Triage: A Thriller (Shell Series) (19 page)

She smiled for the first time, told me, “Lemoyne-Owen.”

I nodded, smiled, too. “Lemoyne-Owen, that’s Memphis right?”

Lovely’s brown eyes regarded me differently. “You know it?”

“HBCU,” I said, using the acronym for a historically black college or university.

“True,” she said, smiling and nodding vigorously.

It had taken a bit longer than I anticipated it would, but it came finally.

A strong hand gripped my shoulder, pulling at me, attempting to turn me around. I made it easy, followed the momentum, and completed the turn. The guy wearing the burgundy hospital scrubs and the backward Pontiac Firebird mesh hat. His forehead lined and nostrils flaring, ready for whatever I brought. After the night with Shepard, I admittedly didn’t have much reserve left in my tank. I raised my arms to signify as much.

“Is there a problem here?” he asked.

“None at all,” I assured him.

“Explain something to me then, if you would?”

“Shoot.”

“Why did it look as if you were giving my girlfriend a job interview?”

“I think you’re mistaken.”

“I don’t think so.”

“If I were,” I said, and smiled, “she seems highly qualified for the position.”

“What?”

“I don’t want any trouble,” I said.

“That’s ironic, because you sure enough seem to.”

“Be careful how you use that term.”

“Pardon?” he said, frowning.

“Irony,” I explained. “It’s often misused.”

“A fucking MLA handbook,” he snarled. “That’s great. You want to conjugate my fucking verbs for me now, too?”

That got a smile out of me. I liked these two.

Lovely tried to pull him back, but he resisted, saying, “Back down, Monroe.”

Monroe.

I actually liked that even more than Lovely.

“I’m Shell,” I told him, extending my hand at the same time. “What’s your name?”

“
This
motherfucker,” was his incredulous response as he ignored my hand.

“Chris,” Monroe said. “Be easy. He’s okay.”

Chris listened to Monroe about as much as I listened to my conscience. In other words, not much at all. He took a hard step toward me, bad intentions in his movements. I noticed his balled fists and wished I had Cherie’s knife or Shepard’s sap. Make this easy.

I put my hand in the middle of his chest, stopped him in his tracks. His eyes widened in surprise. I was surprised, as well. Didn’t think I had an ounce of strength left.

“Chris,” I said calmly. “I just need to have a word with you.”

“We have nothing to speak about,” he said.

“Southaven, on the Mississippi side,” I said. “Close to Memphis.”

“I need travel suggestions,” he said, “I’ll consult Fodor’s.”

Again I smiled. “I’ve done some business with a car dealership in Southaven.”

He tilted his head and frowned. “What?”

“What do you drive?” I asked.

“None of your business,” he said.

“I had an Aston Martin once,” I said. “V8 Series III, flip tail model.”

I saw the flicker of recognition in his eyes.

Monroe said, “Chris loves cars. Sounds like something you’d like, doesn’t it, baby? How much does a car like that cost? Thirty Gs?”

Chris shook his head at Monroe, did not take his eyes off me. “Little more than double that probably,” he said.

“Damn,” Monroe said.

I asked again, “What do you drive?”

Manipulation.

Chris grimaced. “Piece of shit, nothing worth mentioning.”

Monroe said, “He’s past due for an inspection, and scared to take it in. Surprised he hasn’t been pulled over.”

Chris glared at her. “I’m not scared. It’ll pass.”

“Only because of the five dollars I made you give to the Red Cross last month,” she said, “God returning the benevolence.”

“You talk too much, Monroe.”

“And your car is a piece of shit,” she replied.

I smiled. “You two remind me of a couple I once knew. Lots of passion.”

Smile to keep from crying. Call it passion instead of a misguided relationship.

Chris turned his attention back on me. “About you…”

I shook my head. “This is about you.”

“Oh, yeah? I don’t know how you figure that.”

“The way I figure it, you two have a long distance relationship. You work in a hospital and Monroe attends college. She’s headed back to Memphis and you’re here to see her off.”

“What gave me away? The scrubs?”

“Chill, Chris, this is interesting,” Monroe said. “Go on, Shell.”

“You’re older and working hard, but Monroe’s forever telling you it isn’t too late to go back to school.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“But you don’t have the energy to even think about it,” I went on. “You work long hours and have little to show for the labor. You love cars but drive around in a piece of shit. Even though you’re smart, you have some insecurity about whether you could handle the coursework.”

“You think you know it all,” he said weakly.

Monroe chuckled.

“You’re due a break. I have a business proposition for you, Chris.”

He smirked, shook his head, and looked at Monroe. “I knew this was coming. Some bullshit.”

“Hear me out, Chris.”

He said, “Go ahead. Tell me.”

I told him.

A DULL SUN WAS POSITIONED at a distance above me without coloring the gray out of the sky. Figured. I’d gotten some rest, but my mouth tasted as though I’d eaten a dirty shoe for breakfast. I’d yet to make acquaintance with a toothbrush, and instead of washing my face with warm water I’d pumped a coin of lotion into my palm from a bottle I found in Chris’s glove box and used that to chase the sleep from my eyes and give my skin some life. I felt every pound of Shepard’s weight down in my bones and deep in my muscle tissue, but counted my blessings just the same. At least I was still among the living. That had to stay my focus.

Several car horns competed with one another, and all around me blinking brake lights glimmered like Christmas in RockefellerCenter. I kept the window up so I wouldn’t choke on exhaust fumes.

