Problem Child, page 16
I’ll meet you haffway. Enid cool?
Interesting. The town of Enid is halfway to Tulsa if you go by the back roads instead of taking the tollway. And something tells me Little Dog doesn’t have an EZ Pass.
Yeah man no worries. Wtf is going on?
Did that guy come back?
No.
Ok, tell you in Enid.
Hm. Nate knows more than he let on. I nudge his shoulder. “Hey. What did Brodie tell you when you met him in Enid?”
He grumbles into his pillow, and I’m highly irritated that I had to come back to this stink-ass house, so I raise a hand high and bring it down hard on his ass with a satisfying crack. “Wake up.”
Nate squeals and flips around, seeming to hover in midair as he twists with a wordless cry.
“What did Brodie tell you in Enid?” I repeat. “I know you saw him there, so don’t bother lying to me.”
“What the fuck, man? Who are you?”
“I’m a fancy lady, not a man, dude. And I’m not here for fun and games this time. You’ll tell me what you know right now or I’ll make your life a living hell, starting with calling the sheriff to report all the drugs strewn around this house. I’ll tell them you’ve been dealing, and I don’t think they have video games in jail, Nate.”
He’s awake enough to be scared now and scooting back to press himself to the headboard while his hand slides back and forth under the sheets. I hold up his phone. “Are you looking for this?” When he doesn’t answer, I raise my other hand to reveal the knife I brought along. “Or are you looking for something more like this?”
“Eep,” he bleats out, and I snort-laugh at the sound.
“Just tell me what Brodie told you in Enid and I’ll leave. No big deal.”
“In Enid?” he gasps. “Uh. He asked if that guy that beat him up came back and I said no.”
“What else? And don’t lie or you could wake up anytime and find me watching you in your sleep again. I’m sneaky that way.”
“Jesus,” he whines. “I don’t know. He said Kayla had fucked up. That’s all. He said, ‘Kayla fucked up and we need to lay low.’”
“So he’s with her?”
“I think so.”
“And he was her pimp?”
Nate swallows with comic loudness. “Something like that. I mean, it was weird.”
“Weird how?”
Nate presses a hand to the front of his sweats. “Can I pee, man? I’m gonna piss myself.”
“I don’t care. You’ve probably got a gun stashed in the toilet tank or something. Piss yourself if you’re going to.”
He shakes his head and swallows again. “Brodie used to say he was her pimp. But he didn’t act like that around her. But, like, I don’t even know if she even gave him any, you know? She slept in a separate room and smoked all his weed.”
“But he claimed he was pimping her out.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re in Tulsa?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know where. I swear. He didn’t say anything more than that.” He’s actually squeezing himself hard now as if he’s trying to stop water coming out of a hose.
I aim my knife at his groin. “What else do you know?”
“Nothing! I swear! Brodie came by my place three weeks ago, and his face was a mess. Lip split, black eye. He told me he had to get the fuck outta town, and he said I could stay here if I wanted but that dude might be back. That’s all I know!”
“Did he hurt Kayla? Kidnap her? Sell her to someone?”
“I don’t know. He left town for a day around the same time she disappeared. Maybe he took her somewhere, or maybe he was lying and something bad happened. I seriously have no idea!”
“Okay. What did he tell you about the guy who beat him up?”
“Nothing!”
“Maybe a guy named Morris? Roy Morris?”
“I don’t know anything, I swear!”
“Ugh. Fine. I need to use your phone. If you stay in the house and don’t cause trouble, I’ll leave it in the mailbox at the bottom of the driveway.”
“The mailbox,” he repeats, nodding violently.
“You gonna be cool?”
“Yeah. I’m cool. Mailbox. That’s fine.”
“Don’t follow me.”
“I won’t. Swear to God.”
I take his phone, and before I’ve even made it to the double doors, I hear his feet hit the ground and pound away toward the bathroom. Just in case he’s playing hero, I slide past the doors and watch through the crack near the hinges. If he comes barreling out with a gun, I’ll just trip him and kick him in the head.
