The Garden of Last Days (43 page)

Goddamnit, he should’ve taken her inside Mama’s or back home to Deena. If he was going to do something good for this girl, then damnit he should’ve done it all the way.

He was driving north when he should be heading south to Lido Key, but there was the municipal fishing pier at the north end of
Ringling’s Causeway. He might be able to find a phone booth there, though he doubted it; since cell phones, they just didn’t seem to exist anywhere anymore.

His head ached. He was hungry now, and thirsty. But it was too late to reach for just one more Miller. He didn’t want to smell like beer when Caporelli drove up to find him pinned under the bucket. He raised his bad hand and looked at it in the dim blue light of dawn. His wrist was wider than his forearm, and the fingers of his hand thick and curled. It’d been over six hours since that big motherfucker broke it and again AJ had no worries about Cap Jr. believing his tale, but wouldn’t the doctors know the difference between what had been done to it and how long ago and what he was going to say? Or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d be as busy as those poor sonsabitches in that show Deena liked, and they wouldn’t have time to even think about it. A broken bone was a broken bone.

For a flashing moment AJ considered letting go of the plan entirely. Just go to work and carry on, but with a laugh that came from a knowledge he’d forgotten, he lowered his useless hand back to his lap. If he did
not
go ahead with this, then he’d be out of work with nothing for weeks, maybe months. He might be able to collect but how good would that look to the judge? Cole’s daddy laid up because a bouncer at the Puma thought he was being too rough on one of the girls.

Too rough.

Goddamnit but his blood started to shoot through him all over again and he gunned his engine and shot his truck onto the concrete causeway, the rubber expansion joints clicking under his tires steadier than his own jagged heartbeat. Off to his right lay the purple waters of Sarasota Bay, then the early-morning lights, the streetlamps and traffic signals above empty intersections, the fluorescent glow of first-floor security desks of the office buildings downtown, the neon glow of what had to be at least one all-night coffee shop where he could get a cup and a muffin. But there wasn’t time. Already the sky was visible over the buildings to the east, a band of blue lifting to gray to
a rose that made him think of Marianne, her black hair, the rose he was going to give her on their night out. A flower for a flower. A man treating her like a lady. A
gentle
man with a
lady
.

What a sorry-ass sack of shit he really was.

He eased up on the gas and coasted down the causeway and turned left into the asphalt lot of the city pier. With his elbow he pressed his window button and could already smell the salt water and dried fish guts, the pelican shit and shell dust.

It was chilly without his shirt. He left his window open and rode down to the water’s edge. The Gulf was dark gray under a steel sky and his headlights shone over the wide planks of the pier, its weathered two-by-six railings, the white masts and hulls of boats moored below. They swayed from side to side in the early-morning chop.

He left his engine running and slid out of the truck and ran down the pathway to the only building around, a one-story hut with new windows and a thatched roof like the old Seminoles’. In front leaned a couple vending machines, Pepsi and bottled water. And at the far right side, bolted into the trim, was an oval sign:
PHONE
. His arm pulsed and throbbed and he held it up and ran around the corner, saw the half booth attached to the hut, its metal shelf and plastic phone book cover hanging on a brass chain, but no phone. No damn phone.

He turned and walked fast back to the truck, thinking, Fruitville Road. She was in the first garage in the first alleyway to the left going east of St. Armand’s Circle on Fruitville. Why not just open his cell phone, call the county, and say that? He could do it in less than a minute. But man, that’s all it would take to get his number and him. Why didn’t he leave her something to drink? He could’ve put her melting Slush Puppie right there on the floor for her to find. It’d be cold and sweet, familiar too.

A breeze kicked up from the east and blew across the lot. It felt good against his face and bare chest, but it was already warming up, the sky clear in its lighted strip on the horizon. It was going to be hot. He had to go back. It was in the same direction as Lido Key and just a few blocks north of his CAT. He’d get the garage door open, leave her
the Slush Puppie, then catch the exact street number of where he’d left her. On his way to the ditch he’d call 411, try and get a number from an address, then call the Honda owner directly, tell him or her about the little girl in the garage. Hang up.

But shit, then his number would be on
that
phone and anyway it was getting too light now. Neighbors might identify his truck. And what if Francie woke up when he went back in? And goddamnit, he couldn’t get back in anyway, he’d locked her in!

Shit
. He opened the access door, reached in over the empty car seat for his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. He was careful with his hurt hand, nudging gently for the arm hole, the world darker now and smelling like diesel and dirt and his own sour sweat. It was a dead-end smell, the smell of a life that would know only work, work, and more work. But as he poked his head and good arm through the right holes, the Gulf breeze blew back in his face, something shifting inside him: the girl was no longer his problem; he’d done what he could and now it was somebody else’s damn turn. It was that simple. He was just going to have to trust in Mama’s God that this child would be taken care of because he had about twenty minutes before Cap Jr. drove up to make a show of getting the day’s work started, and A.J. Carey still had to get that one-and-three-quarters yard bucket into the ditch where his wrist and hand were supposed to be, this poor good-luck arm he now had to reach by to pull his door shut. AJ put her in reverse and backed up too fast, swinging around to face south, the sky over Sarasota a pale coral, and just moments from the sun.

