Crashed

39

Wendy’s eyes widened in panic when she saw what was in my hand. She stuck her tongue between her teeth, bit down on it, and took a step backward. For a second, I thought she was going to close the door in my face. She yelled, “Jennie.”

Louie said to me, “Why isn’t this kid in school?”

“She’s a full-time student in the School of Life,” I said.

“Kid like this,” Louie said righteously, “she oughta be learning stuff.”

“I am,” Wendy said. Then she called, more loudly this time, “JENNIE.”

“I’m peeing,” Jennie shouted. “Is that okay with you? Am I supposed to get permission or something?” I heard a door open, and Wendy glanced to her left and said, “Pull your pants up. Junior’s here with some little guy.”

“Little?” Louie said.

“She means like cute,” I said.

“Hey, Junior,” Jennie said, coming around the door. Then she saw the phone in my hand and stopped like some character in Ovid, turned into a stone fountain or something.

“You guys left something out last night,” I said. I waved the phone back and forth. “And it’s sort of important.”

“I don’t know what you’re-” Jennie began.

“I saw your eyes in the restaurant when I mentioned Jimmy,” I said. “And you should have seen your sister’s face just a second ago. Don’t look at Wendy like that. You weren’t exactly Miss Cool, either.”

The two of them stood there, their eyes drifting downward, identical expressions of thought on their faces. “Why don’t we come in,” I said, “and you can tell me about it.”

. “Thistle had been really scared about doing that movie. She was taking too much stuff, and I got scared that maybe she’d try something stupid, you know, something to, uh, hurt herself. So I went back over.”

“What time?”

“A little after midnight.” Louie and I were sitting on the double bed, Jennie having cleared a spot for us simply by throwing onto the floor everything that had been in the space we now occupied. She and Wendy sat on the floor, or what would have been the floor if it hadn’t had a couple of inches of stuff on top of it.

“You kids were up at midnight?” Louie said.

“Louie,” I said. “Just bottle all the paternal outrage and let these young ladies tell me what happened.”

“So I was worried. I took the car and went back over. When I was looking for a place to park, I saw the Porsche. We’d seen it before, when we went to see Thistle the first time that day.”

“She means she saw it,” Wendy said. “She thought the guy was hot.”

“So I came back and parked a couple of spaces away, and I saw that his cell phone was on the street, just under the driver’s door. It had broken apart, you know how they do that? So the little door on the back pops off and the, the battery comes out?” She licked her lips and swallowed, coming up on the hard part of the story.

“I know,” I said. “Happens to mine all the time.”

“So I picked it up, and I, um … I-” She passed a hand over her hair, although it was already neatly brushed. “I went to, like, hand it to him.” She broke off, blinking hard.

“And you saw him.”

She nodded. “I was just really, really scared,” she said. “I suddenly thought, oh, Jesus, he was there to watch Thistle. I mean nobody else interesting lives there, just trailer trash and dopers and stuff like that. Who else would this really cool-looking guy, in a Porsche, and all, be … But he was all bloody. And his eyes were open. It was almost like he could see me, like there was still something in him that could see me but it was just miles and miles away, whatever it was, like there was some long dark tunnel behind his eyes and he was looking down it at me.” She swallowed, hard. “And then I thought, Oh my god, what about Thistle? I mean, maybe she was dead, too.”

Her voice had climbed up a couple of notes, and Louie surprised me by leaning over and putting a hand on her shoulder and saying, “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay. We’re all here now.”

Jennie nodded once, then twice, and looked over at Wendy. Wendy put an arm around her waist.

“So I went up to Thistle’s apartment and I used the key she gave me.”

“You’re a brave girl,” I said.

“Thistle’s my friend. So anyway, she was there. I mean, she was out and everything, but she was there. I’d seen her worse. I put her white robe over her like a blanket and came back down. I looked at the Porsche again and just got really scared, and ran all the way home. I even forgot my car. I didn’t know I still had the phone in my hand until Wendy asked me where I got it.”

“Because we don’t have one,” Wendy said. “So she told me how she got it, and we tried to figure out what to do with it.”

“You called me,” I said.

“I didn’t know it was you. It was the last number he dialed, and the time, you know how you can see the time the call was made, well, it was only about fifteen minutes before I–I found him. And I figured, probably, you know, he was trying to call some kind of friend. I thought if I dialed it and didn’t say anything, whoever it was would know something was wrong. There was nothing anybody could do for him, but, I mean, it seemed like somebody should at least know.”

“And I yelled into the phone and probably scared you to death.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And I was going to dig a hole and bury the phone. But then I started thinking, and it seemed to me that you probably weren’t yelling at him, the boy in the car, whatever his name-”

“Jimmy,” I said.

