on this thing a little while longer so they can jack up the price of everything from gasoline to coffee. She advises a citywide boycott in protest. To which the next five call ers reply that there is no way in hell they intend to live without gasoline
Jay snaps off the car radio and balls the butt of his ham sand wich inside the waxed paper it came in, stuffing the whole of it into a paper bag. He lights a cigarette as he pulls into a stripcenter parking lot across the street from 4400 Fountainview, which is a newly constructed, low-lying office building encased in walls of mirrored glass that painfully catch the afternoon sun. Jay yanks down his car’s plastic visor, shielding his eyes. He smokes his Newport and waits.
Twenty minutes pass, then thirty. In the whole time he’s watching and waiting, no one, that he can see, has come in or out of the building across the street. When the heat in the Sky lark becomes unbearable, he finally gets out of his car. Dodging lunchtime traffic, he crosses the street to the office building.
The doors to 4400 Fountainview are locked. The building, as far as Jay can tell, is completely closed. He walks around to the parking lot in back. There are no cars anywhere, not a stitch of litter, not a paper cup or even a gum wrapper. The building’s back doors are locked too. Jay pulls on them a few times. Then, cupping his hands around his eyes and pressing his face against the glass, he peers into the building. Inside, he sees nothing. Not even a desk or a telephone. The Stardale Development Company is, apparently, no more than an empty building.
Chapter 22
He has a dream about dead ends. Streets in his hometown. He’s a boy, five, maybe six years old, dressed in a Roy Rogers vest and cowboy boots made of cheap plastic and dusty with red clay. He’s got a toy holster on his belt. The matching gun is missing, has been for some time. He lost it or let his sister take it or some neighborhood kid ran off with it. In the dream, he can’t remem ber. In the dream, he’s looking for something else. He sets out early in the morning with two ham sandwiches in a knapsack and a small carton of milk.
He sets out to find his father.
He imagines his daddy tied up on somebody’s fort, held cap tive by a general’s army or maybe taken in by Indians. Jay will be the one to save him, the one to bring him home. But in the dream, he’s only a little boy, and scared of the dark sometimes. He doesn’t have a horse or even a gun. And he can’t get out of Nigton. The streets ain’t laid out right, not like he remembers. And seems like every road he tries starts out wide with promise, only to stop a few yards later at a point so narrow he can barely pass through. The road suddenly becomes thick with scrub oak and weeds, tall and thin as reeds, with points as sharp as needles. He thinks of snakes and chigger bites and is too scared to venture forth. Each time, he backs up the way he came, starts over again, down another road . . . until he finally accepts that he’s going nowhere, only walking in wide circles, always ending up on the same street corner, stuck in the middle of an unworkable grid.
The light behind the trees starts to fade.
His food is almost gone.
He feels himself getting scared.
Jay turns and sees a kid not that much taller than he is. The kid says he’s Jay’s father, says it more than once. Jay shakes his head over and over, stamps his little foot in the dirt. His daddy is a man, not no boy. The kid kicks a rock with his shoe, tells Jay he can believe him or not. But the truth is waiting for him, if he can just get home. Just look under the house, the kid says. I’ll be waiting for you, he says, kicking the rock all the way down the street.
The way home is long and black and full of thorns and mos quito bites.
Jay arrives hungry and tired and without any satisfaction.
His sister is hanging her feet off the porch, telling him he’s in big trouble for staying gone so long. He asks her if she’s seen a man come by, somebody asking for him. She shakes her head, swinging her matchstick legs in the air.
The kid said his father would be waiting. Just look under the house, he said. In his good clothes, Jay crawls in the dirt, clawing his way under the house. He pretends he’s an old-timey soldier, breaking into the enemy’s fort after dark. There is no great res cue, though. He never finds his father.
Only a nickel-plated .22 lying in the dirt. Friday, his other father calls.
The Reverend and his wife invite Jay to dinner. He’s told to be at their house by seven o’clock. Yes, sir, he says, sure he’ll be asked to explain himself tonight, why he’s got the man’s young est daughter staying at a house that is not her home. Jay’s plan was to leave the office at six, give himself plenty of time, maybe stop off for some flowers for his wife. But at a quarter ’til, Rolly shows up at the office unannounced. Eddie Mae buzzes him past the waiting room. He strides by her desk with a wink and walks into Jay’s office, moving his long legs like a man on stilts, every thing slow and deliberate. He’s wearing a Rolling Stones concert T-shirt beneath his usual black leather vest. When he smiles, plopping himself in the chair across from Jay’s desk, his teeth are tobacco stained. “Guess who rented a gold 1980 Chrysler LeBaron from a Lone Star Rentals out near Hobby Airport on July thirty- first,” Rolly asks, somewhat proud of himself. “The day before the shooting that’s got you wound up so tight?”
Jay shrugs and states what seems obvious by now. “Dwight Sweeney.”
“Nope,” Rolly says, smiling, relishing the curious look on Jay’s face. “Try a man by the name of Neal McNamara, a man who, I’m made to understand, bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Dwight Sweeney.”
“You think it’s the same guy?” Jay asks. “The same car?”
“Well, I can tell you this much. That Chrysler was never returned.”
“Neal McNamara?” Jay says, repeating the name.
“The guy I talked to at the rental place said two detectives come around wanting to look at the books. They told him the car was being impounded.”
Jay shakes his head to himself, wondering why he didn’t think to call the rental place himself. “So you think he was using an alias?”
“Something like that.”
“Elise said the guy told her his name was Blake Ellis,” Jay remembers.
“Three names, one dude. Sounds like trouble to me.”
“Maybe he was married,” Jay offers. “You know, covering his tracks.”
“I can do you one better,” Rolly says, leaning forward in his chair, pulling out a couple of pieces of folded-up yellow legal paper, smudged with gray pencil markings on both sides. Rolly slides the pages across Jay’s desk.
