Rain Dogs, page 17
“Rubber noses and mustaches, that sort of thing?”
“We like newspapers with eyeholes, too.” Farmer lipped yet another cigarette out of his pack. Tom supposed a guy whose alter ego didn’t smoke had to make up for lost time. “We’ll arrange with Aurora PD to get your truck back.”
Tom knew the rest, but he waited for it anyway.
“Look,” Farmer said. “I need you at your place. With me and Foster. Help me keep everything on an even keel until we get this little mess cleaned up.”
“Business as usual.”
“It’ll be fun. Just like old times.”
“Sorry, I missed it. Where was the compromise?”
“I’m trying to be a good guy, here. If you want to keep playing nice, there’s no reason why Abby can’t bring Scott in herself. I’ve got a teenager at home, believe it or not. I get it.” Farmer cupped his lighter around the end of his cigarette and thumbed the wheel. “We’ll keep an eye on them, but we can wait until Monday morning to pick him up. Either way, they’re both part of the program, now. Wheeler, too. Nothing to be done about that.”
“It sounds like it doesn’t matter whether I play nice or not,” Tom said.
“You know it does. Four weeks is still a long time.”
Tom looked off the porch, out over the river valley. In the distance, he heard the high, throaty gurgle of a bull elk bugling.
He didn’t think they challenged each other this early in the year. Maybe these animals were out of their element. Maybe he didn’t know jack shit about bull elk.
Farmer said, “What’s it going to be? Do we have a deal, or what?”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“You know I still want Magruder. I think we can still make that happen. With your help.”
“But if I hear you correctly, my help is no longer a requirement.”
“Look, I’m not going to yank your chain. The fact is, as soon as North Platte’s finest pick up Wheeler at that storage unit, I’ve got the least I need.”
“I understand that.”
“Me, I’d rather keep fishing. I don’t mind the great outdoors.” Farmer dragged on his cigarette and blew a few rings. “But like I said, the operation’s flexible.”
Tom shook his head.
“When I go back inside a minute from now, I’m calling the same people either way. You decide what I tell them.”
“So we’re back to the threats, then.”
Agent Farmer cocked his head. “I thought you were asking me for a personal favor.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Farmer smoked while he waited.
“So that’s it, then?”
“Pretty much.”
“Your final offer.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“I guess I owe you one,” Tom said.
THIRTY-TWO
He told her everything in the car.
It was a minivan, technically. A nice Plymouth Grand Voyager with lots of legroom. Tom tried to imagine the endless shit Scott must have taken from the Wheeler brothers, having to sneak out to go drink in a minivan. With a car seat, no less.
Tom could feel Hannah’s empty spot behind him. Toys and books lay scattered around the backseats and floor.
He explained all he could, starting with the very first beer Scott had swiped at the Landing and ending with the cash he hadn’t. In between, he heard himself talking about weapons and drugs, a crooked cop, feds crawling around the river valley like ticks.
Told like that, in one long summary, it all sounded so much more dramatic than it had seemed along the way. From a distance, it wasn’t a bad story. Tom could see which parts he would have juiced if he’d been the one covering it.
He spared Abby the seasoning. By the time they made I-80 west out of North Platte, she’d fallen completely silent behind the wheel.
Tom rode along in the passenger seat. He checked over every so often, tried to read her silence. She wore sunglasses against the afternoon glare, and he couldn’t see her eyes; the rest of her face appeared perfectly neutral. For twenty miles, Abby wore no discernible expression at all. She just drove, stable and constant, needle anchored at a steady eighty-five.
Traffic blasted past them on the left just the same. Cars and trucks, other minivans. A massive RV pulling a snap-covered boat took them like they were standing still. Tom imagined a family headed for the white sand beaches of Lake McConaughy. He wondered where else people in RVs would be pulling a boat in this part of the country, this late on a Saturday afternoon. He wondered where all the other cars were going.
Halfway to Ogallala, Abby finally chuckled a little. It came out like a stutter.
“I thought I was doing him so much good,” she said. “Me with the tough love. Boy.”
“Abby, I’m sorry. I should have seen this.”
“It’s not your fault. Don’t pretend it is.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
She shook her head and sighed. He heard her chuckle again. This time, she kept going. He looked over when he heard her draw in a breath and saw the tight bounce in her shoulders. Her arms shook.
Abby jerked her foot off the gas and drifted right. She took the shoulder and braked to a long stop, eighty-five to zero in a few hundred feet. The rumble strips alongside the roadway vibrated the minivan bottom to top, rattling the buckles on the car seat, filling the inside with noise.
She threw the transmission into park as vehicles shot past, rocking them in their wake. Abby pounded the wheel, then gripped it until her knuckles turned white. She leaned forward, put her head on her hands, and cried.
Tom didn’t know what to do for her. He put his hand on her back, felt heat through her shirt. He could feel her sobs bucking his palm. Sitting there, buffeted by the wind of passing cars, he felt like an intruder.
She yanked off her sunglasses and pressed her hands over her face. She ground her knuckles into her eyes. She said, “I miss him so much sometimes.”
