All-Day Breakfast (14 page)

“
Was
he!” The old guy squinted at the roast beef sub in his hand—the price tag looked too waterlogged to read. “Dockside boys kept his doors pinned shut, and some of them took an ax to the back of the truck—I used to stock axes up until then, hunting knives too, but I got rid of all that. People too unpredictable nowadays.”

I finally bit into the sandwich. Whichever part of my body kept track of such things detected precious little ham and wanted to know why it had been given so much soggy goddamn bread.

“They get the bacon?” I asked, mouth full.

“Oh, yeah.” He puttered under the register for something. “Hundreds of pounds. Ripped the plastic open with their teeth, started eating it raw. I saw it all from in here, with the door locked. A couple of them got the big idea to cook bacon on their engine blocks, I guess that was on a
tv
show one time, you see that one? They never did get to eat it, though.”

“They—they didn't?” The bread caught in my throat at the thought of what the poor bastards must've been going through. A teardrop swam at the corner of my eye.

“No, no, couple of police cars came. Guess the driver radioed for them, I hadn't had the brains to do it myself.”

“They got put in jail?”

“That's twenty-four thirty-nine for all that mess of sandwiches. No, most of the boys got away. Just three officers, they couldn't keep all of them from driving off.”

I gave him three tens.

“But,” I said, “could they have scraped the bacon off the engine once they, you know, got where they were driving to?”

“I wouldn't know.” He handed me my change. “Half a dozen of the boys got caught in the back of the truck, throwing hot dogs around in there, and once they were in the squad cars with the cuffs on I saw they had that bacon fat smeared all over their faces. All greasy and white, you imagine? Like clowns.” He peered out his window. “Your plate says ‘MacArthur Motors,' that right? You from way over in MacArthur?”

He held a notebook and pencil.
Sure
, I could've told him,
I'm from way over in MacArthur
. But the kids were in MacArthur, and no one could ever know that.

“No,” I said, “I bought it used over there. I'm from Hoover.”

Maybe I should've pretended I was from somewhere else entirely but I'd stalled too long already and had a face unaccustomed to lying.

“Safe travels, then.” He finished writing then tucked the pencil into the notebook's spiral binding. “Sorry, ever since the trouble, I try to keep track of every little thing.” He shrugged. “Not too many ways to make sense of it.”

He deposited the notebook back under the counter. I could have reached across and ripped his arm out of the socket, but were James Jones's cronies really going to swarm through Velouria, seizing every spiral-bound notebook in their statewide hunt for me?

“That's perfectly understandable,” I said. “Those guys still in jail?”

“The bacon bandits? Oh, sure! Waiting for the circuit judge to come through.”

“And they're doing okay in there? Sounds like they weren't right in the head.”

“Well, I heard from Martha Lovett there's some kind of flu bug going through the jail, the families went in and the boys were pretty laid up. Stranger and stranger, if you ask me.”

“Yes, sir.” I grinned and picked up my plastic bag. “Whereabouts is this jail?”

He'd been all set to pick his teeth with the end of a match.

“Why you want to know that?”

“Uh. Asshole cousin got picked up for marijuana possession.” I shook my head as though smoking dope was inconceivable for any decent citizen to imagine, even when he'd nearly had fragments of some guy's ear in his back teeth. “Figured I'd swing by in the
am
for my aunt's sake.”

“Stupid little bugger. What's his name?”

“Jesse Turnbull.”

“Don't know the name.” He reached down for his notebook.

“Whereabouts is this jail?” I asked again.

“Left onto the main drag here, right at the fire station. In behind there.”

“Good enough,” I said, and went out the door before he could ask why my teeth had started chattering, in which case I would've had to tear his guts apart and smear the fat all over
his
face. Jesse Turnbull, incidentally, had been Lydia's bridesmaid, who'd been in Costa Rica the day of her funeral. Funny how the brain works, to come up with stuff like that—to hell with Cam Vincent, I was getting sharper!

