The Long and Faraway Gone (7 page)

She looked at Wyatt with curiosity, like she wondered how he managed to tie his shoelaces every morning. “If I knew that,” she said, “I wouldn't need you.”

Fair enough. Wyatt flipped the page in his notebook. “So you inherited this place?”

“From Mr. Eddy.” Candace nodded. “He was such a sweet old dude. And he used to crack me up, all these funny stories he had.”

She explained how Mr. Eddy had visited Vegas four or five times a year to play blackjack. He'd gone through a bad divorce a few years before and had no kids, he was a lonely old dude, he liked the company of the dealers and cocktail waitresses more than he liked actually playing blackjack. Whenever Candace had a break, he'd buy her dinner in the food court and tell her stories of his life.

“Did you know one time he had to kick Elvis Presley out of here?” Candace said. “Elvis played this big show in town, at the old arena downtown right before he died, and afterward he stopped by the Land Run because he'd heard that the music was so good. But then Elvis started talking shit about OU football, and there was almost a riot. Mr. Eddy said he just about crapped his pants. He was only like twenty years old or something, and his mom, who owned the place, was out of town.”

Wyatt paused to do the math. Elvis had died in '77 or '78. “Mr. Eddy was in his early fifties when he died? That made him an old dude?”

“Sure,” Candace said. And then she grinned at him, a big white flash of teeth against her cinnamon skin.

“I'm only forty.”

“And six-­feet tall. I remember.”

“So you and Mr. Eddy—­”

“There was no sex!” she said. But really it was more like four exclamation points crammed into one sentence.
There! Was! No! Sex!

“Okay, okay,” Wyatt said, “I'll stop insisting there was.”

“I know your mind's in the gutter just like everybody else's. Mine would be, too, I guess. But we were just friends. No matter what Mr. Eddy's brother thinks. Mr. Eddy always made me order some kind of vegetable at the food court, because it was good for me. He! Was! A! Sweet! Old! Dude!”

“Can we stop referring to him as an old dude, please?” he said.

“I was so sad when I heard that he died. I'd been wondering where he'd been. It was an aneurysm. And then when I heard about his will and that he'd left me this place . . .”

She re-­created the moment by parting her lips slightly and letting her eyes go glassy with shock, like she'd just witnessed a vision of the Virgin Mary shimmering near the card catalogs.

“I just about crapped my pants!”

“But in a good way.”

“Yeah! Shut up. I mean, nothing good like that ever happens to me!”

“Tell me about Mr. Eddy's brother,” Wyatt said.

Candace groaned. The groan turned into a sigh. The sigh turned into a hiss.

“Say no more,” Wyatt said.

“He wants me to sell him the Land Run,” Candace said. “I told him no. I told him no like a million times! He can't get it through his thick head why I won't sell.”

“And why is that?”

“I don't know. I mean, I know this is kind of a grody place and all, but . . .” She paused to take a look around.

Wyatt swiveled on his stool and took another look, too. All in all, the Land Run was in pretty decent shape. It was a dive, but no worse a dive than it had been twenty-­six years ago. More than could be said for most things.

“But it's yours,” he said.

“Yeah!” She checked to be sure he wasn't making fun of her. “Yeah. It's mine. And business is good! It's hard. You wouldn't even believe how hard. I sleep like four hours a night. But I'm the boss!”

Mr. Eddy's brother.
Wyatt jotted it in his pad. He circled it.

Candace glanced up at the balcony. “You can come down and say hi for a minute. He won't bite. If he tries to bite, just bite him back twice as hard.”

Wyatt looked up. A little girl, the five-­year-­old cutie-­pie that Gavin had told him about, stared gravely down at him from between the bars of the balcony railing. She had fair skin, blue eyes, a messy tangle of blond curls.

“Where'd you steal her?” Wyatt said.

Candace laughed. “I know, right? She took after her dad. Not his personality, though, thank God.”

Gavin hadn't mentioned the father. Candace wasn't wearing a ring. “Is he in the picture?” Wyatt said. “Her dad?”

“Brandon? No! I dumped his butt. We got divorced two years ago. A ­couple of months ago, he moved to Hawaii. He sends—­ Wait.” She found a box behind the bar and pawed through it. She handed a postcard to Wyatt. A golden beach, silky blue waves, hula dancers. “He sends Lily a new one every week.”

“That's nice of him.”

“No. Ha. He just wants me to know how great his life is since I dumped his butt.”

Wyatt flipped the postcard over.
“Greetings from paradise! The new place is great, right on the beach!”

“See? A new one every single week. How he just got a raise at work, or a better job, or a new condo, or his new girlfriend is an Instagram bikini model from Australia. Like, right.”

