A Drink Before the War (5 page)

The drive to
Wickham is not a fun one. You have to switch interchanges every third mile or so, and one wrong turn dumps you in New Hampshire, trying to talk directions with eastern rednecks who don't speak the language. To top it off, there's nothing to look at but the occasional industrial park, or as you get closer to the belt of towns that lie along the Merrimack River, the Merrimack River. Not a pleasant sight. Usually you have to look down a sewer grate to find water as brown and sluggish as the Merrimack's—a casualty of the textile business that built a lot of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The next thing you see as you drive through this region are the mills themselves, and the sky turns to soot.

I had
Exile on Main St
. pumping through my speakers the whole way so I didn't mind it that much, and by the time I found Merrimack Avenue, the only thing I was worried about was leaving the car unattended.

Wickham is not an upwardly mobile community. It's dingy and gray as only a mill town can be. The streets are the color of a shoe bottom, and the only way to tell the difference between the bars and the homes is to look for the neon signs in the windows. The roads and sidewalks are uneven, the tar cracked and pale. Many of the people, especially the workers as they trudge home from the mills in the dying light, have the look of those who've long ago gotten used to the fact that no one remembers them. It's a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because
at least they confirm that time is actually moving on.

Merrimack Avenue is the main strip. Simone Angeline's address was a good ways past the center of town—the bars, gas stations, mills, and clothing factories were five miles behind me before I reached the twelve hundred block. Angie was back in my rearview mirror by then, and she passed me when I pulled onto a side street and parked the car. I set the Chapman lock and disengaged the radio, taking it with me as I got out. I took one last look back at the car and hoped that we would find Jenna soon. Real soon.

I didn't win my car in a card game or have it bequeathed to me by an overly generous client. I banked my money and waited, banked some more money and waited. Finally I saw it advertised and I went to the bank for a loan. I sat through an excruciating interview with a condescending loan officer who reminded me of every bitter, high-school geek who sees his adult life as a mission to avenge adolescence by being a total prick to anyone he assumes would have treated him badly in homeroom. Luckily, my practice grew and my fees rose and I soon had that monkey off my back. But I still pay the price of being constantly anxious about the only material possession I've ever given a damn about.

I slid into the passenger seat of Angie's car and she took my hand. “Don't wowwy, baby, nothing will happen to your pride and joy. I promise.”

She's funny enough to shoot sometimes.

I said, “Well, least in this neighborhood, nobody will be suspicious of
this
thing.”

She said, “Oh, good one. You ever think of going into stand-up?”

It went like that. We sat in the car and passed around a can of Pepsi and waited for our meal ticket to make a guest appearance.

By six o'clock we were cramped and sick of each other and even sicker of looking at 1254 Merrimack Avenue. It was a faded A-frame that might have been pink once. A
Puerto Rican family had entered it an hour ago, and we'd watched a light go on in the second-floor apartment a minute or so later. Short of our second can of Pepsi exploding all over the dashboard when I opened it, that was the closest we'd come to excitement in four hours.

I was looking through the tape collection on Angie's floor, trying to find a group I'd heard of, when she said, “Heads up.”

A black woman—rope thin, with a stiff, almost regal bearing—was stepping from an '81 Honda Civic, her right arm around a bag of groceries, resting them on her hip. She looked like the picture of Jenna, but younger by a good seven or eight years. She also seemed to have too much energy for the tired woman in the photograph. She slammed the car door with her free hip, a hard, swift move that would have left Gretzky on the ice with a wet ass. She marched to the front door of the house, slid her key into the lock, and disappeared inside. A few minutes later, she appeared in silhouette by the window, a telephone receiver to her ear.

Angie said, “How do you want to play it?”

“Wait,” I said.

She shifted in her seat. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She held her chin with her fingers, moved it around in a semicircle for a moment. “You don't think Jenna's in there?”

