hand, then reached lower and stroked his balls. He moaned quietly, and she said, “Do you have any condoms?”

“Yeah. In the dresser. I’ll go get one.”

But she didn’t let go of him.

“If you were to tell me you didn’t have anything I should worry about, should I believe you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t lie. I’d be scared you’d beat me up if I did.”

“So are you telling me you don’t have anything I should worry about?”

“Yeah...” As he said it, his cock was touching her cunt, and a second later he saw the look on her face as he went into her.

It lasted a long time. Afterwards, they lay quietly together, sweat and come drying on their skin, their breathing slowing down as they kissed softly. And then they weren’t quiet anymore, their kisses were ferocious and deep and they were biting lips and sucking on tongues. She reached for him and he was hard again and when they finally slept in each other’s arms the sun was shining outside.

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D
avid wasn’t a morning person, but when Laura woke up at around eight, she promptly woke him too. “Hey, what time do you have to get to work?”