72 Hours
A Novel by Dietrich Stogner
Ebook by Ebookfab
Copyright © 2011 by Dietrich Stogner
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published in the United States of America by Dietrich Stogner
http://www.dietrichstogner.com
Ebook by Ebookfab
Dedicated to Catherine Stogner.
You were the first to tell me I should write my stories down, and never doubted that I could be great.
I love you, Mom.
Contents
My buddy Wally Stanovich fires frozen chickens…
My face itched…
I lived in a relatively low end apartment…
Five minutes later, Lopez was wearing jeans…
“So where do we even begin…
“Shit.”
Sophie’s was a small Cajun restaurant…
“Something is fucking wonky…
Lopez and I began walking back…
After getting home (and being attacked…
In the midst of a very strange dream…
“Holy crap. You did this with a frying pan?”
I awoke to Albert whining…
I woke to a smack on my arm…
The car was actually better…
“Karen was okay with us searching…
We spent the next forty minutes driving…
I finally spoke, and my voice didn’t…
“What the hell is this?”
“Are you sure this is the place?”
“That was different.”
We pulled into the parking lot…
“What time is it?”
Roberts didn’t say anything until…
We talked for a while…
I woke to a buzzing noise…
Stuffing my phone back into my pocket…
I looked up, and saw the front of a deli…
As soon as the spinning round clinked…
I drove the car, following Harris’ muttered…
“You’re extremely lucky, you know…
My buddy Wally Stanovich fires frozen chickens at airplane windshields for a living.
That wasn’t his career goal in life. We served together in the Navy, and not once did he tell me of a lifelong ambition to send subzero poultry crashing through aviation glass on a daily basis. No, he got kicked out of the Navy after he popped positive on a drug test for marijuana. He claims that it must have been the brownies that his girlfriend made, but I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit.
Anyway, he walks into this company called Skyward Technologies because he heard they needed a filing clerk. They hired him, and he did that for three days. On his lunch break on the third day, he was wandering through the testing floor, and overheard a group of engineers trying to figure out the best way to test airplane windshield’s ability to resist a goose impact.
Wally steps up, and tells them about this story he heard about the Japanese catapulting live chickens at Zero windshields to test them before battle in World War 2. Total bullshit, and they knew that, but it got them thinking. One thing led to another, and next thing you know? Clock in, pull the lever, splat, good, time for lunch, pull the lever, crash, bad, clock out, home in time for Simpsons reruns.
The entire point is, you never know what’s going to happen. I let myself forget that a lot can change in three days. In seventy-two hours, Wally went from an unemployed pothead to a guy with arguably the most amazing job on the planet. So I guess it’s not too surprising, at least in retrospect, how much happened in our seventy-two hours.
It certainly wasn’t what I had planned on happening. But it happened, and I’m trying to make it work.
Monday
Chapter 1
My face itched. I’d actually let my beard start to grow in for the first time in over six years, and it itched like crazy. Staring in the mirror, I also reflected on the fact that it really wasn’t coming in the way that it was supposed to. By the end of the third day, I should have had a manly ghost of a beard, like that tough cartoon soldier with the kung fu grip. After trimming carefully, it should provide a strong accent to my tough jaw line, guaranteeing my status as a tough no nonsense veteran who intimidates men, and makes women swoon in the presence of such overwhelming testosterone. My reflection stubbornly refused to adopt anything close to the proper image. As of this particular moment, I looked like a homeless man with a bad case of mange. But given time, I was confident that I would look like an extra from a bad seventies porno.
But it wasn’t so much the look I was pursuing, it was evidence that I, Michael Whiting, had, after six years, four months, two days, and three hours (give or take) of donating the vast majority of my life to the demands of the United States Navy, finally wriggled my way to a discharge. I was a civilian. I could find a job and quit it for any reason. I could wear whatever the hell I wanted, be it a suit or a fishnet tank top. I could grow a beard, and no one could demand that I shave. I spun around from the mirror, reveling in my new freedom, and strode confidently into the kitchen to present the new, fuzzy face of my liberation to Albert. Albert, my perennially overjoyed basset hound, stared at me, whined, and went to hide under the table.
Despite this less than enthusiastic response from the only creature I answered to these days, I was excited. I had completed the Transition Assistance Program, the week long seminar intended to transform me into a productive member of civilian society. After that, I completed the checkout process, which essentially entails presenting yourself to anyone who has anything to do with your military career and listening to their own comedic styling as they riff about how pleased they are to not have to deal with the apparently massive heaps of bullshit that accompanied every step you took in Navy blue.
Finally, I presented myself to Personnel and braced for the inevitable bribery and pleading as they desperately pawed through their arsenal of fear and cajoling to preserve such an invaluable government resource. This consisted of a bored yeoman slamming a stamp down on a mountain of forms and droning, “Sign here, drop your ID off with security, don’t let the door hit your fat ass on the way out.” Somehow I managed to resist their wiles, and found myself a free man.
I couldn’t really blame anyone who had served with me for the remarkable level of ambivalence regarding my departure. In the course of my naval career, I had graduated the distinguished Naval Nuclear Pipeline two spots away from the dead center of my graduating class. I completed five strategic deterrent patrols on a ballistic missile submarine, and did so with so little distinction that one of the petty officers in my division regularly ran a pool as to how often our captain would forget my name.
My one claim to fame was dropping a can of nonstick spray into a deep fryer during my third patrol. The resulting explosion and fire did attract attention, but even that was forgotten rather quickly. When I did step away from this career path, I did so with complete confidence that the United States military, the USS Pennsylvania, and indeed anyone who served with me would continue with no issues whatsoever. Like a wrench that snapped during use, I was discarded without a thought, and replaced with the next available set of blue coveralls that wandered on board.