“No. Since she disappeared, she's played it relatively careful. She has to know her apartment's been trashed. And the beating the guy in the schoolyard gave me tells me she's probably into more than the petty theft we're after her for. With people like that after her—maybe this Roland guy too—I don't think she's going to set herself up in her sister's place.”

Angie half shrugged, half nodded in that way she has, and lit a cigarette. She hung her arm out the window and the gray smoke pooled by the rearview mirror, then separated into equal strands and floated out the windows. She
said, “If we're smart enough to figure out where she is, wouldn't someone else be? We can't be the only ones who know about the sister.”

I thought about it. It made sense. If whoever “they” were had put a tail on me in the hopes of following me to Jenna, then they must have put a tail on Simone. “Shit.”

“Now, what do you want to do?”

“Wait,” I repeated, and she groaned. I said, “We follow Simone when she goes somewhere—”

“
If
she goes somewhere.”

“Positive energy, please. When she goes somewhere, we follow, but we hang back first, see if we have company.”

“And if our company is already on to us? If they're watching us right now as we speak, thinking the same thing? What then?”

I resisted the urge to turn around and look for other cars with two immobile occupants, staring in our direction. “We deal with it,” I said.

She frowned. “You always say that when you don't have a clue.”

“Do not,” I said.

At seven-fifteen, things started happening.

Simone, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, faded jeans, and generic sneakers the color of an oyster, walked out of the house with determination and opened her car the same way. I wondered if she did everything the same way—with that set look on her face, that the-hell-with-you-if-you-can't-keep-up air about her. Could people
sleep
that way?

She went straight up Merrimack, so we gave her a few blocks, waiting to see if we were the only interested party. It seemed to be the case, and if not, I wasn't about to lose my only lead. We pulled out, and with one last look at my thirty-seven thousand dollars worth of automobile—insurance company estimate, mind you—we tailed her through Wickham. She went straight through the center of town and hopped on I-495. I was tired of being in the car and hoped
like hell she didn't have Jenna stowed away in Canada. Thankfully, that didn't seem to be the case, because she got off the expressway a few miles later, turning off into Lansington.

If possible, Lansington is uglier than Wickham, but in imperceptible ways. In most respects, they're identical. Lansington just feels dingier.

We were waiting at a traffic light near the center of town, but when the light turned green, Simone didn't move. I felt two cold spades press together around my heart and Angie said, “Shit. Think she's on to us?”

I said, “Use the horn.”

She did and Simone's hand went up in apology as she realized the light had changed. It was the first undetermined thing she'd done since I'd seen her, and it felt like a jump start: we were close.

All around us were squat two-story clapboard buildings, circa the late 1800s. Trees were sparse and gnarled in hideous ways where we saw them. The traffic lights were old, still round, no Walk/Don't Walk signals or neon pictures for those who couldn't understand the Walk/Don't Walk parts. The lights made clicking sounds when they changed, and as we drifted along the two-lane road, I felt that we could just as easily have been in rural Georgia or West Virginia.

Ahead of us, Simone's left blinker went on, and a fraction of a second later, she pulled off the road into a small dirt parking lot filled with pickup trucks, a Winnebago, a couple of dusty American sports cars, and those wretched testaments to Detroit's bad taste—El Caminos. Two of them. A car that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a truck; a truck that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a car—obscene, hybrid results.

Angie kept going and a half mile down the road, we U-turned and went back. The parking lot belonged to a bar. Just like Wickham, you wouldn't have known what it was without the small neon Miller High Life signs in the win
dows. It was a low two-story building, a little deeper than most of the houses, stretching back an extra ten yards or so. From inside I could hear glasses clinking, a smattering of laughter, the babble of voices, and a Bon Jovi song coming off the jukebox. I amended that last thought; maybe it was just a stereo tuned to a radio station and no one inside had actually paid money to listen to Bon Jovi. Then I looked at the pickups and the bar again, and I wasn't hopeful.

