Cooler Than Blood (23 page)

CHAPTER 38

Jenny

S
he opened her eyes.

I’m a big girl.

Red crayon markings on the floor. Now black. Now red. “Run” played from far away. Down a long hall. A forgotten hall. A song about an imagined world. About putting yourself in better times. A title that described her life. At first, she was just taken with the restrained soft voice that fronted the lush orchestra and heart-tugging strings. When she’d read what the lyrics were intended to mean, however, she’d adopted it as her anthem. But it was fading—the hope for a better life, creating her own place by the sea. The belief that the emotional tug of a song could actually shape a life.
What a crock-shit full of illusions
, she thought.
And sooner or later, they all melt away like snowflakes on a spring day.

The stuff you’ve got to figure out on your own.

She lay on her side with her head on her hand. She heard and felt her heartbeat through her wrist. It stopped. She passed out. She woke. She considered,
What was the last thing I heard when I thought my heart had stopped? Nothing. Not even the static of an empty frequency. There you have it—the smell of forgotten and the sound of death.

A beach
, she thought.
A place in the sun.
Was that too much to ask? Something had gone wrong on the beach. What was it? She tried to focus, but her mind was a swirl of images. She was back on her father’s boat, and she smelled the wood, for old boats smelled their weight. She felt the pump handle in her tight, oily fist then saw him as he walked out of the mangroves
. But he’s dead. No…no…no. Did I say it out loud? Don’t even think that.
She blacked out again, and this time she surrendered to the concrete floor. She went back to her father, back to when it was good. To the last trip to Club 57, the waterfront bar. It played in her head as if someone had stuck in a DVD.

I’m a big girl.

It was the last summer, which was only the second summer, that they had shared the Trojan. It was just the two of them, and it was the time of the year that got hung up in nowhere. It was hot, but not July hot. It was as if the earth was a grill that had been turned off but still radiated heat. There was no wind, like whatever had caused the early summer gusts had packed up and gone home. Good-bye. I’m gone. The planet had stopped revolving and finally come to rest before its next big convulsion. In September, in Ohio, the earth sleeps.

Jenny had spotted a vacant picnic table on the deck that hung over the water before Larry had even docked at Club 57. After she had tied the bowline—her responsibility—she sprinted ahead of Larry to secure the prize. Like mid-September, Jenny was starting to transition. She still carried Puddles, her stuffy, but Larry noticed she was getting self-conscious about it. She had spent a week at Camp Tecumseh, and Larry figured that part of her innocence had stayed in those woods. He didn’t know whether she left it or it was taken, nor was he one to dwell on such things.

Jenny took her seat at the picnic table and heard a loud smack and a grunt. She looked up and saw her father towering over a man who was sprawled on the ground next to the bright blue hostess stand that had been built into the side of a gnarly maple tree. Larry’s right hand was balled into a fist, his face redder than anytime she’d ever seen, and a vein the size of the Ohio River rode his neck until it disappeared under his faded red Buckeyes 2002 championship T-shirt. Three men with bandannas around their heads and Harley T-shirts—“bikers,” her daddy once had called them; some of the nicest guys you’d ever meet—sat on picnic benches with their eyes darting between Larry and their comrade, who now lay on the concrete, staring at the underside of the tree and making no effort to improve his position.

“Anyone else?” Larry asked, as he stood over the table. Fist tight. The Ohio River about to break its levee.

“Take it easy, boss,” the man with long braids and wearing a Hog’s Breath Harley T-shirt said. (Jenny had seen so many Key West Hog’s Breath T-shirts at Club 57 that she once had asked her father if Key West was somewhere in Columbus.) “The only thing I’m gonna do is hit him myself when that stupid son of a bitch gets to his sorry-ass feet. You just need to accept our apologies. Follow me?”

Jenny saw her father shrink as if he was leaking air. His fist went back to being a hand. He blew his breath out and nodded at the man. He walked over to Jenny.

“What happened, Daddy?”

“Nothing for you to be concerned with.” He took the bench across from her, waited a beat as if figuring something out in his head, and then said, “Let’s switch sides, Jen.”

“Why?”

“So you’ll have the better view.”

“I thought you just did that for Mom.”

“Well…it’s time I did it for you. You’re a big girl now.” And they did switch sides, and Jenny looked out over the lake and sandbar and tossed french fries to the grateful ducks and carp below.

You’re a big girl now. You’re a big girl now
.

I’m a big girl now.

She sat up and brushed her hair away from her face. There was red crayon in her hair.
How odd
, she thought. She felt the crayon. Crusty, not a waxy substance at all. Blood.

Last night burst free in her memory.

Detective Eric Rutledge had busted down the door, descended the steps, and proclaimed he was there to rescue her. Her spirit had ignited in relief, but before she had the chance to thank him, he clipped her temple with the stock of his Browning shotgun. Jenny had stumbled to her knees.

