Pretty Girl Gone (8 page)

“There’s needing and then there’s needing.”

“I know. Only we haven’t reached that point yet.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“C’mon, McKenzie. Think about it.”

“I think you don’t want to marry me and now you’re trying to convince me that I not only don’t want to marry you, I don’t want to get married at all.”

“Do you want to marry me?”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“You’re starting to annoy me, Nina.”

“Why can’t you just say it? You don’t want to get married.”

“I don’t want to get married tonight.”

“Neither do I. So, we’re both on the same page. What’s the problem?”

“I might change my mind tomorrow.”

“If you do, let me know. We’ll work something out.”

“What happens in the meantime?”

“Nothing happens in the meantime. We just keep on going the way we have been.”

This is a good thing,
my inner voice told me.
You don’t want to get married. The beautiful, intelligent, successful woman you’ve been sleeping with doesn’t want to get married, either. Yet she still wants to sleep with you. Most guys would kill for a relationship like this.

So why was I angry?

Despite her protests, I insisted on walking Nina to her door. I stood back while she unlocked it and slipped inside.

“Come in for a moment while I disarm the security system,” she said.

A few moments later she returned. She had removed her overcoat and her red velvet dress shimmered in the light behind her.

“Thank you for coming,” I told her.

“Thank you for inviting me.”

I hesitated for a moment.

“When you played piano, tonight—that was for me, wasn’t it? You were performing for me.”

“I just wanted to remind you that I was there.”

“I’m sorry I left you alone for so long.”

“It’s all right.”

“I should have been more attentive.”

“Yes, you should have.”

Nina stepped forward and kissed me. The kiss was warm and moist and lasted a long time.

“I should go,” I told her.

She held open the door and I stepped through it and made my way to the Audi. I had just about reached it when I turned. She was watching from the door. There was considerable distance between us now and she had to shout.

“I said I didn’t want to get married and I meant it, but . . .”

“But what?” I shouted back.

“You’ll never find anyone better for you than I am, Rushmore McKenzie. Never.”

I lay in my bed a long time yearning for sleep that did not come. My brain was convulsed by too many thoughts and images that made me toss and turn and twist and continually flip my pillow to the cool side. The incident in the skyway.
Do the right thing.
Wasn’t that a Spike Lee film? The parking lot.
There is nowhere you can run that I can’t follow. There is nowhere you can hide that I can’t find you.
If that wasn’t a line from a movie, it should be. Jack and Lindsey Barrett, Donovan, Muehlenhaus, and the others. Nina.
Maybe I didn’t want to get married, but what the hell!
Who could sleep though noise like that?

Eventually, I gave it up and padded in bare feet down the stairs and into my kitchen. In the freezer compartment of my refrigerator I retrieved a half-filled bottle of Stolichnaya. I poured two fingers of the icy vodka into a short, squat glass and took a sip. It was so cold it made my
teeth ache, only, Lordy, it went down nice. I returned the bottle and glanced about. The kitchen appliances on my counter gleamed in the moonlight that filtered through my windows—blender, espresso machine, bread maker, ice cream churn, microwave, pasta maker, George Foreman grill. My sno-cone, mini-donut, and popcorn machines were stored in boxes on my kitchen table—I reminded myself to take them to the Dunstons.

I took another sip of vodka and drifted to the breakfast nook. I sat at the end of the table, surrounded by eight windows arranged in a semicircle, each window with a view of my backyard. The pond had been frozen over since early December; the ducks that lived there had been gone since late September.

Nina.

The first year there had been seven ducks, Tracy and Hepburn and their five ducklings that I named Shelby, Bobby, Victoria, and Katie, after the Dunstons, and Maureen, after my mother. Victoria and Katie returned with their mates the next year and had nine ducklings between them that I named after an assortment of friends. Yet I had never named one after Nina.

Why not?

The phone rang before I could answer the question.

“There is nowhere you can run that I can’t follow,” a voice told me. “There is nowhere you can hide that I can’t find you.”

