Cooler Than Blood Read online

  “I’m not here to—”

  “Bushes are fine.”

  “I’m looking for the—”

  “I already got me someone to do the yard. I appreciate your time.” She started to close the door.

  “—girl you told the police you saw walking with—”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why not? Your mother never teach you manners?”

  “Jake Travis.”

  “See, you can do it. You law, Jake?”

  “No, ma’am. Friend of the family.”

  “‘Cause I told that man with the shoulder that looks likes it wants to fall right off everything I saw. I never spoke to her, just saw her skipping down the street that day. I was out with Happy—he’s my dog. He’s inside eating right now, or he’d be all over you, but you don’t need to worry. I’ll tell you, though…I gotta keep an eye on him. Got one osprey that tracks him every time he’s out, and I’m afraid Happy might just go airborne one day. You see them birds flying with fish in their claws? Can you imagine seeing one with a dog? Lord, what a sight. Plus they screech all day and night. You can barely…”

  A talker. God in heaven, I can’t tolerate talkers. A year ago, I would have said I hate talkers, but Kathleen’s been counseling me on how not to see everything in extremes. How not go through life like a sixteen-pound bowling ball smashing social gutter guards.

  “My cat, Pamela—she’s around here somewhere. Picked her up at the humane society. They got a day in and day out listed for all the animals.” She dialed up her volume and leaned into me. “You believe that? Day out is when they euthanize them. I never thought of dying in those words. I was saying about those birds—”

  Enough.

  “I’m sorry. Your name?”

  “I said, ‘Those hawks give me a headache.’ How do you think his shoulder got like that?”

  “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Never gave it to you. What is this, the first day for your new brain?”

  I blew my breath out, took a step back, and put both my palms up. “Help me.”

  “What?”

  “Help me find this girl.”

  She was quiet for a moment. Maybe there is a supreme power. “Sure. Sure, Jake Travis. I can do that. What are you standing outside for?” She extended her hand. “Patricia Wilkinson.” I stepped over her threshold, and she led me in with a crushing handshake. “You go ahead and call me Patty. All my deceased husband’s friends do. They’re the only men in my life anymore. Besides, I never made a very good Patricia.”

  Two minutes, and a few thousand words later, I drained the last half of a beer Patty had popped on me. I sat on her lanai on a flowered vinyl couch that was under a picture of J. R. Ewing. She burned more calories talking than I did running, but I found myself strangely enjoying her company.

  Don’t think I’m softening down here; I wanted out of her house as soon as possible. I desired to see—and hear—as little of her as possible during my remaining days.

  But I liked her.

  I placed the bottle on a coaster next to a pink-porcelain crocodile ashtray that looked as if it had handled decades of smokes and said, “You noticed that Jenny walked with purpose.”

  “That’s right.” I waited, but no more words spilled forth. I think Patty had run the deck on the English branch of the Proto-Germanic languages.

  “What exactly does that look like?”

  Patty leaned in, and her earrings, like giant pendulums, followed a split second behind her head. “Like I said, I saw her leave the house and head down the street, toward the Laundromat. Told Funny Shoulder that she seemed in a hurry. No purse or nothing. I’d say that was with purpose.”

  “Anything else that convinced you she had purpose?”

  “Yup.”

  “What?”

  “Her feet.”

  Chatty Patty had suddenly gone underground on me. “What about her feet, Patty?”

  “She didn’t have on no shoes.”

  Patty Wilkinson took a sip of her bourbon on the rocks and shifted Happy from one knee to another. Happy’s eyes fluttered open at the minor disruption then returned to dreamland.

  “Did you tell that to Detective McGlashan?”

  “No.” She drained her glass and plopped it down on a side table but left her eyes and hand on it. She fondled the empty glass. “He, if you ask me—you know…” She brought her eyes up to mine. “You younger guys like your beer, but you’ll come around to the real stuff one day. Trust me—we all take that road. Like I was saying, he didn’t really seem all that interested. Know what I mean? Let me ask you something, Jake. What do you think the chances are of any woman walking barefoot on those damn shells that litter this street unless she thought it was just a quick trip or she was in a big-time hurry?”

