Big Bad, page 6
Jim was caught a little off guard by the reaction. “I’m afraid I don’t follow, sir.”
“He’s bullshitting you. Rabbit Jepson hasn’t shot straight since he pissed his first diaper.”
Jim made a mental note that Bayard’s expression made absolutely no sense, other than the fact that it tried to somehow tie the word straight to a stream of piss.
“He had no reason to lie,” Jim said, inching forward in the chair. “Not that I can see.”
“Doesn’t need a reason. He just likes to do it, for the same reason a pervert does pervert things. It’s their nature. Can’t help it.” Bayard sighed, opening up his posture, as if about to become more sincere. “Jim, you’ve lived here all your life. Can you honestly tell me you didn’t know he was a chiseler?”
“I guess I—”
“Hell, maybe he just wanted the free room and board,” Bayard interrupted, tossing his hands up. “Which, I might add, you seemed to have generously afforded him for the night. That’s probably all he was after.”
“I considered the same thing,” Jim said. “But I’d already offered him as much when he said it.”
Bayard’s face darkened, stalled, then seemed to sprout something like consideration. “All right, all right, fine. I came down here, so you might as well tell me what he told you. We won’t make it a total waste. At least I’ll get a story out of it.” He bowed his head a little and gestured a beckoning motion with his fingers again. “Let’s have it. Lay it on me. What’d old Rabbit see out there in the blizzard?”
Jim told him.
6
The clock on the wall behind Bayard said it was ten past two by the time Jim finished retelling Rabbit’s story.
“What do you make of it?” Jim asked. “I know it sounds a little bizarre—”
“A little?” Bayard scoffed. “That’s a bit of an understatement, don’t you think?” Tess had brought him his tea a few minutes ago, and now he was shaking his head and slowly dunking the teabag up and down in the mug, keeping a steady rhythm.
“Yes, sir, I don’t disagree. But I swear when he was talking to me, he was telling the truth. I have a good sense of when a person’s lying, and I don’t think he was. Besides,” Jim said, and paused a beat. “I don’t think he’s as crazy as you make him out to be. A little strange? Sure, I can see where you—”
“I didn’t say he was crazy,” Bayard said, holding up a finger. “Although he very well may be. I said he’s a liar. And he is.”
“Okay. Fair enough. But what if he’s not lying about this? Even a thief pays from time to time. What if something really did happen to Molly and he did see something?”
Bayard stared pensively at Jim for a moment, then finally said, “Can I bring up a point?” He carefully sipped his tea. “Ow. Hot. That’s good,” he said quietly.
“What is it?” Jim asked.
“Let me rephrase that,” Bayard said. “I’m going to bring up a point. Other than it being a red coat that Rabbit claims to have seen, how do you even know it was Molly Rifkin? It could’ve been anyone in a red jacket. Couldn’t it?”
“Sure, I suppose it could’ve been,” Jim said.
Bayard set his tea down. “Now, what if—and I’m just throwing out an idea here—what if the person he saw, if in fact he did see someone, was just someone running to their car or to their house? And what if, maybe, by coincidence this person happened to be wearing a red coat? Couldn’t that be possible too? It wouldn’t exactly be a rare thing, and it would tie pretty nicely to the husband’s report, even though the two things got nothing to do with one another.”
“I understand,” Jim said dubiously. He couldn’t help but feel like Bayard was trying to deflate the whole thing without at least considering it first. It seemed careless to dismiss Rabbit’s account so easily. “What about everything he said about it looking like she was being chased, and how she was carrying a gun?” He could already hear some of the enthusiasm sapped from his voice, drained away by his boss’s lack of the same.
Bayard glanced at the window to his right, then back at Jim. “Considering the weather, wouldn’t they be running like all hell to get wherever it was they were going? And you saw what it’s like out there, Jim. Do you really think he could spot a gun at thirty or forty feet in this mess… and at night? Seems unlikely to me. And if he made that part up—or even if he was just mistaken—then I don’t buy any of what he claims to have seen.”