At first, he thought, He’s only been gone a few hours. As soon as he thought it, he realized she wasn’t talking about Scott.
Then he understood that there was only one thing he could do that would be worth much of anything. So he lifted his hand away and got out of the car.
Hot wind pushed against him as he walked around the back bumper to the driver’s side. Tom opened her door and had to grab on tight as a big eighteen-wheeler drifted left and roared past. The force of the truck put him back on his heels, nearly tearing off his shirt in the slipstream, leaving him standing in a momentary vacuum.
When the coast was clear, he patted her shoulder. “Shove over.”
Abby didn’t bother arguing. She leaned to the right and gave up the wheel, seeming to melt from one seat into the other.
Tom waited until she was settled and then got in himself, feeling the last of her warmth in the upholstery. Abby leaned forward, covered her face again, and let herself go with the tide.
He put the van in gear and started forward, picking up speed along the rough shoulder. Soon the judder of the tires over the warning strips overwhelmed the sound of Abby’s tears.
When he saw a break in traffic, he merged back onto the road.
She was asleep by the time they crossed the state line.
He’d never driven this stretch before. Left alone with his own thoughts, Tom discovered that eastern Colorado was every goddamned bit as desolate as western Nebraska. It got to be tedious. Every so often, he saw a lone oil pump in the distance, its iron donkey head nodding along mechanically in the late-afternoon light. He began counting them to pass the time.
Abby still hadn’t woken by the time he stopped in Fort Morgan for gas. She didn’t stir when he pulled in to the pumps. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen her smoke since that day at the hospital; he wondered if she’d quit since, or if she’d only fallen off the wagon that particular day. He thought about waking her to ask if she wanted anything.
He let her sleep.
The tarmac had soaked up the day’s heat and felt soft under his shoes. Tom gassed up and went inside to pay cash. He bought Abby a Snickers in case she woke up hungry. He assumed she still liked them. He bought himself a travel bottle and topped off the flask before he got back in the van.
When he climbed back in behind the wheel, he found her sitting up. Her eyes looked puffy, hair frizzy and tangled on one side. She’d been watching him through the windshield.
He pulled the door shut and handed her the candy bar. “Morning.”
“Mm.” She covered a yawn with the back of her hand. “Where are we?”
“Hour, hour and a half. Almost there.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sleep.”
“It’s been a long day.”
“I can take over driving if you want.”
“I’m okay.”
She seemed to be fine with that idea. Tom pulled out, took the frontage road to the onramp, and got back on I-76. He reset the cruise control two miles over the speed limit and left it there. He knew she’d be anxious to get where they were going, but he figured they didn’t need the added hassle of a speeding stop turning into a DUI on the way.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Abby looking at the paper sack he’d stashed in the dashboard cubby beneath the stereo. They went several miles before she said anything. He’d begun to hope she’d decided to leave it alone.
“Was it Emily?” She cut short and corrected herself. “Grace?”
“Was what?”
She nodded toward the sack. “I’m not judging. I just . . . wondered.”
He drove a few more miles without saying anything. He wasn’t sure there was anything worth saying about it.
“There was this guy at the paper,” he finally told her. “Rim editor on the metro copy desk. He always said, ‘I was an alcoholic for twenty years before I developed a drinking problem.’ ”
“You were never a drinker.”
“I drank just about every day when we were in college.”
“A beer or two,” she said. “And parties. We all did.”
“Guess I’m one of the ones who tapered up instead of off.”
She listened.
“I drank with cops and EMT guys sometimes. Seemed to go with their territory, too.”
“I can imagine.”
“Dad never drank,” he said. “You tell yourself whatever you tell yourself.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I like to think I always had a handle on it,” he said. “I never wanted to drink more than I wanted to meet a deadline.” He tapped the brake, passed a car on the left, and hit the cruise again. “After Grace, I guess I didn’t really give a shit. It felt better to drink than not. So I didn’t not.”
“What about now?”
“What about now?”
She put her foot on the dash and leaned forward, untied her shoe and tied it again. She always fiddled. “Have you developed your drinking problem yet?”
“It’s more of a stopping problem.”
“Do you want to stop?”
He thought about it and realized he honestly didn’t have an answer.
They didn’t say much else for a while. Abby sat and looked out the window. Tom watched the road. He felt self-conscious now, reaching for the flask. It aggravated him that he felt self-conscious. It annoyed him that he felt aggravated.
At one point, she opened her mouth to say something else, then seemed to change her mind. It wasn’t like Abby to edit herself.
“What?”
“I was just thinking,” she said. “You and Dan have something in common.”
“Um . . . yeah.”
She dropped her jaw and looked at him. When he glanced over, she broke into a genuine laugh. It caught both of them by surprise. Tom realized it was the first time he’d heard her laugh since he’d gotten here. He’d forgotten how nice it sounded.
“Never mind,” she said. “Sleazeball.”
“Sorry, that just came out. Go on.”
“I don’t want to now.” She took her foot down and shifted in her seat. “This is better. I’ve cried enough today.”
He could tell that she wanted to say what she’d started to say, but he didn’t press it. She was right. The break was nice. Anyway, he knew she’d probably get back around to it eventually. It took about a minute.
