Problem Child, page 8
James seems to stand silently for a long moment before he lets out a string of curses beneath his breath.
“Better luck next time!” some asshole calls from farther down the row of rooms, and I have to close my door to hide my snorting.
“Fuck you straight to hell!” James snarls out before I hear his boots stomping down the nearest set of stairs. When I peek out the open curtains of my window, I see him charging toward the front entry, a beer and a tumbler still clutched in his fists. If I’d stayed dressed, I could have followed him back to spy on his ignominious return to the bar, but, oh well. I’ve chosen comfort over entertainment this time.
Utterly pleased with myself, I retrieve my cookies and grab my book before turning off the lights and climbing into bed. The curtains are still parted. I love to watch people going by, especially when they’re unaware. It’s like watching TV, their little lives playing out for me to see.
I like this place.
Send me that pic when you’re in bed, I text to Luke. Then I tuck myself in for a great drunk evening of dessert, reading, and masturbation. What more could a girl ask for on a chilly autumn night?
CHAPTER 7
My hometown is about ten minutes outside of the county seat. It isn’t much. There are no government offices here. No retail shops. It’s big enough for a pitifully small school, but not big enough for a McDonald’s. There’s no Dairy Queen either. No Sonic. The only thing the population can support is a knockoff drive-in called Taste ’n Freeze that’s only open during the summer.
Taste ’n Freeze. What the fuck does that even mean?
But even the Taste ’n Freeze looks permanently boarded up as I approach the edge of town. And I was wrong about the retail. There’s a brand-new dollar store that cropped up next to the ancient gas station.
Beyond the new store, there are other changes. The one run-down motel has been converted into a cheap studio apartment complex by the looks of the hand-painted sign propped on the roof. Half the doors are open to let out cigarette smoke and welcome in fresh air.
A ragged old coffee joint has been turned into a high-interest loan company decked out in shiny yellows and blues to make signing your meager earnings away seem more fun. The used-car lot next door is now just empty asphalt and destroyed light poles. Otherwise, things look pretty much the same. I pass the street that leads to my parents’ home and drive toward the narrow steam cloud that climbs into the sky like the grasping, greedy arm of some lowly god.
The smoke is attached to the huge white tower that looms above the power plant. I hate that damn plant with a passion. I scowl as I drive by, because I know that passing it won’t leave it behind. It’ll be there in my rearview mirror for the next ten miles.
You can’t ever forget where you come from when the land is so mercilessly flat. On a clear, cold day that steam follows you forever, calling you back.
“Assholes,” I say to no one in particular, then I focus my eyes on the one windmill I can see peeking over the road ahead.
No, not windmills. Wind turbines. I looked them up last night. Wind turbines. I keep my eyes on my big robot friend and drive on toward the next town over to dig up dirt on Little Miss Kayla. I smile at the first sign that warns me not to pick up any hitchhikers because they could be escaped convicts.
The area I’m heading to is mostly populated by prison guards and their families. On the far side of the town limits is a small Oklahoma state prison. Ricky has never been housed there, because they try to keep inmates out of their own stomping grounds for fear that escape would be too tempting. Plus they don’t want your troubled buddies gathering around the exterior fences to wave and hoot at you during yard time.
Let’s be honest: I probably would have done that to Ricky, given such easy opportunity. A little payback for all those years of making fun of me every time I walked anywhere near him in the house.
Of course, the best revenge is living well, but really the best best revenge is living well while mocking him to his face. Why not have it all?
The apartment complex I’m looking for is at the closest edge of town, a big semicircle of two-story buildings constructed sometime in the early nineties. Most of the patios are empty but for rusting charcoal grills and a chair here and there. The one I park in front of is screened in, and two cats sit on a couch looking out scornfully at me. The sight of them makes me wonder what my own cat is doing and whether she misses me.