But now that was past, and I found myself wondering what I would do next. Throwing some eggs in a skillet and switching on the burner, I opened my laptop and logged online to check my email. A week before, I had placed the resume I had assembled onto all of the major job hunting websites and was certain that my inbox would be bloated with dozens of employers from across the country desperate for the volumes of experience and training that I took away from the Navy. The reality was the usual deluge of spam promising bigger erections, freakier girls, and even more desperate deposed monarchs of third world countries. Although all worthy of my attention, none of these promised to provide anything close to a steady paycheck.
The odd thing was that I found myself remarkably apathetic about the lack of job prospects. Money was a bit of an issue, but the majority of my thirty thousand dollar enlistment bonus was still sitting fat and happy in my savings, and would probably hold me for a bit. But even more than that, I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing. Engineering was boring, repetitive, and not at all what I wanted to be doing for decades until incontinence and the promise of sponge baths from nubile nursing home attendants lured me into retirement.
I wanted something different, something that was actually interesting. I knew I was moderately intelligent. I knew I could work hard. When I spoke of this with Lopez, my closest friend from the Navy who had left a year before I had, he expressed absolute confidence that I would have no problem finding a job slinging chili, shoveling horse shit, or even, if I was willing to climb that corporate ladder, working the day shift at that kiosk in every mall that has those weird wire spiders that fat middle age women spend way too much time scratching their heads with.
Lopez is kind of an asshole.
Albert padded into the room, attracted by the smell of overcooked eggs. I scooped his portion out of the pan and dumped it into his bowl. He attacked it with the same rapturous joy of a heroin addict going after his latest fix. I sat at the cheap card table that served as my dining room set and shoveled my food in, pondering how I was going to fill the hours of the day. In my now six-month-long period in an unemployed state, I had been searching for something to pass the time until I figured out what to do with my life.
Two months after I got out, I realized my unrealized passion for painting was finally going to be unleashed upon the world. Five days of frenzied and exhausting artistic ejaculation later, Lopez came over to watch television, and while I was grabbing beers from the kitchen, yelled out to me, “Hey Mike, I think Albert shit on your canvas.” That was the end of my painting career. I had similar experiences with the kayaking guide business that I wanted to start, the abortive attempt at video game programming that resulted in one trashed computer and a bruised tailbone (don’t ask), and a week of going door to door asking if I could spray paint home addresses onto curbs. By the way, if you’re curious what the answer to that last question is, it ranges from, “What are you, some kind of lazy pedophile who can’t hold a job?” to “Get off my lawn before I turn on the sprinklers, you hobo.”
I felt a wet drooling dog chin slap down on my leg. Albert gazed up at me, trying his best to telepathically communicate to me that I didn’t really want my eggs, and indeed that I needed to cook up the rest of the dozen so I could not want to eat those too. Setting my plate on the floor, I moved over to the phone and dialed Lopez’s number. He picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hey, my asshole of a garbage man flashed gang signs at me this morning. I think it’s a precursor to a damn drive by.”
Okay, so I feel now that I should explain Lopez. Dave Lopez is a five-foot-tall former reactor chemist. He acts like a complete idiot sometimes, and a perverted, offensive idiot the rest of the time. The first time I saw him, he was protesting the regulation requiring us to wear radiation dosimeters, small belt clips that measure radiation. He chose to protest this by spending four days on board wearing nothing but a belt, his dosimeter and a pirate hat fashioned from duct tape.
He went to captain’s mast (navy version of misdemeanor court) three times, the first time for conduct unbecoming a noncommissioned officer (tying ropes to the arms and legs of three new sailors and forcing them to act as puppets as he acted out a pornographic version of Gone With the Wind). The second time was for unauthorized absence (he left while he was on watch to go to a KISS concert and hold up a sign reading, “Gene Simmons raped my great grandmother and didn’t even call her”).
The third time was also for conduct unbecoming, in addition to theft and reckless endangerment. This incident also marked the end of his eight year career in the navy. While on a port call in Pearl Harbor, he drank an entire bottle of Jose Cuervo, stole a forklift loaded with helium tanks, and crashed it through the front of the base commander’s greenhouse. When they came to arrest him, he was huddled in a corner behind a pile of wrecked calla lilies sucking on a helium tank and squealing, “You’ll never fucking take me alive!” while brandishing a bamboo stalk like a spear. After that, it was decided that the military wasn’t the best place for him.
All this serves to mask the most disturbing fact about Lopez. He’s a freaking genius. The only person to achieve a perfect score on the navy’s nuclear comprehensive exam, Lopez has a photographic memory and an IQ higher than most physics professors. The navy wanted to recruit him when he graduated high school, but he was only fifteen. If he had as much self-control as he had intelligence, he would have been an officer by the time he was twenty. As it was, he spent the majority of his time posting conspiracy theories on various web forums. It’s not that he believed any of them. He just enjoyed adding fuel to the arguments.
At his most recent outburst, I just sighed. “I’m sure your garbage man is not about to open fire on his customers.”
I heard him snort. “Whatever. When it happens and you’re tearfully confessing your undying love for me over my open grave, you’ll feel guilty as shit.” He paused, and added, “See, I’m saying that you’re gay.”
“Yeah, I got that. Asshole.”
“Anyway, I’m glad you called. I found a job for us.”