“Look, it’s not like I’m taking anything Rabbit said as gospel. The gun thing? That makes no sense to me, either. I just think we should consider what he said and not assume it’s a lie. At least not all of it. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I am considering it,” Bayard said, his voice adopting a more genuine tone. “Why else would I be here and not home in bed? If we have a missing person, I’ll consider everything until we find them or they turn up safe, but I’m just not ready to lap up the word of a known liar as greedily as you.” A gust of wind howled outside, shaking the station. He looked at the window again and sighed.
“So what should we do, Chief? Like you said, we have ourselves a person who’s been reported missing. That still stands, regardless of Rabbit.”
Bayard turned away from the window and suddenly looked ten years older. “Well, not much we can do in this weather. It’s not like we can send a search party out to start poking every snowdrift they can find. We’ll have to wait until things settle down a bit and go from there. Hopefully by the time it does, Molly Rifkin will have returned home. My guess would be she and her husband had themselves a fight and she’s trying to teach him a lesson. It happens all the time. Karen used to go to her sister’s and spend the night there whenever we’d have ourselves a spat. She’d come back the next day and everything would be okay. Sometimes people just need to make a point. If I was a betting man, I’d wager this girl will be back before the snow stops. They always come back. And honestly, I think if it weren’t for this storm, her husband never would’ve called it in. He’s probably just scared and thinking the worst.”
Jim couldn’t help but notice Bayard didn’t sound terribly convinced of his own words. Even so, he said, “You’re probably right, Chief. I didn’t think about it like that.”
That was a lie, though. He had thought about it like that, but he hadn’t been able to convince himself of it when he had. No, something inside him continued to feel misaligned. If this were one of those rerun cop shows, it would be what some old, seasoned detective would call a hunch. Yes, Jim had a hunch something bad had happened to Molly Rifkin. And like all hunches, their initial emergence was when they were hardest to believe and easiest to ignore. They required a person to defy standard logic. In this case, other than a call from Molly’s husband and a strange account from a less-than-reliable witness, he had no real evidence to support this feeling that something malicious had occurred. On the surface, what Bayard had just laid out made far more sense than anything involving a gun and Molly being chased through a blizzard. Yet the feeling stayed, heavy in his gut like a smooth, cold stone that hummed a low frequency of disquiet.
“If I’ve learned anything over the years,” Bayard said, “it’s that the simplest answer is almost always the right answer.”
“Until it isn’t,” Jim said.
After a brooding pause, Bayard offered something like begrudging agreement. “Until it isn’t.” Then he added, “But most times, it is.”
A moment of tense silence began to settle between the two men, but Jim broke it. “How is Karen, by the way?” he asked. “She doing all right?”
“She has her good days and her bad.”
“She’s a strong lady,” Jim said.
“No doubt about that.” Bayard lifted his eyes, offering a flat smile that never touched his features. “Anyway,” he said, patting his desk with both hands, “no sense in you staying on now that I’m here. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep? I can handle this for now. I got Tess and Rabbit to keep me company. I got my tea. I’ll give Jack Rifkin a call to see if I can’t get some more color on this thing with his wife. It doesn’t sound like anyone has heard the full story yet. With any luck, she’s already home and they’re working it out as we speak.”
“Are you sure?” Jim said. “I don’t mind staying on.”
“Harry’s on, too, isn’t he?” Bayard asked. “I thought it was the two of you tonight.”
“Yeah, he’s parked over at the firehouse. Probably sleeping.”
“We don’t need both you guys right now. And you seem like you’ve dealt with enough nonsense for one night. I’m up and I’m here, so I might as well take it from this point. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll call you if I need you.”
7
As a courtesy, Jim popped into the holding area on his way out of the station to let Rabbit know he was leaving for the night, but the loud rip and gurgle of deep snoring met him instead. Rabbit was out like a light, a forearm draped across his eyes. Jim went over and closed the window he’d left open to air out the cigarette smoke.
