Bad Move (18 page)

"No."

"No, she didn't tell you?"

"Yes, she told me, and no, you can't get one."

Paul was crestfallen. "Can we, like, talk about this?"

"We are talking about this. And I'm saying no."

"I don't believe this. You haven't even heard me out. You don't even know what I'm asking for."

"Are you asking whether you can get a tattoo?"

"Maybe, yeah, but -"

"You're too young. You need my permission, I think, at any reputable tattoo parlor, to get a tattoo at your age, and I'm not signing."

"Everyone has them, Dad. It's not a big deal."

"I'd love to discuss this with you, but I have an errand to run."

"Sure. Walk away."

I grabbed my cell phone off the table by the front door and slid it into my jacket pocket on the way out, didn't stop to chat with Sarah and Trixie, who were still at the end of the drive, and squealed out.

Once I was down around the corner on Lilac, where I couldn't be seen, I pulled over and got out the map book. Deer Prance Drive was on the other side of Oakwood. I got across town in about fifteen minutes and found that Stefanie Knight's house was in a new development that was every bit as architecturally fascinating as our own, except this one was completely finished, no uncovered foundations, no houses waiting for sod.

Deer Prance was off Autumn Leaves Lane (God almighty, where would it end?), and as I turned onto it, I leaned back in the seat enough that I could reach into the front pocket of my jeans and fish out the piece of paper with the street number on it. There was still another hour of sunlight, and the house numbers were easy to read.

Deer Prance was a street of relatively new townhouses, and I found 2223 on the left side, about two-thirds of the way down. The driveway already had an old Ford Escort in it, and there was no room either behind or next to it for my car, so I found a spot at the curb.

As I got out of the car, the drawstring of the bag looped around my hand, I noticed that for a new development, this stretch already had a slightly run-down look. The paint was peeling on some of the garage doors, one car up the street was on blocks, and tucked out of the way between 2223 and 2225 were a rusted-out stove and an abandoned tricycle.

As I mounted the steps, I noticed two cases of empty beer bottles, just outside the door, waiting to be taken back to the store. There was an aluminum screen door between me and the wooden front door, but I didn't have to pull it open to knock. There was no glass or screen in it, so I rapped directly on the wood.

I could hear some talking inside, and a radio going, but no sound of approaching footsteps. After about ten seconds, I knocked again.

Inside, a woman's voice: "Jimmy!"

A pause, a young man's voice, from somewhere deeper in the house, perhaps upstairs: "What?"

"Door!"

"Get it yourself! I still can't find Quincy!"

"Jesus, why the fuck did you let him out anyway?"

"Get the frickin' door yourself, your legs broken?"

"You better find him lickety-split!"

I heard some padding toward the door, and then it opened only a crack.

"Yeah?" I saw a sliver of a woman's face. One eye, a cheek, half a mouth.

"Uh, hi. I was looking for Stefanie?"

"Stef? You're looking for Stef?"

Stef. Now that rang a bell.

"Yes," I said. "Would she be in?"

"I'm gonna invite you in," the woman said. "But when I open the door, you have to come in real fast. Y'understand?"

Hesitantly, I said, "Sure."

And then the door swung open wide, the woman grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me inside, then closed the door forcefully. I was going to have to be fitted with a whiplash collar.

"I don't want Quincy to get out," she said. I glanced around the floor, looking for a little dog or cat, but saw nothing.

This woman might have been fifty, but it had been a hard fifty. Her hair was gray and pinned back, and she wore a white short-sleeved blouse with enough grease stains to qualify it as a Jackson Pollock. Her short sleeves revealed meaty shoulders and upper arms.

"So you want Stef?" The woman cocked her head just a little, looked me up and down, and her eyes danced darkly.

From upstairs: "Is it for me, Mom?"

"No!" Not taking her eyes off me. "Just keep looking!" She sighed. "She don't live here," she said coolly, glancing down at the plastic bag that hung from my wrist.

"Oh. Okay. See, I had this address for her, but if I've got the wrong house ..."

"You got the right house. But she don't live here no more. She hant lived here for a couple years at least. What's your business with her?"

I wasn't sure whether to say. So instead I asked, "Would you happen to be Stefanie's mother?"

"Yeah."

"I had something I had to return to her, and was going to drop it off here, but if she doesn't live here, maybe you could tell me where I might find her."

"Is it whatever you got in the bag there?"

"Maybe if you had an address?"

The woman jerked her head to motion me further inside. I followed her into a narrow kitchen where the sink was stacked with dishes and a cigarette sat burning in an ashtray on a table that was part of an aging aluminum and formica set that couldn't have been original to this house. The table surface, what you could see of it, given the number of empty beer and wine bottles, was pockmarked with cigarette burns. "Just follow me," she said.

There were more burns on the cracked linoleum floor and several places where it had been gouged, revealing plywood underneath. The counter next to the overloaded sink was littered with more dishes and more empty beer bottles and crumpled Big Mac cartons flecked with shreds of lettuce and smears of Special Sauce.

"Like I said, she hasn't lived here for, I don't know, a couple years now."

She'd never notified the DMV of a change of address, I figured. It occurred to me that maybe she didn't come from a home where a high priority was placed on attending to such details.

"Whaddya say your name was?"

"Walker," I said. "Zack Walker."

"You look a bit old for Stef."

Well, I thought, not necessarily. Just how old did she think I looked? I mean, surely it was not unheard-of for some men in their early forties to attract a woman who appeared to be in her mid- to late twenties. Maybe I didn't work out a lot, and perhaps I could stand to lose a few pounds, but -

Shut up, I told myself.

