Diners, Dives & Dead Ends (4 page)

I dug under the counter for
the phone book to find Packard Graystone’s number.  Axton and Packard—okay seriously,
what had their parents been thinking with those names?—were estranged.  But I
still wanted to talk to him in case he’d heard from Ax. 

Packard’s home number wasn’t
listed in the white pages, but his office was listed in the yellow ones.  Pack
was a dermatologist and the receptionist wouldn’t let me talk to him unless I
made an appointment.  I might have raised my voice when I told her Pack’s
brother was missing, but she didn’t seem to care.  I grrred at the receiver.

I finished helping Ma and
Roxy with cleanup, then drove to Axton’s house to check in with Joe.  Because
he spent most of his life buzzed or better, I thought talking to Joe in person,
rather than over the phone, would be the way to go.  And maybe I could press
him about that exclusive club Axton talked about.

Without bothering to knock,
I opened the front door and found Joe sitting on the sofa watching an episode
of
Bewitched
with a bag of potato chips on his chest.  A glass bong sat
on the scarred coffee table along with an empty pizza box.  Crushed beer cans
littered the carpet.  Joe wore the same clothes from the night before: a
t-shirt with a picture of the St. Louis Arch and ripped jeans.  And his purple
tuque, of course.

“Hey, Rose.”  He shifted his
eyes from Elizabeth Montgomery to me and back again.  “You ever wonder how
Samantha does that nose twitch thing?  I’ve tried to do it, but I can’t.”  He
demonstrated his attempt at the nose twitch thing.  He looked like a rabbit
with a cocaine habit.

“Have you heard from Axton?”

“Um, negative.”  He stared
at the TV, bringing a chip from the bag to his mouth without sparing me a
glance.

I reached over, grabbed the
remote control from his lap, and turned off the television. 

He gazed at me, his brow
furrowed.  “What’d you do that for?”

“Axton hasn’t shown up for
work, he hasn’t been home, and he left the house last night without taking his
car.  I’m worried about him.”

He reached for the remote
control, but I tossed it over my shoulder and heard it thunk against the wall. 
“Joe…Axton is missing.”

“Dude, that was so uncool.”

“Focus.  Where did Ax go the
other night?  The club, where was it?”

“Um, can I have the remote
back, please?  I need to see if Samantha’s mom turns Darren back into a dude.”

I leaned down, my face
inches from Joe’s.  “She does.”

He blew out a breath and I
winced.  “Man, I hate spoilers.  You are seriously harshing me.” 

Straightening up, I closed
my eyes for a second.  I obviously needed to go about this in a different way. 
I settled myself on the edge of the sofa and patted his shoulder.  “Joe, we
need to find Axton.  I’m afraid he’s in trouble.” 

He nodded, seeming to
understand.  Okay, we were making progress.

“Did he tell you anything
about the club?  Anything at all?”

With his mouth hanging open,
he lowered his brows and rolled his eyes upward.  Awww, he was trying to
think.  Mostly though it looked like he was trying to poop.  “I know he said
something about an invitation.”

“Right,” I nodded.  “Do you
know where he was going?”

“Um…some club?  It sounded
kind of boring.”

“Where was the club, Joe? 
Think really hard, because this is important.”

He scrunched up his face and
closed his eyes.  When he opened them, he looked like a sad puppy that had peed
on the carpet.  “I don’t know.” 

“What about last night? 
What did Axton say when he got home?”

“He told me to save him a
piece of pizza.”  He gestured toward the empty box.  “And like, I totally would
have if he hadn’t skipped out.”

I sighed.  “Where did he go
last night, before he came home, I mean?”

He shrugged his bony
shoulders.  “Sorry, Rose.  Can I have my remote back? 
I Dream of Jeannie
is on next.  I love her, man.”

I rubbed my temple.  I was
starting to get a headache to go along with the pain in my ass named Joe. 
“Sure.  I’m going to check out Axton’s room, okay?”  Not waiting for his reply,
I walked down the hall.