“You leaving?” Tess asked from the dispatch desk as Jim passed back into the lobby. The monitors cast a bluish light on her rectangular face, accentuating her high cheekbones. She was pretty in the sort of way that took a little time to see. Her cobalt eyes were set a little wide, and she had a cute upturned nose. Her white-blond hair—which matched her eyebrows—she kept pulled back in a ponytail. Her mother’s Norwegian ancestry was much more on display than her father’s Irish.
Jim went to the coatrack next to the front door and grabbed his jacket. “Looks like it’s my lucky night.”
“Be safe out there,” Tess said.
“You bet.” He pulled the hat and gloves from the pockets of his jacket and put them on. “And don’t forget you got Rabbit back in that cell. He’s sleeping, so I doubt he’ll be a bother.”
“I know. Hard to miss the snoring,” Tess said, smiling.
Jim laughed as he zipped up his jacket. “Have a good night.” With his back pressed against the door, he pushed it open and went out into the storm. If Tess returned the salutation, he didn’t hear it in time. The moment he stepped outside, the violent roar of the wind cut her off, and Jim was driven sideways like some giant invisible hand was batting him around. As he made his way to the Explorer, he could hear the faint, hollow ding of the rope slapping against the aluminum flagpole around the side of the building.
He fumbled with the SUV’s door latch for a moment, snow stinging his face, then opened it. When he got in the cruiser, he shut the door and sat there, breathing out thin clouds of vapor and fogging up the windshield. He started the engine at once and turned on the defroster, hoping the engine still held a little warmth from earlier. The vents blew cool air, and the temperature dial next to the speedometer sat flat over the blue C. It didn’t matter—he didn’t have far to go.
He turned on the four-wheel drive, then pulled away from the station and headed toward his house. After ten minutes or so, he arrived at an intersection back in the main downtown strip of Rockcliffe. He sat there a moment with the heat now blowing hot, watching the snow whip sideways in the orange glow of the streetlights, watching as everything slowly disappeared under thick snowdrifts. If he went left, he would be home in five minutes, in bed and asleep in probably ten, and God how he needed the rest. But he couldn’t get Molly out of his mind, and going home felt like he was abandoning her.
So instead he drove straight through the intersection toward Wyoma Square, where Rabbit said he had last seen her.
8
Jim pulled up in front of the Stone Soup Café a few minutes later, parked, and replayed Rabbit’s story in his mind. He’d said a woman in a red coat, presumably Molly Rifkin, had come running around the corner near Aldi’s Bookstore—which would’ve meant she’d been coming from Derby Street—then disappeared behind the café. Something about the last piece rubbed Jim the wrong way, the itch he needed to scratch. He hadn’t really thought about it much at first, but now it was all he could focus on.
The Stone Soup Café sat on a corner, and the property was situated in such a way that if someone were to “disappear behind it,” as Rabbit described, the only place they would end up was in the little back parking lot where customers parked while they grabbed some grub. The parking lot also happened to be a dead end, surrounded by other buildings and tall fencing that separated the property from the self-storage facility behind it. It was one way in, one way out. So on the off chance someone had actually been chasing her and Rabbit’s story wasn’t total fiction, she would have penned herself in back there, with no place to go. Good for the pursuer, not the pursuee, as Sheriff Buford T. Justice might’ve called the latter.
Smokey and the Bandit was still fresh in his mind. He and his father had watched it two nights before on AMC, when he had stopped by the nursing home to spend the evening with him. It was one of the few movies his old man could still remember through the haze of Alzheimer’s, which had started clearing out the memory closets of his mind.
Jim left the engine running and stepped out of the Explorer. The snow on the sidewalk was over a foot deep now. It came up to just below his knees. He trudged through it, heading behind the café, wanting to take a quick look. After that, his hunch would be satisfied enough for him to head home and get some sleep. In the morning, maybe Molly would be back home and this would be dead news. Maybe Bayard would be right, after all. Jim hoped so. Perhaps this whole thing—especially his “hunch”—was just him being bored with the usual traffic tickets or noise complaints that usually filled up his shifts.
