Panic

19

‘H ow did you get this number?’ Evan whispered. Outside was still and quiet, except for the infrequent hum of traffic; the lovers next door slept or, more likely, had concluded their business and crept back into the empty night.

‘We have our ways,’ Bricklayer said.

‘I’m hanging up unless you tell me how you got this number.’

‘Simple. We recognized Mr. Gabriel from the police description. We know Mr. Gabriel seized you for, well, let’s call it his version of protective custody. We know he was in Bandera because of a credit-card charge he made. We know he has a family member with a house that has been occupied, damaged, and abandoned as of yesterday. We know Mr. Gabriel is missing. We know a truck with a cell phone in it was stolen from Bandera. We arranged with the owner and the cell phone company to keep the phone activated. So we could talk to you, if you or Mr. Gabriel was in possession of the phone. And I see that you are.’

Evan got up and began to pace the room.

‘May I speak to Mr. Gabriel?’ Bricklayer asked.

‘He’s dead.’

‘Oh. That’s unfortunate. How did he die?’

‘A man named Dezz Jargo shot him.’

A long sigh. ‘That’s very regrettable. Are you injured?’

‘No. I’m fine.’

‘Good. Let’s proceed. Evan, I bet you’re scared and tired and wondering what you ought to do next.’

Evan waited.

‘I can help you.’

‘I’m listening.’ He wondered – they had found him because of a stolen phone. Jesus. Could they be tracing the call, turning a satellite miles above to shift its lens onto Texas, onto Houston, onto this seedy nowhere?

‘You and I have a mutual problem. Jargo and Dezz.’

Evan blinked. ‘Dezz is Jargo. Jargo’s his last name.’

‘Clarification, Evan. I say Jargo, I mean a man we know as Steven Jargo. Dezz is his son. Of course, those aren’t their real names. No one knows what their real names are. Probably even they don’t.’

‘His son.’ He’d had it wrong. Dezz and Jargo. So there were two. Son and father. ‘They killed my mother.’

‘Dezz and Jargo will kill you, too, if they get a chance. We don’t want you hurt, Evan. I want you to tell me where you’re at, and I’m gonna send a couple of men to pick you up. Protect you.’

‘No.’

‘Evan, now, why say no? You’re in terrible danger.’

‘Why should I trust you? I don’t even know your real name.’

‘I understand your reticence. Truly. Caution is the hallmark of an intelligent mind. But you need to come in under our wing. We can help you.’

‘Help me by finding my dad.’

‘I don’t know where he is, son, but if you come in, we’ll move heaven and earth to find him.’

It sounded like an empty promise. ‘I don’t have the files you all want. They’re gone. Jargo and Dezz destroyed them.’ He picked up his music player. Perhaps not. But if he simply gave them the files, they could use them how they wanted, destroy them, and make him vanish. He would only trade them for his father. Nothing else.

Bricklayer paused, as though contemplating unexpected news. ‘Jargo won’t leave you alone.’

‘He can’t find me.’

‘He can and he will.’

‘No. You want what he wants. These files. You’ll kill me, too.’

‘I most certainly would not.’ Bricklayer sounded offended. ‘Evan, you’re emotionally exhausted. It’s understandable, given your horrible ordeal. Let me give you a number, in case we get disconnected. I loathe cell phones. Will you write the number down?’

‘Yes,’ and Bricklayer fed him a number. He didn’t recognize the area code.

‘Evan. Listen to me. Jargo and Dezz are very dangerous. Extremely.’

‘You’re preaching to the choir.’ He risked a guess. ‘Are you with the CIA?’

‘I loathe acronyms as much as cell phones,’ Bricklayer said. ‘Evan, we can have substantive talks when you come in. I personally guarantee your safety.’

‘You won’t even tell me your name.’ Evan paced the room. ‘I could buy time by talking to the press. Telling them the CIA is offering to help me. Give them this number.’