The voice startled me. The malice it conveyed was unmistakable and I had to remind myself that it was merely a voice on the phone.
It can’t hurt you.
Besides, I had heard it before.

I turned on the light to read the number in my caller I. D. attachment, but the field was empty.

“Did you hear me?” the voice asked.

“There’s nowhere I can run that you can’t follow, there’s nowhere I can hide that you can’t find me. Anything else?”

The voice hesitated as if it was unsure of itself. “John Barrett must not be allowed to run for the Senate,” it replied in a rush.

“Okay. Thanks for sharing.”

A moment later, the connection was severed, leaving me staring at the silent receiver.

This is what happens when you agree to do favors for old friends.

The difference between five below zero and five above is mostly in the mind. The odds that your car won’t start are just as slim at either temperature; the likelihood that your water pipes might burst is just as high; the danger of frostbite, of numbing death from exposure, is just as real. Yet there was something joyous in the fact that the Twin Cities had finally crept into positive digits. I could see it in the robust gait of pedestrians who no longer felt as anxious over the climate as they had the day before and I could hear it in the voices of the customers at the Dunn Brothers coffeehouse where I had stopped for a mocha. It made me glad to be about with a job to do and
a heart for any fate,
as the poet once wrote. I didn’t even mind that the early morning rush hour traffic had forced me to rein in the 225 horses beneath the hood of my Audi as I made my way to Merriam Park. For once the prevailing traffic laws seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

I had moved to the suburbs. It was an accident. I thought I was buying a home in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul, but after
making an offer I discovered I was on the wrong side of the street, that I had actually moved to Falcon Heights, though I won’t admit it to anyone but my closest friends. Bobby Dunston, you couldn’t get out of the city, not with a crowbar. He purchased his parents’ home after they retired and was now raising his children in the house where he was raised directly across the street from Merriam Park, where he and I played baseball and hockey and discovered girls.

I parked on Wilder in front of his house. It took me a few moments to wrestle the popcorn machine out of the passenger seat. If I hadn’t fumbled my car keys in the process and had to pick them out of the snow, I might not have looked up and seen the white Ford Escort parked about a block behind me, its exhaust fumes plainly visible in the cold air.

I carried the machine up the sidewalk, across Bobby’s porch, and knocked on the door. While I waited, I directed my eyes across the street as if there was something in the park that interested me. It wasn’t an abrupt gesture, but casual—for the benefit of my tail. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, or rather I watched the car. I couldn’t see who was in it.

Shelby opened the door with a smile that could guide ships at night. Which in turn made me smile. I tried to picture her at sunrise, telling myself that in the morning’s first light she would look as attractive as a wrinkled grocery bag, but failed. I had known her since college, known her, in fact, for three minutes and fifty seconds longer than her husband—the exact length of Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” the song they were playing when we met—and she always looked good to me.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the box.

“A 2554 Macho Pop popcorn popper.”

“Of course it is. Do you need help carrying it in?”

“I’ve got it. Can you get the door?”

I muscled the machine into her house and set it on her living room carpet.

“What’s that?” Bobby asked.

He had come from the kitchen, a newspaper in his hand.

“Popcorn machine,” Shelby told him.

“How did the Wild do last night?” I asked him.

“Lost 2–1.”

“Nuts.”

When I went back outside, he followed me. Bobby and I had started together at the very beginning and watched the world evolve in fits and starts, in disappointments and small victories. He was me and I was him and we felt exactly the same about most things most of the time, and since we lived in the same place at the same time forever, we were able to communicate volumes to each other with a single word or sentence fragment or a raised eyebrow.

He lifted my Belshaw Donut Robot Mark I, capable of making one hundred dozen mini-donuts per hour, thank you very much, while I grappled with my Paragon 1911 Brand Sno-Cone Machine. I do like my treats.

“Where’s the Jeep Cherokee?” he asked.

“In the garage.”

“I thought the Audi was going to be the summer car.”

“It’s just so damn fast.”