THEY CAME JUST
as the sun began to light the yard, the Virgin Mary’s alabaster face looking sadly accepting of all things, even the murder of her only son.

Virginia was still in her robe. She had the morning news on the TV and was in the kitchen making her toast when the buzzer sounded and she thought, Alan, but he has his key and anyway he’s working, and she pressed the intercom button and asked who’s there. And when he told her, the air itself seemed to be without air and she saw her son crushed under an overturned excavator or buried alive in a ditch, and she buzzed the men in and met them in the darkened hallway, her oxygen tube trailing behind her only so far, two policemen from Sarasota County and one from Bradenton, the uniforms different.

“What is it? Is it my son? Is it Alan?”

There was a tall one, older and wearing glasses, and he asked if they could come inside, and yes, yes, but you have to tell me. And now
they were gone, their visit inside her small kitchen so brief it felt like a bad vision.

Except there was the tall one’s card on the counter, his name and rank at the Sheriff’s Department, the kitchen air smelling like aftershave and the spearmint gum the one from Bradenton had chewed quietly while the one with glasses had shown her a picture of her own boy holding Cole on his lap, both of them squinting into the sun.

“Is this a recent photo?”

“Yes, it is.”

She’d let them walk through the three rooms of her apartment, and one of them ventured out into her enclosed yard. She didn’t want to tell them anything, but what could she do? She gave them the name and number of the company Alan worked for, and she told them about Lido Key, that he’d been called in to work early out there, something about a broken pipeline.

Virginia left her toast in the toaster and, careful to keep her tube from snagging under the foldout bed, she walked quickly to her chair by the window. She sat down, muted the television, and picked up the phone. It was Deena she wanted to talk to, Deena she wanted a few answers from, but her finger was punching Alan’s cell phone number instead. She was breathing with some difficulty. On the TV there was footage of a baseball player being hit in the back by a pitch, throwing down his bat and running after the pitcher, punching him in the face before the field was full of players from both sides, punching and kicking and screaming at one another.

“Yeah, this is AJ. The phone’s off or I’m workin’ so leave a message.”

“Alan? It’s Mama. Some policemen were just here looking for you. They think you know something about a missing little girl.” Virginia checked the clock across the room. “It’s 7:16 and they just left, honey. I had to give them your boss’s number and they know you’re out at Lido Key. Please call me, honey. Please tell me what’s going on.”

She pressed the Talk button. She’d forgotten to say she loved him and wished she had. She began pressing the numbers to his home, but
they weren’t coming right away. There was a four and seven in it, but was the three first or the five? Her eyes were on the TV, a jumble of sports news of big men in bright colors chasing little balls.

7435. Those were the last four digits to her son’s home, and of course this had to be one big mistake: she knew her son; she knew he liked his beer and occasional whiskey; she knew he was brokenhearted and missed Cole, that he was spending money he didn’t have on fallen women in that fallen place, that yes, he’d had enough and slapped that woman and shouldn’t have, but he was no danger to children. Not Alan. Not her son.

She pressed the numbers of the home he was locked out of and his phone began to ring. On the screen came a photograph of a young girl. It was one of those photo booth pictures, and she was sitting on the lap of a pretty woman. The girl had curly sun-streaked hair and plump cheeks and she was looking into the camera with great purpose, as if she knew taking this picture was meant to be something special. At first Virginia thought the girl’s name was Amber. Then she remembered seeing it quite a few times before for all children with names far different, boys and girls, but mainly girls. This little one was Franny Connors. There was a number to call. Then the image was gone, replaced by a beautiful young housewife loading happy children into a shiny new minivan.

JUST SEEING THE
job site under a brightening sky made him feel halfway normal: the yellow excavator and its tall boom folded in close to the cab, the bucket sitting beneath it like a loosely clenched fist; there were the clumps of clay and tree root he’d dumped yesterday along both sides of the ditch, the stands of cabbage palms and saw palmettos and jack pine between his work and the houses to the west. If it weren’t for his bad wrist and hand, this could be any workday morning, but as he pulled his truck into the clearing behind the excavator, the word
reward
came to him and he felt all the weeks and months and years he’d worked since he was fourteen years old, his childhood a blur of claustrophobic classrooms and loud, hot construction sites and long fluorescent-lit hours at Walgreens in a tie, then Deena and remodeling their hurricaneproof house and training with her daddy on heavy equipment and being too tired to even
play with Cole, then boiling over and having to live with Mama. Well today his reward was coming, and it was way past due.

He only had about fifteen minutes before Cap Jr. drove up. AJ was out of the truck, walking fast around the excavator. It was too late to put a realistic tear in the hydraulic line. The only thing left was to say the bucket rolled when he went to change it. But couldn’t they say it was his fault then? And how was he going to change the bucket over with one hand anyway?
Shit
, he’d spent too damn much time and energy on that bitch’s child when he should’ve been thinking more about
this
.

With his good hand he grabbed hold of the safety handle and stepped up onto the track and swung open the cab door. He held his hurt wrist to his chest, climbed in, and started her up. It was a comforting sound, the diesel engine rattling with all that power under him. The only thing left was to lower the bucket into the ditch and say the hydraulics failed, which would be highly fucking unlikely.