  I didn’t bother to tell her I’d been down that road. “I imagine slim to—”

  “Mr. Jake, there’s nothing to imagine here. That girl was a scootin’, and I’ll tell you something else too.”

  I waited, but she was done. Patty Wilkinson displayed proficiency in both silence and noise. I kick-started her. “What might that be?”

  “Wherever she is?”

  “Yes?”

  “She got nothin’ on her feet.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Jenny

  Really? I wound up with Angie for a mom, and my dad—the only smile the Almighty ever threw my way—is corralled with 4,129 tick-infested deer and replaced with a pair of exposed armpits with a Hostess Twinkie for a brain. And then, she thought, I reach the promised land only to be attacked by a whacko with an aversion to sunscreen. And now I’m trapped in this horse shed with no shoes. All I wanted was to finally enjoy my youth, and now I’ve got to grow up fast. Warp speed, girl.

  She glanced around for the fifty-thousandth time, but nothing had changed. A single-car garage. Old. A solitary bulb hanging from the rafters by a black wire the thickness of a pencil. The doors hinged on the side and swung out. Green picnic bench seats, eight feet in length, were stacked one atop another. They’d been painted, by Jenny’s estimate, at least three times. When she did sit, she sat on a white Adirondack chair with a broad armrest painted green to match the picnic table benches. Most of the time, she paced. It was five steps before she hit the grill with no propane tank and was forced to turn toward the door. She’d done five gazillion round trips.

  Above her was a rowboat suspended by an old ski rope. Jenny had climbed on top of the green benches to peer inside the aluminum boat. Nothing but old life jackets that held a decade of dust, mouse turds, and a once-white life preserver cushion with a faded blue anchor design on one side and diagrams for tying nautical knots on the other. She didn’t find any of it particularly disgusting. After Boone walked in on her when she was in the shower with his stiff prick that looked like a celery stalk with a swollen mushroom cap on top, then showed his grocery-bag ass on the way out, there wasn’t much the world could serve up to gross Jenny out. A workout mat with two clean sheets abutted one wall and served as her bed. Three bamboo fishing poles that practically ran the length of the garage hung from hooks. Jenny tried not to look at them because when she did it made her miss her father. Not that he, as far as she knew, ever had a bamboo pole, but that didn’t matter. He would know about them and tell her how to use them.

  “Hey, bozo,” she yelled. “I got to pee. You hear me?”

  Bozo only came every four hours. Or was it three? No clue. He wore a green facemask, like the guys she went skiing with at Mad River Mountain, west of Columbus. But those guys were her age and dug the retro look. Her bozo never spoke, just led her to an outhouse with a Liberty Bell knocker on the outside, red shag carpet on the inside, and a black-and-white picture of the TV cast of M*A*S*H on a wall. There—in an outhouse in Florida—stood the final bastion of the seventies.

  The only other structure on the property was a tin-roofed, colorless, single-story home with a front porch. On
e corner was a solid foot higher than the opposite end. A few trees with blankets of Spanish moss, a blue minivan on a gravel lot, and an entire landscape of nothing completed the canvas. Jenny didn’t know Florida could be so empty. They certainly kept that out of the magazines, didn’t they?

  Not that she was supposed to see any of it.

  “Keep that hood on at all times, girl,” Green Mask had told her the first time he’d come to take her to the outhouse. He had placed a burlap sack over her head while they were still in the garage. It smelled like the chicken incubator in Mrs. Sobisky’s first-grade class. That was when Jenny discovered she didn’t like cute things if they smelled. He led her out of the garage and to the outhouse.

  “You put it back on before you come out, or I’ll kill you. Understand?” He closed the outhouse door.

  “Sure,” Jenny had replied. She dropped the sack down the hole and did her business. She stepped out of the outhouse and batted her eyes at the sun.

  “Kill me.”

  He had not.

