Stalking The Angel

Chapter 21

One of the moussed girls by the 944 went around to the driver's side, got in, and leaned across to unlock the passenger door. The other girls climbed in, but the Porsche didn't start. One of the girls lit up. The one in the tiny back seat turned crosswise, and kept raking her fingers through her hair. Music blasted out of the Porsche's door-mounted speakers, rolling across the parking lot, and you could see them passing around an Evian bottle. They had gotten in the car, apparently, to better watch us from Black Forest comfort.

I looked at the photograph that Traci had given me and at the people in it. Eddie was the oldest, and the biggest. The other two guys were probably not out of their teens and were slight, one wearing narrow-legged jeans and a white shirt and a couple-of-sizes-too-big cloth jacket with a lot of buckles and studs, the other a uniform that looked like something a Red Chinese National would wear, all gray and plain with a single row of buttons down the front and a Nehru collar and a Red Army cap. The kid in the uniform was Asian. He didn't look like a yakuza thug, but maybe he was executive material. Kerri and the other woman were also Asian. The one Traci didn't know was dressed in Jordache jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a Swatch watch. Normal. Kerri was a Clorox blonde with a spike cut and a powdered face and neon-red lips and nails. There was a dog collar around her neck. Billy Idol. I said, "Traci, this is important. Did Mimi ever say what she talked about with these people?"

"Uh-huh."

"Was it about something called the Hagakure?"

"Uh-uh."

"What did she talk about?"

"Stuff I didn't understand. She said they were real. She said they loved her. She said they were the first people she'd ever met who truly had purpose." I looked out the window. Purpose. When you're sixteen, maybe all life is drama. I looked back at Traci. Her big eyes went from pink to red and she rubbed at them and said, "I gotta put in drops."

She took a little plastic bottle from her purse and put two drops of something into each eye and sat with her eyes closed for a couple of minutes. Trying not to cry.

"When was the last time you spoke to her?"

Nervous shrug. "About three weeks ago."

"Did she tell you what she would do when she was hanging out with these people?"

Traci stared at the photograph. I handed it back and watched her put it in her wallet like something precious that had to be handled carefully.

"She told me they went to all these clubs. She told me they did all these drugs and had sex and it sounded just like when she would make stuff up only this time I believed her. I said she ought not. I said she was gonna get in trouble or get fucked up or get arrested, and Mimi got real mad so I shut up. This one time she got so mad at me she didn't talk to me for a month. You have to be careful." Traci said it like she was telling me a secret that only she knew, like it was important and special and I had probably never heard anything like it ever before.

I said, "Mimi could sneak out, make herself up and change her clothes, and be with these people, then undo it all and go back home and be a different Mimi and her parents never knew."

Traci nodded, sniffling.

"Man." I stared out the front of the Rabbit at the Administration Building. It was large and clean and old with thick Spanish walls and a red tile roof. The hedges and the lawn and the trees were neat and well-groomed. Small knots of girls still moved along the walks, some carrying books, some not, but almost all were smiling. I shook my head.

Traci Louise Fishman picked at the steering wheel some more, then gave me the Special Secret look again. Like there was something else I'd never heard before, and something Traci had never been able to tell, and now she wanted to. "You want me to tell you something really weird?"

I looked at her.

"Last year, we were up in my room, smoking. My room is on the second floor and in the back, so I can open the window and no one knows."

"Uh-huh."

"We were smoking and talking and Mimi said, 'Watch this,' and she pulled up her shirt and put the hot part of the cigarette on her stomach and held it there." I sat in the Rabbit, listening to sixteen-year-old Traci Louise Fishman, and my back went cold. "It was so weird I couldn't even say anything. I just watched, and it seemed like she held it there forever, and I yelled, 'That's crazy, Mimi, you'll have a scar,' and she said she didn't care, and then she pushed down her pants and there were these two dark marks just above her hair down there and she said, 'Pain gives us meaning, Traci,' and then she took a real deep drag on the cigarette and got the tip glowing bright red and then she did it again." Traci Louise Fishman's eyes were round and bulging. She was scared, as if telling me these things she had been keeping secret for so long was in some way giving them reality for the first time, and the reality was a shameful, frightful thing.

I ran my tongue across the backs of my teeth and thought about Mimi Warren and couldn't shake the cold feeling. "Did she do things like that often?"

Traci Louise Fishman began to sob, great heaving sobs that shook her and made her gag. The secret had been held a long time, and it had been scary. Perhaps even incomprehensible. When the sobs died, she said, "You'll find her? You'll find her and bring her back?"

"Yes."

"I told her I was real. I told her I had purpose."

I nodded.

"She's my friend," she said. Her voice was hoarse and bubbly.

I nodded. "I know, babe."

The sobs erupted once more and took a long time to die. I gave her my handkerchief. With the pale skin and the out-from-under eyes and the heavy little-girl face, there was a quality of loneliness to her that comes when your only friend walks away and you don't know why and there's no one else and never will be. A left-behind look.

We sat like that for another few minutes, Traci rubbing at her flat nose and me breathing deeply and thinking about Mimi and Eddie Tang and what that might mean. Most of the cars had long since gone, but the red 944 still sat in its spot, music playing, girls within pretending not to stare toward Traci Louise Fishman's white Volkswagen Rabbit. After a while I said, "They're still watching us."

Traci nodded. The eyes weren't watering anymore and the nose was dry and she gave back my handkerchief. "They can't believe a good-looking guy like you is sitting here with me."

"Maybe," I said, "they can't believe a good-looking girl like you is letting me."

She smiled and looked down at her steering wheel again, and again picked at the plastic. She said, "Please bring her back."

I looked at the Porsche. The girl in the back seat was staring our way. I said, "Traci?"

She looked up at me.

I leaned across and kissed her on the lips. She didn't move, and when I pulled back she was a vivid red. I said, "Thanks for the help."

Her chin went down into her neck and she swallowed hard and looked mortified. She touched her lips and looked over at the girls in the Porsche. They were gaping at us. Traci Louise Fishman blinked at them, and looked back at me. Then she squared her shoulders, touched her lips again, and folded both hands very neatly in her lap.

I got out of the Rabbit, went back to the Corvette, and drove to my office.