I walked out between the bug-lights—which had nothing to kill so late in the year—and threw a wary glance at the slack-jawed faces peering from behind the three windshields. I gave my head the slightest shake and hoped that'd keep the kids from hollering my name and address. But would they be more likely to follow my game plan if they had a little luncheon meat in them, or if I kept them dangling?

I sidled up to each car and passed a couple of damp sandwiches to the passenger.

“Okay, all right, we got it,” Franny whispered. “Radio silence. But Ye Olde Candy Shoppe is exactly six blocks
that way
.” She pointed to my left with a green-nailed finger close to her chest. “I mean, C here broke his brother's leg this morning, and even he says he's down for an ice cream sundae.”

“Shut…up,” Clint mouthed, wolfing down so-called pastrami.

It had sounded, of course, like the bacon bandits had our symptoms, and maybe they possessed valuable insights, though if they'd solved our mutual problem to anybody's satisfaction they probably wouldn't have hijacked a meat truck. I did not glance across the roof of the car at the gas station window.

“What ice cream?” I said through my teeth.

“Didn't you see the sign, G? Big sign, bright colors, ‘Velouria, Nebraska, Famous for Ice Cream Sundaes'?”

“Just follow me a couple of blocks first.” I nodded down to Clint, the driver, who now had mayonnaise dripping down his red scarf. “Place we got to be.”

I got into my own car, and as I slid the key into the ignition I felt the old temptation to pull the picture out of the ashtray. In the yellow wash of gas-station light, an unwrapped sandwich across her knees, Colleen sat with arms around her middle, like I might hit her with a rolled-up newspaper.

“I want to ask him if he's seen Megan,” she said.

Her eyes looked like dark puddles with weeds around them. I hadn't thought of Megan. I turned off the car and Colleen climbed out, walking nimbly across the rainy concrete.

I focused on the sandwiches still in the bag. I tore through plastic wrappings, peeled out meat slices and jammed them in my mouth, barely chewing before I hurried on to the next. They used nitrites to process the meat and I could feel the blessed chemicals flood through my chest and out into my extremities like good-hearted lines of falling dominoes. Three sandwiches dissolved like that in a minute and a half, and I relaxed back into the seat, chewing a mouthful of what might have been roast beef. My suddenly steady hands said,
You may keep us another day
. Arms still wrapping her middle, Colleen walked out of the office, past the row of white propane tanks, back to the car. She got in and slammed her door, then sat looking at her knees. From the movement of her jaw she seemed to be chewing the inside of her mouth.

After each fresh diagnosis my Lydia had done the same thing, hunched in that very same seat.

As I drove
the quarter-mile into town Colleen constantly leaned forward and back, trying to get a look at every driveway and rain-slicked parking lot. A Ford truck up on blocks seemed to be Velouria's vehicle of choice.

“If we spot a sporty yellow car,” I said quietly, “it won't necessarily be our guy.”

“No, but he has to be somewhere on planet Earth. Wouldn't have stayed in Hoover, and his bosses are most likely here. My gut says Dodge Charger.”

“There's more than one yellow Dodge Charger on planet Earth.”

“I'll know it when I
see
it, okay?” She whirled in her seat as we passed a poorly lit cluster of cars in front of a bar. “Shut up two seconds!”

I smiled at her companionably—
my
little quest might've seemed just as nebulous, after all, and in the meantime I at least knew where my children were. I parked in the alley behind the red-walled, clearly demarcated Velouria Fire Station. The other two cars pulled in beside us. People's silhouettes walked by on the main street, maybe couples out for their anniversaries.

“That is so
not
the punchline!” a woman told somebody.

A guy strolled beside her in a ball cap and jean jacket. For normal people, every night is a good night.

“There's the ice cream shop Franny's so crazy about.” Colleen bundled her purse onto her lap. “I can buy everybody something.”

“Appreciate it. I'm going up to the police station, there's a bunch of Dockside guys in there—maybe they know as much about it as Rob Aiken does. If I'm not back here in an hour, you all drive away, okay? Just go where no one would think to look.”

“I have a friend in North Platte.”

