Sean sighed. “Man, you just don’t quit, do you?”
“Something’s going on, Sean. Something with Claire. I don’t know what it is yet, but you answering my questions, it helps. I’m not looking to make trouble for you. I just want to find Claire.”
“What me and Hanna are doing, it’s got nothing to do with Claire.”
“Why don’t you let me decide that?”
Another sigh, then, “Okay, so, we get stuff people want, you know, to drink, and we deliver it.”
“You and Hanna. Using your Ranger?”
“Yeah.”
“Just to friends?”
“Like, anybody. Word gets around, people have a couple numbers they can call, they say they need some rye or vodka or beer or whatever, and we deliver.”
“With a markup.”
“Well, yeah. We’re not doing it for nothing.”
“How do you get it? You and Hanna aren’t old enough to be buying booze in bulk.”
Sean’s lips stayed pressed together.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You need someone who’s twenty-one, who can pick up everything you need. Roman.”
He looked at me. He didn’t have to admit it. I could tell from his expression.
“Roman gets a cut of what you and Hanna make?”
Sean nodded.
“You just work Griffon?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We kinda go all over. Lewiston, Niagara Falls, Lockport. If the order’s big enough. Thing is, it used to be easy to go over the border for a drink. But now, you gotta have a passport to get into Canada and back, so more kids, we gotta do it on this side. There’s a market, you know?”
“How much you make?”
“We usually only do it on Saturdays, maybe on a Friday night, too. We can make a couple hundred.”
I smiled. It was entrepreneurial, to be sure. But risky, too. Driving into neighborhoods they didn’t know, a truck full of liquor, large sums of cash. Pretty dumb, all things considered.
We rode for a minute in silence. Then I said, “I’ve got one last question for you. Not about Hanna, or Claire, or any of this.”
Sean waited.
“At Patchett’s, when I told you my name, and you asked if I was Scott’s father, the first thing you said was that you didn’t know anything about what happened to him.”
“I don’t.”
“I hadn’t even asked you anything. You came out with that pretty fast.”
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then, “I got another friend, Len Eggleton. Maybe you know who I’m talking about.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Len says one night, this guy came to see him, said he wanted to know who sold his kid some X. Len said this guy, he’d heard a rumor that Len dealt the stuff, even though, far as I know, Len’s never been into that kind of thing. Just weed, you know.”
I still said nothing.
“So anyway, Len says no way, he never sold or gave this guy’s kid any X, and the guy, then he’s all, okay, if Len didn’t give it to the kid, maybe he knows who did. And Len says no fucking way, he doesn’t know, and the guy, he says maybe Len needs time to think about his answer, and he grabs Len and he stuffs him into the trunk of Len’s car. Len’s, like, he’s totally claustrophobic, and just about freaks out, so the guy lets him out, and I think he actually kind of believes Len now, that he really doesn’t know who gave the kid the X, but the guy, he tells Len if he tells anybody about what just happened, he’ll put the word out that he did give up a name. Len was scared shitless, so he never told his parents or the cops or anyone else but me and a couple of other friends.”
It was very quiet in the car.
“So,” Sean concluded, “that’s why, when I saw you, I told you right out that I didn’t know anything. Because I didn’t want to end up in a trunk like Len. That’s why Roman decked you. He was trying to save my ass.”
I shot him a startled look, but said nothing. I pulled the car over to the shoulder, eased to a stop, and put it in park.
“We’re here,” I said. “This is where I dropped Hanna off.”
Twenty
We both got out and stood a moment in the cool night air. Unlike twenty-four hours before, there was no rain. There was the sound of distant traffic, and the occasional vehicle that went right by us, but other than that it was very quiet.
A few car lengths up, the traffic light changed. The businesses were closed, and there were few lights on in the homes that were sandwiched between them.
“You let her out here?” Sean said. “This is, like, the middle of nowhere.”
“She tried to jump out of the car when it was moving. I had to pull over. I couldn’t force her to stay.” I was trying to convince myself as much as Sean.
“Seems like a shitty thing to do,” he said.
I went around to the back of the car, used my remote to pop the trunk. Sean spun around, a nervous look on his face.
“Don’t worry, I’m just getting a flashlight,” I told him, and grabbed a heavy Maglite I kept in there, along with other tools of the trade, like a bright orange safety helmet that would allow you to go almost any place you wanted when you put it on your head, as well as a laptop, a mini-printer, even a Kevlar vest I’d kept from my days as a cop but had never worn since. I closed the trunk, joined Sean, and clicked the light on.
“When she jumped out,” I said, “she ran that way.”
“Why are we doing this?” he asked. “This doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“This is where Hanna called you from. Last thing she did was show me she had a phone, which I took to mean she was going to call someone else for a ride.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“She called you. And got interrupted. Right now, it looks like you’re the last person we know who’s spoken to her. It happened around here. So I want to look around. Over here, by these bushes, that’s where she tossed her wig.”
I cast the flashlight beam around the shrubs. Panned it low first, then went higher, in case the wig had caught on a branch before it hit the ground.
“There,” I said.
We closed the distance. I went down to one knee and took hold of the wig, tentatively at first, like it was a piece of roadkill. “This look like the wig?” I asked him.
“I think,” Sean said.
“Me, too. How many wigs can you expect to find along the side of the road?”
“I guess.”
I got up, heard my knee crack. I walked back to the car, unlocked it, and set the wig on the backseat.
“Let’s head up this way,” I said, pointing to the corner. “When she got to the corner, she turned right.”
I kept scanning my flashlight across the sidewalk, using it like a white cane. I didn’t know what I was looking for, if anything, but it seemed like a detective-ish thing to do. When we hit the corner, I saw that the cross street went only about a hundred yards before there was a short bridge. Just this side of it, on the right, was a house that looked as though it had been knocked down in one windstorm and reassembled by the next. Boards askew, eaves hanging loose. But there was activity here. Three people sitting on the sagging porch, drinking beer, sitting in what were once, perhaps in another millennium, living room chairs that now had the stuffing exploding from them.
“Hey,” I said as we came up in front of the house.
There were two women, heavyset, and a thin, bearded man between them. All in their sixties, I guessed, enjoying a night of getting buzzed in the evening air.
“Hi,” said the man. “How you boys doing tonight?”
“We’re good,” I said. “My name’s Cal, and this is my friend Sean. We wonder if you might be able to help us.”
“You lost?” the man asked. “’Cause I can’t imagine anyone would intend to be walking along here at night unless they was.”