  Instead, he had inflated the atmosphere with enough air to launch a hot air balloon, jerked her right arm, and yanked her back into the garage. After that, he never covered her head, but it didn’t matter. Jenny never imagined a place so perfectly synchronized—flat and meaningless.

  Her stomach rumbled. Bozo brought food three times a day, and the final time was approaching. He always served the same questions, and she always smacked back the same answers:

  “Where’s the money? What did he tell you?”

  “I don’t know. I already told you.”

  Jenny surveyed the garage. There’s got to be something, she thought. After all, I did Glow Boy with a stick. But she’d already searched the garage and found nothing to use as a weapon. An ancient refrigerator with a pull-down handle and a monotone hum held a case of bottled water. She opened the refrigerator to get a water she didn’t need. She contemplated the bottles for a moment then placed three of them in the freezer. She climbed up to the rowboat, tore the straps off the boat cushion, and put them in the pockets of her shorts.

  She sat. She paced.

  She sat again in the chair and fingered her light blue T-shirt. Still somewhat clean, but how many days would she have to wear it? She leaned back and closed her eyes. Her hands twitched. No phone. She hadn’t gone a day without her iPhone since never.

  She listened to Snow Patrol’s “Run” in her head.

  She performed her mental chants: I’m going to watch a sunset on the beach. I’m going to blaze out of this place. I’m going to wring life until it begs me to stop.

  She did push-ups on the floor. Crunches on the exercise mat.

  She paced. She sat.

  I can’t believe, she thought, that I walked out of Aunt Susan’s house—oops, forgot she doesn’t like that “aunt” stuff, probably reminds her that she’s related to my mom—walked out of Susan’s house without my phone or shoes. Ouch. But he said it was urgent, and what was he doing there in the first place?

  Jerk.

  CHAPTER 9

  I survived the Chatty Patty show and headed to the Laundromat at the end of her street. If Jenny had dashed out to meet someone, and that someone had abducted her in a car, he—or she—most likely would have pulled into the Laundromat parking lot. I decided to drop anchor, throw a line in, and see if I got any bites.

  It was vacant, and a lone dryer hummed a dissonant tone. A corner-ceiling TV was turned off. A fan whipped at high speed and threatened to lift the roof off. I claimed a metal chair and took out the picture of Jenny that Susan had given me. Senior portrait. Confident. Hair the color of sea oats at sunset. The flawless, silky cream skin of the young. Hazel eyes that looked like she’d grown up fast. Kathleen had hazel eyes; on different days, even different times of the same day, they changed colors, as if to foil me so that I could not answer even the simplest of questions; what color are her eyes?

  A guy in a Badgers T-shirt came in. I flashed him the picture, and he said he didn’t recognize the girl and asked if she was my girlfriend or daughter. A lady with flabby arms who wore a Caribbean bluish-green sleeveless top was next. She went to the dryer, and no matter how I smiled or what I said, she was petrified of me. I felt bad for spoiling that special moment that was reserved for when she folded her clean, warm clothes.

  I endured for an hour and talked to three other people. I received an offer for drinks, one to share a toke, and unsolicited advice. “Put her on the board,” said the thin man, who put his wash in with one hand while he held his beer with the other. “You’d be surprised. Everyone who comes in here looks at that thing. Anyone saw her, they’ll let you know. We’re a…” He paused to drain the rest of his beer in one act. “…pretty tight group around here.” He tossed the bottle into a green tin trash can, and it rattled off the inside.

  I got Jenny’s picture out of my shirt pocket and found a pen under a table. I removed from the board someone’s faded notice that they did yard work, trimmed trees, and painted. References upon request. “Request” was spelled with a “g.” I turned the soiled paper over and scribbled on the back, “If anyone has seen this girl, Jenny Spencer, please call me. She’s missing and in possible danger.”

  I took a picture of the picture with my cell.

  I tacked Jenny’s picture onto the bulletin board next to a picture of “Sidney,” a calico cat that was AWOL. “Call Avery. Fifty dollars to whoever finds her.” Smiley faces in each corner. Heavy-stock paper. Strips of cut paper with a phone number hung at the bottom of the notice. A lot of pets in Florida are named Sidney; it’s a variation of Disney.

