Lethal Control, page 8
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
“He’s being a—a dick.”
“You can do better than that.”
“He’s being a fucking knob.”
I burst out laughing.
Dag’s eyebrows drew together.
“No, that was good,” I said, fighting more laughter. “That was really good.”
“Go sit in the truck,” he said, trying to shoulder past me. “You two can keep each other company.”
Instead, I took his arm, and we moved off around the side of the house. The day was cooling, the gold evaporating into blue. I’d stolen another of Dag’s sweatshirts and layered it over a thermal Henley, and I was shivering again. The sweetness of laundry detergent floated on the air. I wondered if I should threaten to wash Dag’s mouth out for saying knob.
“If you threaten to wash my mouth out,” Dag said, “I’ll spank you, and I’m not joking.”
I had to bury my face in his sleeve to hide my grin. When I trusted myself, I pulled back and said, “I know you can handle things.”
He grunted.
“But if this is serious, whatever it is with Posey, you’ll tell me, right? Because the whole point of being, um—”
Sometimes when Dag looked at me, it was like old war movies, with the flashing red lights and the klaxons sounding.
“Boyfriends,” I said with what I considered Enthusiastic Commitment and Everlasting Love.
“Good Lord,” Dag muttered.
“The whole point is that you don’t have to handle things yourself, you know? We’re a team. I want to help you. You basically spend your whole life helping me.”
He grunted again, but it had some of the edges knocked off this time. I kissed his cheek, and he squeezed my arm.
Behind the house, a woman was hanging laundry on a sagging clothesline. She was white, probably in her sixties, her hair crimped into crinkle-cut frizz, and she wore pearl earrings that turned her lobes into stretched-out pendulums. Her housedress hit her at mid-calf and rose a few more inches every time she bent to retrieve clothes from the tub—what appeared to be children’s clothes, I realized on closer inspection. The backyard gave way to a canebrake that rippled when the breeze picked up, dark lines combing through it as the cane whistled.
“Can I help you?” she asked as she grabbed unicorn-printed underwear and clipped it onto the line.
“I hope so,” I said. “I’m Eli; this is Dag. We wanted to talk to you about someone who used to live here. He’s in trouble, and we hoped you could help us.”
“Half the kids who come through here end up in trouble,” she said. “If it’s Bobby, he’s eighteen, and you can talk to him yourself when they get back from the corn maze.”
“His name’s Reb,” Dag said. “Rebellion.”
She pulled out a Ninja Turtles t-shirt that had to have been meant for a five- or six-year-old and hung it. She had red knuckles, and I thought I should recommend a good hand cream.
“Ma’am—Ms. Ortiz—”
“Missus,” she said. “I heard you. You can dump that along the canebrake; there’s a ditch, you see?”
Dag and I shared a look. Dag pointed to a tub of gray water, which had a bottle of something called Mrs. Stewart’s Liquid Bluing wedged into one of the handles. Mrs. Ortiz didn’t acknowledge his silent question, so Dag shrugged and walked over to the tub. He slid the bottle of bluing out of the handle.
“That’s a job for two people,” she said as she picked up an identical Ninja Turtles t-shirt. I was starting to wonder how many kids she had. A pack? If there were more than three, was that technically a horde?
“Dag’s really strong.”
She looked at me.
My mom had been dead for several years at that point. I had forgotten how quickly and hard I could blush and what it felt like to have absolutely nothing smart to say.
Together, Dag and I carried the tub to a ditch running along the canebrake. We emptied the tub. Then, per Mrs. Ortiz’s instructions, we rinsed it out and dumped that water in the ditch too. By the time we’d finished, she was done hanging clothes, and she had the empty basket under one arm. She was eying the clothes and indicated for us to lean the washtub against the house. Then she said, “They’ll get a little sun tonight, and there’s a breeze, low humidity. They’ll be all right after a few hours in the morning.”
I nodded.
Dag was looking at me.