She had gotten up.

“What the hell?” Rutledge said, and struck her again. She went down for the count.

Now she had to get up again. She didn’t know if she could. If she even wanted to. Why bother?
Why him? He’s a cop
, she thought. Jenny tried to find reason for what had happened last night, but neither the energy nor the curiosity was there. She rolled over on her back and blew her breath out at the rafters. She wanted to go home
.
In her head now,
Please, God. I’ll do anything
.

Oh, that’s just super swell
, she thought.
Stupid-promises-to-God time. Not yet. This floorboard might be floating—

“But this boat’s not going down.” Her voice startled her.

She stood and took a moment to make sure that position would hold.
Oh, yeah
, she remembered as she glanced at the floor,
I don’t have any shoes.
“Never thought that would be an issue,” she said. Her voice sounded strange.
Wonder how long I was out?
She surveyed her surroundings. “Wonderful, a barn.” She took stock: one wheelbarrow with a flat tire, an assortment of garden tools, empty plastic trash cans, paint cans on a shelf with dried paint coating their sides, and a red Toro lawn mower. No food. No place to sleep.

No plans to keep me alive
.

Her head throbbed with every downbeat of her heart. She felt like one of the paint cans; part of her was outside her and no good anymore. She considered the cans. Could she swing one? Whack the next person through the door with it? The spiked water bottle certainly hadn’t made the cut. She lifted a paint can and saw it half hidden by other cans.

A hatchet.

At the sight of it, all of Jenny’s frustrations, all of her dreams, all of her battered hope, all of Jenny turned to anger. Her world seemed so much simpler now that everything was boiled down to one emotion. She picked up the hatchet by its rubber handle. “What do we have here?” she said, her voice low and outside of her. She took a swipe at the air. “The big gun, baby, and the next bozo through that door gets the welcome package.”

Just like my daddy laid that man down at Club 57.

CHAPTER 39

I
t was evening, and I sat at the end of my dock with my buddy Mark. First name “Maker’s.” We go back a bit.

I wasn’t going to run out this time and had brought the bottle along with a bottle of water. I have a theory that if you drink water while drinking booze, you’ll be able to drink twice as much alcohol. If you know or believe otherwise, kindly keep it to yourself. I fished my phone out of my pocket and brought up the picture of Jenny. I took a quick glance and put it away. I’d had her at the Lizard. I’d given her up at the Lizard.

Her blood was on me now.

I poured some amber gold into my tumbler. I had just finished a few shots and was looking forward to a solitude binge. Hadley III, fascinated with the baitfish that skimmed the surface, hung her head over the side. I gave her a shove, and she went in with a frantic scream, paws outstretched. Easy now—it was just a fleeting thought. Even though I’d told them Binelli couldn’t find an alternative address for Rutledge, Morgan and Garrett were inside, still trying to get a hit on his whereabouts, advancing the cause of finding Jenny, and generally doing constructive things with their lives. Good for them.

McGlashan finally had returned my call and confirmed that Rutledge was AWOL. His car was gone and wasn’t at the airport. His house was clean. He said he’d immediately pass on any new information. He had checked the records of Rutledge’s cruiser and said Rutledge had spent a little more than a minute at Billy Ray’s car after he had interviewed Jenny. We agreed it was nothing he couldn’t have handled if it ever came back to him. If it were me, I’d blow off any questions or accusations by stating I’d heard a rattle under the car and gotten out to check it: “Billy Ray’s car was right next to me? No kidding. Nope, never saw it.” There isn’t much in this world that you can’t bullshit your way into or out of. Take it from me; I know.

Kathleen sat down next to me. I don’t know where she came from. She was just there. Plop. Like magic. Her bare feet dangled over the edge of the composite decking. We sat in silence, and no boats went by. The premonitory red channel marker was doing that blinking thing.

“I just want you to know,” she said, “if the only thing you wanted out of our relationship was my car, it would be worth it. I’d do it again.”

I didn’t respond. Can’t a guy drink alone?

“But you’ve got to bring it back clean. No excuses for the way it looks.”

Nothing.

“I made chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.”

I took a sip of bourbon.

“Oh, and I saw Elvis,” she said. “He had a ‘War on Drugs’ T-shirt on and was having drinks with Nixon and Frost on the front porch of the Vinoy.”

I glanced at her. Her hair was pulled back, and the moon illuminated her face. Hadley III had already found her lap. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to pick her up—the woman, not the fur ball—and walk out of life. Instead, I asked, “How did you get here?”

“Nice to see you too. I called Morgan.” She picked up the bottle of bourbon. “You dropped me for this floozy?”

“She understands me.” I went to take it from her, but she pulled it away. Hadley III jumped off her lap.