‘You could go public. I suspect, though, that Jargo will kill your father in retaliation.’

‘You’re saying he has my father.’ Evan waited.

‘It’s most likely. I’m sorry.’ Bricklayer sounded like a mortician, gently agreeing that, yes, it was a beautiful casket. ‘Let’s move forward, so we can work together to get your dad home. Would you meet with me? We can meet in Texas; I assume you’re still in the state…’

‘I’ll consider it and call you back.’

‘Evan, don’t hang up.’

Evan did. He switched off the phone, dropped it on the bed as if it were radioactive. If Bricklayer could triangulate on the phone, the government could just bust the door down.

He pulled on a change of clean clothes he’d packed in the duffel. He spread his cash in front of him. He had ninety-two dollars. A camcorder, a cell phone, a Beretta with no ammunition.

He couldn’t face Shadey or the sweet-talking Bricklayer or Dezz and Jargo without being armed. It would be suicide. But he didn’t think gun shops were open on Sundays, and he couldn’t go into one anyway, not with his picture all over the news as a missing man. Pawnshops? He didn’t want to part with the camera suddenly; he wished he could have gotten Dezz on film. That would have been leverage. Selling the camera was a last resort.

You could buy all sorts of things on the street. Drugs. Sex. Why not ammo?

He closed his eyes. Thought out ways he could acquire ammo for a particular gun. One idea came to mind, crazy, definitely daring, but it played on the only common wish he knew how to grant with the skills and resources he had.

Evan ventured into the early-morning damp. Down low on his head, he wore a baseball cap that had been in the rear seat of the stolen truck. He bought the Sunday Houston Chronicle out of a vending machine in front of a decrepit coffee shop. His face and his father’s face were on the cover of the metro section, an old publicity photo his mother had shot after Ounce of Trouble had made the short list for the Oscars, where his hair was shorter and he wore nerd-boy eyeglasses. He didn’t need glasses but he’d decided they made him look smarter, more artistic. It had been a shallow affectation, his mother had teased him about how seriously he took himself, and now he felt embarrassed. The paper said his father was also considered missing; no record existed of anyone named Mitchell Casher having flown to Australia from the United States in the past week. No mention or picture of Carrie.

Carrie’s here with me, Dezz had claimed in his creepy singsong voice. Evan had not believed him. If Carrie had been kidnapped, it would have been in the papers.

Or would it? She had quit her job. She wasn’t with him. Who would report her missing? But if she had been taken, she wouldn’t have been able to call him and warn him before Gabriel’s attack. So where was Carrie? Hiding? He ached to talk to her, to hear her soothing voice, but he couldn’t go near her, he couldn’t involve her again.

He folded the paper under his arm. Pay phones were a dying breed with cell phones wedged in every pocket and purse, but he found one two blocks down at a convenience store where the lot smelled of Saturday-night beer. A gangly kid lounged near the phones, chewing on a grape Pixy Stix, watching Evan with all the suspicion and arrogance of a prison guard.

He might do. Evan picked up a phone, dropped in the required coins.

‘’Spectin’ an important call on that phone,’ the boy said in a low murmur. Giving Evan a narrowed stare.

‘Then they’ll get a busy signal for a minute.’

‘Find another phone, son,’ the kid said.

Evan stared at him. He wanted to pop the kid in the sneering mouth and say, You picked the wrong guy to mess with today. But then he decided he didn’t need another enemy. He had learned one thing as a film-maker: everyone wanted to be in a movie.

Evan didn’t put a smile on his face because smiles weren’t always good currency. ‘You an entrepreneur?’

‘Yeah, that’s me. I’m a fucking mogul.’

Evan grabbed the Beretta tucked in the back of his jeans, under his shirt, and he jammed it into the kid’s flat stomach. The kid froze.

‘Calm down. It’s unloaded,’ Evan said. ‘I need bullets. Can you get them for me?’