Angie said, “We going to wait here too?”

“Nope. Going in.”

“Goody.” She looked at the building. “Thank God I'm licensed to carry a firearm.” She checked the load in her .38.

“Damn straight,” I said, climbing out of the car. “First thing you do when we get inside, shoot the stereo.”

 

Simone was nowhere in sight when we entered. This was pretty easy to ascertain, because the moment we stepped through the door, everyone stopped moving.

I was wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and a baseball cap. My face looked like I'd had a disagreement with a pit bull, and the jacket that covered my gun was a raggy, faded army thing. I fit right in.

Angie was wearing a dark blue football jacket with white leather sleeves over a loose white cotton shirt that hung untucked over a pair of black leggings.

Guess which one of us they were looking at.

I looked at Angie. New Bedford isn't terribly far from here. Big Dan's Bar is in New Bedford. That's where a bunch of guys threw a girl down on a pool table and had their version of fun at her expense while the rest of the bar cheered them on. I looked at the patrons of this bar—a Heinz 57 mix of eastern rednecks, white trash, mill workers only recently immigrated from the Third World, Portuguese, a couple of black guys—all poor and hostile and gearing up to let off some steam. Probably came here be
cause Big Dan's was closed. I looked at Angie again. I wasn't worried about her; I was considering what would happen to my business if my partner shot the dicks off a barful of people in Lansington. I wasn't sure, but I didn't think we'd be able to keep that office in the church.

The barroom was larger than it looked from the outside. To my left, just before the bar itself, was a narrow staircase of unfinished wood. The bar ran halfway down the floor on the left side. Across from it were a few tables for two against a dark plywood wall. Past the bar, the place opened up and I could see pinball and video machines on the left and the corner of a pool table on the right. A pool table. Terrific.

The place was medium to crowded. Just about everyone wore a baseball cap, even those who I assume were women. A few people had mixed drinks, but for the most part, this was Budweiser country.

We walked up to the bar and folks went back to what they were doing, or pretending to.

The bartender was a young guy, good-looking and bleached blond, but a townie if he was working this place. He gave me a slight smile. Then he gave one to Angie that, in comparison, looked as if his lips exploded. “Hi. What can I get you?” He leaned on the bar and looked into her eyes.

Angie said, “Two Buds.”

“My pleasure,” Blondie said.

“I'll bet,” she said and smiled.

She does this all the time. Flirts her ass off with everyone but me. If I wasn't such a rock of self-confidence, it would annoy me.

My luck was good tonight, though. I felt it the moment the Bon Jovi song ended. While Blondie went for the beers, I looked at the stairs. In what passes for a moment of stillness in a bar, I could hear people moving around overhead.

When Blondie placed both beers in front of Angie, I said, “Is there a back door to this place?”

He turned his head slowly in my direction, looking at me as if I'd just bumped his knee stepping onto the bus. “Yeah,” he said with extreme slowness and nodded in the direction of the pool table. Through the smoke that hung over the back I saw the door. He was looking at Angie again, but out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “Why, you planning on sticking the place up?”

“No,” I said. I flipped through all the cards in my wallet until I found the right one. “I'm planning on citing you for building code violations. Lots of them, asshole.” I flipped the card on the bar. It said, “Lewis Prine, State Building Inspector.” Lewis made the mistake of leaving me unattended in his office once.

Blondie stopped looking at Angie, though I could see it hurt. He stepped back a bit and looked at the card. “Don't you guys have badges or something?”

I had one of those too. Good thing about badges, most of them look pretty much the same to the untrained eye, so I don't have to carry fifty of them around with me. I flipped it at him, then put it back in my pocket. “All you got's that one back door?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. Nervous. “Why?”

“Why?
Why?
Where's the owner?”

“Huh?”

“The owner. The owner.”

“Bob? He's gone home for the night.”

My luck was still holding. I said, “Son, how many floors you got here?”