Wyatt realized that the little girl, Lily, had suddenly materialized next to him. As if she'd teleported soundlessly down from the balcony, like a vampire. She climbed up onto the stool next to him.

“What's your name?” she said.

“Wyatt.”

She considered that. “Okay.”

“What were you doing up there, lurking in the balcony?” Wyatt said.

The little girl looked at her mother.

“Hiding,” Candace said. “But like an animal does, getting ready to jump out and get you.
Rrraarrrr!
”

“I wasn't,” the little girl told Wyatt, her face grave. “Lurking. I was reading a book.”

“Okay,” Wyatt said.

She slipped off her stool and headed back to the balcony stairs, taking what had to be the most tortuously circuitous route possible, around every single table and chair on the floor, some of them twice. It made Wyatt dizzy just to watch.

“So,” Candace said. She stood with her fists on her hips again, legs apart, astride the world. “What's the plan?”

 

W
yatt started by interviewing the Land Run's staff as each employee arrived for his or her shift. Candace claimed they all loved her, but Wyatt intended to verify that.

The bartender was a woman named Dallas—­in her early thirties, wearing a tank top that showed off shoulders and arms covered with elaborate tattoos. She told Wyatt that the new owner had raised wages across the board when she took over.

“She can be a firecracker,” Dallas said, “but she treats me right.”

Farcracker.
The woman's Oklahoma twang surprised Wyatt a little, at odds with the tattoos and the silver hoop in her nostril. But why should it be at odds?
Times change,
he told himself.

“What about customers?” Wyatt asked. “Any problems recently?”

She considered, then shook her head. “No. Not that I can think of.”

Not that I can thank of.

Fudge, the giant black guy who worked the door, said Candace was the best thing that ever happened to the Land Run. And not just because she'd bumped him a dollar an hour.

“She one of the
­people,
” he said. “You know what I'm saying? She understand what it like, to be on your feet all night.”

“I know what you're saying,” Wyatt agreed.

“Her swag is
legit,
” Fudge said, and then watched to make sure Wyatt wrote that down.

The sound engineer, Jonathan, smelled like the inside of a bong and was not a fan of the new policy on shorter and less frequent breaks. Candace had won him over, though, when she let him start programming the walk-­in music that played over the Land Run's sound system before bands went on. The late Greg Eddy had reserved this power for himself, much to Jonathan's frustration.

“Greg was a very nice dude,” Jonathan said. “No doubt. But you know what he considered the best Pearl Jam bootleg of 2003? Perth, not Mexico Three. Yeah! And Bonner Springs wasn't even on his list. He said he
admired
Bonner Springs. Yeah!”

Neither Fudge nor Jonathan could remember any recent incidents with angry customers either. They couldn't guess who might be harassing—­
totally
harassing—­Candace.

After he finished with the staff, Wyatt went outside. He circled behind the Land Run. There was a square of cracked asphalt between the back of the building and a stockade fence that marked the property boundary. A rusted metal sign nailed to the fence said
EMPLOYEE PARKING ONLY!

There were four cars in the lot, but Wyatt could tell that the ten-­year-­old Ford Focus belonged to Candace. She'd washed it but not quickly enough, and the bird shit had done a number on the paint job, which had puckered and faded in places. Wyatt studied the asphalt around the car. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. Something, anything, nothing.

A few feet away, he saw a crushed empty Coke can that the wind had blown against the stockade fence. He crouched and lifted the empty can. Beneath it were what looked like a few grains of sand, or rice, or . . . what? Wyatt picked one up.

Birdseed. The empty can on top had kept the seeds from blowing away, from being gobbled up.

Something, anything, nothing.

He walked back to his rented Altima and called Gavin.

“I told you the girl was a piece of work,” Gavin said by way of a greeting.

“I'll give it another day or two, because she intimidates me, and I like her, and I agreed to do this. In that order. But there's probably no case. You're the one who explains that to her when I'm safely back in Vegas.”

The silence of a man calculating pot odds. “All right,” Gavin said finally.

“Let me ask you a question.”

“Can I stop you?”

“What would you do if you wanted birds to shit all over somebody's car? Just the one car, precision bombing.”

Wyatt could picture Gavin shifting in his office chair, custom-­built to comfortably accommodate his bulk.

“Bread crumbs,” Gavin said after a second. “I'd put bread crumbs all over the car. Or birdseed.”

Wyatt nodded. Probably the birdseed he'd found beneath the empty Coke can meant nothing. Or maybe, if it meant something, just that the kids who rearranged the marquee letters had pulled another prank.

He dialed Laurie next. She sounded out of breath.

“You're not having sex with another guy right now, are you?” he asked.

“Just one guy? No.”