It was my turn to snort. Lopez’s attempts to become gainfully employed never seemed to last past the interview. It might have been the fact that the only suit that he was willing to wear was a pale yellow leisure suit he found in a dumpster in Bangkok while hiding from the local police. Or, it may have been the fact that he considered a job interview an opportunity to showcase his ability to sing “Baby Got Back” in his native Spanish. For whatever reason, it never seemed to happen.
“Okay, I’ll bite… what’s the job.”
“Not over the phone.” He lowered his voice. “We really need to discuss this over here.”
“Why? Is this something illegal?” I really didn’t think that he would get us involved in anything against the law, but I figured it might be a good thing to be sure.
“No, I just really need a energy drink and don’t feel like opening the door. That asshole sanitation department psycho might be waiting.” He hung up, and I sighed. Well, I didn’t have shit to do today anyway. At least it might be entertaining. Dropping the phone onto the cradle, I threw on my jacket, grabbed a Red Bull out of my fridge, poured enough food into Albert’s bowl to distract him from me leaving, and darted out the door.
Chapter 2
I lived in a relatively low end apartment building. After squeezing my admittedly expansive physique into a cot on a submarine for years, pretty much anything was a step up. As I walked towards the exit, the door next to mine cracked open, and I saw someone peer out towards me.
“Good morning, Mrs. Edleman. How have you been?” I tried to be polite to the people who shared my building, even if I couldn’t tell you most of their names.
The door opened further. Mrs. Edleman slithered into the hall, clutching some knitting between her hands. I don’t think that she actually knit, but I think she thought it was expected of any woman over the age of five hundred, a category in which she qualified. She never really spoke, but when she stepped into the hall she stretched out her hand and offered me a mint.
I popped it into my mouth and grinned. “Thanks, cutie. See you tonight.” She rewarded me with a shy smile and slid back into her apartment, waving goodbye.
See, Lopez has the brains, but I have my own gift. Everyone likes me. I may be remarkably forgettable after the fact, but when I’m talking to someone I always seem to know what to say to make someone smile and feel like it’s all about them. I’m the guy who can flirt with your girlfriend in front of you while you laugh. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty useless gift. It never helped me get a job or pick up women. But you need me to make an agoraphobic octogenarian smile, I’m your man.
Out in the parking lot, I slid behind the wheel of my beat up Nissan Stanza, cranked over the engine, and set off for the four block trip to Lopez’s place. We live in Nashville. Lopez moved here for a potential job. I moved here because my family lives nearby and I thought it was as good a place as any. In both of our cases, we really just have kind of floated here without finding any kind of direction or purpose.
The drive wasn’t far, but Nashville has the kind of traffic infrastructure that I’m fairly certain was designed either by a sadist or a mental patient. Four major interstates converge upon the city, bringing thousands of big rig trucks driven by sociopathic men fueled by a near-lethal combination of No-Doze, speed, and Glenn Beck radio. As a result, Nashville’s main roads turn into a parking lot early in the morning, and show little to no interest in changing until lunchtime.
The mist of rain drizzling down from the slate gray sky was that perfect level where turning on my windshield wipers resulted in a sound that made my molars try to claw their way out of my head, but leaving them off left my windshield about three degrees shy of greasily opaque. I eyed the sky nervously. Tennessee has oddly bipolar weather patterns. While there’s some vague approximation of seasons, the climate can shift remarkably quickly, sometimes with disastrous results. One year prior, a gloomy drizzle changed with terrifying speed, spawning a thunderstorm that spat fourteen tornadoes through various subdivisions, one of them containing my parent’s four bedroom colonial. While my parents were unharmed, their home was reduced to a pile of shattered wood and lawn ornaments. By the time they had emerged from the rubble, the sun was shining once more.
Despite the traffic and the weather, I found myself liking this city. There are a few towns across the world that seem to have a pulse, a rhythm that flows through the people and the buildings. Nashville is extremely eclectic, with neighborhoods ranging from slums to clusters of mansions that wouldn’t seem out of place in Beverly Hills, but the music and culture of the town permeate every inch of the city. I wasn’t sure it was where I wanted to remain, but it was a hell of an interesting place to hang my hat for now.
Taking advantage of a gap in the traffic, I broke away from the stagnant herd of exhaust-spewing vehicles and pulled into the side street leading to Lopez’s apartment. Lopez lived in a giant concrete brick of a building, the only character to the exterior granted by a large patch of moss on the wall facing the swimming pool. I pulled into a space next to a Geo Metro with $900 rims and a two foot tall lime green spoiler, slammed my car door shut and began the trudge up to the fifth floor.
I could hear the mechanical creaks and slams of a garbage truck tossing back another bin like a shot of whiskey down the gullet of a particularly cantankerous drunk, and paused in order to check out the guy driving the truck. Didn’t really seem like the drive-by shooting type, but who knew. I refrained from throwing up a gang sign, just in case.
By the time I reached the fourth floor, I heard Lopez’s door open. Looking up, I could see his head poking out over the railing. “Tell me you remembered the fucking Red Bull or I’m dropping this waffle iron on your skull.” He brandished the aforementioned weapon over his head.
I shrugged sheepishly at the shocked expression on the face of a passing woman as her pudgy two year old scowled at me, and tossed the can up in response. Lopez reached out to snag it, and vanished back behind the railing, calling out, “Door’s open.”
Walking into Lopez’s apartment was always surreal. It was always immaculately neat, to an almost obsessive level. Every single thing was in its very specific place, from the remote control to the furniture itself. Everything gleamed, not a speck of dust to be found anywhere. This was first made unusual by the fact that I have never seen Lopez clean anything up, ever. I came over to his place to get drunk and play video games, and we trashed his living room during a particularly contentious game of Pong. Halfway through our last game, I passed out on the floor.
