at the white edges of various newspaper stacks. “I scribbled it down someplace, so I could tell Gary when he called. He calls me every couple of days. He don’t get home much, but he cares about his mother. I hope you call your mother regular.”
I smiled sadly to myself. “I would if I could,” I said. “But I’m in touch with my dad more these days.”
Mrs. Merker scoffed at that. “Gary’s fucking father, I hope the son of a bitch is dead someplace and has been for a long time. He was a no-good cocksucking bast-Hang on, here it is, I think.” She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “Yeah, this friend phoned and said to tell Gary that cunt was in Oakwood.”
“Oh yeah,” I said.
“I guess he lives down that way, saw her picture in the paper, remembered Gary was looking for her.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Guess I made this trip here for nothing. I was going to pass on the same information.”
“No harm done,” she said, taking a seat on the small clear spot on the couch. She pointed to the television. “That crickets they’re eating?”
I looked. “Maybe.” She cackled. I asked, “So what’s Gary been looking for Candace for, anyway? He kind of got a thing for her?”
She let out a laugh. “Ha! I don’t think he’ll be dipping his dick in that pussy!”
“Then why does he want to find her?”
“Well, if some bitch stole something from you, wouldn’t you want it back?” She looked at me like I was some sort of an idiot.
“So that’s why he wants to find her?” I said. “Because she stole something? Not because, I don’t know, for revenge?”
“Revenge?” The old woman cocked her head at an odd angle. “I suppose. If you stole something from me, I guess I’d want revenge. That what you gettin’ at?”
“I was just thinking back to that time. When Gary’s three friends got shot.”
“Oh, that,” she said, and waved dismissively. “He got over that. Only real friend Gary’s ever had is that retard Leo.” She turned her attention to the TV, where contestants were working up the nerve to swallow tiny wiggling things. “For fifty thousand dollars, I’d put anything in my mouth,” she said, and laughed.
She barely noticed as I slipped out the front door and walked down the sidewalk to Cherry’s truck. I felt, in some small measure, slightly relieved about what I’d learned.
“Well?” Cherry said as I pulled the door shut.
“Someone, some old friend of Merker’s, called his mom, told her to tell her son that this woman he’d been looking for, that her picture had turned up in the newspaper in Oakwood. So he knew where she was, where to look for her. And, I’m just guessing here, he ran into Martin Benson by mistake, and ended up killing him, maybe trying to get some info out of him about Trixie, or Candace, or whoever the hell she really is.”
Cherry waved his hand impatiently. “I don’t mean that shit,” he said. “Is the hole still in the wall?”
I paused. “Yes,” I said.
Cherry banged his fist on the steering wheel and let out a whoop. “Fucking awesome,” he said.
23
I watched the news without taking in what any of the stories were about, then Letterman without laughing at any of the jokes, then turned off the light and tried to get to sleep. I tossed and turned and punched the pillow. I don’t sleep well when there’s not someone in the bed next to me, and at two in the morning I felt overwhelmed with the notion that there might be a lot of nights like this in my future.
I had too much time to think, and worry, about a great many things.
First, Sarah. I could only hope that by finding out the truth behind this mess I’d been dragged into, and by trying to take control of the situation instead of letting it control me, I might somehow redeem myself.
Then there was Trixie. My quest to find out just what kind of trouble she was in, and what had led her to this point, was motivated by more than a desire to help out a friend. I needed to know, for myself, what the hell I’d been dragged into. And if uncovering that truth brought some aggravation and inconvenience to Trixie, well, if it happened, it happened.
And then there was me. Well, I guess it was already about me. About me and Sarah, about me and the kids, about me and Trixie, about me and my job. As I lay there in the hotel bed, staring at the ceiling, turning to the side and watching the luminous numbers of the digital clock work their way to 3:00 a.m., I hoped that maybe these events, and perhaps the story that city health inspector Brian Sandler detailed for me, would help me win my way back into the newsroom, and liberate Sarah from Home!
I couldn’t have known then I’d be happy just to come out of all this with my life.
Once in the car, I got out my map and double-checked how I was going to reach Groverton. There was a yellow wooden pencil in the tray between the seats, and I used it like a pointer, tracing the route I would take.
It was a long shot, of course. All I had was a gas receipt leading me there. But it was the best, and only real clue I had. Groverton was farther away than I’d first realized-two hours, and still heading in the direction away from home.
I didn’t have much of a game plan for when I reached my destination. I figured I could find the gas station where Trixie got her receipt, but beyond that, I couldn’t think of much to do but drive around looking for my car, the one Trixie had fled in. Perhaps, once I got there, other opportunities would present themselves.
As I drove, tuning in Trixie’s eight-speaker stereo to a jazz station-my friendship with Lawrence Jones had expanded my musical tastes in the last couple of years-that was playing some Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, and Diana Krall, I tried to sort out the things I had learned in the last day.
Trixie, if she was the person I’d been hearing about named Candace, or Candy, certainly had a colorful background. She’d come to work at the Kickstart, fallen in love with a man named Swain, who ended up plastered onto the front of a locomotive. She’d had a child. She’d disappeared after three members of the Slots motorcycle gang were murdered at the Kickstart. And the surviving gang leader, Gary Merker, trying to earn a bit of cash selling presumably stolen stun guns, had been putting the word out, for years, that if anyone ever saw her, they were to let his mother know, so that she could pass the message on. And shortly after that happened, Martin Benson was found dead in Trixie’s basement dungeon, with two telltale marks on his body indicating that he’d been shot with a stun gun before he’d had his throat slit.
And Merker’s charming mother had said that the reason her son wanted to find this Candace so badly was because she’d taken something from him. Something that he wanted to take back from her.
I had a hunch that Merker wanted more from Candace than just something she’d stolen from him. He wanted to take from her the memories of what had transpired the night of that massacre, her memories of what she’d witnessed. And I was guessing Merker would have a permanent way of dealing with a witness.
There’d been that little voice in the back of my mind, wondering whether Trixie might have played any role in the deaths of Merker’s gang associates, but his mother’s responses seemed to suggest otherwise. Gary seemed to have moved on with his life pretty quickly after the tragedy. “He got over that,” Mrs. Merker had said.
The highway to Groverton was two-lane all the way, and between all my ruminating and the music, the trip went quickly. I passed through some gently rolling hills the last twenty miles or so, and the outskirts of Groverton were marked by a lumber store and, across the street, a tractor dealership. There wasn’t much to get excited
