“That’s the thing, Jay. You’re not just ‘some other guy.’ You know how hard that is for Brody?”
I wanted to say, “You know how little I give a fuck?” But I didn’t. “How’s our son?”
“He’s with my mom. She’s taking him to her sewing group.”
“Poor guy.”
“You kidding me? All those old ladies pinching his cheeks and giving him treats? I know you don’t like her much, but I’m glad he has at least one grandparent in his life. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“I like your mom just fine,” I said. “She doesn’t like me. Listen, I’m not working right now. I mean, I still have a job, but Tom is laying low for a while. I can help out watching Aiden more during the day, if you need me to.”
“He’s your son. You can see him anytime you’d like. But my mom has the time and, frankly, I’m not sure I’d feel good with Aiden over at your place with what’s been going on. After what you just told me, I don’t feel too good with you being at your place.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m a big boy. I’m sorry for any headache with Brody last night. Blame it all on me if you need to.”
Jenny giggled. “What do you think I did?”
CHAPTER TEN
I called Charlie to see if he had time for lunch at the Olympic Diner. As luck would have it, he said, he was wrapping up a service call down the road and would meet me there.
The Olympic was on the south end of the Desmond Turnpike, which connected bigger counties like Colebrook and Pittsfield, so it attracted more foot traffic than the rest of town. We’d practically lived at the twenty-four-hour diner in high school, every party eventually finding its way there come dawn.
Sitting in the parking lot, I drank the coffee I’d picked up across the street at the Shell station, smoking from a fresh pack of cigarettes, waiting for Charlie. The streets were paved, but you couldn’t scrape up all the snow and ice, each passing storm only adding a layer to the asphalt permafrost.
A slick sheen glistened off everything, long icicles dripping from electrical lines, Ashton consumed by deep, dark gray. Tall weeds and bramble reeds poked through the hard snow, creeping and cracking around streetlamps, bumpers and barriers, like crippled beanstalks.
This section of the Turnpike seemed more respectable, with businesses and restaurants like Best Buy, Jiffy Lube, Friendly’s-there was even a duckpin bowling alley where I attended birthday parties as a kid-but in between all the department outlets and national chains were still the places no one really wanted to be: cheap motels, dollar stores, military surplus shacks, knickknack and consignment shops, The Salvation Army, fast food drive-throughs, all-night gas stations.
I watched the stragglers. Not bums, exactly. That wouldn’t be fair to say. But hardly upstanding citizens. It was pushing one o’clock on a weekday afternoon, and the boulevard bustled with activity. Didn’t anybody work? Almost always in pairs, they seemed to wander without direction. They were vagrants, welfare recipients who lived in one of the countless dumpy hotels that populated this stretch, waiting for their next public handout to get high and fuck away the pain, the lost kids, the alcoholic men and broken-down women, the easily forgotten and the quickly replaced.
I remembered buying pot years ago off a guy who lived in one of these motels. He couldn’t have been much older than I am now, but he seemed incomprehensibly old at the time. I could still picture the inside of that hellhole as he weighed the bud on an old-fashioned, balance-beam scale-warbling game show on a tiny black and white TV with rabbit ears; the near-naked, emaciated woman laying on the unmade bed; the ribbons of blue smoke that floated like cirrus clouds in a lazy summer sky-thinking I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
For as much time as I’d spent on the Turnpike and in the diner when I was younger, these sights and sounds never before completely registered. I didn’t understand how someone could tolerate a single day of it, let alone years. And that’s how my brother had lived most of his life.
A knock on my passenger-side window startled me, and I looked up to see Charlie mugging against the glass.
“You were kind of a dick last night,” Charlie said inside the diner. We sat in a booth against the long pane window, overlooking the Turnpike. Each booth came with its own miniature jukebox. We were about the only ones in there, having missed the lunch crowd.
“Fisher hates my guts.” I flipped through the selections on the jukebox, nothing more recent than the 1980s, and not the good shit, either. The best you could hope for was maybe Hall & Oates, a “Little Red Corvette,” a Michael Jackson song before his face turned entirely plastic. The diner did its best to maintain the illusion of nostalgia, which was its primary appeal. That and the waitresses. Certainly wasn’t the food.
“You shouldn’t have felt up his girlfriend,” said Charlie.
“A, she wasn’t his girlfriend, and B, that was fifteen years ago. How long does someone hold onto a grudge?”
“You tell me. Guy’s trying to do you a favor. You might be a little more appreciative.”
“Someone broke into my place last night.”
The waitress, a beautiful, young Greek girl with long, straight black hair and the type of face they write poetry about, came to take our order. Her family had owned the restaurant since I was a kid, and it seemed they never ran out of beautiful, young waitresses. An endless parade. Every time you stepped into the Olympic, there was another gorgeous Greek girl in a tight blue skirt, ready to offer service with a smile.
“Who?” Charlie asked, after he’d ordered a burger with the works and she’d strutted away.
“Huh?”
“Stop ogling the help. Who broke into your apartment?”
I hadn’t ordered anything, just coffee, my gut acting up, which didn’t make coffee the smartest bet, I knew, but I was dragging ass and needed to get it in gear.
“Beats me,” I said, grabbing a fistful of sugar packets and emptying them in the faded brown mug. “I walked in on them. Cracked me good on the back of the head. Cops found me out cold. And don’t ask if it was my brother. I’m sick of the question. Chris couldn’t drop me with a hockey stick and a running start.”
“Actually, I was thinking it was those guys from the computer shop.”
“Possible,” I said. “Didn’t take anything, whoever it was. Tore the place to hell looking for something, though.”
The waitress returned with the pot and filled me up, smiling awkwardly when our conversation halted as soon as she came near.
“That hard drive,” whispered Charlie after she’d left. “I told you.” He stabbed his finger at me. “That’s the key to this whole thing.”
“I’m not ready to go all in on that yet. We’re basing everything we know on the ramblings of a drug addict-a drug addict who believes, among other things, that our country was founded by aliens and that the government poisons our drinking water. My brother is a lunatic. And a liar. When Chris speaks, you have to divide by four.”
“Pete Naginis is dead. Murdered. Or have you forgotten that?”
“They live a rough life, stealing, shooting drugs, getting in debt to the wrong people.”
Charlie held up a hand and started ticking off items, using each finger to illustrate his point. “Your brother’s missing. That detective’s up from Concord. The phone call? Those gangbangers at the shop? And now somebody breaks into your apartment? That’s gotta add up to something, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what to think, Charlie.” I peered out through the cold glass, at the cars and trucks zooming along the wet road. “That detective’s name’s McGreevy. He was at my place with Turley and Pat last night. Tell you one thing. I don’t like the guy. He’s playing some angle.”