The kid let out a long wheeze. ‘Man, double-fuck you. I might’ve if you hadn’t been a dick just now.’

‘Then I’ll make my call.’ Evan let his fingers drift back to the filthy keypad.

‘Wait, wait. What is it?’ The kid put his back to the street and examined the gun. Evan kept it in a tight grip. ‘Beretta 92FS… yeah, I bet I can score a few sweet mags for you. Friend of a friend. Cash basis.’

‘Of course.’

‘Lemme make a call on your coins,’ the kid said.

Evan handed him the receiver. The kid punched numbers, spoke in a low tone, laughed once, hung up the phone. ‘An hour. Be here. Cash. Four mags, two hundred dollars.’

He didn’t know ammo prices, but the quote was higher than what he thought he would pay in a gun shop. But the street didn’t ask questions. ‘I don’t need that much ammo.’

‘Won’t deal less. Otherwise not worth getting out of bed, son.’

Evan didn’t have two hundred dollars, but he said, ‘I’ll be back here in an hour.’

Now that he had a customer, the kid nodded. Ambled off across the lot, sliding a fresh Pixy Stix out of his pocket, tearing off the top, and dumping the purple powder onto his tongue.

Evan walked four blocks until he found another convenience store. He wore the sunglasses he had found in the stolen pickup and he bought hair-coloring dye, a pair of scissors, a giant coffee, and three breakfast tacos thick with fluffy eggs and potato and spicy chorizo sausage for breakfast. It didn’t get him closer to two hundred dollars. He swallowed the crazy urge to show the clerk the gun tucked in the back of his pants to see if that would produce two hundred bucks. The clerk rang him up. Watching Evan when she gave him the change.

Fear slammed into his stomach like a fist. Was this what paranoia was?

He hurried back to the motel. Evan locked himself in. Devoured the breakfast tacos and finished the black coffee while he read the directions on the hair dye. It would take only thirty minutes to set.

He cut his hair, locks falling into the sink. He had never given himself a haircut before and it looked really bad until he muttered, ‘Screw vanity,’ and he hacked it into a not-as-bad burr. He removed the small hoop earring from his left ear. The earring seemed too young for him now; it was time to grow up. Then he dyed his hair, sitting on the bathroom floor, refining his plan while the black color set. He laughed when he saw himself in the mirror, but it was serviceable. He didn’t look exactly like the picture in the paper. But he still looked like himself.

He had about eighty bucks left and ten minutes before the kid showed up with the ammunition. He drove back to the store where he had met the kid, parked at the edge of the oil-pocked lot. He went inside the store. An old lady bought orange juice and a can of pork-and-beans and shuffled out the door. Evan waited until she was gone and approached the clerk. This clerk nodded along with a Sunday-morning evangelical-church service and slurped coffee. She was an older lady, dour, with a stray eye.

‘Excuse me, ma’am. That tall kid who hangs out by the phone,’ Evan said. ‘Mr. Pixy Stix. Is he a problem for you?’

‘Why you care?’

‘He warned me off using the phone. I bet he’s using it for drug deals.’

‘He don’t buy enough Pixy Stixs to pay rent.’

‘So if I get him to quit hanging out here, you won’t be heartbroken? You wouldn’t feel you have to call the police right away?’

‘I don’t want no trouble.’

‘He’ll never know what hit him.’

‘What do you care what he’s doing? I never seen you in here before.’

‘My aunt just moved in down the street, and that kid smarted off to her when she was using the phone, and old ladies should be able to make phone calls without hassle.’

‘So tell the police.’

‘That’s a temporary solution. The police come, then they go. My idea is longer lasting.’

The clerk studied him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going to hang out at the phone and wait for him.’

‘Why? You buying?’

He held up the duffel and showed her his camcorder. ‘No. I’m selling.’