When I woke up the following day, the room was back to its usual standard of cleanliness. I sat up and stared around the room in hung over disbelief, then realized that someone ironed the t-shirt that I was wearing. Creeps me the hell out just to think of it. When I asked Lopez, he just shook his head and muttered something about sushi-loving Presbyterian leprechauns. I don’t fall asleep there anymore.
The other bizarre thing about his place is the fact that nothing matches. It looks as if an Ikea store got hammered on bad tequila, stumbled into the center of his place, vomited, shit itself, and then died. The leopard bean bag chair is precisely fifteen inches from the mahogany captain’s chair, which is set exactly ninety degrees to the pink pleather couch. The refrigerator has a stainless steel freezer door, but a white fridge door. The stove is avocado green, while the dishwasher next to it has an air brushed copy of a Pantera tour poster on it. The floor is bamboo, but kind of stops halfway through the living room and is switched out by sky blue shag carpet. I haven’t been into his bedroom (not sure I really want to see where he sleeps), but I know that there is something large and neon from the otherworldly glow that emanates from beneath his door. Finally, standing in the corner of the dining room is an excellent example of a stuffed duck-billed platypus with a slab of Caberra marble attached to the top to serve as an end table. I don’t know where he gets this stuff, but I get a headache anytime I try to take it all in at once.
Sprawled out on the sofa, Lopez was crushing the can of Red Bull while trying to squeeze the last drop from the can. He looked like shit, but then again, he always looked like shit. Personal presentation always seemed to be an afterthought. Tossing the can to the side, he gave a sigh of deepest contentment, and then glared at me. “One fucking can? I know you have more at that rat hole of yours, you selfish bastard.”
“Good morning to you too, sunshine.” Others have taken offense at the way Lopez tosses around insults without restraint, but anyone who served with him knew that he just hadn’t figured out another way to talk. Could be why he doesn’t have a lot of dates. I plopped down in the bean bag chair and promptly swore; it’s a pain in the ass getting out of the damn thing.
“So what the hell are you up to today, other than bogarting your Red Bulls and squatting at my place? By the way, you look like you have mange… shave that shit.” He snatched up a game controller and resumed a game of Ms. Pac-Man he may have started five days ago.
I rolled my eyes. “You asked me to come over, remember? Said something about a job… although I shouldn’t hold out too much confidence that someone still wearing Yogi the Bear pajamas is on the fast track in the corporate world.”
“First of all, Yogi is the shit, and if you pay attention to his show, he has a hell of a lot to tell us about the way corporate America is sucking the blood of our economy and strangling the American sense of innovation. Right up there with Hitler and Gargamel, the Gap. Don’t ever shop there or you’re punching Uncle Sam in the nut cluster.” He paused the game long enough to shove a half eaten lollipop into his mouth. “Second of all, you don’t want to work some white collar bullshit. Stuck in a cubicle all day, punching in numbers, staring at some screen for hours on end… only way that ends is when you inevitably snap, build a crossbow out of stolen office supplies, and kill your boss and half your coworkers. And don’t think I’m going to be on the news talking about what a quiet friendly guy you were. I’m making up some shit about you having some weird obsession with Mr. Belvedere and the early guys in Menudo.”
“Okay, so what’s the job?” I glared at him, trying not to laugh. After years hanging out with him, I knew that laughing at his random rants would only encourage him to continue. “If this is about that male prostitution ring you want to start again…”
He shook his head. “No, I’ve decided you aren’t nearly good looking enough for that gig. Blue light special of male hookers, that’s you. Besides, I’d gobble up all of our customers with these Antonio Bendaras good looks.” He struck a pose, looking more like one of the before pictures on those laser hair removal billboards than Zorro. I wisely refrained from commenting.
Planting his feet on the ground, he wandered over to the fridge and yanked the door open. With his head and shoulders inside the fridge, he yelled out, “It’s my neighbor. She needs some help, and I told her that these two fine upstanding veterans were more than willing to extend a helping hand.”
“Wait, which neighbor… the one you think is convinced has a meth lab in her guest bedroom? Or the one who you got in the fistfight with when you asked if his wife was Russian or Ukrainian mail order?” God, those are weird questions to actually be asking out loud.
He wandered back to the living room, talking around a spoon piled high with Smuckers shoved in the corner of his mouth. “No, fuck that asshole and his Slavic love slave. I was just trying to get to know him better, pay him a compliment or two.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You asked him if he got a discount due to the fact that she obviously had been forced to bathe in llama shit for the first few years of her life!”
Lopez considered this for a second, and then grinned. “Yeah, that was awesome.” Sitting back down on the couch, he said, “No, this is Karen. Even if she does have a meth lab, she still needs our help.” Now he looked thoughtful. “Hey, maybe she could pay us in meth!”
Despite his behavior, neither Lopez nor I ever used drugs. For me, it was actually just a fear of needles and snorting anything. For him, well, I think even he was terrified how he might behave with some kind of chemical swimming through his head. Scares me just to think about it.
“So what does she need help with? It better not be babysitting. I’m not going to babysit her five hundred kids.” Although I was pretty sure she only had six kids, I still wasn’t interested. I don’t like kids very much. They’re small, expensive, messy and annoying. I know people say kids are cute, but I have trouble seeing it.
“No, she just said she needed help with something. Said to come over whenever you got here.” He stood up, and headed toward the door. “Come on, Boo Boo. Let’s go get paid.”
