picture all over the news as a missing man. Pawnshops? He didn’t want to part with the camera suddenly; he wished he could have gotten Dezz on film. That would have been leverage. Selling the camera was a last resort.
You could buy all sorts of things on the street. Drugs. Sex. Why not ammo?
He closed his eyes. Thought out ways he could acquire ammo for a particular gun. One idea came to mind, crazy, definitely daring, but it played on the only common wish he knew how to grant with the skills and resources he had.
Evan ventured into the early-morning damp. Down low on his head, he wore a baseball cap that had been in the rear seat of the stolen truck. He bought the Sunday Houston Chronicle out of a vending machine in front of a decrepit coffee shop. His face and his father’s face were on the cover of the metro section, an old publicity photo his mother had shot after Ounce of Trouble had made the short list for the Oscars, where his hair was shorter and he wore nerd-boy eyeglasses. He didn’t need glasses but he’d decided they made him look smarter, more artistic. It had been a shallow affectation, his mother had teased him about how seriously he took himself, and now he felt embarrassed. The paper said his father was also considered missing; no record existed of anyone named Mitchell Casher having flown to Australia from the United States in the past week. No mention or picture of Carrie.
Carrie’s here with me, Dezz had claimed in his creepy singsong voice. Evan had not believed him. If Carrie had been kidnapped, it would have been in the papers.
Or would it? She had quit her job. She wasn’t with him. Who would report her missing? But if she had been taken, she wouldn’t have been able to call him and warn him before Gabriel’s attack. So where was Carrie? Hiding? He ached to talk to her, to hear her soothing voice, but he couldn’t go near her, he couldn’t involve her again.
He folded the paper under his arm. Pay phones were a dying breed with cell phones wedged in every pocket and purse, but he found one two blocks down at a convenience store where the lot smelled of Saturday-night beer. A gangly kid lounged near the phones, chewing on a grape Pixy Stix, watching Evan with all the suspicion and arrogance of a prison guard.
He might do. Evan picked up a phone, dropped in the required coins.
‘’Spectin’ an important call on that phone,’ the boy said in a low murmur. Giving Evan a narrowed stare.
‘Then they’ll get a busy signal for a minute.’
‘Find another phone, son,’ the kid said.
Evan stared at him. He wanted to pop the kid in the sneering mouth and say, You picked the wrong guy to mess with today. But then he decided he didn’t need another enemy. He had learned one thing as a film-maker: everyone wanted to be in a movie.
Evan didn’t put a smile on his face because smiles weren’t always good currency. ‘You an entrepreneur?’
‘Yeah, that’s me. I’m a fucking mogul.’
Evan grabbed the Beretta tucked in the back of his jeans, under his shirt, and he jammed it into the kid’s flat stomach. The kid froze.
‘Calm down. It’s unloaded,’ Evan said. ‘I need bullets. Can you get them for me?’
The kid let out a long wheeze. ‘Man, double-fuck you. I might’ve if you hadn’t been a dick just now.’
‘Then I’ll make my call.’ Evan let his fingers drift back to the filthy keypad.
‘Wait, wait. What is it?’ The kid put his back to the street and examined the gun. Evan kept it in a tight grip. ‘Beretta 92FS… yeah, I bet I can score a few sweet mags for you. Friend of a friend. Cash basis.’
‘Of course.’
‘Lemme make a call on your coins,’ the kid said.
Evan handed him the receiver. The kid punched numbers, spoke in a low tone, laughed once, hung up the phone. ‘An hour. Be here. Cash. Four mags, two hundred dollars.’
He didn’t know ammo prices, but the quote was higher than what he thought he would pay in a gun shop. But the street didn’t ask questions. ‘I don’t need that much ammo.’
‘Won’t deal less. Otherwise not worth getting out of bed, son.’
Evan didn’t have two hundred dollars, but he said, ‘I’ll be back here in an hour.’
Now that he had a customer, the kid nodded. Ambled off across the lot, sliding a fresh Pixy Stix out of his pocket, tearing off the top, and dumping the purple powder onto his tongue.
Evan walked four blocks until he found another convenience store. He wore the sunglasses he had found in the stolen pickup and he bought hair-coloring dye, a pair of scissors, a giant coffee, and three breakfast tacos thick with fluffy eggs and potato and spicy chorizo sausage for breakfast. It didn’t get him closer to two hundred dollars. He swallowed the crazy urge to show the clerk the gun tucked in the back of his pants to see if that would produce two hundred bucks. The clerk rang him up. Watching Evan when she gave him the change.
Fear slammed into his stomach like a fist. Was this what paranoia was?
He hurried back to the motel. Evan locked himself in. Devoured the breakfast tacos and finished the black coffee while he read the directions on the hair dye. It would take only thirty minutes to set.
He cut his hair, locks falling into the sink. He had never given himself a haircut before and it looked really bad until he muttered, ‘Screw vanity,’ and he hacked it into a not-as-bad burr. He removed the small hoop earring from his left ear. The earring seemed too young for him now; it was time to grow up. Then he dyed his hair, sitting on the bathroom floor, refining his plan while the black color set. He laughed when he saw himself in the mirror, but it was serviceable. He didn’t look exactly like the picture in the paper. But he still looked like himself.
He had about eighty bucks left and ten minutes before the kid showed up with the ammunition. He drove back to the store where he had met the kid, parked at the edge of the oil-pocked lot. He went inside the store. An old lady bought orange juice and a can of pork-and-beans and shuffled out the door. Evan waited until she was gone and approached the clerk. This clerk nodded along with a Sunday-morning evangelical-church service and slurped coffee. She was an older lady, dour, with a stray eye.
‘Excuse me, ma’am. That tall kid who hangs out by the phone,’ Evan said. ‘Mr. Pixy Stix. Is he a problem for you?’
‘Why you care?’
‘He warned me off using the phone. I bet he’s using it for drug deals.’
‘He don’t buy enough Pixy Stixs to pay rent.’
‘So if I get him to quit hanging out here, you won’t be heartbroken? You wouldn’t feel you have to call the police right away?’
‘I don’t want no trouble.’
‘He’ll never know what hit him.’
‘What do you care what he’s doing? I never seen you in here before.’
‘My aunt just moved in down the street, and that kid smarted off to her when she was using the phone, and old ladies should be able to make phone calls without hassle.’
‘So tell the police.’
‘That’s a temporary solution. The police come, then they go. My idea is longer lasting.’
The clerk studied him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to hang out at the phone and wait for him.’
‘Why? You buying?’
He held up the duffel and showed her his camcorder. ‘No. I’m selling.’
The kid returned, five minutes late. But not alone. His companion was a thick-necked young woman with a toughness etched in her face. She stood bigger and taller than the kid, and a similar set to their eyes and their frowns suggested she might be an older sister. She carried a shopping bag from Goodwill in her hand. They arrived in a new Explorer and parked at the end of the lot.
Evan stood by the phones with the duffel over his shoulder, the digital camcorder wedged in place in the duffel. He left the zipper gaping open enough so that the lens could get a clear shot. The woman didn’t like that he had the duffel. Tension deepened the frown in her face.
‘Hey,’ Evan said.
‘Drunk barber got ahold of your hair, son,’ the kid said.