The kid returned, five minutes late. But not alone. His companion was a thick-necked young woman with a toughness etched in her face. She stood bigger and taller than the kid, and a similar set to their eyes and their frowns suggested she might be an older sister. She carried a shopping bag from Goodwill in her hand. They arrived in a new Explorer and parked at the end of the lot.

Evan stood by the phones with the duffel over his shoulder, the digital camcorder wedged in place in the duffel. He left the zipper gaping open enough so that the lens could get a clear shot. The woman didn’t like that he had the duffel. Tension deepened the frown in her face.

‘Hey,’ Evan said.

‘Drunk barber got ahold of your hair, son,’ the kid said.

‘The makeup director wanted me to have a more street look,’ Evan said, and waited to see what they would say.

The kid just frowned as if Evan were crazy – and then the woman said, ‘Let’s go to the back of the store.’

‘Actually, there’ll be a phone call coming in for you here in a minute. We should just wait right here.’ Evan put a bright, fake smile on his face.

‘Excuse me?’ The woman was running the show now, not the kid.

‘Here’s the deal,’ Evan said. ‘I’m a scout for a new reality show, it’s called Tough Streets. HBO next fall. We put people who don’t have any street smarts in neighborhoods where they’ve never been before. Picture soccer moms and suburban dads trying to cope in the Fifth Ward. Whoever can accomplish a set list of goals, well, they move on in the competition. The grand prize is a million bucks.’

The woman stared at Evan, but the boy said, ‘I got an idea for a show. You put my ass in River Oaks, let me live in luxury, and film that all the livelong day.’

‘Shut up. You buying or not?’ the woman said.

‘Did you bring the ammo?’ Evan asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m buying. But we’re test-driving this as one of our challenges. I just wanted to see how easy it was to buy ammo on the street. While taping.’ He raised the camcorder, with its lens cap off and recording lights aglow, out of the duffel. ‘Smile.’

‘No, no, no!’ the woman said, and she shielded her face with her fingers.

‘Wait. Wait.’ Evan switched off the camcorder. ‘I’m not getting you in trouble. I just had to test the challenge. Ma’am, you’re an original. You’re what we’re looking for on Tough Streets.’

‘Me. On TV.’ But she brought her hands down from her face.

He held up one hand as though framing her face. ‘I think you’d be great. But you don’t have to be on TV if you don’t want to be.’

‘Big Gin, gonna be a star.’ The kid laughed.

Big Gin froze. ‘What bullshit is this?’

Evan held up his hands. ‘No bullshit. The contestants all have street guides as partners in the game, because you and I know that they won’t have a chance without them. Dumbass people from suburbia.’

‘Like you,’ Big Gin said.

‘Yes, like me. You’re beyond telegenic. The strength in your face. The confidence of your walk, your talk. Of course the street guide shares half the prize money -’

‘A half million. You bullshitting me,’ Big Gin said.

‘- unless you have a record,’ Evan finished his sentence. ‘We could not hire anyone with a record. The lawyers are just asses about that.’

‘Buying ammo would get you a record,’ Big Gin said.

‘Well, the contestants wouldn’t truly be buying real ammunition. Just blanks. The lawyers are asses about that, too.’

‘She ain’t never been convicted,’ the kid said.

‘Shut up.’ Big Gin looked at Evan in a way he’d seen in film-deal meetings: a player who’s wondering if she’s the one being played.

‘This is bull,’ the kid said. ‘You got two hundred bucks for the ammo, or not, ’cause we ain’t staying if you don’t.’

‘Shut up,’ Big Gin said to him.

‘Um, I cannot give you two hundred bucks,’ Evan said. ‘That would mean we’ve conducted an illegal transaction, and we couldn’t hire you then for the show, Ms…’

‘Ginosha,’ she said.

‘Don’t be telling him your name,’ the kid said. ‘He don’t have the money, let’s go.’ Evan had a leftover card in his wallet from a screening and cocktail party he’d been at last week in Houston. One was from a producer with a Los Angeles production company called Urban Works, a guy named Eric Lawson. He handed Big Gin the card. ‘So sorry. Meant to give this to you earlier.’