After climbing through the window
last night, I’d unlocked Ax’s door.  I hadn’t wanted to search his room then,
because it seemed like such an invasion of his privacy.  Today it seemed like a
good idea.

It was even more of a wreck
in the daylight and the sour, musty smell hit me hard, just like it had the
night before.  The bed was unmade and I had trouble telling whether the sheets
had once been white or if they had always been that shade of gray.  Little
mountains of clothes were piled up across the floor.

I surveyed the room and tried
to figure out where to start.  The desk was as good a place as any. 

It was one of those discount
store models you put together yourself.  The top was cluttered with jewel cases
filled with burned CDs and gaming magazines.  I looked in the cubbyholes and
found a bag of pot—no surprise there—and not much else.  I flipped through the
gaming magazines to make sure there were no loose papers between the pages. 

Glancing around the rest of
the room, I realized was going to have to touch that bed.  My whole body
shivered and I took a deep breath, wishing like crazy I had thought to bring
gloves.

Under the bed were dust
balls and spank mags, featuring women with novelty breasts the size of beach
balls.  I did the same thing and shook them to be sure there were no loose
papers inside.  Some of the pages were stuck together.  I gagged a little.  I
lifted the twin mattress and found bubkes, as Ma would say. 

Next I carefully made my way
to the small bookcase where books had been haphazardly shoved on the shelves.  All
science fiction—natch—and as I thumbed my way through the pages, I noticed a
theme.  Most of the covers depicted large breasted women in skimpy outfits. 
Some wielded swords, some stood tall, their legs in a wide stance, their ginormous
breasts thrust out.  Axton
really
liked the boobies. 

The closet yielded nothing
but a few faded t-shirts, one pair of khakis, and a dirty pair of tennis shoes
on the floor.  A cardboard chest of drawers held his socks and a lone pair of
underwear. 

I glanced around the room
one more time, trying to take in anything that might hold a clue, and spied two
pairs of jeans tossed in the corner.  I picked my way through the dirty boxer
bombs to get to them.  Holding up the first pair with two fingers, I felt
around in the pockets.  Nothing.  But in the front left pocket of the second
pair, I found a folded yellow Post-it with the words NorthStar Inc. written in
Axton’s blocky handwriting. 

I smiled.  I didn’t know if
this was a clue, but I felt kind of excited.

With the paper tucked in my
pocket, I scooped up all the burned CDs from the desk and slipped them into my
purse.  I doubted they contained any clues to Ax’s whereabouts, but I wanted to
be sure.  I left the bedroom and went into the living room for one last attempt
at Joe. 

“Joe?”

“Mmm?” he didn’t look away
from the TV.

“Joe?” I said, louder this
time.

His glassy gaze drifted my
way.  “Hey, Rose, you still here?”

“What did Axton wear to the
club?”

He blinked, and seemed
sharper, more alert for a moment.  He grinned and snapped his fingers.  “He had
on this jacket, like you wear to funerals and stuff.”

“A suit jacket?”

“Yeah, and
pants
.”

“Slacks?”  In all the years
I’d known Ax, I’d never seen him in a suit.  I didn’t even know he owned one.

“Yeah, not like jeans or anything.” 
He stared at the wall next to my head, the glazed look back in his eyes. 
“Yeah,” he whispered.  “Kind of like the dude who dropped by earlier.”

“What?”  My heart hammered
in my chest.  “What dude?”

“Some tall dude who looked
in Ax’s room.”

I stomped over to the TV and
shut it off, then blocked it with my body.  “What tall dude?”

“I don’t know, man.  A guy
showed up and asked for Ax…,” he looked up at the ceiling, “this morning?” 

I buried my face in my
hands.  So help me God, I was going to strangle this moron with his own hat
strings.  I took a deep breath.  “Joe.  Start at the beginning.  A dude came to
the house.  What did he look like?”

He scratched the top of his
head.  “Like a funeral guy, I told you.”

