When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3) (8 page)

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T
he Denny’s was on the corner of Camelback Road and 24
^th
Avenue. Frank parked his car and went inside and got a seat in a booth at the window. The waitress came over, and she actually called him “Hon,” and he ordered coffee, and then he looked at the menu, at all the different food he could choose from, and he wanted all of it, but he finally ordered a chicken-fried steak. When the waitress asked him if he wanted soup or salad, he though she was saying “super salad”, and he said yes, and then she asked which of the two he wanted, and he got it, and asked for soup.

It was French onion soup and it was so good, and so was the steak, even though probably nobody else would have thought so. Frank chewed each mouthful slowly, not wanting it to be over. When he’d eaten everything on his plate, he wanted to order another one, but he knew he was too full to be able to eat any more, so he just ordered more coffee and looked out of the window as he drank it, looked at the night, at what he had now, at what he might have.

His wristwatch told him it was time to head back to the halfway house. He paid his bill and left a tip, and the waitress said, “Come back and see us soon, hon,” and Frank said, “I will.”

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L
aura lay in bed, on her side, as David held her from behind. The light was off, and a scented candle flickered on the nightstand.

“What time do you need the alarm set for?” Laura said.

“Whenever.”

“Damn, I want to be you when I grow up.”

“Hey, I have to work plenty. I just get to set the hours. Unlike a certain drain on society...” He kissed her bare shoulder.

“Shut up. As of Monday, I’ll be a serf. Eight till five.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. And those were the hours I put in at Capital Habeas. At
least
those hours. It’s called working for a living.”

“Hey, I’m not afraid of hard work. Doesn’t scare me at all. I can lie down right beside it and go to sleep.”

“Speaking of sleep, I need to.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Sure you do. So I guess that’s not your cock I feel getting hard against my ass?"

Before he could answer, she pressed back against him, and he started a laugh that turned into a groan. Then she moved again, and he felt how wet she was, and then he was inside her.

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F
rank lay on the dark in the institutional bed, a sheet covering his body, his cock in his hand. As he stroked it, he didn’t think about any of the things he knew people would expect him to think about. He thought about a woman, not a child, not at all, and it was okay, he came, and after he came he lay there and felt the spreading stain on the sheet turn cold in the air-conditioned chill, and he thought about having someone’s arms around him, someone who loved him.

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L
aura told David she wasn’t going to be able to come again, because she was sore from the relentless fucking they’d done earlier, but it still felt good to have him moving inside her, his hand on her flat stomach as he lay behind her, his mouth close to her ear, talking to her quietly. Eventually he pulled out and came all over her ass. She pressed herself into him, rubbing the come into their skin.

She actually hadn’t come at all tonight, but she had pretended to, because she didn’t want to have to explain to David — or, worse, not explain to him — why she didn’t. The first time they had gone to bed together, her orgasms has been intense. It was always that way when she fucked strangers, or men she liked okay but could take or leave. That could sometimes last a while, even years, for as long as the guy saw no more of her than she wanted him to. It wasn’t like that with David now, and she liked it and hated it.

She fell asleep without saying anything. He watched her for a little while, then leaned over and blew out the candle.

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F
rank had always loved to sleep, but he didn’t feel that way anymore. In the joint, his favorite time of day had been the moment just after the lights went out, when it felt as though the darkness was absolute, something no one could see through, falling on him and protecting him, keeping everything else away. He would close his eyes and try to fall asleep quickly, before he felt compelled to open his eyes and realize that they had adjusted to the dark and he could see everything and that anyone who wanted to hurt him would be able to see him too.

Now he didn’t need the dark, and he didn’t want to sleep. He lay there with his eyes open, and he loved that he could see the outline of every item in the little room, see the shadows on the wall and the weak light from the street lamps coming through the window. He didn’t want to sleep, because he was happy, and because he wasn’t scared. He had everything, streets and diners and strangers who called him “Hon” and didn’t hate him, and it was so good he didn’t want to let go of it even for a little while, because dreams could never be as good as this. But when sleep finally came to take him, gently pulling him away from it all, it was okay and he was still happy because he knew he wouldn’t sleep for long and it would all be waiting for him when he returned.