I couldn’t stop nodding, and Dag was starting to smile, and I realized I was probably going to have to break up with him or cut him off sexually or mix up his notecards before a test.
“You wanted to talk about Rebellion,” she said, and she sounded tired. “What’s he gotten himself into this time?”
“We’re not sure, actually,” Dag said. “He’s disappeared, and we think he’s in danger.”
“But you think he did something, too. Well, you’re not wrong—he probably did. That boy.” Her red knuckles moved as she opened and closed her fingers around the basket. “It’s a good thing Dave and Bobby took the kids to the maze. That boy broke Bobby’s heart.” She must have caught something of what Eli was thinking on his face because a hard smile cracked her expression. “Bobby and Rebellion might have had something going on. I don’t know. I tried to catch them, and I told them what’s what more than once, but when they’re that age, and after what most of them have been through—well, give them a who, and they’ll find the when and the how, even if they don’t have a clue about the why or sometimes the what.”
“Dag sometimes doesn’t know the what,” I said.
She gave me another look, and I was starting to remember what it felt like when my face caught on fire.
“We thought Reb might be here,” Dag said. “If he is, I want you to know that we only want to make sure he’s ok. His boyfriend is waiting in the truck, and he’s worried sick.”
The clothesline creaked as the breeze dragged on the wet clothes.
“You could tell him,” Dag said. “After we leave. You could let him know we’re worried. Posey is worried. He might not recognize our names, but he’ll know Posey. Even if he could just call.”
I thought she might not say anything. Then, massaging the small of her back, she said, “A boyfriend. Well, I guess I was wrong.”
“I thought you said—I mean, Bobby is a boy, right? So you knew Reb was, um, gay?”
She snorted. “Do you know how long Rebellion was with us?”
I shook my head.
“Six months. That’s five months longer than anywhere else. He was a runner, that’s the thing. Couldn’t hardly keep him in the house without tying him to a chair. I told him as long as he came back once a day, as long as he let me know he was ok and ate something, he could do whatever he wanted. Maybe that’s wrong. But I’ve been doing this a long time, and the ones like Rebellion, well, there’s nothing else you can do for them. He never went far. He took his meals on the gallery, and then he was off again. After a couple of months, he started sleeping inside. He liked the laundry room. He had a way of getting behind the dryer; I think he ran it sometimes to keep himself warm. And before you say anything, he had a bed.”
“It sounds like you took care of him the way he needed,” Dag said.
The slashing line of her mouth wasn’t quite a smile.
“What—what happened to him?” I asked.
“Young man,” she said, “I stopped asking that so I could close my eyes at night.” She started toward the house, her gait uneven, and she used the weight of the basket as a counterbalance. “He’s not here, and he hasn’t come back here. I’ll ask Bobby; if he knows anything, well, I’ll see what I can do. But this wasn’t home for Rebellion. You’ve got to understand that. He was out tramping in sheds and barns as often as he was here, even if I wish it were different. Six months later, he got himself arrested for attacking that man, and I haven’t seen him since. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
With that, she stepped up to the rear gallery, let herself into the house, and shut the door.
“Well,” I said, “fuck.”
Dag was frowning.
“Maybe we can find a way to talk to Bobby,” I said. “And I’ll keep trying to find people online who knew him. They might be able to tell us something about him—friends, favorite places. That’s what the cops would do, right?”
Nodding, Dag said, “One of the basics, when you’re trying to find someone, is that people run to places they’re familiar with, especially places they feel safe. You assume when they run, they’re not thinking clearly, and so routine takes over.”
“Ok, so that’s what we’ll do.”
I took a step toward the side of the house, but Dag looked toward the canebrake.
“Dag?”
“He liked it here,” Dag said. “He felt safe here. He was here six months, when everywhere else he barely lasted four weeks. He ate her food. He slept inside. He might have had a relationship with that boy.”
“But he’s not here,” I said. “Or she says he’s not here, anyway. Do you think she’s lying? Or do you think Bobby’s—what? Hiding him in the basement?”