“Good. Because I was getting ready to go buy you a present.”

“I had a meeting downstairs, and I took the stairs back up. I'm in such bad shape.”

“I beg to differ,” he said. “Your shape could not be more ideal.”

“Speaking of presents, I'm still holding my breath on that lime juicer from Williams-­Sonoma. Don't blame me if your gin and tonic tonight is less limy than ideal.”

Wyatt shifted his phone to the other ear. “It looks like I'm gonna be stuck here a ­couple of days.”

“What? Where?”

“Here. I didn't tell you? I had to go out of town this morning. A job for Gavin. A favor. He came to me, if you can believe that. You should have been there.”

Wyatt thought for a second that the connection had gone dead.

“No,” Laurie said. “You didn't tell me. Where's there?”

“Oklahoma City. The Paris, France, of Oklahoma. I'll be back by Thursday or Friday at the latest. Or die trying, believe me.”

“Wyatt,” she said. And then there was another second of silence.

“What?”

“Nothing. Love you.”

Why?
he wanted to ask.

That thought startled him, flashing up out of nowhere, like it belonged in someone else's head.

“Love you, too,” he said.

He drove north: Reno to Broadway, Broadway to NW Twenty-­third. On Western Avenue he passed the First Presbyterian Church and Fairlawn Cemetery. He remembered how O'Malley had announced one night, out of the blue, that you haven't lived until you've played Frisbee in a cemetery after midnight. So after the late show ended, after they'd cleared the auditoriums and cleaned the concession stands, everyone had piled into cars and driven out to Fairlawn. They'd played Frisbee till one or two in the morning, when the cops chased them off.

The past had power. The past was a riptide. That's why, if you had a brain in your head, you didn't go in the water.

But what was Wyatt supposed to do? Buy Laurie a lime juicer? Eat dinner and check in to a hotel and watch ESPN until he fell asleep? Just pretend that he wasn't already in the water, being gently tugged farther and farther from shore?

Yeah, pretty much, Wyatt admitted, that's exactly what he should do.

But instead—­just one quick, harmless stop before he bought a lime juicer and ate dinner and watched a few hours of ESPN—­he drove over to the Pheasant Run.

It was still there, at the busy intersection of NW Sixty-­third and May Avenue, and it was still a mall of sorts—­the May Market Plaza, according to the sign. What had once been the entire main building of the mall, two levels of shops, was now a giant Burlington Coat Factory, and the single-­story wings had been expanded and opened up to direct parking-­lot access. A Staples, a Bed Bath & Beyond, a discount shoe store.

The movie theater had been at the back of the mall, on the ground floor of the main building. Wyatt didn't need to step inside the Burlington Coat Factory to know that no trace of the theater remained. He knew, if he went inside, he wouldn't feel a thing.

He drove around back, to the parking lot behind the main building. The two auditorium exit doors had been sealed off and plastered over, but the concrete steps remained, the metal handrails. Wyatt remembered sitting on those steps, leaning back against those rails. On break, after hours, with O'Malley and Theresa, with just Theresa.

He parked across the street but didn't get out of the car. The light had begun to soften. It was that time of the day when they always clocked in for the night shift, half an hour before the bargain matinee.

Wyatt, for the longest time, had not been able to understand what the female detective kept trying to tell him. His ears were still ringing. He was shaking. He was embarrassed because he couldn't stop shaking.

He'd been sitting in the parking lot behind the theater auditoriums. On a strip of grass between the parking lot and the street, in a blaze of ambulance headlights and police strobes. The paramedics had already checked him out. They couldn't believe, with all that blood, that none of it was Wyatt's. They smeared salve on his wrists, where the cord had cut into the skin, and gave him a Valium.

The female detective crouched next to him. Wyatt remembered that she wore the kind of square-­toed black shoes that a man would wear. He didn't remember her face at all.

Was she young? Old? Was it tough being a woman in a man's world? Was that why she wore those shoes? Or were they just part of the departmental dress code?

What the female detective kept trying to tell Wyatt, what he couldn't understand, was that everyone else in the projection booth was dead. O'Malley had been shot in the head. Theresa had been shot in the head. And Tate, and Melody, and Karlene. Mr. Bingham, too. Everyone was dead but him. None of the blood was Wyatt's.

Wyatt had been positioned, facedown, between Theresa and Melody. The gunshots were so loud that his ears hadn't stopped ringing for days. Even now Wyatt's right ear was only about half strength.

Why?

But he was too dazed to ask that question. That question would come later. So Wyatt just stared at the female cop's square-­toed black shoes and shook his head and said, over and over again, “What?”

Why?
Once that question came, it would never go away.

“You're lucky,” the female cop told him, patting him on the knee. “This is your lucky day.”