“What did he say?  Tell me
exactly.”

His stomach rumbled and he
looked up at me.  “Huh, did you hear that?”

“What did he say?”  My jaw
was clenched so tight, I could barely move my lips. 

“Man, chill.  He said Ax had
something important and he needed to search the Axman’s room.  Like you did.”

I stepped closer to Joe. 
“Did he find anything?  Please Joe, please focus.”

“No…” he tilted his head to
the side and closed his eyes for so long I thought he’d fallen asleep.  Then
they popped open.  “No, I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“Ah man, I don’t know.”

I could tell I wasn’t going
to get any more out of him, no matter how much I pushed.  “Joe,” I said slowly,
“I want you to call me if the man comes back.”

“Sure.”  He dug into the
chip bag and brought out a handful of crumbs.  Half made it into his mouth and
the other half landed on his shirt.  “No problem.”   

I stared at him in
frustration.  I had no doubt Joe would completely forget our conversation, let
alone his promise to call, if this guy showed up again.     

As I left the house and made
my way to the car, I dug in my purse for hand sanitizer, pouring half the
bottle into my palm.  The bright blue October sky was completely at odds with
my dark mood.  There was just a little breeze, a nip of fall in the air. 
Still, I was freezing.

I now knew Axton wore a suit
to a club, had the name of a company that may or may not, in any way, be
related to Axton’s disappearance, and knew a man had searched Ax’s room before
I got there.  It had to be the same mystery man I’d met in the woods.  What was
this guy looking for?  And what would happen if he found Ax before I did?

On TV they say you must wait
forty-eight hours before a person is considered missing.  I hoped that wasn’t
the case in real life.  I knew Axton was missing and I needed him back. 

I drove to the better side
of Huntingford where the police station resided.  The old station had been an
historical landmark, but the city built a new one fifteen years ago.  It was now
a generic brick box.   

As I walked through the
doors, my feet met industrial grade dark green carpet.  A large framed aerial
view of the city hung on the off-white wall to the right.  Except for a few
people in police uniforms milling around, it wasn’t at all what I imagined a
police station would look like.  Where were the criminals handcuffed to
chairs?  Where were the hookers in bad wigs?  I didn’t think we had a large
hooker population in Huntingford, but I still felt a little let down.   

I walked to the window near
the front door where a uniformed female officer sat behind a desk and stared, unblinking,
at a computer.  “Can I help you?” she asked in a bored voice. 

“Uh, yeah, I’d like to
report a missing person?”  My hands felt clammy and I wiped them on my jeans. 
I didn’t know why I was nervous.  I hadn’t done anything wrong. 

She looked up at me then. 
Her gaze took in my hair, face, and red t-shirt.  “Who’s missing?”

“My friend, Axton.”

With a sigh, she stood.  She
wasn’t very tall, but she was sturdy, like a fire hydrant with big boobs.  Just
Axton’s type.  “How long has your friend been missing?”

“Since last night.”

She sighed again and sat
down.  “I can take an information report, put his name in the database.  If you
want to make a missing person report, you need to wait forty-eight hours. 
Thank you.”  She dismissed me and returned to her computer.

“He called me for help, but
we were disconnected.  He gave me his backpack.  He’s never without his
backpack.”  I did a little jazz hand move, trying to get my point across.  “He
left his home without his car and no one’s heard from him.  He didn’t show up
for work today.  Don’t you think that’s suspicious?  Because, personally,” I
pointed to my chest, “I find that very suspicious.  And there’s a man in a suit
looking for him.”   

She held up her hand to stop
me.  “Ma’am, you need to lower your voice.”

I took a breath and nodded. 
“Sorry.  I’m just very concerned.  This isn’t like him at all.”

“Give me his name and DOB
and I’ll put him in the system.”

I did, and she tapped on the
keyboard and fiddled with the mouse for a couple of minutes, and then eyeballed
me.  “He’s got two misdemeanors for marijuana possession.”