“I think you’re right,” Dag said, turning slowly in a circle. “I think he ran somewhere he felt safe.”
It took me a moment. Then I said, “Oh shit.”
I started turning around like Dag—like I was going to spot something he hadn’t, for fuck’s sake—but by then, Dag was already pulling out his phone. He had the Maps app open, and he was looking at a satellite view of the Ortiz property and the surrounding area. With one blunt finger, he started pointing. “East, you run into the interstate. And north takes him back into the bayou. See here? This is the private property where he ditched the airboat. Maybe a mile from here. South, you’ve got new developments—subdivisions, mostly, with lots of people close together.”
“So, he ran west,” I said. “Into these fields.”
“Ag fields,” Dag said with a satisfied smile. “Fields that have been worked for a couple of hundred years, with plenty of sheds and barns and cribs, a lot of them probably abandoned.”
“Dag, that was amazing.”
He blushed. “It was pretty obvious.”
“Uh, no, it wasn’t. I mean, not to me, anyway. Can you be bad at something, please? Just once. It would be a huge relief.”
“I’m bad at plenty of things. Come on; I guess we should get Posey and take a look while there’s still some light.”
“Name one thing you’re bad at,” I said as I followed him around the house.
“Putting my foot down with you seems like a good start.”
“Oh, I thought of one. Fighting. Not, like, actual combat because you’re really, really good at that. But relationship fights. Just one time if you would please get in my face and scream, boy, howdy—”
Dag looked over his shoulder, and I thought the boy, howdy might have been a little much.
After explaining to Posey what we thought might be happening, we started west. The first field after the canebrake looked abandoned, with weeds and wild grasses growing waist high and whispering against the denim of my jeans. Then we hit a tree line, and from the other side came the rumble of a big engine. Through the branches, I could see a tractor trundling down a tilled field. It was towing some other machine behind it, and it was spraying something everywhere.
“Broadcast spreader,” Dag said, nudging me to get me moving again. “They’re seeding winter rye.”
“Reb wouldn’t have hung around if somebody was working a field,” Posey said. He was craning his neck like he might get a glimpse of Reb anyhow, and I was still having a hard time deciding his particular ratio of dumb to desperate.
Dag nodded, and we started walking again.
The day’s last light felt good on my face, and when the occasional eddy kicked up, stirring dust around my tennis shoes, it brought the smell of diesel and sun-warm dirt. The shower and the food had helped push back the nightmare of the parlangua, but in some ways, this helped more: the quiet, the easy movement of my body, the shadows of the trees, the fields of what Dag insisted on telling me—even when I threatened not to glitter up his notecards for a month if he didn’t stop—were probably chard and onion and kale. It was like a part of my brain could go to sleep. Stop worrying.
I was holding hands with Dag, kicking a clod of dirt ahead of us, watching it break apart, when the memory came again: the pain in my shoulder, Dag pushing me to the ground, dragging myself up to see Dag and the parlangua fighting. But the rush of old fear didn’t come this time. Instead, my thoughts were cool, detached. I imagined what it would have been like, when it opened its jaws, to shove a branch in there. To keep shoving until the wood tore at the sensitive tissue of its throat. I could see it in my head, the splintered end of the branch driven with such force that it tore through the leathery hide, ripping its way free of the parlangua’s neck. The spray of blood. Folds of flesh sagging outward. I rolled my head on my neck. I felt flushed. I felt like I weighed as much as the sunlight. I thought, in that moment, it would have looked like a flower.
“Eli, Christ!” Dag said, and he yanked his hand away.
For a moment, I didn’t know where I was: the furrowed soil, the line of the sky, the outstretched arms of the trees. Then, pieces of it started to come back together. I turned, opening my mouth to ask if I’d fallen asleep, and stared.
Dag was holding one hand with the other. On the back of his hand, in a clear line where my fingers had rested, were puncture marks. Where, I realized after a moment, I’d driven my nails into the flesh.
“Jeez,” Posey said.
“I didn’t do that,” I said automatically.