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L
aura woke at five. It was still dark. She lay awake for almost an hour, enjoying David’s warmth as she watched the windows start to lighten. She hadn’t closed the blinds, but, even when sunlight was filling the room, David still didn’t wake. Laura got up, put on her sweats and running shoes, tied her hair back in a pony tail, ate a granola bar, drank some water. Then she drove to A-Mountain and did her usual workout. When she got back to her apartment, David was still asleep. She drank about a liter of water, then ground some beans and brewed coffee.

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C
offee. Coffee, coffee, coffee, Frank was drinking coffee and it felt so good.

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S
he took a shower while the coffee was brewing. She toweled herself dry, put on a robe, used her hair-dryer. She poured two cups of coffee and went to the bedroom. David still wasn’t fully awake, but he looked like he was getting there.

“Hey,” she said. “Want some coffee? It’s Fair Trade, so even a hippie like you can drink it.”

“Thanks,” he slurred as she handed him a cup. He took a sip. “Damn, that’s good.”

“Glad you like.”

“You’ve had a shower already? I wanted to take a shower with you.”

“You snooze, you lose. I not only have taken a shower – while your lazy ass was hogging my sheets, I was running up A-Mountain and doing fifty push-ups.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding. Please tell me you can’t really do fifty push-ups after running up a mountain.”

“Sure can. Wanna feel my muscles?”

“No, thank you.”

“Jealous?”

“Damn right. Life has thrown me my share of humiliations, but I never thought I’d have a girlfriend who could beat me at push-ups.”

“Girlfriend? You think of me as your girlfriend, huh?”

“Not really. That just kind of slipped out. But I’d like to.”

“Like to what?”

“Think of you as my girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“
‘Oh’
? That’s all I get? I open my little heart, and all I get is an
‘Oh’
?”

“Calm down, you goddamn drama queen. I got up and made you coffee. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Hmph. Maybe.”

“Also, you think I always have Fair Trade coffee?”

“Don’t you?”

“No. I normally donate to exploitation of the Third World as a matter of routine. I got the Fair Trade stuff so I wouldn’t have to listen to your hippie bitching.”

“Seriously? You got it for me?”

“You sure you never went to college? Yeah, I got it for when you come over. And I got a big bag of it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I guess what that means is that if you want to consider me your girlfriend, it’s cool with me.”

They stared at each other in silence for a few seconds.

“Wow. I can tell people I met my girlfriend when I exposed her history of criminal violence and abuse of power.”

“I can tell people my boyfriend is a muck-raking scumbag who helped ruin my career.”

“At least you didn’t beat me up.”

“Not yet.”

Later, after David had taken a shower and they were heading out to have breakfast, she asked him what he was doing the next day.

“Tomorrow’s Friday... Shit, I’m meeting a source.”

“Will you be available for a booty call later in the evening?”

“That’s definitely possible. What you doing Saturday?”

“Going to the Rhythm Room with some people you know.”

“Who?”

“The people you bugged the hell out of to try to get them to talk about me. My erstwhile colleagues.”

“Ah.”

“They’re having a kind of belated going-away party for me.”

“Well, I don’t imagine they’d be very glad to see me.”

“It’d be cool. I’d like it if you came along.”

“Okay, I will, then.”

“But if you’re gonna be around these guys, I better warn you about what they’ll ask you. I’ve been avoiding this, but... how do you feel about the death penalty?”

“It varies. If I’m at a crime scene, I’m for it. If I’m at an execution, I’m against it.”

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F
rank was eating bacon and eggs and hash browns and toast and he was drinking orange juice and he was looking at a family in the restaurant who had a little girl and her face reminded him of the face of a little girl he had once known, but that little girl was dead and this one was alive and Frank was glad she was alive and he hoped that no one would ever do anything to hurt her.

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A
s Laura and David walked from her apartment to his car, David’s cell phone rang. He looked at the caller I.D. and sighed. “I have to take this. It’s my editor.”