But Nate isn’t playing hero. I hear the wild flow of urine hitting water and then his guttural sigh of relief, so I bounce down the hallway and out of the house, and I even close the front door politely behind me.
I do watch the house carefully as I get into my car, and I glance constantly into the rearview mirror as I drive, but the door stays still and unmoving.
Since he didn’t try anything and he was kind of funny, I actually stop at the bottom of the driveway to send a text to Little Dog from his phone so I can put it in the mailbox as promised:
That lady came back! With a huge dude! They just left!
I wait a few moments for the ellipses of response, then send a WTF man in case he didn’t wake up with the first text.
Finally, I see a dot dot dot and then Nate’s phone dings.
Fuck! Whatd you tell them?????
I hit the telephone icon and raise the phone to my ear. “Hello, Mr. Little Dog,” I drawl when he answers. “Don’t hang up.”
“Shit!” he yelps. “Who is this?”
“I’m a relative of Kayla’s, and I have a law degree and more than enough money to hunt you down and send you to jail for the rest of your life for trafficking a minor child. Tell me where she is right now or I’ll have this text traced and you’ll lose the one hiding place that you’ve managed to dig out for your sorry ass.” I pause for a beat and add a smile to my voice. “Nice to finally meet you, Brodie.”
“I don’t know where she is!” he screeches.
“Don’t be a lying little bitch, Brodie. I know you’re in Tulsa; I just need your address. And if you don’t give me your address, I’ll let that big bald guy know what I’ve discovered and he can help me find you. Is that what you want?”
“Fuck off!” he tries, but fear makes his defiance squeaky.
“I’ve got Roy Morris’s number right here, Brodie. One phone call and he’ll know you’re in Tulsa.”
“I want a thousand dollars,” he blurts into the phone.
“I’m not giving you a thousand dollars, Brodie.”
“Five hundred. Five hundred and I’ll send you the address. You can have her. This stupid bitch has been nothing but trouble. Fuck this.”
“I’ll give you two hundred dollars when I get there after I see that she’s fine.”
“Deal.”
“I’ll be there by tonight. Don’t move or the deal is off.”
I write down the address he gives me and warn him that he’d better damn well answer any texts from me in the future. Then I very kindly get out of my car and slide Nate’s phone into a mailbox that’s shaped like a red barn.
It’s not until I’m turning away from the miniature barn that I notice the black SUV driving slowly down the road toward me. As it approaches, I lock eyes with the big bald white guy behind the wheel.
Very interesting. It’s scary mystery man himself.
Well, Nate definitely isn’t getting his phone back now. I snatch it from the mailbox as the SUV passes, then get back into my car and watch the truck turn around. He’s welcome to follow me if that’s what gets him off. I’m a grown-ass woman with a law degree and a camera, not some scrawny two-bit hustler scared to go to the cops.
I’ve got only one more stop before I go pack up my hotel room and head for brighter horizons. There should be several luxury hotels to choose from in Tulsa.
The SUV follows me onto the highway, not on my tail, but not bothering to hang back. There are two possibilities here. Either Little Dog came up with some scheme that got him in trouble with Roy Morris or Kayla did. I’m really, really hoping it’s the latter, because that’s what Baby Jane would have done at Kayla’s age. But Brodie seems to be the one calling the shots and taking the beatings, so it’s hard to tell.
Considering what the soccer coach blurted out under pressure, I assume that Kayla or Brodie made some sort of extortion attempt after he paid her for underage sex. And I assume they did the same to Mr. Morris, not realizing he actually had deeper pockets and dangerous connections behind his failing business.
Big Baldy here has got to be working on that side of things. He’s approaching all of this like a hired goon, not a panicked middle-aged man. He tracked down my mom, used her, and then tracked down Little Dog and put the fear of God in him.
Once my car approaches the familiar environs of my old hometown, I pull into the ancient gas station and sit there to see if Baldy wants to chat. He pulls in and parks but doesn’t engage.
