Camped out alone at a corner table, I stared down at the double shot of Cuervo the young waitress with the black lipstick had dropped off. I wanted so badly to feel the tequila burn all the way down my throat and into my stomach, to cloud my mind and help me forget as only tequila can, if only for one night.
I picked up the glass. I held it to my lips. I set it back down.
Over and over, the exercise repeated itself until sobriety ultimately won out. I never took a sip. Not because I feared that after so many years of being clean, I might end up in detox, and not because the Buddha warned that practitioners of his teachings should keep their minds clear and lucid at all times. No, what deterred me from getting smashed that night was unadulterated rage.
I couldn’t very well find and kill the man who’d murdered Savannah and Chad Lovejoy if I were inebriated.
“Hi.”
I looked up from my drink. Standing across the table, smiling at me, was a buxom, thin-waisted brunette in her mid-twenties. Gray-green eyes. Nice full lips. Black turtleneck. Black ski jacket. Jeans tucked into calfskin knee boots. She was no beauty queen, but nobody, as the old saying goes, would’ve tossed her out of bed for eating crackers.
“You mind if I sit here?” she said. “This place is crazy crowded.”
I gestured: have a seat.
“Great, thanks.” She pulled out the stool to my right and offered me her hand. “I’m Jessica, by the way.”
“Logan.” We shook. “You want some tequila, Jessica?”
“Sure.”
I slid my glass over. “Cuervo. Haven’t touched it.”
Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” was playing on the bar’s megaspeakers.
“You don’t want it?” Jessica asked over the music.
I shook my head no.
“Can’t let premium liquor go to waste,” she said.
She slugged it down like a marine.
“Is Logan your first or your last name?”
“Last.”
“You come to Tahoe often?”
“Hardly ever.”
“You seem sad to me.”
“Do I?”
“You do. You have this, like, aura or something. It’s pretty creepy, really.”
I told her it was a long story, and that she seemed like too nice a young lady to be burdened by it.
“Well, whatever it is,” she said, resting a comforting hand on mine, “I’m really, really sorry.”
A tall, skinny white guy with dark, greasy hair came barging through the crowd, sloshing a sixteen-ounce glass of beer. Black jeans. Black hoodie. Black Oakland Raiders cap pulled down low over his ears, Compton gangster style.
“What the hell, Jessica,” he said accusingly as her hand quickly retreated from mine. “You said you were with me.”
“Dude, chill,” Jessica said. “I just needed a place to sit down, that’s all.”
I recognized him before he did me: Preston Kavitch, the panty-sniffing creeper from the Tranquility House Bed-and-Breakfast. Even in the dim light of the bar, I could see the blood drain from his face as he realized who I was.
“What’re you doing here?”
“I was just leaving.”
I stood to go.
“Thanks for the drink,” Jessica said.
“This guy trashed my parents’ house, and you let him buy you a drink?” Preston was pissed, slurring his words, a little drunk. “He thinks I killed his chick. Can you believe that?”
“He thinks you did what?” Jessica stared at him with her mouth open, then at me.
I walked on — or tried to, anyway.
“Hey, where you going, man?” Preston said. “I’m talking to you, asshole.”
Blame what happened next on muscle memory. He clamped his hand on my right arm as I walked past him. In one fluid motion, I drove my right elbow into his midsection, shrugging off his grip, turned back, and snagged his wrist, bending it outward. With no option other than following the direction of his wrist or feel it splinter like a turkey bone, Preston crashed to the floor as the après-ski crowd scurried to get out of the way.
“Did you see that?” he screamed to no one in particular, sitting on the floor and holding his wrist, writhing in pain. “He assaulted me!”
“You deserved it,” Jessica said as she slid off her stool and made her way toward the ladies’ room.
“Call the cops! I’m filing charges!” Preston shouted.
Everyone seemed to ignore him as I headed for the exit. Nobody tried to stop me.
The red message light was blinking on the room phone when I got back to the Econo Lodge. Gil Carlisle, Savannah’s mega-wealthy oilman father, had called, weeping. At the crime scene that morning, Deputy Streeter had offered to notify Savannah’s next of kin so that I wouldn’t have to. I’d given him Carlisle’s name. Streeter in turn apparently had given Carlisle my number at the motel. Carlisle wanted me to call him back as soon as possible, to fill him in on the details of his daughter’s death.
I had a moral obligation to do so. I understood that. I’d been married once to his daughter. I probably should’ve alerted him when she first went missing. It would’ve been the decent thing to do, certainly the less cowardly. Yet I hesitated. How do you explain to your former father-in-law, a captain of industry used to having his way in virtually everything, that the death of the child he loved more than anyone on this planet was fundamentally your fault? In what manner do you initiate that dialogue? I was too spent to sleep, too numb to cry. So I simply sat there, frozen and inert, and did nothing for a very long time — until the room phone rang, jarring me from my catatonic haze. I forced myself to pick up the handset.
“Hello?”
“It’s Gil Carlisle.”
I offered the only words I could think to say.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You should be, you son of a bitch.”
Gone was the deceptively honeyed twang in his voice. Gone, too, was any semblance of the weeping, disconsolate father. The Gil Carlisle on the other end of the line was a man, in the parlance of his native West Texas, fit to be tied. He told me he couldn’t believe it when Savannah called him, to tell him we were getting remarried. He counseled her against it, he said, told her I was a loser, and that’s what I’d always be. But she wouldn’t listen to him.
“Why did you have to go and find that airplane?”
“I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times, Gil.”
“Why didn’t you call me back?”
“I was going to.”
“When?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You didn’t call me when she got taken, either,” Carlisle said. “I could’ve done something. Brought in help, you son of a bitch.”
“I should’ve called you. I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that! ‘Sorry’ don’t bring my daughter back, goddamn it.”
“I don’t blame you for being mad at me, Gil.”
“You don’t blame me? Well, that’s mighty white of you, Logan. I’m gonna tell you something, son, that I should’ve told you a helluva long time ago: the worst day of my life was the day my cherished, beautiful daughter crossed paths with your sorry ass.”
I couldn’t much blame him for saying that, either.
“She told me she was pregnant. Couple months along. That true?”
“Yes.”
“You were gonna get married, make a decent woman out of her. That true, too?”
“She already was a decent woman.”
“Well, whoopty-damn-do. You thought she was decent. That don’t mean a damn thing to me, you know that? You don’t mean a damn thing to me.”
Carlisle told me he would dispatch his private jet to retrieve Savannah’s remains as soon as the coroner released them. Her funeral would be in Las Vegas, where he lived. I wouldn’t be invited. If I showed up, Carlisle vowed, he’d have Nevada authorities arrest me on the spot for trespassing.