“You going to change out of the Yogi pajamas?” It wasn’t so much that I felt they were entirely and completely inappropriate for seeing a potential employer, it was also the fact that they were about five sizes too small and were desperately fighting a losing battle to contain Boo Boo and both of the pikanik baskets. I don’t care how much meth you’re on, that’s not a sight designed to make you feel anything other than slightly nauseous.
He paused, and looked down. I braced myself for an argument, but to my surprise, he nodded. “Yeah, wouldn’t want to intimidate anyone. I’ll go change.”
Chapter 3
Five minutes later, Lopez was wearing jeans and a t-shirt depicting a improbable romantic liaison between Big Bird and Henry Kissinger, but at least his genitals were not quite as visible. We walked over to the next door down the hall, and knocked. The door flew open, and a toddler wearing a diaper and what looked like half a bottle of ketchup stared dolefully up at us.
“Nice threads.” Lopez peered past him, and yelled, “Hey Karen! You home, or is this just some kind of weird nudist daycare?”
Karen Stuart came to the door, gave us a half hearted smile, and scooped up the midget doorman. “Come on in, guys.” We followed her into her apartment, and I looked around. It was definitely a home with a lot of people crammed in it, but it was neat and as clean as one could expect. Two teenagers sprawled out on the floor playing some shooter on the television. The outer wall was almost completely covered with a trio of huge bookshelves stuffed almost to overflowing with everything from Joseph Heller to Sesame Street. I was looking through her selection when she came up behind me.
“You guys want some coffee?” I turned to face her. Karen Stuart was tall, and fairly slender. Shoulder length blonde hair tumbled down past an impossibly exhausted face. She was actually pretty, but it was lined by years of sixty hour work weeks and juggling a handful of kids. There was no ring on her hand, which made me suspect that she handled it all herself. She held a chipped blue ceramic mug in her hand that she offered to me. I took it gratefully, and offered my hand.
“Mike Whiting.”
Shaking my hand with a surprisingly firm grip, she nodded. “Dave has told me a lot about you. Any friend of his…” She stopped, considered the statement, then smiled. “Well, you must be a very patient man.”
I tried not to grin too widely, and looked around. “This is a nice place.” There was a definite influence of those shows that demonstrate how you can use two hundred dollars and a bucket of grasshoppers to transform a crack den into the Trump Plaza penthouse. She had slipcovers on all of her furniture, and a collection of black and white photographs of her children playing scattered across her walls in a chaotic arrangement that somehow worked.
“Thanks. It’s not easy, but Katie helps a lot.” She walked over to the wall, and gestured to a photo of a pretty teenage girl trying to wobble along on what looked like a pair of stilts. She had a round, pleasant face and the tip of her tongue was poking out the side of her mouth as she focused on staying upright. “She works the evening shift at Wal-Mart. She should be starting college in about two months.” Karen smiled with obvious pride. “I know she could have gotten a scholarship anywhere she wanted, but didn’t even try. She applied to TSU so that she could still help take care of the rest of the bunch. She’s a rock.” She walked over to another framed photo of the same smiling girl wearing graduation robes proudly posing for a photo with her mom. I wasn’t sure, but I was fairly certain that the sash around her neck meant that she did much better than I did in high school. Karen beamed for a moment with obvious pride, and then her expression darkened. “I really hope you guys can figure something out. I’m really scared.”
“What?” That took me off guard for a moment. I glanced around for Lopez, and saw him coming back out of the guest bedroom with a disappointed look on his face. Apparently, there were no meth labs in the Trading Spaces showcase. He came up just in time to hear the last thing that Karen said, and shrugged. I looked back at Karen. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”
Karen looked confused. “I told Dave what was going on. He said you guys might be able to help. Was he wrong?”
I turned and fired a look at Lopez, who assumed a look of cherubic innocence. “I’m sorry; my associate here has yet to fill me in on the details of the job. I thought that you needed us to do some odd jobs or something.”
She sighed. “Okay, I’ll tell you what’s going on. Why don’t we sit down.”
We moved into the kitchen and sat down at a round maple table covered with coloring books and a half eaten pack of cookies. Karen fidgeted with a crayon for a few moments, clearly unsure of how to begin.
“Katie is my oldest daughter. She turned eighteen two weeks ago. As I told you, she is a good girl. She has been doing odd jobs, working part time and giving the family the money to help out since she was twelve. Her grades are perfect. She was on the school soccer team, and was also class president. She even spent the last semester doing an internship at Middle Tennessee State.” She smiled sadly. “I was actually a bit worried about her. Always thought that she needed to get into at least a bit of trouble while she was a teenager, but she never did. Not until last week.”
“What happened last week?” I was already feeling very unhappy about our visit here. I kept shooting dirty looks towards Lopez, but he ignored me and just kept eating the cookies and flipping idly through a coloring book depicting some kind of mutant sponge cavorting with an obviously intoxicated crustacean.
Karen assumed a sour look. “Last Monday, Katie came home and introduced us all to her new boyfriend. His name is…” She scowled, and then spat out the name, as if it left an unpleasant taste in her mouth. “Grub Harris.”
“Grub?” I gave her an unbelieving look. “That’s got to be the worst nickname I’ve ever heard.”
“No, remember Sammy Lyman?” Lopez grinned. “After we caught him giving himself a sponge bath in the aft head, everyone started calling him…”
“Lopez! Kids!”
He glanced over at the three children in the living room, all staring at him. “Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “He cried a lot though, didn’t he?”
Karen looked at Lopez as if he had just grown a new head. She had the look of someone seriously reconsidering their decision-making process. After a few seconds, she took a deep breath. “I think his name is actually Erik, with a K. I don’t know where he got the nickname, but it’s all he seems to answer to. In any case, I really didn’t like him from the beginning. He kept leering at Katie right in front of me, and I caught him doing the same to me. I tried to get along, though. Like I said, Katie’s a good girl and I figured if she liked him, he had to be a decent guy. That lasted half an hour.” Her face flushed with obvious anger. “That was when I caught him letting Liam here drink from a beer can.”
