The Long and Faraway Gone (15 page)

 

C
andace had told Wyatt on the phone that someone broke into the Land Run during the night and turned it upside down. Wyatt realized, when he stepped inside and looked around, that she'd meant it literally.

Everything in the Land Run really
had
been turned upside down. Everything: the tables, the chairs and the barstools, the amps on the stage, the cash register, and the flat-­screen TV. Each and every one of the framed show bills—­there must have been fifty of them covering the walls—­had been flipped. The pour spouts had been removed from the bottles behind the bar and the bottles balanced on their necks. Jars of olives and cocktail cherries, napkin holders. Even the cutout metal silhouettes on the restroom doors, a cowboy and a cowgirl, were now heels over head.

Candace came out from behind the bar with a mop. Wyatt saw that the floor back there beneath the rubber-­tread mat was wet with spilled liquor. He could smell it now.

“Don't step there!” she said.

“I'm standing still,” Wyatt pointed out.

“I don't care. I just mopped there. You were getting ready to step.”

“You know me so well.”

The Land Run's overhead lights and wall sconces hadn't been turned on yet. The primary source of illumination was the skylight above—­a shaft of early-­morning peach and gold and dust that slanted down like a toppled Roman column. It fell on Candace and made the scene look like something from a Rembrandt. Well, if Rembrandt had ever painted a furious Thai-­American woman with a pair of plastic butterflies holding her hair back.

“Do you believe me now?” she said. “Do you?”

“Did you call the police yet?” Wyatt said.

“Ha,” she said, just as a cop emerged from the back.

“Looks like somebody used a pry bar to jimmy your back door,” the cop said. “Between the door and the frame? Popped that sucker right open.”

“Really?” Candace said. “You sure?”

The cop either missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. He had the tranquil expression of a man
this
close to retirement.

“Anything stolen?” Wyatt asked Candace. “Damaged?”

Candace shook her head. “I told him already. I don't keep cash here overnight. Nothing damaged unless you mean like three or four hundred bucks' worth of booze spilled all over the floor. Unless you mean my time, which I don't have enough of to start with, when I have to spend all day today turning those stupid posters right side up.”

The spilled booze, Wyatt considered, hadn't been the point. The bottles wouldn't balance unless the pour spouts were removed. The spilled booze was just a secondary consequence.

So what, Wyatt wondered,
was
the point? Steal nothing, destroy nothing. Just turn the place upside down.

The cop had walked over to the nearest wall and was looking up at the upside-­down show bills.

“Might've been a buncha kids,” he said. “Fooling around? Who else'd do something like this? I never seen anything like it.”

Wyatt considered how long it must have taken somebody to turn all those show bills upside down. To flip all the barstools and chairs. To yank the pour spouts from two dozen bottles of booze. To unbolt the flat-­screen TV from its brackets and then find a way to bolt it back in. To do a grid search afterward and make sure nothing that could be flipped had not been flipped.

Unless there had been more than one somebody. But even then.

“Seems like an awful lot of effort,” Wyatt said. “For a bunch of kids. When I was kid, Officer, and maybe your experience was the same, effort was the least of all possible temptations.”

“I'll tell you what I think.” The cop turned back to them. “Get you a security system. Or a big old dog.”

“Ms. Kilkenny told you about the other incidents?” Wyatt said.

“Yes, of course I told him,” Candace said. “And stop calling me that.”

“She did,” the cop said. “About the birds and such.”

He kept a straight face, but the way ­people do when they want to make clear they're keeping a straight face. Wyatt could feel Candace vibrating next to him at a frequency that was about to blow out the glass in the Art Deco skylight above them.

Wyatt didn't think the cop was dumb. The cop, like everyone, was just keeping a finger on the pulse of his own self-­interest. He had real crimes to solve, real criminals to catch, so he saw the evidence in front of him the way he wanted to see it. Humans, by nature, did this all the time. They wanted something, so they found reasons to support that desire. And then they convinced themselves that the reasons came first, that the reasons led to the desire and not the other way around.

