Eric sighed. “You know what I think? I think you never tried hard enough. If she was my daughter, I’d have been out there looking for her twenty-four/seven, not sitting around being Mr. Car Salesman, slicking back my hair, wearing my plaid jacket, adjusting my white belt, trying to sell Jap cars.” What was with the past tense? Why was he talking like I was done searching? “What the hell kind of father you been, anyway?”
“You lousy son of a bitch,” I said. Even with the AC blasting in my face, I felt hot with anger. If this guy hadn’t been sitting behind the wheel, I’d have tried to grab hold of him around the neck.
Eric shot me another glance, then looked forward. Without taking his eyes off the road, he launched his shifting hand blindingly fast, backhanding me on the nose.
The pain was instantaneous, and tremendous. Most people go their whole lives without getting punched in the nose, and up to that moment, I’d been one of them. I shouted out in pain, cupped my hands over my face. Blood trickled into them.
“Try not to get anything onto the upholstery,” Eric said. “I’m not going to buy this car if it’s got blood all over the seats.”
“Jesus!” I said. “You son of a bitch!” If this had been my own car, I might have been able to find a box of tissues in the glove box, but there’d be nothing in there but a crisp, new, unopened driver’s manual. Blood dripped onto my pants as I reached into my pocket for something to blot my nose.
“Don’t be rude, Timmy, or I just might not buy this car. Can I ask you something? Does it come with a decent warranty, or do you have to buy those extended things, because, personally, I think those things are a huge fucking rip-off.”
I closed my eyes a moment, winced, opened them. Through tears, I surveyed the navigational screen. We were heading north through Stratford on Huntington, almost to the Merritt Parkway. Eric slipped a cigarette from a pack in his pocket, put it between his lips, and lit it with a silver lighter.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Eric said, breathing out smoke. “Maybe you want to grab the wheel or something, show you’re a tough guy, be a big hero, that kind of thing. Well, I’m better at this sort of shit than you are. You sit in your little showroom day after day, handing out brochures, filling out forms, trying to talk people into buying options they don’t really need, you probably don’t run into somebody like me every day. Somebody who can mess you up really, really bad. And the thing is, there’s not just one of me. There’s a whole fucking bunch of us, okay? So don’t go doing something stupid. You do something stupid, you’re not just putting yourself in jeopardy, but your daughter, too, got it?”
I dabbed some tissue under my nose. “Yeah,” I said.
“The fact is,” Eric continued, “it’s time for a change of approach. More direct, more up-front.” He smiled. “The Seattle thing, that was okay at the time, but things have escalated, you catch my drift?”
I glanced over.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Seriously? Did the cops even find that coke?”
“Yes,” I said slowly.
He slapped his thigh. “I win the bet,” he said. “The others said, no, it was too well hidden, and I said, fuck, if it’s sitting right in the open, who’s going to believe that it wasn’t found when the place was torn apart? You get what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“But my other question is, what the fuck are you doing, walking around? Why didn’t the cops arrest you?”
“They didn’t buy it,” I said.
He banged the steering wheel with his fist. “Shit.”
“Why’d you do that? Plant cocaine in my house?”
He shook his head angrily for a moment, then became almost philosophical. “Honestly? The coke thing was kind of an afterthought. Mainly, we just wanted you out of town for a while, get you out of the way. Buy us some time, maybe your kid would show up while you were gone. Be a lot easier to deal with her with no daddy to run home to.”
He smiled to himself. “But once you were gone, I had what you might call an inspiration. Figured, tear your house apart, plant some coke. I thought, hey, once you came back, you’d have a whole ’nother shitload of problems to deal with, including having to explain to the cops how it got there.”
The anger returned. “Fucking stupid cops! Laid it all out for them. House torn apart like somebody was looking for something, the cops find the coke, they start leaning on you. It’s simple. I can’t believe they’re so fucking stupid!”
“If they’d bought it, wouldn’t that have made them stupid?” I asked.
“That just really pisses me off. I was in a good mood up to now.”
“Why’d you want me out of the way, for the police to arrest me? What have I done to you?”
Another glance. “You just won’t quit. Going here and there, bugging the shit out of everybody, looking for your kid. You’re a fucking problem waiting to happen. A goddamn liability.” He banged the steering wheel again. Then, “Did you happen to find a phone, by the way? It might have slipped out of somebody’s pocket.”
“Yeah,” I said.