"We're not, you know, going out or anything," I said. "I just needed to give her something. Maybe I could leave it with you."

"I dunno. Like I said, she don't live here, and she does drop by occasionally but I don't know when. She's so busy, you know, buying her fancy clothes and working for her fancy boss. Hasn't got time to come by here, unless she needs some money, of course. And I'm betting she's making enough that she could pay me back some, because I've got my own expenses, raising her little brother here on my own after Victor left us high and dry, don't you know."

That's when I decided I couldn't leave the purse here. I didn't know the history between this woman and her daughter, but it was a safe bet that as soon as I handed that purse over, this woman was going to take whatever cash was in it, and I didn't want that to be my fault.

I said, "You know, I'll probably be running into her again soon, so I won't bother you with this."

"You work with Stef? You one of those realtor people?"

"Realtor? No. Where does Stef work?"

"Over at one of them new developments. In the office. Forest Estates it's called."

"Valley Forest Estates?"

"I think."

And then I remembered. The receptionist who didn't want me to see Greenway. Small frickin' world.

"Well then, I'll just pop into the sales office," I said. "It's not far from where I live. You see, we were in the checkout line at Mindy's, and she was going through her wallet and I didn't notice until she was gone that she had dropped her driver's license, so I grabbed it, and this was the address that was on it, which was why I just dropped by here, you know, to give it back to her."

Stefanie Knight's mother looked at me, then at the shoe bag I was carrying. Was it big enough to carry an entire driver's license?

"Or, you know, if you could let me know where I could find her, I could drop this off even before I run into her next time, because, you know, if she gets pulled over or something and has to show her license to the cops, well, I'd hate to see that happen."

"You think the cops want to talk to her again?"

"Oh no, heck, I wasn't suggesting that. Just for a ticket, they set up these radar traps all over the neighborhood, you know, getting their quota, whatever."

"That's what you got in that big bag there? Stef's driver's license?"

"No, no." I paused. "I just bought some new shoes."

"And you brung them with you to the door?" She cracked a smile, called out, "Hey, Jimmy, man's got a new pair of shoes he wants to show ya."

"Listen, how about if you tell me where I can find her, and just in case she calls here before I find her, I'll leave you my name and -"

I would have said more, but I felt something large and heavy drag across the back of my legs, exerting a kind of pressure, and then, while the pressure was being maintained on the back of my legs, felt something press against the front of them down by my ankles. And I looked down, and it appeared, at a glance, that a tree trunk was wrapping itself around my legs. And I said:

"God! What the - shit!"

I didn't just stand in one place while I said this. I started jumping up and down, threw myself up against the refrigerator, knocked a box of Froot Loops off the top and to the floor, where the contents scattered across the cracked linoleum, crunching under my feet as I continued dancing about, trying to disentangle myself from what was clearly the biggest fucking snake that ever found its way to North America.

"Jimmy!" the woman screamed. "We found Quincy!"

The snake moved away from my legs and slithered its way silently through the table and chair legs, heading for the dining room.

"That's Quincy," Stefanie's mother said. "I think you scared him."

"Jesus!" I said. My heart was pounding so hard I felt it would explode through my jacket like that little critter in the Alien movie. "What is that?"

"Quincy's a python," she said. "We were going to name him Monty but that seemed so obvious. He was a gift from one of Stef's old boyfriends, but I gotta tell you, there are days I'm not so sure we wouldn't have been better off with a dog."

Jimmy was barreling down the stairs, running through the kitchen and into the dining room. "Come here, you son of a bitch!"

"He's harmless," she said.

"You're allowed to keep a python?" I said.

The woman frowned. "You're just like everyone else. It's a kind of prejudice, you know? There's a lot of misconceptions about pythons, but the fact is, they can make very nice house pets. I mean, what do you really know about pythons?"

"I've seen enough jungle movies and documentaries on the Discovery Channel to know they like to wrap themselves around you until you can't breathe anymore. And later your friends can't find you but your snake has gained two hundred fucking pounds and looks like he swallowed a Pinto."

"Well, I wouldn't sleep in the same bed with him, if that's what you mean. But Quincy's not really like that. He's a nice python, and he loves us." To her son: "But you know, Jimmy" - wherever he was in the house now - "I think maybe we could use a break from Quincy for a while. Maybe he'd like a little vacation. Give Richard a call, see if he'd like to take him off our hands for a day or so, I can go visit my sister."

I tried to get my breath, my eyes darting about the room. "Maybe you could give me that address."

She shrugged, grabbed a pen and a piece of scratch paper, and scribbled something down. "I don't know the number, but it's on Rambling Rose Circle. She's got a little blue Volkswagen, one of those Beetles, the new kind?"

"Yes," I said. But I wasn't expecting to see a car in the driveway. The VW keys were still in Stefanie Knight's purse, and odds were that the Beetle was still in Mindy's parking lot.

"I think it's the third or fourth house in, on the right," she said.

"Let me borrow your pen," I said. On another piece of paper I wrote down my name, and was about to put down my phone number, when I thought better of it. So far, I'd managed to shield Sarah from the knowledge that she was married to the biggest idiot on the planet. Clarification: It was possible Sarah already understood she was married to the biggest idiot on the planet, but she was still unaware of his most recent stunt. I'd confessed to stupid things in the past, but nothing approaching this. My attempt to teach Sarah a lesson had backfired on such a grand scale that I could see no good in letting her, or the kids, find out about it. The last thing I needed was Stefanie Knight phoning the house, getting Sarah, and asking for me so that she could get her driver's license - if she accepted my story as I'd related it to her mother - or her entire purse back.