“I was just thinking that he didn’t get to see his kids grow up, either,” she said. “I don’t know which way is worse.”
Tom didn’t offer an opinion.
“The other day I was watching Hannah, and I thought, she was barely two when he died.” Abby looked out the window while she spoke. “I realized that if I don’t keep talking about him, showing her pictures, telling her stories . . . she won’t even remember him. At some point, for her, it’ll be like he was never even here.”
“She’ll remember him,” he said.
“Why? I look at Scott. I used to see so much of Dan in him.” Her voice acquired a little tremor. “I don’t know if I see Dan in him at all anymore. It makes me wonder how much even Scott remembers him now.”
Even as she said it, Tom thought of the book Scott had loaned him. How battered it was, dog-eared and creased. He imagined Scott reading it, flipping pages, falling asleep with it tented over his chest.
He thought of the way Greer had actually managed to make ten thousand words on the topic of groundwater reasonably interesting. He thought about the way he’d written of hidden resources waiting to be tapped, needing conservation during crisis.
He thought of something else the best editor he’d ever had once told him:
I dearly fucking hate a good metaphor. That’s why I like you, Coleman. You never met one you didn’t torture half to death.
“He remembers,” he said.
THIRTY-THREE
Valerie Donner-Burbach had lived in Chicago for almost two years. The way Tom estimated it, she and he must have moved there from Nebraska very near the same time.
Life was full of little coincidences.
After taking back her maiden name, Donner once placed in a beginner’s mixed martial arts tournament at the Degerberg Academy on North Lincoln Ave. Yellow belt group.
That was how Scott first found her; somebody had posted the tourney results on a Usenet newsgroup, where they lingered in perpetuity.
Apparently, Tom’s own paper had covered a black-box stage adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper at the Lookingglass. A guy named Burbach wrote and directed. Scott’s mother—already hyphenated by then—had played Charlotte.
According to Abby, reviews had been mixed.
You wouldn’t find a story like that by running a general search on the Web. The Trib kept an online archive going back to 1985, but Scott would have had to go to the paper’s Web site, run a specific search on the name Valerie Donner, and then pay to access the text of a story that old.
According to Abby, he had a talent for research. All his teachers at school said so.
According to the stack of printed Web pages she’d found in a folder under the bed in his room, Scott had made a graduate-level project out of piecing together his birth mother’s past thirteen years.
She lived an open-book life and left excerpts of it all over the Internet. He’d tracked her down once in New York, once in Sedona. She’d lived in Los Angeles for a few years, but that must not have panned out. At some point, she’d started her own Web site and kept a journal there, making it easier for Scott to follow the ups and downs and arounds.
The Donner-Burbachs now lived in the Denver suburbs, where Burbach worked as a PR veep for the Avalanche. Valerie worked days as an administrative assistant in an office building. She had a photography exhibit coming up at a co-op in September.
“Apparently, he called the first time around four this morning,” the desk sergeant told them. His name was Vidas. He had a ruddy complexion and thick red hair. “She says she told him she couldn’t see him, but he kept calling back. The husband finally unplugged the phone.”
This would have been seven or eight hours after Scott had left the Landing in Tom’s truck. Tom was amazed that the truck even made it to Denver. The old man must have kept the motor up.
“According to the husband, the subject—sorry—Scott was waiting out on the curb in the morning,” Sergeant Vidas said. “When he wouldn’t leave, they locked the doors and called in.”
Abby pinched her mouth and glanced at Tom.
Vidas seemed to empathize. He gave her a gentle smile and said, “He hasn’t given us any trouble here, for what it’s worth.”
The officers who had responded to the call found a ranch kid from Nebraska with a scarred arm, a swollen mouth, and no driver’s license pounding on the door of a well-kept split-level on a shady, tree-lined residential street. At the curb, they found what appeared to be a stolen pickup with a road atlas and a map of Denver on the seat. They’d also found a snub-nosed .38 revolver in the glove box. Unregistered. When asked about the gun, the kid had claimed he’d won it off a guy. Tom wondered where Scott kept winning firearms.
“I’ll have him brought up,” Sergeant Vidas said. “Unless you’d like to go on back.”
“Thank you,” Abby said. “We’ll wait here.”
Vidas nodded and picked up a phone. While he spoke into the receiver, Abby turned and crossed her arms.
Tom said, “It could be worse.”
A muscle jumped in her jaw when she looked at him.
“The cunt turned away her own son.”
Tom thought of something to say to that, but now didn’t seem like the time for platitudes. Abby wanted to be angry. As far as he was concerned, she deserved to be. So he nodded and said nothing.
“Are you Tom Coleman?”
He turned and saw a cop that reminded him of one of his uncles. The man had the same angular face and calm brown eyes. If he’d been gray on top, he might have reminded Tom a little bit of the great Jack Coleman himself. Maybe that was why he recognized brass without checking for stripes.
“I’m Tom,” he said.
“Deputy Chief Byrle. Pleased to meet you.”
Everybody shook hands. “Sorry you folks had to make the drive.”