“In case you forgot, sailor, you’re on deck.”

“You do know I drowned my last three girlfriends.”

“
Finally
—I could never understand that swim test.”

“How’d your thingamabob go today?”

“Hmm…” She put the cap back on the bottle. So sad. “It was a fine thingamabob. Kind of you to inquire.”

“I don’t have a clue what—”

Her finger lightly graced my lips. “Where’s Jenny? She’s not in that bottle. That would be Jeannie, and she’s not real.”

“Gone.”

“Gone?”

“As in ‘with the wind.’”

“That’s Tuesday, I believe.”

I remembered that Susan had called twice, and I had let both go to voice mail.

“Do you know who has her?” Kathleen asked.

“I think so, but we don’t know where. She’s been passed around, and I can’t see how her current captor has any use for her. Her luck, as it was, has run out.”

“And you’re sitting here sparring with me and supporting the hard liquor industry?”

I shrugged then gave her an abbreviated version of the past twenty-four hours. I left out my conversation with Dangelo regarding his suspicion of her true identity and my nebulous understanding with him to trade the money for his silence.

“We hit the wall,” I concluded. “We can’t find him.”

“What about Susan?” she asked.

“What about her?”

“Have you kept her informed?”

“No. I’ve been avoiding calling her because I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news.”

“My, such courage. Can’t your friend Jack here help prep you?”

“It’s Mark.”

She stole a glance at the liquor bottle. “So it is. The devil has a twin. Susan deserves—”

“I know.”

“—to know.”

A baitfish jumped. It leapt out of its element, propelled by fear and the evolutionary instinct to survive. It didn’t think; it acted.

“Call her,” Kathleen said, and placed her hand on my shoulder. She stood up with my liquid savior in her hand and strolled down the dock, allowing me to call Susan in privacy. I could use a few ounces of her common sense. Couple more ounces from that bottle wouldn’t be bad either.

I called Susan and informed her that I thought Rutledge had Jenny. I told her that I believed he had stolen the money and that the Colemans’ abduction of her was unrelated to Rutledge, but it had forced Rutledge to cover his tracks. She was reserved during the conversation and showed little emotion, let alone disbelief or anger that Rutledge was to blame. I realized that time had been chipping away at her, eroding her hope and attacking her dreams like a virus.

“He needs to silence her,” she said. It came out as neither a question nor a statement.

“I didn’t say—”

“You said you can’t find him.”

“That’s correct. We’re—”

“Did you check his sister’s house?”

“His sister?”

“Remember? I told you he flirted with me and said he used to take care of his sister, but she’d died recently.”

“Who never married,” I said as I recalled Susan telling me that Rutledge had hit on her. I stood and started jogging the hundred feet down the dock to my house. Morgan and Kathleen were on the screen porch. I didn’t see Garrett.

“Tell me more,” I said to the phone pressed hard against my ear.

“That’s about it. Can you find his sister’s house? Do you think he’d take her there?”

I stopped at my back screen door. “I don’t know, but we’ll look.”

I hung up. I didn’t trust myself to say anything else to Susan. I didn’t want her to get her hopes up. So far, I hadn’t done a damn thing for her except let her down. I recalled Binelli telling me Rutledge “grew up just south of you.” It took Morgan less than five minutes to find the address of a Margaret Rutledge, who had passed away five months ago. The property was still in her name. It was in Manatee County, twenty minutes south of here. He asked if I wanted him to check for other female Rutledges who had died south of us in the previous six months; I replied that we’d go with the odds. I told Kathleen not to wait up, and she rolled her eyes and shook her head. She claimed a lounge chair on the porch, tugged her legs underneath her, put the side table light on low, and picked up a book.

I changed into boots, jeans, and a tight jacket with inside pockets. Garrett was in the garage, hooking up a new Ringside punching bag. I wasn’t aware he’d gotten one. I gave him the new intelligence. He unlocked the steel cabinet and got out his SASS and the red spinnaker bag. It held a medical kit, currency, passports, sat phones, and a dessert tray of guns and knifes. Garrett, Morgan, and I piled into my truck.

“My bet is that at least the money is there,” Garrett said. He was in the backseat with the spinnaker bag. “Been there all along. Rutledge wouldn’t keep it at his house. Too much risk.”

“She’s there,” Morgan said.

“We don’t know,” I started in, “but we might as—”

“He’s confused,” Morgan said, “doing something he’s never done. He’ll take her to a place he’s familiar with. Not for long—he’ll know that’s dangerous—but long enough to regroup his thoughts, and then he’ll act quickly.” I didn’t answer. He held strong convictions based on a different sphere, one I didn’t fully acknowledge. I gave Morgan a glance. But it wasn’t his face or ponytail—or flowered shirt or moon talisman around his neck—that caught my attention. He wore tightly laced tennis shoes.