He walked away from her, until he was just out of her hearing range, and answered the phone. She stood leaning against his car, feeling the hot metal through the fabric of her jeans, and watched as he walked around in a circle, talking. After a minute he ended the call and walked back to her.

“I’m guessing you have to skip breakfast,” she said.

“Yeah. You know who Mad Marky is, right?”

“Sure, who doesn’t?”

Marky Moorhead was a legend in the Valley biker community. For years, he had headed up a local gang and violently resisted assimilation by the Hell’s Angels when the Angels moved into Arizona and forcibly assimilated every other gang. When the Angels eventually won the war – with the assistance of the Phoenix Police Department – they realized that they were going to have to either kill Marky or give him some serious compensation. They appointed him second-in-command of the Valley of the Sun chapter, and, when his commander-in-chief did too much crank and rode into the back of a semi, they decided to let Marky run the show. He turned out to be good at it, and the cops never managed to nail him for anything serious, until he beat his lover and her husband to death in front of witnesses, which he had been on trial for. But he wasn’t on trial any longer.

“It seems he just walked this morning on some technicality,” David said. “Some police screw-up. I don’t know the details – I don’t think Jerry knew either, and he’s too dumb to explain even if he did. But he wants me to head over to Marky’s house and see if I can get him to talk to me.”

“Why would he?”

“Because I’m so charming.”

“If he won’t talk to you, are you gonna write an article anyway, then bug him till he sleeps with you?”

“Quack, quack, quack. Look, I have to roll. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Okay. Listen, I feel like a dork for saying this, but be careful.”

“Sure will.”

“Or as careful as you can be when you’re bugging hairy psychopaths.”

He squeezed her ass as he kissed her, then got in his car.

Laura walked back to her apartment. She logged on to the Internet and did a search on Marky Moorhead. She couldn’t believe how worried she felt, and reading Marky’s bio wasn’t making her feel any better.

Mad Marky lived in a stucco house in a suburb of Mesa. When David arrived, the entire Valley media seemed to be camped there already. He recognized some T.V. guys, and Richard Ortega, the daily paper’s metro columnist, who hated David nearly as much as he hated having to leave his office and do some leg work.

“Hey, man,” David called to a camera guy. “Any sign of him?”

“Yeah, Ricky Ortega went and knocked on his door, and Mad Marky came out and actually chased him.”

“No shit? Cool. What happened?”

“Ricky pissed himself in fright. Seriously. He actually pissed in his pants.”

“I’m surprised he’s still here.”

“He left and then came back. His editors must have sent him back.”

“Yeah. Or maybe he went home to change his pants.”

The guy laughed. “So, what are you gonna do?”

“Me? Nothing. Just hang out.”

“As soon as it’s past our deadline and we’ve all gone, you gonna make your move?”

“You know it, brother.”

“Good luck.”

David called his editor and told him what was happening. Then he called Laura and told her.

“So you’re gonna stay there?”

“Yeah. The T.V. people won’t stay all that much longer, once they know they’re not gonna get anything in time for the six o’clock news. Then I’ll see if I can get him to open his door.”

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L
aura had never thought of herself as being religious, but when she got off the phone with David, in absence of faith she still got down on her knees and prayed.

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A
s time passed and his bottled water ran out, David felt as though his organs were sizzling in their own juices. When the T.V. people finally left, he wished he could go with them. He had never felt less like confronting a violent criminal. The thought of a cold bottle of beer in an air-conditioned bar seemed almost pornographic.

He thought about Laura, and thinking about her made him remember how it had been when he’d first moved to Phoenix. He was working a piece-of-shit job that paid just enough to cover food and rent and gas, and not enough to cover car insurance or pay to have a phone connection in his apartment. He was looking for another job, and when he saw ads in the paper he would walk to a public phone nearby and use it to make the call. One Saturday morning, he went  to call a restaurant about a dishwashing job, and found that somebody was already using the phone. The guy was around David’s age, and spoke with a Southern accent. “I really love you,” he said. “I miss you so much. So damn much... you know?”