Wyatt tried not to do that. He always tried to listen to the evidence, no matter how much he didn't like what it was saying.

“I'm gonna go out to the car and write up the report, ma'am,” the cop told Candace. “You can send a copy to your insurance, and they'll pay for any damages, after the deductible and all.”

“Wait,” Candace said. “What? Wait! Aren't you going to check for, like . . . DNA or whatever?”

The cop did the thing with his face again, straight but not straight. He glanced at Wyatt to see if Wyatt was in on the joke.

“No, ma'am,” the cop said. “Not in this instance.”

Candace was about to have a stroke. “So that's all?” she said. “A report?”

Wyatt set a hand lightly on her shoulder before she could say anything else. One way or another, the cop was walking out the door of the Land Run in the next thirty seconds. Wyatt figured he might as well walk out friendly, not pissed.

“Thanks very much, Officer,” Wyatt said. “We appreciate all your help.”

“You betcha,” the cop said. He appreciated being appreciated. Who didn't?

After the cop left, Candace turned and punched Wyatt in the ribs with a small brown fist.

“All his help?” she said. “All his
help
?”

“DNA?” he said.

“I know. That was stupid.” She went back behind the bar and started mopping again. “You didn't have to, like, grab me. I wasn't going to go all batshit on him.”

“That wasn't blindingly obvious to me.”

“So do you have any ideas yet? About who's doing this to me?”

Wyatt told her what he'd found out about the new tax initiative.

“There's a good chance the Land Run is going to be worth a lot more than it is now,” he said.

“I don't care! I'm not selling!”

“I'm not asking you to. I'm just letting you know why Jeff Eddy wants to get his hands on it now.”

Candace wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. She flung the sweat away. “So that's all?” she said. “All day yesterday, and that's all you've found out?”

Wyatt really wished he didn't like her as much as he did. If he didn't like her as much as he did, he was pretty sure he'd already be back in Las Vegas by now.

He realized that Candace's daughter, Lily, was up in the balcony again, pale and luminous in the shadows, watching him. He waved at her. After much deliberation she waved back. One finger only, though, the absolute bare-­minimum requirement for a wave. And then she melted away.

“I'm going to check the door,” Wyatt said. He walked past the restrooms, down the short corridor to the back exit. He stepped outside and took a look at the door. Definitely jimmied. Wyatt saw where the wood of the frame had been gouged and splintered. He used his thumb to measure. Maybe a pry bar, but maybe a tire iron. The distinction might matter. It might not.

He took a photo of the door with his phone and then looked out across the back parking lot. The eight-­foot stockade fence ran the full length of the property line, from the street to the east all the way to Land Run's next-­door neighbor on the west, a boarded-­up body shop. Wyatt doubted that whoever wanted to turn Candace's life upside down had entered the back lot from the street side—­it was too exposed, even late at night, with a streetlight only a few yards away.

One of Wyatt's favorite quotes from college was from Flannery O'Connor. She said, or at least this is how Wyatt remembered it, that the writer should never be ashamed of staring—­that there is nothing that does not require the writer's attention.

Or the detective's. So he stared. After a minute he noticed that one of the flat six-­inch cedar planks in the stockade fence—­the plank farthest to the west, flush against the wall of the body shop, seemed to be very slightly lower than the others.

Wyatt walked over. He reached up and gave the plank a shake. It came free. So did the one next to it. The nails that connected the planks to the horizontal rails, Wyatt saw, had been pried out, and the lower rail itself had been sawed away—­the planks had been leaning against the upper rail.

Crouching, sucking in his breath, Wyatt squeezed through the opening that someone had made in the fence. On the other side, a narrow alley—­not even an alley, really, just a dirt track—­cut past the old warehouse directly behind the Land Run. The dirt track appeared to be freshly scuffed.

