Unless you can provide more information relative to this woman, there’s no hope of finding her. Can you tell us her age, where she was born, something about her family, mother, father, brothers, sisters, where she was educated, where she was married, or any information about her past? Without such information to develop leads, there is simply no hope of finding her.
No hope of finding her. He had been living in Oklahoma City then, using the name Fry. He had driven to Bakersfield. Two hard days and nights on the highway. In Nevada, he’d decided his name probably wasn’t Fry. Maybe it was Maddox, but it wasn’t Fry. He remembered Fry faintly – a round, dark, pock-marked face, a round belly, a sullen, unhappy mouth. They had lived with him in San Jose and Colton had been Colton Fry in school there. He’d assumed Fry was his father. Perhaps it was someone named Maddox. Colton could remember no one by that name. Somewhere west of Las Vegas, he’d decided to choose a neutral name for himself. He’d use it only until he could find his mother. She’d tell him his real name. She’d tell him about his father, and his grandparents. And about the family home. It would be in a small town, Colton thought, and there’d be a graveyard with tombstones for the family. When he found her, she’d tell him who he was. Until then, he’d pick a last name. Something simple. He picked Wolf.
The coffee was perking now on the butane burner. Through the aluminum walls of the trailer came the sound of a truck’s air horn blaring on the freeway. Colton was not conscious of either sound. He was remembering arriving in Bakersfield, the drive to the old neighborhood. The Mexican woman who came to the door spoke no English, but her daughter had talked to him. She knew nothing of a thin, blue-eyed blond woman named Linda Betty, nor of a burly man named Buddy Shaw. He could see the girl now, nervous at his questioning. And he could see the cracked concrete steps as he left the porch – no more broken now than they had been when he was eleven and had sat on them those nights when Buddy Shaw and his mother were drunk, had sat waiting for Shaw to go to sleep so that he could slip in.
Colton had stood beside his pickup, looking back at the house. The sparse grass he remembered was no longer there, the glass in one window was replaced by plywood. But otherwise it looked much the same. The last time he had seen it was the day after his twelfth birthday – the last time he had come home. The boy he knew at school had said he couldn’t stay at his house any longer and he had walked home to see if Buddy Shaw had sobered up, and if Buddy Shaw would let him return. He had found the house empty. He had peered through the windows and seen the kitchen stripped of his mother’s pans, and the bathroom stripped of her toiletries. But in the room where he slept, his things were still scattered. The bedclothing was gone from the cot, but the blue jacket his mother had got for him somewhere was still hanging on its peg. And his books were there. And his cap. He had broken a window and gone inside, cutting his hand in his panic. There had been nothing except the old furniture that had been there when they moved in and his own spare clothing.
Colton Wolf stirred uneasily in the recliner. All the desolation of that discovery came back to him again – the sense of loss and confusion and rejection, and with it the bleak, hopeless loneliness. Where could she be? How could he find her? Why had she gone? On the burner, the percolator gave a final cough and fell silent, its duty done. Colton Wolf ignored the sound, if he heard it. He was considering the same questions he’d considered for nineteen years.
A few minutes after one-thirty, he pushed himself out of the recliner and poured a cup of coffee. He took it to the truck, to sip as he drove. At a pay booth beside Central Avenue he made the call. He dialed the El Paso, Texas, area code, and the prefix number, and then waited while the second hand of his watch swept toward 2:10. Then he completed the dialing. He dropped in the coins and heard the number ring just a moment before the second hand swept past his deadline.
It was answered instantly. “This is Boxholder,” the voice said. That address had become something of a joke between them. A joke and a code.
“Okay,” Colton said. “Boxholder here, too.”
“We have another opportunity in New Mexico,” the voice said. “One thing led to another, I guess.”
“Same client?” Colton asked.
Silence. “We never talk about clients,” Box-holder said. “Remember?”
“Sorry,” Colton said.
“Conditions are a lot the same, though. The subject won’t be on guard. And there’s a hurry.”
“How much hurry?” Colton asked. Hurry bothered him. And his voice showed it.
“Nothing specific,” Boxholder said. “Just the quicker the better. Every day increases the risk. So forth.”
“I don’t like to rush things,” Colton said. “Things go wrong.”
“You don’t have to handle it,” Boxholder said. “Maybe you’d better not. But I know you wanted to clean up that original business, and that kept you in Albuquerque anyway, and…”
“I think I’ll have the other business finished in twenty-four hours or so,” Colton said. “Maybe tonight.”
“Well, that’s all we’re committed to. After that’s done we’ve kept the original contract.” Boxholder chuckled. “Took a little longer than anybody figured, but what the hell?” Silence. “I thought maybe you’d like to show these folks how good you usually are.”
Colton grimaced. Boxholder assumed the thought of a dissatisfied customer would bother him. That was correct. Boxholder assumed he took intense pride in his work. That was also correct. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
Boxholder told him. Then, as they always did, they arranged the time and telephone number for Colton’s report.
Colton used up three hours. He walked. He dropped the letter he had written to Webster Investigations into a mailbox. It contained his check for $1,087.50 and a note suggesting that Webster run personal ads in West Coast newspapers asking Linda Betty Shaw/Fry/Maddox to contact him. He walked some more. He sat on the bench at a bus stop. The bus stop was near a school crossing and he studied the homeward-bound students. They seemed to be junior-high age and younger, and most of them walked in little clusters and bunches, talking. Once a single kid came along, all by herself. Colton guessed the single was somebody who had just moved to the neighborhood. If you did that, you couldn’t make friends, because everybody already had them. When he was eight they had lived in San Diego in this one apartment almost a year and he had made a friend there. And then when he was fourteen and had been in Taylorville long enough, he had made a friend on two. But that was different. In reform school nobody knew anybody at first and everybody was looking for connections. Taylorville had been a pretty good place, all in all, and he’d been glad enough to go back for his second stretch. They kept the gays off of you in Taylorville. Not like in Folsom, where he’d done his armed robbery time.