He knows he’s going to be leaving here soon.
He knows he’s going to get out of this bed, and shower in this lady’s bedroom, put on his Jockey shorts and his jeans and his denim shirt, and his socks and loafers, and then either take a taxi or ask her to drive him to the truck stop where he’s parked the rig, knows he is going to walk out of this bedroom, and out of this house, and never see this woman again. Because no matter what Eminem has to say about opportunity knocking just once or whatever the words were, seize the moment, seize the music, he knows that maybe such dreams are okay for a talented kid on 8-Mile Road, but they’re just not there for people like Rafe who don’t know how to rhyme.
Opportunity may have come knocking when he learned about all those phony bills out there someplace, and maybe it kept knocking and knocking when he found this beautiful passionate woman willing to chase the dream with him, but man, there is no way on earth he is going to find those two chicks sitting on that fake bread, no way in the world at all. He has tried to seize the moment and the music, but his hands have closed on nothing but thin air.
So he knows he will now go back.
Knows he will go back to Carol and the kids, knows in his deepest heart that eventually he will go back to jail, too, that’s what recidivism is all about. It’s all about making the same mistakes over and over again. Going back home again to a woman he no longer loves and kids he never wanted, going back on the shit again, too, and getting caught with it, and going back to jail as a three-time loser who once upon a time heard opportunity knocking, and opened the door to let it in, and found nobody standing there, nobody at all.
It’s kind of sad, really.
It’s kind of so fucking sad.
She drives him to where he parked the rig.
They stand outside the cab in the harsh bright overhead lights, and they hold hands, both hands, his outstretched to hers, hers clasped in his, and he tells her he’s sorry this didn’t work out the way he was hoping it would, tells her he can still think of a hundred and six ways the two of them together could have spent all that money. He tells her he’s never met a woman like her in his entire life, tells her that these few days he’s spent with her have been the happiest days in his life, he wants her to believe that. He tells her that there are a couple of things he still has to straighten out back home in Atlanta, but that as soon as he’s taken care of these few little odds and ends, he’ll be coming back down here to Florida, where he hopes she’ll be waiting for him.
“Wait for me, Jenny,” he tells her, though she’s asked him not to call her Jenny, but he’s already forgotten this.
Still holding both her hands in his, he draws her close to him, and kisses her on the mouth. She kisses him back. They pull apart from each other at last, still holding hands, and he nods silently and solemnly, and finally drops her hands and climbs into the cab and rolls down the window.
“I’ll be back soon,” he promises, and starts the engine.
She watches as he backs the truck out of its space. She watches as he drives it over to the exit. Before he pulls out onto U.S. 41 North, he waves back at her from the open window. Then he is gone.
She walks over to where she parked the red convertible. She puts the key into the ignition, and sits there for a long while without starting the car. Then, aloud, she says, “You’re all so full of shit,” and starts the car, and turns on the radio very loud, and drives out of the lot.
Monday
May 17
14
Sally Ballew calls her boss at eight-thirty in the morning. She sounds jubilant. She tells him that GTE here in Florida was able to provide a New Orleans phone number for the call made to Harper Realty in Calusa Springs.
She tells him that Ma Bell in New Orleans was able to give them the name of the subscriber for that number, and the name wasn’t Clara Washington, it was Edward Graham, no middle initial.
She tells him that the FBI’s regional office up there in the Big Easy was able to obtain a list of calls made from Edward Graham’s number to Florida in general and more specifically to Cape October, and one of the numbers called was for a marina out on Crescent Island.
She tells him that a call to that marina…
“Which happens to be called Marina Blue,” she says, “which I think is what the little girl was trying to tell her mother on the phone…”
“Uh-huh,” Stone says.
“A call to the marina,” she says, “confirmed that a man named Edward Graham booked docking space there for the months of April and May—”
“Have you been watching television?” Stone asks.
“No. What? Television? No. Why?”
“It’s been on television since late last night,” Stone says.
“What’s been on television?”
“The woman shot him. They got both him and his accomplice. Her husband and his bimbo.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sally says.
“The Glendenning woman. Her husband never drowned, Sally. In fact, he’s still alive after she plugged him three times. They got the woman, too. Where’ve you been, Sally?”
“I’ve…”
Sally looks at the list of phone numbers she’s been calling.
“Who gets credit for the bust?” she asks.
“A security guard at the marina,” Stone says.
There are television cameras all over Alice’s front yard when Charlie gets there at nine-fifteen that morning. Her sister’s Explorer is still parked in the driveway. He pushes his way through all the microphones being thrust at him, and almost knocks a young reporter on his ass as he shoves his way to the front door and rings the doorbell.
“Are you a cop?” a woman reporter asks him.
“I’m a painter,” he says, and rings the doorbell.
The door opens. The crowd of reporters instantly surges forward, but Charlie has already eased his way in.
“You okay?” he asks Alice.
“Fine, Charlie.”
“The kids?”
“Asleep.”
“Did they book you?”
“Not yet.”
“Will they?”
“I don’t think so. They said there’d be an investigation.”
“You should’ve seen her,” Carol says proudly.
“I almost killed him, Charlie.”
“You should have,” Charlie says. “Is there any coffee?”
The story that runs in Dustin Garcia’s column that morning makes it sound as if the Cape October Tribune, and more particularly Dustin Garcia himself, played a major role in locating and apprehending the couple who’d kidnapped the Glendenning children.
Were it not for the fabricated story this columnist reported in the “Dustbin” yesterday, the perpetrators would not have ventured to be so bold as to…
And so on.
No Pulitzer prize maybe, Garcia thinks, but close enough for a cigar.
At ten past eleven, Reginald Webster appears at Alice’s front door. Through the peephole, she sees behind him a phalanx of reporters still waiting patiently for a glimpse of her. It appears that she has achieved fifteen minutes of fame she is not especially eager to claim.
“Want me to get rid of him?” Charlie asks.
“No,” she says, and opens the door.
Flashbulbs pop, and cameras begin rolling. The same woman who earlier asked Charlie if he was a cop now shouts, “How’d it feel to shoot your own husband, Mrs. G?”
“Good morning, Alice,” Webb says.
“Good morning, Webb,” she says.
“Was your little girl molested?” a male reporter shouts.