‘Goddamn,’ she said. ‘You for real.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where’s your camera crew? Why just you?’

‘Because this is guerrilla TV. We don’t bring camera crews out here when we’re scouting for talent and locations. It would not be reality TV then, would it?’

Big Gin studied the business card, as though it held a doorway to a long-held desire.

‘So who’s calling on the phone?’ she said.

‘One of the talent scouts,’ Evan said. ‘He’ll pretend to be the suburban contestant you have to help. But I want to film you from back over here, near this side of the lot. Just talk off the top of your head, show me how you can improvise. I’ve got a mike built into the phone already, but I want a distance shot of you. Here, young man, I’m sorry, what’s your name?’

‘Raymond.’ The boy examined the business card but with a critical glare.

‘You come over here and stand by me, out of the shot.’

Raymond frowned but not at the business card. ‘Why can’t I be in the shot?’

‘It’s my shot,’ Big Gin said.

‘Well, Raymond, frankly, you didn’t act interested,’ Evan said. ‘You didn’t think I was legit.’

‘Sure he did,’ Big Gin said. ‘That’s just the way he talks. He’s cool now, he’s not disrespecting.’

‘Raymond, you know, we have to win over the young audience as well,’ Evan said. ‘Our target demographic includes teenage girls.’

Raymond, holding the bag with the ammunition, tented his cheek with his tongue, gave Evan another frown, but went and stood by the phone, calculated a pose, stood his best side.

‘Excellent. But I don’t like the bag being in your shot. You look like you’re shopping.’ Evan took five steps back.

Big Gin picked up the bag of ammo clips, brought them over to Evan, put them at his feet. ‘We ought to be compensated for our time if you ain’t buying.’

‘Oh, absolutely. Of course this is basically your private audition, and you didn’t have to stand in line, and’ – he put the camcorder up to his eye – ‘I go down to the community center, I got folks lining up around the lot to try out.’

Big Gin gave him a look in the lens. ‘What do I do?’

‘Let your natural personality shine through.’ Evan was fifteen paces from them now, worried about the boy, whose suspicions had not flagged for one moment. The duffel and the bag of ammo sat between Evan’s feet. The stolen cell phone lay wedged in his back pocket.

‘Act natural. Don’t look at me.’ Evan reached behind him, pressed the dial button of his pocketed phone. It was already keyed to the pay phone’s number.

One ring. ‘Look at the pay phone, let it ring three times, let me get the film rolling.’ But Evan was the one rolling, grabbing the duffel and the ammo, running backward toward his truck. Two rings. Raymond still stared at the phone, but Big Gin couldn’t resist the lure of the camera’s eye. She spun as Evan jumped into the truck. He’d left the key in the ignition. He wrenched the car into reverse, saw Big Gin shout and run after him. He tore out into the street, into a hail of horns of oncoming traffic.

Raymond, now sold on the idea of TV stardom, answered the phone. ‘Is this part of the audition?’ he asked.

‘I’ve taped you dealing for a week,’ Evan lied into the phone. ‘You show up at that phone again, I give the cops the tape.’ In the rearview mirror Big Gin stormed out into traffic, shooting him the finger, winded in a short run.

‘That’s illegal!’ Raymond hollered. ‘You nothing but a chump-ass thief.’

‘Complain to the cops. Thanks for the ammo. We’ve made a fair trade, I’ll be quiet and I’ll keep your bullets.’

Raymond’s reply got cut off when Evan thumbed off the phone. Evan floored the accelerator in case Big Gin came after him in their shiny new Explorer. He hoped Big Gin and Raymond had been more honest than he had. He opened the bag. Four magazines. He tried to fit one into the Beretta. It smacked in clean and true.

Now he could go find Shadey.