The toddler in question wobbled over to her and reached up, assuming hearing his name meant the promise of something exciting. She picked him up and handed him a crayon, which he promptly bounced off of my forehead. This was apparently the pinnacle of hilarity, as he dissolved into peals of laughter.
“I’m guessing that you didn’t find that as amusing as he did?” I handed Liam back his weapon of choice. Taking the green crayon, he stared at it with an impressive intensity, and began thoughtfully gnawing on it. I shook my head, and looked back at Karen, who fished it out of his mouth as she spoke.
“Maybe I overreacted. I started screaming at him to get out of my house. Katie tried to calm me down, but I was already so on edge from just being near that bastard that I just flew off the handle. After a few minutes of him spitting insults at me, he grabbed Katie’s hand and they stormed out.” She looked down at her hands, and began fidgeting. Her nails were short, and my suspicions of a nail biting habit were confirmed when she began nibbling at her pinky nail. “I tried calling Katie over and over the next few days, but she never answered her cell. I was really starting to get scared, and thought about calling the cops. But she showed up two days ago. I tried to talk to her, apologize for the way I acted…”
“Why the fuck would you apologize?!” Lopez looked at her with disbelief. I winced at his lack of restraint around the kids, but he stormed on. “She brings home some piece of shit to your house, lets him scope your ass and waste good booze on this little turd monkey, and you apologize?” He shook his head in disbelief, and leaned back. “No offense, Karen, but my dad would have knocked my fucking head off just to rattle loose whatever bullshit had made me even consider acting like such a shitbird.”
Karen stared at him with her mouth moving slightly, but no sound came out. I don’t think she was so much angry as disbelieving that so much profanity could be crammed into so few sentences. The two teens in the living room looked absolutely delighted at the display, and Liam squealed with glee and began racing around the apartment yelling, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Lopez glanced around, and then actually looked embarrassed. “Sorry. Force of habit.”
She still looked a bit taken aback, but she smiled weakly. “It’s okay. They’ve heard worse.” Her hands shot out like a striking cobra, snagging the toddler on his third lap. Looking up at her with a beatific grin, he began repeating his new mantra even faster. Karen shook a finger in his face. “No, Liam! Bad word!”
He stopped, seemed to consider this, and then offered, “Turd monkey?”
“Anyway,” I interjected as Lopez roared with laughter, “You were saying?”
Sighing, she set Liam down. “She seemed so cold. She just stood there as I apologized, had her arms folded and this stiff expression on her face. Finally, when I stopped, she just stared at me and told me that she was leaving.” Her voice caught a bit, but she swallowed and continued. “I tried reasoning with her, but she wouldn’t say anything after that. She just packed a bag while I begged and pleaded. After she was done, Katie just shoved past me and walked out the door. Before she got to her car, she looked up and said that she didn’t want to see me ever again, and to leave her alone. She got in her car, and left.”
“Wow.” Lopez raised an eyebrow. “I’ve met your daughter. She always seemed to be the straight and narrow type. That’s… weird.” His face was still neutral, but I could tell that he was disturbed.
“You know her pretty well?” I asked.
“As well as any of her neighbors, I guess,” he said. “She came over about once a week for help with her math homework. Serious shit, too. Way past high school level, linear algebra and the like. She was taking some college courses for credit before she graduated. This doesn’t sound like her at all.”
“She just stormed out?” I frowned. “What did she take with her?”
“Not much,” Karen said. “She grabbed a few clothes that were sitting in a laundry basket without really looking at them. It seemed like she was less interested in what she was packing than she was in getting out of here. The only other thing that she took was a photo of her father and me taken right after she was born.”
“You said her father’s not around, right?”
“No, but she loves that picture. It was taken just after Katie was born.” Karen’s hands started to shake, and she closed her eyes for a moment, collecting herself. “She always said we both looked so happy to have her. We’ve moved four times in the last ten years, and Katie always insisted on carrying the photo with her so it wouldn’t be lost. Her grabbing that really scared me.”
“Why?” asked Lopez.
Karen kept her gaze fixed on the worn table surface. “If she hadn’t taken it, I would be sure she was planning on coming back.”
“Did you call the cops?” I felt I knew the answer to this, but I had to ask anyway.
“Of course. My ex’s cousin is a cop. I gave him a call, told him everything that happened. But he says that since Katie is over eighteen, she can do whatever she wants. I can’t even file any kind of report, because she didn’t break any laws.”
“Well, I hate to say it, but what do you expect us to do about it?” I really was beginning to wish that she had asked us to babysit. At least then, I could say no and move on. But this… I shot Lopez a look that clearly expressed my intention to punch him in the head as soon as I got a chance. He ignored me, watching Karen with an uncharacteristically serious look.
Karen looked at me, her desperation written all over her tired face. “Something’s not right. I know my girl. I know her better than anyone else, and she wouldn’t do this. Katie is the sweetest girl I’ve ever known. I know I’m her mom, and I’m supposed to think that, but she is.” She started talking faster; as if afraid she would lose courage if she stopped talking. “You can ask Dave. He’s known her for about four months now, and he can tell you. Katie never swore at me, never came home late, never did anything but help out and be the daughter every mother dreams of. This… it’s like someone hit a switch and turned her into this cold bitch of a girl. Maybe she’s on something, maybe she’s afraid this jerk will hurt her, but something is very wrong, I know it. She’s in trouble, and I don’t know what to do.” She took a deep breath, and gestured at Lopez, who was listening intently. “I know you aren’t cops, but I also know how smart this joker is. He said that you served with him, he knows my daughter, and I thought maybe you might be able to find out something.”