She doesn’t. I dropped her off at Luke’s, and she’s far too busy enjoying new, strange environs and getting into all the high hiding places and fun shadows to be found in his converted loft. She probably won’t even want to come home with me, but that’s too bad for her, because I’m not leaving her there.
Would she like a little house in the suburbs with a white picket fence? Yeah. She would.
But then there’s me.
Maybe I should just try it. I can leave anytime I want. Maybe I can even secretly keep my place in the city and escape there when I need to get away from my loving, supportive boyfriend.
Damn it. I hate him so much.
I get out of my car and head toward the building number Ricky gave me. As I approach apartment B, I’m surprised to see a tidy little patio overflowing with potted plants, including a few that are still flowering, the old buds neatly nipped off. Between the pots nestle colorful ceramics of bejeweled fish and animals with big eyes. Several bouncy balls and a plastic trike take up the rest of the cement space. Not what I was expecting from a family that doesn’t care that a daughter has gone missing.
The faint sounds of cartoons dance through the door as I knock. Just a few seconds later the door opens to reveal a tall Native American woman I’m sure I’ve never seen before. She has a brown-haired young boy on her hip and a spatula in her hand, and she’s still wearing her state prison guard uniform. “Yes?” she prompts.
“I’m looking for Kayla.”
“Kayla?”
I don’t really need her answer to know I have the wrong place. The apartment behind her is clean and neat, and I smell something delicious cooking in the kitchen. “She’s a teenage girl who went missing a few weeks ago. I was told her mother lives here.”
She shrugs her free shoulder as the boy lays his head on the other. “Maybe try the next building?” She points with the spatula. “I’ve seen cops over there once or twice.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
I walk around to apartment B of the building she indicated, and I find a moldy old love seat on the porch, the cement beneath it strewn with dead leaves and dried-out cigarette butts, and my Spidey senses tingle. This place feels like home.
The patio door is cracked open, and the sound of a raucous talk show spills loudly out, but the noise fades to a dull roar as I approach the front door and knock, giving it an extra-hard rap so I sound official.
“What?” a woman yells from inside. I ignore the question and knock again, which prompts muttered cursing from the other side of the door. Finally it opens, revealing a painfully thin blonde in a tank top that’s so worn and loose, it’s nearly exposing one of her nipples. It’s Wanda Stringer.
“I’m with the county,” I lie. “I’m looking for Kayla Stringer.” I’m taking a chance that Wanda might recognize me, but why would she? The last time I saw her I was eighteen or so, and if I introduce myself as Ricky’s sister, I’ll have to listen to a long tirade about what an asshole my brother is. I could supply that tirade myself, so I’m not interested.
Kayla’s mother shrugs. “I don’t know. She doesn’t live here.”
“Your sixteen-year-old daughter doesn’t live here?”
Wanda rolls her eyes. “Don’t give me that shit. She’s been staying with her dad’s parents.” Oh, great. Of course. Because my parents were so capable with kids the first time around that they produced at least one sociopath and probably two.
“But she is missing,” I prompt.
“She hasn’t come around asking for money or stealing my shit in the past month, so if you want to call that missing, then sure.”
“Ma’am”—I try on my most snippy tone, the one I remember from so many school meetings as a child—“you’re telling me that you have lost track of your girl, you haven’t seen her in a month, but you don’t know if she’s missing. Is that correct?”
“Check in with her pimp; maybe he’s got that little bitch on a tight leash.”
She swings the door closed, but I catch it with a slap of my hand just in time. “Your teenage daughter is being prostituted?”
“Kayla is a little truck-stop whore and she loves it. Does that clear it up for you? Do you think you can still save her? She’s a lazy slut who didn’t want to get a real job and decided to run wild in the streets instead. She’s the one who wanted to go stay with her grandparents. If they lost her, is that my fault?”
Well, technically I’d put responsibility for her child right in her lap, but who am I to judge? “Who’s her pimp?” I ask. “Does he live around here?”
