12th of Never

Chapter 94

WE WERE BRINGING up the rear of the Randy Fish motorcade, the cherubic serial killer and his armed guards bumping along ahead of us on the patchy road.

I swore as our right front wheel slammed into a pothole on Amador Street, jarring my teeth and snapping my last nerve.

Conklin muttered, “Sorry.”

A thermos rolled off the front seat into the foot well, and as I bent to pick it up my partner jerked the wheel and I banged my head into the underside of the glove compartment.

“Hey!” I said.

“The road is like Swiss cheese, Linds. I’m doing my best.”

“Do better.”

It was getting late, sometime after five, and as the sun bled out, I felt a strong pull to be with Joe and Julie. Yesterday at this time, I’d been checking in with Martha’s dogsitter, then heading down to the basement cafeteria for mac and cheese with Joe.

My heart and soul were at Saint Francis.

But I was also being pulled toward a self-storage locker down the street, on the outskirts of nowhere. We hit a good length of road and Conklin gunned the engine. We sped past a rendering plant on our right and a cement factory on our left. Straight ahead, a spotlighted American flag flew at the entrance to the USA U-Store-It facility.

On Parker’s tail, we took a right turn into the asphalt-paved lot lined with rows of garage-type storage units, with their alternating red, white, and blue roll-up doors. We braked next to Parker’s SUV, in front of a red unit marked with the number 23.

We got out of the car and watched as the transport van containing the prison guards and a chained and shackled Randy Fish was unlocked and unloaded.

Parker tacked a notice to the wall, then took a bolt cutter to the padlock and rolled up the door. Fish swung his head around, saw me, then grinned and said, “Hey, Lindsay. It’s great that you’re here. This is going to be a very big moment for you.”

I looked at him, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I might tell him that he disgusted me, that the next time I saw him, I hoped he’d be strapped to a gurney, looking at the people whose daughters he had killed, parents who had come to witness his last breath.

Randy Fish didn’t read my mind, or, if he did, he didn’t care what I was thinking. He looked excited, but under control. Like one of those guys on the show Storage Wars who had just won an abandoned unit at auction for cheap, and suspected that a ‘64 Corvette was inside, all its original parts in mint condition.

I followed Fish’s gaze, but it was getting too dark to see into the shadows.

Conklin left my side, turned on our headlights, and the storage unit brightened. Everyone turned to face the locker as if an alarm had gone off.

No one coughed or fidgeted or said a word.

We were all waiting for Randy Fish to produce the body of a teenage girl who wouldn’t stop screaming.