Wyatt thought about how the Land Run had been turned upside down. There was an element of humor to the delivery, but he suspected that the message itself was earnest. Whoever broke into the bar last night wanted to show Candace, literally and figuratively, how easy it was to turn her life upside down.

Wyatt squeezed back through the fence and went inside. Candace had climbed on top of a card catalog. She was turning the show bills on the wall next to the stage right side up.

“Do you want some help with that?” Wyatt said.

She didn't dignify the question with a glance. “I'm not paying you to turn the stupid posters back around.”

“You're not paying me at all,” Wyatt reminded her.

Candace lifted a show bill off the nail.
“U2, February 17, 1982, 8
P.M.
”

“Dallas and Jonathan are coming in early to help,” she said. “You need to find out Who! Is! Screwing! With! Me!”

“He came through the fence in back. Past the warehouse behind you. He or she or it.”

“Why not ‘they'?”

Maybe. Wyatt just had a feeling. This—­the attention to detail—­didn't feel like a team effort to him.

Candace turned another show bill.
“Tool, December 4, 1992.”

“It's not like this is some gigantic breakthrough,” she said. “That whoever did this came through the fence in back.”

It wasn't. It was a single pinprick in the dark fabric of the night. But put together enough pinpricks and eventually the dawn bled through.

“Come on, baby,” Candace said. “I'm going to take you to mother's day out.”

Wyatt realized that Lily was sitting cross-­legged on the stage. She had teleported down from the balcony.

“Bye, Wyatt,” she said.

“Bye, Lily,” he said.

O
N THE WAY
to his car, Wyatt's phone rang. Laurie. He'd meant to call her back last night. But he'd had a few drinks, he was tired, he didn't like to talk to her unless he could give her his full attention. In Wyatt's opinion that was the secret to a successful relationship. One of the secrets. In love as in life, you had to be
present.

“Tell me what you had for breakfast,” he said. “Tell me what you're wearing. Read me the minutes of the most boring meeting you had yesterday.”

“What time is it there?” Laurie said. “Are you one hour ahead or two?”

“One. Do you have any idea how much I miss you? It's apocalyptic.”

Wyatt checked the bars on his phone.

“Hello?” he said.

“Wyatt,” she said finally. “Are you coming back?”

The question took him by surprise.

“What?” he said. “Am I coming back? What are you talking about?”

“I don't know.”

“Of course I'm coming back. I'll be back in a few days. At most.”

She didn't say anything. Wyatt could picture her expression, her eyes. The one moment out of every million when the surface obscured the depths, when he was blind to whatever the hell was down below.

“Laurie,” he said. “Why would you ask something like that?”

“I don't know.” He heard her sigh. “Since almost the beginning, really, that's how I thought we'd end. I can't explain it. Just this weird sense. That one day you'd just leave and I wouldn't even realize it.”

“What? Laurie. What?”

“What's the longest, Wyatt, you've ever lived anywhere? In one place? Before you had to . . . I don't know.”

Another question that so baffled Wyatt he didn't know how to answer it.

“I love you,” he said. “I want to marry you. I've told you that. I tell you that all the time.”

“You do,” she said, and Wyatt knew the tone, the point. Laurie had said before that he never talked in a real way about making what they had permanent. Whenever they began to talk about it in a real way, according to Laurie, Wyatt turned slippery—­a rubbery, muscular eel, able to flatten and elongate and squeeze away through the most impossibly tiny gap in the conversation.

Well, that was bullshit.

Wyatt took his time. He knew he had to be careful.

“I've told you this, babe,” he said. “The reason I've never had anything last with a woman before—­I've never met the girl of my dreams before. Until I met you. You. And I've moved around a lot because—­ C'mon, Laurie. Who doesn't move around a lot anymore? It's America in the twenty-­first century.”

“I don't care about getting married,” she said. “You know I don't care about that. It's about—­ I want to feel like when we're together, we
are
together. I want to feel like you're
there.
”