It took a good while but finally I was waved forward. I took Chris’s car out of PARK and let it coast forward about fifty feet before braking and putting it back in PARK.

“Daley”—according to his name tag—reached a hand out expectantly. It was a rough hand, the nails bitten off at the ends, ragged cuticles, scarring on several knuckles. I handed him three legal documents to examine: license, registration, and insurance card.

“Daley,” I said. “That’s an unusual name.”

“Not in Ireland,” he replied. Unfortunately my conversation did not distract him from the documents.

“You’re Irish?” I said. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

He looked at me for a beat. “If you had a word with my mother there’d be no mistaking. Her brogue’s pretty thick.”

“Were you born in the US?”

“Brooklyn,” he said, flipping over the insurance card, “for as long as it took them to cut the umbilical.”

I nodded even though his eyes weren’t on me. “I’ve been meeting a lot of people with Irish names lately.” I thought of Siobhan, the call she’d placed to me days earlier, and something clicked in my mind. A smile flitted across my face. I shook my head and chuckled. Women were incredible. Siobhan definitely fit the bill. She’d gamed me. Here I was big and strong, yet I paled in comparison to the capacity of a woman.

Daley glanced at me, then at my driver’s license. I held my breath just as I’d done the day before as the water rose above my shoulders in the Passaic.

 “’Kay. Here you go, Mr. Hall,” he said, and handed the documents back to me. I released the breath I’d been holding. “Press down on your brakes please, sir.”

I did while he stepped behind the car with a clipboard in hand.

In a second he was back at my window. “Said a ’94 right?”

I nodded. “’94 Accord.”

“How many miles?” he asked.

“Just over one hundred and eighty-nine thousand.”

He whistled. “Six cylinders?”

“Four.”

“Okay, Mr. Hall. If you’d step out and over there”—he pointed to a narrow corridor off to the side crowded with four or five nervous looking people—“we’ll take your car down the line and get you out of here as quickly as possible.”

I left the car running and stepped out, fell in line with the others. There was a young Caucasian girl who could send texts on her phone quicker than I could actually speak. A twenty-something stockbroker-type with a face lined by wrinkles premature by at least fifteen years. And three others that were too vanilla for me to even begin to describe.

I reached in my pants’ pocket, pulled out a cell phone. Prepaid. I wasn’t yet familiar with its basic functions. I couldn’t tell for certain, but it didn’t appear as though I’d missed any calls. I gritted my teeth and put the phone back in my pocket. I wasn’t into music so I couldn’t think of an aggressive song to hum. Too bad. It was a moment built for a soundtrack.

Ten minutes later, the line was down to just one in front of me.

I took a moment to mentally map out the rest of my day. Now that I’d passed inspection with the ID I could make some plans.
I’d
passed inspection. The car was another story entirely.

I watched the ’94 Accord as it reached the end of the inspection line. There were so many dents in the frame just looking at it made me wince. Chris Hall had aired on the side of extreme understatement by calling the Accord a piece of shit. It was down officially as having a black exterior, but the paint was so faded by the elements it looked closer to gray. Figured.

I was waved over.

“How did we do?” I asked.

“Passed,” I was told.

“Good old Red Cross.”

“Come again?”

“Nothing,” I said.

 I couldn’t help but smile as I drove off with the new identity of Christopher John Hall, while my old sobriquet was on a flight to Memphis and a new car dealership.

IT COULDN’T BE AVOIDED. I had to travel to Nevada’s home if I wanted to separate fact from fiction. It was quite possible that I’d find something useful in her personal items. Following my mandate of precaution, I waited until after nightfall to make the trip. Chris Hall’s Accord sat with the engine ticking, even after I’d slid the key out of the ignition, along the curb across from East SideHigh School. A few feet away loomed the entrance to IndependencePark. I got out, locked up, looked around to make sure no eyes were studying me, and started strolling. A derelict was engaged in an excited conversation on a payphone at the park’s entrance. The phone was spray painted yellow and black, its coiled cord sheared off and hanging uselessly. I passed quickly by him, my head down and turned away from view.

The walk to Nevada’s wasn’t a bad one. Through the park, band stand to my left, soccer field to my right, and out the other side onto Adams Street. Cross Nichols, Warwick, New York Avenue, and Walnut. Elm Street would be the fifth block I’d come upon. I moved swiftly, taking in nothing during the entirety of the walk, and made it to her front door in a matter of minutes. My next move was simple enough. Use my key for entry. Despite that understanding, I couldn’t seem to budge. I gritted my teeth and focused. Spoke the directions to myself.
Put the key in the lock. Turn the knob. Step inside.
Nothing major.

Across the way, Narciso Lopez’s flag of Cuba stared at me from Mrs. Rubalcaba’s porch. I tumbled Nevada’s key over and over again in my fingers. My eyes were closed, my breathing had suddenly grown uneven, and my brain was sending signals that my body completely ignored.

Stuck.

I don’t know what eventually enabled me to move. Was it a thought? Was it a memory? Shepard wasn’t standing at my back pitching bricks at me. What was it? I just know that after awhile I was stepping inside Nevada’s front door. I slipped out of my shoes and left them in the foyer and moved through the entry hall without turning on any lights, not so much as an effort to evade the suspicions of neighbors, but rather to avoid seeing the framed pictures hanging by the front door.

I made my way to the kitchen first. My socks did a poor job of insulating the cold from the linoleum floor. I briefly wondered how Nevada managed to walk around barefoot all the time. Briefly wondered about that and then forced myself to deal with the task at hand: find something in the way of explanation for her disappearance.