I’ve known Connie since before my folks broke up. She was a nice girl from a nasty family out of Detroit, a little older than we were, liked to shoot hoops with us when her dad still lived in Vegas.
Connie Marino should not have had her throat cut. And if this had anything to do with her dad being a hood, it’s flat-out wrong that death should be an occupational hazard that the kids inherit. I grew up with this gnawing at the back of my mind. Someone should do something about it. But it’s hard to see how that’s connected to me hunting down the girl who stuck it to Connie, this monster girl I’m supposed to find.
I don’t say anything. It’s my father’s trick; it reduces grown men to babbling.
“She might know things she shouldn’t know,” Don whispers. “You have to get to her before the cops find her.”
“What things could a sixteen-year-old girl know?”
Don looks away. “She might be Esteban Mendes’s bimbo’s kid.”
“Crap, Don! You want me to piss off a Colombian guy?”
Don’s eyes narrow in derision. “He’s not Colombian,” he says, as if this were information everyone with half a brain already knew. “He’s Cuban. He was Dad’s money guy.”
“We’re connected to her dad?” This keeps getting worse. It feels like someone threw a bag over my head and dragged me into a true crime documentary—the true crime documentary I’ve spent my life trying to avoid.
“He’s not her dad. He’s not anything to her. What he wants doesn’t matter, anyway—he answers to Karl Yeager, and Yeager wants her gone.”
“I’d be doing this for Karl Yeager?”
Two years ago, the FBI dragged Karl Yeager out of the sleaziest strip club in the city that sleaze built. He was free in two weeks. Every time he gets mentioned on the news, it’s “alleged crime boss Karl Yeager” this and “believed Midwestern mob figure Karl Yeager” that. The man’s a crime celebrity: “Karl Yeager, also known as ‘the Butcher.’?”
He’s everything Don wants to be.
“Yeager doesn’t want cops talking to this girl,” Don says. “Do you get what has to happen?”
What I get is that since NO didn’t work, I’m going to wait him out. Sometimes leading him on gets you a lot less grief than getting into it with him. Cross him directly, you wake up with his knee on your chest, the grill lighter poised so close, you can feel your eyelashes approach ignition temperature, one by one. But let it slide and, eventually, Don loses interest unless there are explosions involved.
I walk out before he can signal a guard to march him back to his cell. I’ve never seen the cell, but I can imagine myself in it.
5
Cat
I climb out of the pipe under a white-hot sun.
My skin is slick with perspiration, the palms of my hands burnt from pushing the chains at the mouth of the pipe out of my way. Shoulders scraped raw from my night slamming against the inside of the pipe. Sun beaming fire to my scalp. Dead muscles coming back to life, not that enthused about walking.
I smell like a football player’s gym bag.
And this upsets me only because I’m afraid it’ll make it hard to hide. That no matter how well hidden I am, someone will smell me.
I’ll be betrayed by my BO.
That, and the sound of my stomach demanding nutrition.
This is how far I’ve come from a life with lavender-scented body wash in it.
Things change so fast.
I tell myself to get a grip.
But my palms are charred and my fingernails broken from actual gripping. It seems like God’s laughing at me for thinking I could get a grip on any part of this.
I lower myself off the truck and into a field crisscrossed by derelict railroad tracks. A couple of sheds, tin roofs reflecting the relentless sun, not one person in sight. And all over, NO TRESPASSING signs warning of armed patrols and watchdogs.
Oh God, oh God, dogs!
They come from out of nowhere. Small, muscular Dobermans. Clipped ears, clipped tails, and fast.
I run at that fence with a shot of adrenaline so massive, you’d need a horse syringe to hold it. The pain just feels like motivation.
The dogs snarl and jump at my sneakers with what look like werewolf fangs. Do these dogs get to tear trespassers to pieces until someone shows up to view the carcasses and bury what’s left?
There are more pressing questions.
Such as, what if they know where I am, and they’re on their way here?
How much easier for them could I make it? Hanging off a rickety fence like a midnight dare at cheer camp, a slow-moving target as they reach for their guns.
I know guns; people in Cotter’s Mill hunt.
I know that the ones they were waving, silhouetted in the moonlight, are for going after people, not Canada geese.
Steve was always dragging me off into the great outdoors to fish. Or, at least, cook the fish. The worst was hunting season, a buck tied to the hood of the SUV on the way home. But as sexist as he got with me, Steve made sure I knew my way around firearms.