I set a foot out on the pavement. “North Platte's good.”

“You're going one place and we're going another,” she said blandly.

“Just like at the gas station, yes. We survived. I will see you
here
in one hour.” I got out, and leaned in to look at her. “Maybe take the kids in the store now so we don't look like freaks in an alley.”

She sat propped against her door—all the fight in her seemed to have collected and dispersed like intestinal gas.

“I don't have lipstick,” she said.

“You're fine. Honestly.”

The four kids looked out at me from their cars, wide-eyed, hopping in their seats. They were good at waiting for instructions. Every year the seniors did a countywide scavenger hunt and this lucky bunch got to do it a year early.

“He said no spoiler on the car,” Colleen told them behind me, “but I don't buy it.”

The post office clock tower said it was ten after seven as I went up the police station steps. I held the door open as a middle-aged woman in a bulky sweater shuffled out, then she left me holding the door while she fished in her purse for cigarettes. Her mouth frowned like it didn't know any other shape.

“Gad,” she said. “If you're going to see a detain-ee, you better take a Bible in there, and a priest too.”

Everybody in Velouria was looking for a friendly ear.

“Who've you been in to see?” I asked.

“Oh, my
kid
,” she said, lighting a Marlboro and exhaling hard out her nose. “Donny Brown. You must know him, right?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“You wouldn't recognize him. He says some of them in those back cells need the doctor, so just now I asked the sergeant about it and he says the doctor comes in the morning. Full stop. Which of 'em in there is yours?”

“Jesse Turnbull,” I said. “Got picked up with marijuana.”

She gave me a weird look and went down the steps. Clint jogged up then, his jacket open to show off his
ninjas make better boyfriends
shirt.

“You don't need to be here,” I said. “I'll run this alone. Go back and—”

“And eat
ice cream
?” His bunched fists looked like sock puppets. “I don't want to sit knitting, man! You know I broke my brother's
leg
when he was buttering toast, you know how messed up that is? You don't get to be king of everything, man.”

“If I get in trouble here, there's no reason why we should both be in trouble.”

“Dude.” He shook his bottom teeth at me. “Way too late.”

I was still holding the door, and I waved him through.

“There's no emperor but the emperor of ice cream,” I said.

Two of the foyer's walls were covered with bulletin boards, as though the police station were the most obvious place for a second-hand leaf blower to find a buyer. Masseurs and notary publics. The third wall had a steel reception counter with a Plexiglas window, its speaking-hole the size of a quarter. Beyond the window a blond, crewcutted cop eyed me from behind a crisp copy of
Rod & Gun
—he was such a ringer for Cam Vincent that it looked like the manufacturer had just reissued the design with a new outfit and hair color.
sgt. dorfsman
, his breast pocket read.

“Help you fellas?” he asked.

I leaned in toward the speaking-hole, but not so close that I'd seem enthusiastic.

“I just want to see my cousin Donny Brown,” I said. “Is there a room we go in to see the prisoners?”

“Visiting stops at six.” He drummed on the magazine with a pen. “We're on the evening shift now, so that's that. Come back tomorrow morning at eleven, happy to bring Donny up for you.”

“Aw, man.” I rubbed my brow theatrically but not too theatrically. “We drove in from Fontaine to see Donny
tonight
—I have to be at
work
tomorrow morning!”

“Jay!” a man called from somewhere back in the station. “You gone on coffee?”

“No!” Sgt. Dorfsman kept his eyes me. “Been waiting half an hour!”

“Wait one sec!” called the voice.

“Didn't you just let his mother go back and see him?” I asked.

“Yeah, well, she's Doris and you guys aren't. What's your relation to
her
exactly?”

“Her sister's stepson,” I said.

Clint, at my shoulder, just studied his scuffed pointy shoes, which was perfect.

“Okay! I'm here, I'm here!” A tall teenaged girl, her hair in a braid, slid in beside the sergeant on a rolling chair. “I had to
ta
the class, I'm so sorry, Jay!”

“Christ, Tina, half an
hour
ago!”