“Not at Jimmy, because he called you. I thought maybe he’d been talking to you when he got shot, because of how the phone fell out of the car and he didn’t pick it up, and maybe you thought you were yelling at the person who shot him. So we waited a really long time and then we drove over to the Hillsider and we saw your open door, but we couldn’t see you because the lights were off.”

“So you what-just sat there?”

“Yeah.” She swiveled her head around and up and down, as though her neck were stiff. “And after about an hour, Wendy tiptoed up and put it by your door. Then we went home.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Maybe there was a clue on it or something. Maybe you could use it to figure out who shot him. He was so cute.” Jennie looked down at her lap for a moment. “And we couldn’t keep it anyway. Probably the cops were looking for it.”

“Geez,” Louie said. “You’re some smart kids.”

Jennie shrugged.

“Not smart enough to tell me last night,” I said.

“Leave her alone,” Louie said.

“I didn’t want to talk about it with Doc there,” Jennie said. “He’s such an innocent guy. And you didn’t really ask.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t. Here.” I reached into the pocket of my shirt and came out with two throwdown phones, the kind you can buy for cash at Radio Shack with hours of calling time already programmed in. “These are for you. They’re both good for about ten hours of talking, if you don’t call Russia or something.”

“You’re giving us these?” Wendy asked.

“Yeah. And when you’ve almost used them up, call me and I’ll give you a couple more.”

“Why?” That was Jennie.

“Two reasons. First, I want to know you’re all right, okay? Call me every four or five hours. Don’t get up in the middle of the night or anything, but do it whenever you think about it. And second, I want you to call me the minute, and I mean the actual minute, you hear from Thistle. Deal?”

Their eyes met for perhaps a hundredth of a second. “Deal,” Jennie said.

“And now my friend Louie, here, and I are going to take you out to breakfast. And don’t even think the word McDonald’s.”

“I axed you before, how many darts you want?”

“As many as you’ve got.”

He gave me a squint, which didn’t mean anything since he gave everything a squint. He was teensy and gaunt, maybe a hundred twenty angry pounds, paler than a floater, and balding in front but sporting a luxuriant ponytail that curled to mid-back. At some point in his career someone had drawn a knife down the left side of his face. The scar started at the hairline and bisected the left eyebrow and traced a fine line across the lid below it, then dug a more substantial furrow down his cheek. It ended at the corner of his mouth, the part that would have gone up when he smiled, if he ever smiled. If he did, he kept it to himself.

His name was Wain, which he spelled twice, because, I was pretty sure, he forgot he’d already spelled it once. If NASA had ever had his phone number, they’d probably tossed it. His office was in an auto repair shop off of Western Boulevard, dirty in the way only auto repair shops can be, and stinking of old black sludge. The sky, which had been turning gray when Louie and I left the Valley, was now dark, and the air was warm and unusually humid. Some sort of tropical storm system seemed to be wheeling up from Baja, so we were all sweating, which did not add to the spirit of camaraderie.

“You know, this ain’t an automatic,” he said. He was talking to me as though I were a kindergarten student with a tenuous grasp of English. “It’s not like you got a clip or something, you can put it on full repeat and just stand there with the gun getting hot and watch stuff fall over.”

“Got it,” I said. “It’s okay. I plan just to stand there, shooting and loading, shooting and loading, until I’m done.”

“Uh-huh. And everybody’s just going to hang around while you shoot them.” He looked at Louie, and Louie shrugged. “Tell you what,” Wain said. “If that’s your plan, I want a deposit for the whole thing, gun, cartridges, darts, and all. You come back alive, I’ll give it back to you.”

“What are we talking about?”

He wiped sweat off his forehead, leaving a trail of dark grease. “I got fourteen sets. You really want fourteen? I mean it’s gonna take all day to fire the damn things.”

“I’ll take ten,” I said.

“Okey-doke.” He grabbed a brown paper bag that a burrito had drained onto, wiped his palm on his filthy jeans, and painstakingly wrote a column of numbers, threading a path between the oil spots, where the ball point ink wouldn’t take to the paper. It was modestly impressive. “Four-twenty,” he said. “And one-seventy-five for the rental.”

“Why don’t I just pay you the deposit, and when I return the gun and the unused cartridges, you deduct the rental?”

I got the squint. “Why don’t you just do what I said. Four-twenty and one-seventy five is five-ninety-five.”

“That’s what I like,” I said, reaching into my hip pocket. “The old give and take.”

“Ain’t no point in making friends,” Wain said. “You probably gonna be dead by dark.”