  I left Jenny hanging next to Sidney and walked out the door. I made a mental note that when I found her, I would get her picture off the board. I couldn’t take the chance that she would ever go in that Laundromat and see herself like that.

  And if I failed? Someone like me would eventually come along, turn my paper over to compose their own notice, see that it was used on both sides, and float Jenny Spencer into the green tin trash can.

  At the condo, I ignored the indolent elevator and took nine fights of steps two at a time. Morgan sat cross-legged on a chair on the screened balcony. He faced a wall of black. At night, on the Gulf, there is nothing.

  “Don’t tell me that you and fire engine lady didn’t ignite,” I said as I dropped into a chair behind a round glass table. I gently pushed the table away to allow myself more room.

  “Teresa had to leave for a couple days. Nothing she could do about it. I told her I’d be back. Teresa Vittjen. It’s good karma when a woman matches her name. How’s the Jenny hunt coming?”

  “Fade into You,” floated out of Morgan’s portable speakers. It’s a song that should never see the day; it belongs to the night and the water. I thought of Kathleen’s theory that the experience one has reading a book may be enhanced by one’s environment while reading. Music certainly affects us that way.

  “No quick scores,” I said. “I don’t want to know the statistics for lost people who are eventually found alive if not located within the first twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Every tick of the clock, and her chances diminish.”

  “Every beat of the second hand, and she’s closer to freedom.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “What’s next?” A cup of tea sat on the glass table, and the faint aroma of whiskey laced the air. The whiskey wasn’t in the essentials box, so I assumed he’d hit the liquor store at Santini Plaza after Fish Head.

  “I need more information on the Coleman clan, but I don’t want to leave Jenny.”

  “What makes you think she’s here?”

  “She’s here. At the twenty-four-hour Laundromat, next to Sidney, listening to the ospreys and parrots.”

  “Monk parakeets,” Morgan said, “also known as Quaker parrots. They’re not indigenous to the United States but were brought here as pets more than fifty years ago and released into the wild.” He took a sip of his tea. “They’re common in Florida but are hardy
little creatures. Supposedly even Chicago has colonies of them. Who’s Sidney?”

  “A cat.”

  He let that go.

  I went to the kitchen, poured a few shots of Maker’s Mark into a tumbler, and dropped in two cubes. I usually add a little Coke, but we didn’t have any. A pity. I returned to the patio, and we sat in silence. When Garrett and I are together, we fill the air with words. Morgan and I can—and often do—fill it with silence.

  I’d never seen Jenny, never heard her voice, never touched her hand. I only knew her aunt, Susan, from a brief encounter at her bar and a dinner we shared afterward. Those brief moments held contempt for any dictum that stated time is a critical ingredient to friendship. Out of seven billion people, I—the only one who really knows what the hell is going on—had been the one to put Jenny on the bulletin board. In many ways, I wish I hadn’t. I’d made her my responsibility. No matter the outcome, I’d be the one who took her down from that board. I would not let that be a tragic moment. It’s not that I wanted to win; I have a strong aversion to failure.

  I went inside and called Susan. After a brief conversation, I secured an airline ticket on my iPad. I went to tell Morgan, but he’d gone to bed. I sat on the porch until my thoughts dried up—an event that coincided with the last drop of bourbon in my tumbler. I left a note on the kitchen counter.

  CHAPTER 10

  The thump of the 737’s tires jolted me from a dream in which Larry Hagman was frantically pacing and protesting, “Who shot me? Who shot me?” What was his problem? Even my alarm clock—especially my alarm clock—Tinker Bell, knows that Bing Crosby’s daughter shot Peter Pan’s little boy.

  After listening to Susan describe Jenny’s dysfunctional family, I doubted Jenny would ever again ford the Ohio River. But I wanted to learn more about the Colemans. Despite McGlashan’s assertion, they were physically too close to Jenny not to have some connection.