Standing up, Karen walked over to her counter. She began fishing through her purse, and pulled out her wallet. “I don’t have a lot of money, and I can’t afford a private investigator. I don’t know anyone in this area. My ex is in prison, and I’m losing it. I don’t know what else to do.” Pulling out a hundred dollar bill, she extended it to me. When I made no motion to accept it, she grabbed my hand and closed my fingers around it. Her grip was firm, but I could feel her hand shaking. Her voice started to tremble. “I know this is stupid and this isn’t what you guys do, but I have to do something. I have to know that there’s someone out there trying to work this out.”
Standing there, seeing this woman do her best to keep from coming apart, I know I should have felt some surge of determination and resolve, but all I felt was that same empty lurch in my stomach you get when you miss a step coming down the stairs. Karen was grasping at straws, and we were available. I didn’t want to have anything to do with this. Standing there, trying to figure out the way to say no and not feel like a lousy excuse for a human, I was silent. Before I could come up with something, Lopez spoke.
“We’ll see what we can do. We’ll call tomorrow; let you know what we’ve figured out.” He stood up suddenly, and grabbed my arm. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Before I could squawk a protest, he dragged me out. Karen yelled out some words of thanks, but I couldn’t make them out. Yanking myself free of his grip, I hissed, “What the fuck was that?!”
“What?” Lopez began walking towards the stairway. Stepping forward, I grabbed him and spun him around.
“That woman is actually desperate. She really genuinely needs help. And for whatever reason, you thought it would be a good idea to let her believe that we could do something other than scratch our nuts?” I shook my head in absolute disbelief. “Is this some kind of joke?”
I’m not sure what I expected. Some kind of smartass comment, some insult, something. I’d known this man for over five years, spent months with him locked away from the world, and I thought I knew him. But he surprised me. He was angry.
His eyes were flashing, and his jaw was set as if he was clamping down on some unwanted words. When he spoke, his voice was shaking slightly. “Look, what the fuck was I supposed to do? I know this kid. Katie comes to my door at least twice a week for help with math. She works nonstop and gives every penny to her mom. When Karen told me this shit, I thought she was fucking with me, even got a bit pissed off. When I realized that she wasn’t joking, I really started getting freaked. It doesn’t make sense.” Lopez took a breath, and then continued. “I even called Roberts, talked to him.” I nodded. Patrick Roberts was our former division officer, now a lawyer in Knoxville.
“What did he say?”
“Said that Karen’s cop friend is right. She can’t even file charges or a complaint. So I spent all night last night trying to figure out something that I could do, and got precisely dick.” He turned, and started walking again. I fell into step beside him. “I’m not going to sit around and watch TV while that kid is in trouble, and she damn sure is in trouble.”
I nodded. “Yeah, she probably is. The whole story smells like shit. But that doesn’t answer the critical question.” He looked over at me while we walked.
“Yeah, what the fuck are we supposed to do about it.” He grimaced as we began down the stairs. We finished the trip down in silence. When we reached the lobby, he said, “How about some breakfast?”
I nodded. We climbed into my car, and rolled off in the direction of Cracker Barrel. After about five minutes, I had to break the silence. “So what do we do about it? What can we do about it?”
Lopez was staring out the window. The only time that he ever shut up was when he was actually stumped by a problem. In the entire time we served together, that happened twice. Seeing him like this was a bit unnerving. I figured that he was working through it, so I let him think. He remained silent, until five minutes after we had our orange juice and were waiting on our waffles. He reached over and started playing with a wooden puzzle. Solving it in a few moments, he set it aside and sighed.
“I’m not sure.” He shoved the puzzle to the corner, saying, “But I know we can figure something out. There has to be something we can do, someone we can talk to. We need more information.” He looked up at me. “But I do need your help. By myself, I’m a bit of a fucking wacko. I know that. I’m a lazy sack of shit, and I haven’t been able to do anything right since I left the navy. I talk shit about people, I’m rude, and I’m a basket case. In my whole life, I’ve never done anything that made me feel like someone who was worth a damn. I’m usually okay with that because I’m a slacker. But I also fucking smart.” He looked down, flushed red from his anger and frustration. “I’m smart enough to know that I’m too spacey and ADD to do this on my own. You’re actually stable. You could always keep me pointed in the direction I needed to go, and we’ve got a long history of working well together. The two of us can do this. Please.” I squirmed a bit, suddenly uncomfortable. Lopez was actually really upset, and he was asking for my help.
The problem was, I really didn’t want to get involved in this. It sounded like a nightmare, and I had no clue where we would even begin. We were engineers by training, and this was so far past us it was ridiculous. This wasn’t something that could be repaired or replaced, and this wasn’t some critical thinking exercise that an instructor was tossing at us. We were now talking about a human being, someone’s safety. This was the kind of thing a private investigator should be poking around, someone trained to look for the right thing and recognize it when they saw it. Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to get back to my place and forget the whole thing. That was the smart thing to do. That was the only sane thing to do.
But there were a couple problems. First, I was curious. It was a puzzle, and looking past all the emotion and confusion, I wanted to know where the pieces fell. Second was the simple fact that Lopez was my closest friend. He kept me alive in the first six months on board when I was the new fish. We got drunk in bars and thrown out of bars dozens of times. In every way that counted, we were closer than brothers. True, he was an asshole, he was immature, and he acted like a complete jackass whenever he was awake. In the entire time I had known him, he had never been this serious about something. But now he was, and he was asking for my help. I sighed. There really was never any question, and that sucked.