Last spring a Chevy Blazer I was chasing outraced me on the freeway. The Audi satisfied my vow that it would never happen again.

“Why are you home?” I asked.

“Accumulated time off. I put in sixty-seven hours last week.”

“Nice hours if you can get them.”

“If people would stop killing each other, I might actually have time for the family.”

“Where are the girls?”

“They had better be in school.”

“Why wouldn’t they be?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because their surrogate uncle likes to tell
them stories about how he and their father used to skip class to run around the city and they think it’s cool.”

“Sorry ’bout that.”

“I can tell.”

A few moments later, the machines were arranged side-by-side in the Dunstons’ living room.

“I thought you were bringing these over Friday,” said Shelby.

“I have to leave town and I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I wanted to make sure the girls had them for their fund-raiser.” I turned to Bobby. “That’s why you don’t have to worry about them skipping school. Because they’re Girl Scouts and we—”

“We were never Scouts.”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Where are you going?” Shelby asked.

“Victoria, Minnesota.”

“Why?”

“I’m doing a favor for Zee Bauer.”

“No kidding,” said Bobby.

“Who’s Zee Bauer?” Shelby asked.

“Lindsey Bauer,” said Bobby. “She’s married to the governor now.”

“Lindsey Barrett, the first lady? You know the first lady?”

“She used to live not far from here, near Summit Avenue, on what, Howell?” Bobby said. “McKenzie dated her younger sister, Linda, when we were seniors in high school.”

“You called her Zee?”

“Lind-
zee,
” said Bobby. “Not to be confused with Lind-
duh.
”

“Linda wasn’t the smartest girl in the class,” I said.

“She was a slut,” Bobby said.

“Hey, hey, hey, c’mon . . .”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

I didn’t. I couldn’t.

“What are you doing for the first lady?” Shelby asked.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Figures.”

“Does it have anything to do with the Ford Escort parked down the street?” Bobby asked.

“You noticed.”

“I’m an experienced law enforcement professional.”

“I heard that rumor. Didn’t they just promote you to lieutenant of something?”

“A richly deserved reward for my many years of outstanding service working homicide.”

“Want to do me a favor?”

“You don’t know who’s in the Escort, do you?”

“Not a clue.”

Bobby sighed, said, “I’ll make a call.”

“When you find out, call me on my cell. I want to lead him out of the neighborhood in case there’s trouble.”

“Trouble?” Shelby said the word like she had just heard it for the first time. “Why does there always need to be trouble?”

I didn’t know how to answer that.

“I understand why Bobby takes risks,” Shelby said. “It’s his job. But why do you?”

“We all take risks everyday, Shel. We all walk down dark alleys without knowing what lurks in the shadows . . .”

“Metaphorically speaking,” said Bobby.

“We risk death riding in hurtling automobiles and by golf balls that are sliced out of bounds and from burritos that aren’t cooked properly. There are diseases waiting for us out there that we’ve never even heard of and probably couldn’t pronounce if we had—”

“Here we go,” Shelby said like she had heard it all before, which, of course, she had.

“The thing is, ain’t no one getting out of here alive, so we might as well have some fun while we can. Besides . . .”

“Live well, be useful,” Bobby said.

“I bet I could learn to like you if I worked at it,” I told him.

He said, “You’re my hero. When I grow up I want to be just like you.”

“You’re both a couple of cowboys,” Shelby insisted.

Who were we to argue?

I explained that instructions for using the machines were in the boxes as well as a hefty supply of ingredients. I told them if I wasn’t back in time, they should call my cell with questions about setup and operation. Then I headed for the door.

I walked briskly to my Audi. I pressed a button on my key chain and the lights flashed and doors unlocked. Once inside the two-seat sports car, I started the engine and waited. The Ford waited, too. I pulled away from the curb. The Ford did the same. I led it to Marshall Avenue and hung a left. It followed.

He’s not being careful at all.

I flashed on my assailant in the Minneapolis skyway, heard the voice of my late-night caller. I wasn’t frightened. Nor was I particularly angry. Mostly I was curious.