Just to be sure, I do an image search for Roy Morris to confirm he’s not the guy behind the wheel, but no. Morris is a fifty-something guy with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and disturbingly pink lips in his round face. He’s smiling in the PR picture I’m looking at, but his smile is snarky and self-satisfied instead of friendly.
Shutting off the car, I get out, figuring this is as good a place to handle this as any. There’s a pretty steady stream of people stopping in for gas and coffee on their way to work, so he can’t shoot me here.
The guy in the SUV is momentarily distracted by his phone and doesn’t notice me approaching. He actually jumps when I knock on his window, my phone raised to snap a picture of his face. I descend into a fit of laughter as his heavy brow falls into a frown like an iron curtain dropping. He rolls down his window, and I find out immediately that I’ve underestimated him when his arm shoots out, hand grabbing for my phone.
“Hey!” I jump two feet away so I’m out of his reach, then hold up a hand when he starts to open his door.
“Don’t do it. I’ve emailed your picture and your license plate to my attorney’s office, so if you’re planning to murder me, you might wish to reconsider.”
“You’re fucking crazy, lady.”
“Crazy or just not an easy mark? They’re not the same thing. And now you’ve made an attempt to steal my phone.”
“Good luck with that claim,” he says, but he shuts his car door.
I’m back in control, but I hate that I underestimated him. “Why are you following me?” I snap.
“I just stopped for gas, lady.”
I take another picture. “I guess I really am crazy, then! So are you working for the Morrises?”
That finally makes him blink. He starts to roll up his window.
“Which one? Bill or Roy?”
I watch his stubbled cheeks turn red as the glass seals him off. When he starts his truck and pulls out, I wave cheerily to see him off. Still, he doesn’t look harmless. His collar is unbuttoned, mere fabric and thread unable to constrain the muscles of his thick neck. His hands look ridiculously oversized around the steering wheel, the knuckles ravaged with scars. And then there was that gun my mother spotted.
I guess she’s good for something after all.
After he pulls out with a squeal of tires, there’s really nothing else for me to do but grab my stuff and get the hell out of this county, so I fill up the gas tank and buckle my seat belt. But just as I’m starting my car, I see a familiar face. It’s not often I’m surprised, but you could knock me over with a feather with this doozy. It’s my old English teacher, Mr. Hollingsway! What an unexpected delight!
He’s walking back to his car with a big coffee in his hand, and he looks just as miserable and hangdog as he did the last time I saw him. Older, though, and thinner and grayer. He was never an enthusiastic teacher, but I liked him fine because he was fairly hands-off in the classroom.
Hands-off. I snort at my little joke.
Mr. Hollingsway gave me an A my senior year because I had sex with him. He was all regretful tears and self-hatred afterward, but the truth is that we both got what we wanted. I wonder if he’s still married to Mrs. Hollingsway, my favorite math teacher. She was way too good for him, so I hope they’re divorced by now.
When he gets into his beat-up gray Hyundai, I follow him to the high school. It’s probably safer for me to stay off the highway for a few minutes anyway. Give Baldy a chance to get confused.
High school is an admitted exaggeration when it comes to my former educational institution. The town is just too small at this point to support individual schools, because most people don’t have families of a dozen kids anymore. One wing is an elementary school and the other houses grades six to twelve.
Every year that I went here, there was talk of shipping the older kids out to the big secondary schools in the county seat, but, frankly, they didn’t want us. Long bus routes and low test scores aren’t on any school’s wish list. That’s why they left the prison town’s kids to us, but there were only about twenty-five of them when I went here.
I park in the teachers’ lot and hop out as Mr. Hollingsway slumps toward the school. He was a plain man before. Slim. Quiet. Slightly miserable with his existence. But now he’s reached middle age, maybe forty-five, and he’s slowly being molded into the shape of a man who knows that this is it. This is his whole world. He’ll never teach at a well-funded school. He’ll never go back and get that PhD. He’ll never even have a group of smart liberal friends he can kick back with on Saturdays to share a joint and have a great debate with.
