Frank shrugged. "I just don't think like that."
"My son. My youngest. He looks up to you so much. Ever since that time you whacked those boys. It's all I hear. Papa, Frank shot all four of 'em, he'd say. Hit four moving targets and three head shots. How many times I've heard that when the kid and I talk about you. You never said shit to me. You never asked him for nothin'. Never asked me for a dime."
"I was glad I was there that day."
"Yeah. Me too," It was a father talking to his son after the baseball game. Telling him how proud he was of the homer the kid clobbered in the bottom of the ninth. And the kind of dedication he gave to The Man was the kind you only give to family. Perhaps, when you think about it, that was his real family. It was certainly the one he devoted his time and energies to.
First, when he failed to hold his wife, it was as if the bedrock on which he was standing suddenly cracked open, and now . . . the thing with his daughter, he felt himself slipping into the abyss.
He was sitting there in the living room in the darkness, waiting for his little girl and thinking about what he could have done to keep Pat, and he heard her coming up the steps and opening the front door.
"You could have had him drive right up. No reason for you to walk all the way from the highway. I wasn't going to go after him with a ball bat. Of course it's not a bad idea."
She didn't even look at him, just started up the stairs.
"That's the last time you'll be allowed out," he said to her. "You get three strikes like everybody else. You've had two. One more and I call the juvenile authorities and turn you over to them. I can't chain you in your room. If the authorities can't take care of you I'll have to hire special guards. Whatever it takes, we'll make sure —" And the sound of Tiff's bedroom door slamming shut on his words put a period to his thought.
Inside her room, Tiff made her decision. She had asked Greg about what they were going to do and he wanted to cut out for Florida. She said, Let's sleep on the idea and they'd talk at school tomorrow. Roger Nunnaly had his fill of school and they could go with Roger in his car. They'd all take off for the South. Lots of fun in the sun. Lots of wild scenes on the beach. It sounded great to Tiff. She started packing and then realized she'd never get the clothes out of the house past . . . him. She dumped her books out of her voluminous book bag and began to pack the essentials into the bag and her biggest purse.
She had some money saved. Quite a bit, in fact. And there was the jewelry. She packed her dowery in silence.
And downstairs, the man who calls himself Spain sits quietly in the shadows.
"Are we really going to leave? I just can't believe it," she had asked Greg, her cat's eyes blinking as she looked at her white knight.
"Believe it," he told her, starting to load the car. Are we really gonna turn out a sweet little pussy like this? Does a snake have lips? he thought to himself, grinning and whistling softly as he packed the last of their meager belongings in Roger's car. He'd put this little fox to work for him.
Within twenty-four hours of the kids' departure everyone involved in the respective families knew they'd left together, including Pat and her insurance lothario, not to mention the cops. Too many people were involved in this. Whole families had suddenly been turned upside down. Spain had ended up having to talk to the police several times, which to him was the equivalent of repeatedly plunging his hands into boiling water, but anathema or not, his daughter had disappeared. He had to find her.
"They'll catch them before the day is out," Roger Nunnaly's father had assured everyone, "that car will stand out a mile."
The private Spain had suddenly become very public, sharing secrets with perfect strangers, not to mention the cops, all of whom were now involved in his personal decision-making.
People he'd never seen in his life were seated in his living room telling him ridiculous things about runaway hotlines and dope and how young girls can use sex to ensare a poor, innocent boy like Greg Dawkins, whom Spain had nailed for what he was first time he saw him, and some kid named Roger who sounded like a crackhead known to everyone but his own parents. And Spain sat there letting it all lap over him as they talked about how his wife and daughter had both run away from him, and almost overnight life had become a steamroller that was crushing the shards of what remained of his shattered ego.
But there was no loving wife to take him aside and say, There, there now, honey, it's going to be all right. You tried your best, Daddy. You just forgot that fathering is a skill as well as an art. And it's a skill that demands practice as well as good intentions. And nobody was there to tell him that Tiff was hurting too. That when you're fourteen years old, frustrations and humiliations are deep knife wounds. Wounds that can be fatal if not treated in time.
He was alone to take it all and deal with it. And that next night, after all the Dawkinses and Nunnalys and police and juvenile authorities had cleared out, he sat there in the dark feeling like he was having a heart attack, and it all came to sit on him with its enormous weight of guilt, and he sat there sobbing and hurting in the darkness of his fine home and began paying dues with currency he didn't even know he had.
And he was still there the next morning, sitting there on the carpeted stairway, racked with the dry heaves, on the edge of breakdown, consumed with guilt, nailed by despair, and absolutely, painfully, heartbreakingly alone.
And half of him was sorry for himself and the other half wasn't, and slowly, like the hard, seemingly stout heart of a diseased gum tree, he began to crack apart deep inside.
So Spain sits there on the edge of his reality, in the gathering debris of his life, well and truly screwed, blued, and subdued.
And the shadow of death edges closer.
Eichord fingered the edges of a few cards and scowled slightly. Christian's Cards and the ritzy mall in which it was situated — both brimming with purposeful, moneyed Californians and a smattering of ordinary commoners like himself — were as far removed and remote as the constellation of Andromeda. Another distant and far-removed spot on the planet, Chicago by name, kept nudging him.
He felt totally out of place in the shop, among genteel, immaculate women clerks and genteel, immaculate customers who regularly frequented such a place. Eichord stood looking at humorous greeting cards in the midst of the L.A. work day, such as it was; a homicide cop feeling the proverbial bull-in-china-shop as he sweated through his short-sleeved shirt, handgun harness, and stylish polyester.
The weight of the heavy revolver in the shoulder rig, the incongruity of the surroundings, the knowledge he was looking at cutesy cards with all that bad steel under his arm, made him feel ludicrous, out of place, quite uncomfortable. A trickle of perspiration trailed down his spine as a small and perfectly coined woman with a slightly rodentlike face asked him pleasantly, "Can I help you with something?"
He smiled automatically as he shook his head. "Just looking. Thanks." Brilliant. She would never have guessed you were looking. He was standing there trying to figure out which of the crazy cards a little girl would like. He was trying to recall what her age was now. He had her birthdate written down somewhere, but he'd forgotten where. He looked at another card and it made even less sense than the last one.