I am not a patient man. I don’t like waiting for things, never have, and yet I’ve been waiting for Coralie for well over half my adult life. I watch her walk out of Willoughby’s, head bowed low, eyes fixed on the sidewalk in front of her, and I have to fight to remain patient a little while longer. Running across the street to talk to her, to simply have her look me in the eye, to be close to me, is all well and good. But what will it accomplish?
She obviously panicked this morning. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have upped and left before I woke up. It would be ill advised on my part if I started chasing her around the streets of Port Royal at this juncture, when she needs some space to process. I let her go. The whole time she walks away, I’m itching inside, unnerved by the prospect that she could just get on a plane back to LA at any moment, and I’ll be right back where I started, miles away from her and still turned inside out because of it.
Shane comes out of Willoughby’s not long after Coralie’s figure has disappeared from view. He makes a direct beeline for me—unlike Coralie, he must have seen me leaning against the huge live oak we used to scramble up when we were kids.
“All you need is a trench coat and a pair of binoculars and you’ll really have the look down pat,” he tells me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re really channeling your inner stalker right now. That’s what that means.” Shane hands me a beer, and then takes a deep pull from his own bottle. I’ve forgotten what it’s like here, commonplace for people to stand on street corners, gossiping while they get slowly drunker and drunker. I take a swig, staring off into the distance, a carbon copy of Shane.
He squints at me out of the corner of his eye. “If Coralie’s dad hid her mom’s stuff from her, where do you think that stuff might be right now?” he asks.
“I have no clue. How’s he gonna give it back to her? He’s dead.”
“Well, his lawyer would tell her where it was, right?”
“Yeah.” I think about this. “Then surely the lawyer would have it, right?”
Shane nods. Drinks his beer. “I’m gonna close the store for the afternoon. I think we should go pay Ezra Mendel a visit.
******
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that with you, gentlemen. I’m sorry, but I’m only here to ensure the wishes of my client are carried out.” Ezra’s got this look in his eye. He knows Shane and I are probably not the types of guy to vacate his pokey little office with that kind of a response. Shane’s a fucking teddy bear, but he’s also a pretty decent actor. He played Peter Pan in the school production three years in a row because every other kid at Port Royal High was terrible. Right now, he looks like a villain out of a Guy Ritchie movie.
I’m the one that steps up, though. “Your client is dead, Ezra. We’re standing in front of you, very much alive, very pissed off, asking for you to do us a favor. Why don’t you just do us a solid and give us what we want.”
Ezra wags a finger at me, a nervous smile playing over his face. “You can’t just threaten me, gentlemen. I know how both of you are. As soon as you leave here, I’ll be calling the sheriff, you can count on that.”
I turn to Shane, feigning confusion. “I don’t get it. He keeps calling us gentlemen. I’ve never been accused of that before. Have you?”
Shane shakes his head. “Nope. Psycho maybe. Lunatic. Never gentleman, though.”
I swung by the house and collected the baseball bat before we headed over to Mendel’s law firm, and the old guy is eyeing it now like it’s a coiled snake, ready to strike. In fairness to him, I am spinning it over in my hands like I’m considering using it any second now. “Oh, don’t mind me. I was just saying to my friend here how it would be a lot of fun to go smash a few balls. After we’re done here, of course.” I look down at his crotch, making sure he knows exactly which balls I’m referring to, though. Ezra glances at the phone on his desk, panic written all over his face, but Shane and me are a wall of muscle standing between him and his lifeline. There’s no way he’s making any calls without going through us first, and, well…that’s just not happening.
“I would be breaking so many laws if I gave you Mr. Taylor’s possessions without his permission,” Ezra says. “I don’t have the right to do that.”
“And Mr. Taylor didn’t have the right to physically abuse his daughter for seventeen years. Not much to be done about that now, though, is there? I’d say the redistribution of a few boxes of clothes is fair turnaround, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know where you heard that, Mr. Cross, but—”
“Callan. Call me Callan. We’re all friends here, right?” I slap the bat against my palm.