Mr. Hollingsway, welcome to the rest of your life.
Twenty feet behind, I follow him through a side door of the school and find that everything inside looks the same as it ever did. Drab gray and green and dirty white. The colors of an institution. The perfect way to torture restless minds and remind you that no one wants to be here. Not you, not the teachers, not the administration.
I pass metal-framed doorways and realize I’ve been in almost every one of these classrooms at some point or another. Had lockers in almost every hall in both of the wings. But I feel nothing as I glide along.
I came to this place and sat in these rooms because that was the ticket to escape, and I was smart enough to use it. I could have earned that A in Hollingsway’s class easily, but I resented the boredom and the busywork, so I chose a shortcut. Plenty of students would. Even normal teenagers are known for bad decisions and impulsivity and spitting on the rules of the Man. The onus, of course, is on the adult. The teacher. The golden holder of authority.
Funny thing, that. There’s a reason they had to pass strict laws to punish the transgressions of teachers and clergy.
Mr. Hollingsway disappears into his classroom. Same classroom. Same view out the window of some pipes on the exterior wall perpendicular to his. He collapses into his chair and begins to arrange his papers.
I wonder if I was a bright spot. A moment of terrible guilt and vulnerability, yes. An utter betrayal of his societal duties. He could have lost everything in that afternoon or even in the months after. He still could.
But, oh man, he had a tight little teenager right there on his sad metal desk. Right there, where he has to put up with their hot pants and back talk and scornful eye rolls every single day. What an exhilarating disaster.
Perhaps he thinks about me still.
“Hey, Mr. H!”
“Hi,” he says automatically. He shifts his coffee and sets his laptop case on the floor before looking up. “What’s up?” he asks, and then he sees me. Sees my face and my smile and raised eyebrows. For a moment I watch the thoughts crawl over his face like spiders. I look familiar, but who am I?
“It’s Jane!” I offer helpfully. “All grown up!”
His face freezes into a blank. Nothing moves. Not his eyes or his hands or his chest. He’s turned to stone as I stroll inside the room and drop into my old seat in the second row. Not that I came to his class much after that little rendezvous. Why bother? I’d put in my service.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m looking for my niece Kayla. She’s missing. Is she one of your students?”
“Who?” he whispers, eyes fluttering strangely.
“Kayla Stringer. She’s my niece.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know that name.”
“Really? She wasn’t in your class yet? But you’ve seen her around.”
“I don’t know.”
I smile at his continued shock. He thinks I must be here for him, his own little nightmare finally scuttling out from his bad dreams. “This is weird, huh?”
He shakes his head but his eyes get shiny, tears magnifying the blood vessels creeping through the whites.
“I was worried if she was your student, you might have slept with her or something.”
“No! Never. Never!”
“Well, come on. Not never, Mr. H.”
“I . . .” He stops there, lips parted, throat working. For a moment I think he’s going to vomit, but then he bursts into tears instead.
“Oh, good Lord,” I mutter as he weeps in strangled, heaving gulps.
“Please don’t tell!”
I shrug and wait for him to quiet down. It takes a while.
“It was a mistake,” he gasps. “I’m sorry. I never . . . never again. I swear.”
I really don’t understand this part of human fallibility. I have no idea what it’s like to have this much regret, but if it hurts so much, wouldn’t you just avoid it? If something will make you so sad, don’t do it. But of course he wanted to do it so much more than he didn’t want to do it, and that’s the eternal problem.
The truth is that Mr. Hollingsway had a fine life when I knew him. A steady job. A nice wife. A halfway-decent house, even. He also has a teacher’s pension waiting for him at the end of it all. He’s fine.
He hadn’t had kids when I knew him, but if he did, he would’ve been able to feed and clothe them and send them to college. Maybe even take a modest vacation once a year.