The hurt on Dag’s face had nothing to do with the wounds on his hand.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” I said, so quickly I felt like I was talking over myself. “Oh my God, Dag, I’m so sorry. I—I don’t know, I think it was a muscle spasm.”
Dag just stood there, supporting his injured hand.
“Oh my God,” I said again. “I am so, so sorry.”
“A muscle spasm,” Posey said.
“Will you shut up?” I said to him. “Dag, are you ok?”
He watched me for a moment longer, and I couldn’t read whatever was in his eyes—disbelief, confusion, fear. Maybe none of those. Maybe all of them.
“I’m fine,” he said. “You startled me is all.”
“Let me see—”
But when I took a step, Dag rotated his body, his injured hand dropping behind him.
I stared at him.
He colored, but all he said was, “I’m fine, E.”
The taste of diesel wafted on the wind, and I felt like I was going to be sick. “Can we—can we go back? I think we should go back.”
“We can’t go back,” Posey said. “Not if Reb’s hiding out here.”
“If he’s hiding out here,” I said, my voice getting pitchy, “it’s because he wants to. He doesn’t want to be found. What’s so hard to understand about that?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Posey said, his volume rising to meet mine. He turned to face me, tugging at his prosthesis. “He’s scared, and he might be hurt, and he’s alone. He doesn’t have anybody else in the world except me.”
“You?” I laughed. This was the old Eli, winging up darkly, wanting to hurt because I was hurting so bad myself. “What the fuck does he care about you? You’re the one he fucks when he can’t get anybody else to pay for it.”
The punch probably would have broken my nose, except Dag got hold of my sweatshirt and yanked me backward. Posey’s fist whistled through the air. I stumbled and fell against Dag, who wrapped an arm—the one with the injured hand—around my waist. For a moment, my mind was bright and blank, like sunlight through quartz. I lunged at Posey. I thought what his eye would sound like when it popped. I thought I’d use my thumb. But Dag dragged me backward.
“Walk it off,” Dag said.
Posey took a step toward us.
“Posey!” Dag barked. “Take a walk!”
After a moment, Posey shook his head like he was the one who’d gotten his bell rung. He turned and staggered away from us. Against the sunset, his outline looked like a paper doll with its edges burned black.
“What’s going on with you?” Dag asked. He gave me a little shake as he released me. “What the hell, Eli?”
“I’m sorry about your hand—”
“I asked you a question! What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” I touched my mouth, surprised to see blood. My lip was starting to ache dully where I’d bitten it. I turned into my shoulder to wipe my forehead on the sweatshirt. Sweat dampened the cotton, even though the day was cool slipping toward chilly. Maybe I had a fever, I thought. Maybe I’m sick. I wanted to laugh. And I wanted to throw up. Maybe? Who was I kidding?
“E,” Dag said softly, touching my arm. “I’m sorry I yelled, but you’re scaring me. What’s happening? That’s not like you, hurting Posey like that. You’re the kindest, sweetest person I’ve ever met—when you’re not threatening to put my phone on the streetcar tracks.” He said the last part with a tentative smile. “You like to act bitchy when there’s nothing on the line, but as soon as somebody needs you—I mean, I’ve seen you do it. The whole reason we’re helping Posey is because you wanted to. But today—help me understand this.”
I dashed at my eyes and shook my head, and for a moment, I couldn’t say anything. Then I turned and started after Posey and called back, “We’ll never find him out here if we lose him.”
His steps came after me, hard and clipped against the dirt. I had this image of him grabbing me by the arm, swinging me around, and—
I made myself stop there. I focused on breathing. The only sounds were the two of us trudging across fields of winter vegetables. And then something else—a high, whirring sound. I glanced up and saw a drone—a kid playing with his new toy, I guessed. Or, as seemed to be the case with a lot of electronics, a grown-up kid. Or maybe there was some legitimate use for drones in farming. Maybe this was how they caught trespassers, and the farmer was about to release his mean old hound.