“We don’t sit around and braid each other’s hair and discuss her pimp, lady. How should I know where he lives?”
“You must have a name.”
“Sure,” she spits. “His name is Little Dog. Does that help? Little Dog? Think you can find him? Maybe he’s in the fucking phone book! If you find that piece of shit, tell him he owes me two hundred bucks for that iPad. I know damn well he’s the one who stole it.”
“What’s he look like?” I ask, but I’ve relaxed too much, and she sees her chance to escape and shoves the door closed in my face.
“Bitch,” I say to the door. The TV volume rises on the other side. I pause for a moment to think of a way to get revenge for her disrespect, but she’s not worth the time. Kayla clearly isn’t here and hasn’t been here for a while.
My cold heart sinks a little. If Kayla was turned out by some small-town pimp, then she’s nothing at all like me. She’s just a poor abused girl like all the other poor abused girls out there.
In a nice suburban neighborhood, if a girl disappears, it’s city news. Maybe even national news. Posters everywhere. Manhunts. Strangers weeping for this vulnerable child. If a grown man is having sex with a teenage neighbor who lives in a McMansion in the good part of town, the police will be notified. Consequences will be swift.
But if that girl is poor trash when she goes missing, or if she’s being paid for the sex, then all law and sympathy gets thrown out the window. She’s a whore and she deserves whatever she gets, even if she’s only sixteen. She’s all used up and worthless now. She probably was from the moment she was born.
Hell, if she’s a brown child, she might not even be called missing at all. Just another girl who hardly deserved to live. What did she expect?
I stroll slowly back to my car, frowning at this lifestyle news about Kayla. She’s obviously a very troubled young woman. “Troubled,” I say aloud to myself with a smile, because I’ve always loved that description.
Troubled means that she very likely walked away from her family and hooked up with Little Dog or some other award-winning loser, because choosing your own bad path is better than following someone else’s. At best, she’s a runaway headed for a long, hard life that will never get better. At worst, this pitiful, pimped-out girl has been killed or kidnapped or loaned out to work for someone else in some big city.
She might be in deep trouble, she might be dead, or she could be nodding off in someone’s heroin basement, having the time of her life on the fast track to an overdose.
I’m not a social worker, and there’s nothing I can do about any of those situations. I was hoping to find someone kick-ass, and that prospect is looking less and less likely. Kayla is just another sad girl who wasn’t ever going to have a chance in this world. There are millions of them. Junkie mom, dad in prison, too many men watching and waiting . . . Come on.
I should just go home. But the kind of trouble I hate is waiting at home. Emotional trouble, the one kind I have no aptitude for, and I hate being bad at things.
And there are more benefits to staying in Oklahoma. There’s road food, of course, always the best part of any trip. And there are strangers to interact with, which is always exciting. And there’s one last benefit to this trip that I wasn’t expecting: each of the partners at my firm has emailed to express their support for what I’m doing. One even mentioned my “heroism.”
Me! A hero!
If I go home with no results and no resolution, I’ll give up this newfound glory and all the bragging rights of returning triumphant. So onward I slog.
As I round the edge of Kayla’s building I see the same pitiful swing set that exists in every apartment complex of this kind. Two swings, one of them broken and wound tight around the supporting pole, the other one hanging at a slight angle. The swings are flanked by the kind of metal slide that causes second-degree burns on a hot summer day. That’s a particularly sadistic touch when it’s one hundred degrees in Oklahoma for the entire season that kids are out of school. Even I could plan a better park, and I’m a goddamn sociopath.
Past the swing set is an ancient picnic table, and gathered around that are several teenagers who decided not to bother with school today. Or this year. Hard to say.
“Hey!” I bark out. They glance up without any alarm at all. Punks. “You guys know Kayla?” I’ve been in Minnesota too long, and now I’ve identified myself as an outsider, but maybe that’s okay. They know I’m not a local cop, certainly.
Two of the kids shrug, but the youngest, a boy, tips up his chin in a nod.