When he turned the corner, the enclosed space of the parking lot shielded the wind enough for him to see without squinting. He stood there, scanning the scene. It was eerily calm without the wind to bully him. He grabbed his flashlight, turned it on, and began walking the perimeter. The parking lot looked pristine, not a single disturbed patch of snow, save for his footprints. He supposed that didn’t mean much, though. The storm could easily erase any tracks within thirty minutes, and Rabbit said he’d seen the woman in the red coat head this way hours ago.
Jim started along the fence, swinging his flashlight up and down then left and right, almost as if making the sign of the cross. He’d only made it a few feet when he spotted the torn piece of red cloth caught in the barbed wire that ran along the top. His heart fluttered.
“No goddamn way,” Jim said, stunned.
He went up on his tiptoes, snagged the piece of cloth, and inspected it under his flashlight. It was a thick material—canvas, maybe—but it was too small to tell for sure what it might’ve belonged to. It was no larger than a postage stamp and heavily frayed. But that wasn’t really the point. Finding it had suddenly given Rabbit’s story some credibility.
Jim clenched his fist around the material and aimed his light through the fence. The snow in the storage facility’s parking lot was just as undisturbed as the snow behind the café had been when he’d first turned the corner. So that meant exactly squat. Even as he checked the footprints he’d left only a few minutes before, it was clear to see that they’d already begun to disappear.
He shined his light up at the barbed wire, looked around, and sighed.
9
Jim returned a few minutes later with the wool rescue blanket that every cruiser had stocked in its trunk. He kept it folded in half, tossing it up and draping it over the barbed wire. This wasn’t exactly the best way in, especially not from a legal standpoint, but the front gate—at least five feet taller—was unclimbable compared to the chain-link-and-barbed-wire fence that surrounded the property. This wasn’t exactly official police business, either. And the last thing he needed was for some town plow-truck driver to report a suspicious person trying to scale the front gate of Rockcliffe Mini Storage at the height of the blizzard. At the moment, he was just following his hunch, and if it yielded results, any transgressions against protocol or procedure could be more readily overlooked. If it didn’t, however, then some disciplinary action would probably be taken.
He mounted the fence, the wide toe of his snow boots having a hard time finding purchase. After some careful situating, he found solid traction and began to climb. When he made it to the top, he hooked his elbow over the blanket he’d draped on the barbed wire, taking some of the weight off his legs. He paused a moment, then continued over, swinging his upper body over first, then trying to swing his legs in the same motion. He sort of teetered on top of the wire for a moment, balanced at an angle—legs extended over the café side of the fence, torso hanging over the storage side—looking very much like a tightrope walker who had fallen and was struggling to stay on the wire.
Jim couldn’t hold on. With a little shift of momentum, he pushed himself toward the storage side of the fence, gave a final little roll, and fell. He landed on his back in a snowdrift with a thick jolt that echoed in his chest and pushed a guh! from his mouth. Snow found its way into every unsealed opening in his coat, and his neck went cold and wet.
“Ahhh. God dammit.” He reached up, wiped the snow out of his eyes, and lay there a moment, staring up at the storming sky lit pale-orange by the sodium bulbs of the streetlights. It was actually kind of peaceful, despite the melting snow starting to drip down his back.
He pushed himself up, got to his feet, wiped a hand around his collar, then grabbed his flashlight from his pocket and clicked it back on, looking first right, toward the front gate, then left, toward the back of the self-storage lot. Jim went left. Following the fence, he kept his flashlight trained on the barbed wire, searching for anything red. But after a full circuit, he turned up nothing.
Next, he headed over to the five rows of units. Each aluminum structure was about one hundred feet long, lined with roll-up metal doors along both sides. The parallel layout created four corridors, where cars and pickup trucks could park to have easy access to their storage units. He turned down the first one, making a decision to walk all four then call it a night. Tomorrow, if Molly Rifkin still hadn’t turned up, he would tell Bayard about the piece of cloth he’d found on the barbed wire. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