“Okay.” I scowled at him. “I’m in.”
Chapter 4
“So where do we even begin on something like this?” I smiled at the waitress as she set down our food. Lopez, looking much more relaxed now that I had agreed to help on this insane quest, began methodically demolishing his waffles. He began talking with his mouth full.
“We don’t know shit. We need as much info as we can before we figure out what we do next. Maybe talk to her boss, try to find her friends. Then, I figure we see about finding this Grub asshole and have a talk with him.”
“Umm… maybe we need to hold off finding the potential criminal.” I started gnawing on bacon that had apparently been cooked in a reactor. “In case you forgot, we’re not exactly the intimidating types. From the sounds of this asshole, he probably isn’t the type to squeal in fright at the sight of a midget Mexican and his overweight friend. In fact, he’s probably the type to beat the shit out of a midget Mexican and his overweight friend.”
Lopez shrugged. “Fuck him. We may not be the brawler types, but from the sounds of this genius, if he blew his nose, he’s losing half of his brain tissue. We can figure out a way to deal with him. We just have to figure out where he is.”
“Maybe her friends know something about him. Where does she go to school?”
“I don’t know, this county has thirty goddamn high schools in it. Oakville or Oakland, something like that. I think she graduated early.” He paused in his eating, and frowned. “She works at Wal-Mart though… maybe she has some friends there.”
I groaned. “I’m gonna have to go to Wal-Mart?! I hate Wal-Mart!”
He grinned. “Yeah, but it is taste test day… fuck yeah. I’m going to get me some of that breaded chicken shit.” He dragged a chunk of waffle through the small ocean of syrup, and shoved it in his mouth. As he chewed, he looked thoughtful. “I think she worked in the bakery. She always used to bring me the slut cakes.”
Staring at him, I had to ask, “Slut cakes?”
“Yeah, the wedding cakes that were ordered but didn’t get picked up because the bride banged the maid of honor or something… Katie didn’t call them that, but I did.” He took another bite, and then paused. “Maybe that’s why she stopped bringing them.”
“Really smooth.” I considered this for a bit, and then shrugged. “Well, it’s all we got, so I guess that’s the best place to start. We need to find out everything we can, and see if anyone there knows anything about this guy she started hooking up with.” Looking up at him, I asked, “Did you ever see him? When he was over, I mean. Did you get a look at him?”
“No, I was gone each time he was over. Wish I had been there, I might have been able to back Karen up a bit.” He sat back in his chair, scowling.
“No use worrying about it.” I grabbed a biscuit. “How well do you know Karen, anyway?” I tried to sound casual, and failed miserably.
“Not that well, asshole. She’d come over to borrow some stuff every now and then. When I realized that she didn’t mind, I used to go bum lunch every now and then. We were neighbors. Karen’s a good mom, and works her ass off nonstop to feed those kids. Normally, there isn’t anything over there to get excited about.”
“Fair enough. When you talked to Roberts, did he look into this guy at all? Maybe he has a criminal record.”
“Yeah, he said he’d ask some friends of his. Supposed to call today sometime, let me know what he found. He also asked if you were still fat, and that you needed to put down the Twinkie and buy a damn Thighmaster.”
“Fuck you too. If we haven’t heard from him in a bit, call him. That could be useful.” I started trying to recall every bad movie I’d seen about finding someone, trying to think of something we were missing. At this point, we should have had a GPS tracer up someone’s ass and been able to call in Will Smith and the rest of the loose cannon swat team. As a substitute, our waitress came up and offered us dessert. It was not a satisfactory replacement.
“Okay, so let’s say the sun shines on this particular dog’s ass for us and we actually find Katie. For all we know, she’s just letting all the pent up teenage rebellion vent and she’s going to tell us to go to hell. What exactly are we supposed to do if we do manage to find her?”
He shrugged. “Only thing we can do is tell her to quit being a bitch and call her mom, let her know everything is all right. If something bad actually is going on, we take it to the cops, and let them handle it.”
“Thank god. I thought you were going to want to pull some stupid shit, drag her back home in our trunk.” I looked over at him with a raised eyebrow. “We have no clue what we’re doing, you know that.”
Lopez nodded slowly, and then grinned at me. “Yeah. But it’s gonna be a hell of a lot more interesting than anything else I’ve done in a while.
Chapter 5
“Shit.”
Lopez looked over at me. “You keep saying that. What’s your problem with Wal-Mart?”
My eyes followed a man in a Jimmy Johnson t shirt and cutoff shorts shoving a cart up to the checkout. As near as I could tell, his purchase included a few boxes of shotgun shells, three cases of beer, lots of chips of various brands, and a Hulk Hogan bible cover. As I watched in disbelief, he pulled out a food stamp card. “Oh, nothing. It’s absolutely paradise. Just not my particular scene.”
He rolled his eyes. “Whatever, Daddy Warbucks. It’s cheap and you can fucking find anything here. Hey, Chief Kowalczyk runs some super size store up in Hoboken, and I hear he’s making six figures a year and is banging some chick from the pharmacy.”
“Chief Kowalczyk? Wasn’t he the only chief on board who lost three fingers?” I raised an eyebrow. “Not exactly a ringing endorsement.”
“What? He wasn’t that dumb.”
“Didn’t he lose two of the fingers trying to fish a tater tot out of the garbage disposal?” The woman walking past us gave a startled glance in our direction, and sped off into the acres of cheap pantyhose.