“She been around?” I ask.
“What’d she do?” the boy calls as I walk closer.
“She won the lottery. I’m just trying to deliver her prize money.”
All three of them collapse into drug-induced giggles at that. I smile as if I’m friendly and hand the young white boy a twenty. “A clue, a clue,” I sing, echoing an old kids’ show I used to watch when I was alone in our trailer for days. The three kids giggle again at the hilarity.
Maybe I’m better with children than I thought I was. At least when they’re high. I could start an outreach program for high teens. I’ll suggest it at our annual five-minute-long meeting about how the firm can have a beneficial presence in our community. Now I’m giggling too.
“Listen, I just want to know if you’ve heard where she could be.”
“Kayla’s a slut,” the boy says. “Could be anywhere with anyone.”
Sluts don’t go missing; they just become looser sluts. I’m getting bored now. “Fine. Just guess.”
The girl, with a cropped blond hairstyle that could be edgy if she’d cut the bangs a little shorter, finally speaks up. “If she didn’t just take off with some trucker, then maybe she’s with Little Dog. He’s been gone a couple weeks himself.”
“You been hanging out with Little Dog?” the taller Hispanic boy asks archly.
“Fuck off, Del.”
I roll my eyes. “Does Little Dog have a real name, or were his parents giant dicks?”
More hilarious laughter. “Brodie,” the younger boy finally offers.
“And where does Brodie live?”
I’m surprised when all three of them point in the same direction at the same time. Following their gesture, my eye falls on the back of a brick building. “The Laundromat?”
“Nah,” the girl says, “the hill.”
I follow the point of her finger again and look beyond the building this time. Past a few hazy clouds, a rise of trees climbs up a shallow hill outside town. Either Brodie is a troll in the old-fashioned sense of the word or there’s a run-down shack up there somewhere. I guess I’m about to find out.
CHAPTER 8
I leave the kids at the picnic table plotting how to score more weed with their twenty-dollar windfall, and I drive in the general direction of “the hill.” I lose sight of it anytime I get too close to a building, but lucky for me there aren’t many structures in this town. I have a clear view in no time and realize I’m not looking for a shack at all. Just the opposite.
A fancy wooden fence runs along the road, like the kind you’d normally find around the horse farms of Kentucky. This one protects no quarter horses or Arabians. It’s just a ridiculous acreage of browning grass, and its sole purpose is to use up precious water. If I ever noticed this in my childhood, I don’t remember it. I probably didn’t realize how much money it would take to fence in a property this size. Who the hell would build something like this outside a prison town? The warden? Even that seems a bit of a stretch. Unless he’s crooked.
And it is a grand estate, though the peeling whitewash of the fence indicates the place has seen better times. I turn under a wooden archway and drive up a lane that’s guarded by rows of pecan trees on either side like be-nutted sentries. Very pretty. My tires crunch over old shells.
At the top of the hill, a good forty feet above sea level, I discover a man-made pond complete with a nonfunctioning fountain and, beyond that, a low ranch house that stretches out forever. A covered porch adorns the entire front side of the house. I expect to see rocking chairs standing sentry, but the whole long porch is empty aside from an overturned bucket someone left near the front door.
Very odd.
After pulling into the circular driveway, I park in front of green double doors outfitted with honest-to-God door knockers. To entertain myself, I use one to clack away at the wood, then push the doorbell for good measure. I’m not the least bit surprised when it chimes out the opening notes of some classical arrangement I don’t know. Mr. Little Dog Brodie comes from surprisingly fancy stock.
When there’s no answer, I press my ear to the wood and I think I detect the rumbling bass of an action movie inside. This time I knock with my fist and hit the doorbell several times. A few seconds later one of the doors flies open to reveal some twenty-something kid with long, stringy hair, a nearly concave bare chest, and loose jeans falling off his hips.
“Monsieur Little Dog?” I inquire politely.
