Читать книгу: «Last Breath», страница 2

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Charlie kicked the vending machine in the basement of the courthouse. The glass rattled in the frame. She kicked it again. The bright yellow pack of Starburst shook on the metal spiral, but did not drop down.

Her shoe was already scuffed from puking in the bathroom. She raised her foot for another kick.

“That’s government property.”

She turned around. Ben Bernard, one of the lawyers from the district attorney’s office, trundled down the stairs. The collar of his dress shirt was frayed. His tie was askew. He studied the stuck Starbursts. A large sticker on the glass warned that shaking the machine could result in fines and possible imprisonment.

He asked, “How badly do you want this?”

“Bad enough to go down on you in the supply closet if you get it for me.”

Ben grabbed the machine with both arms and gave it a violent shake. Her husband was no Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he was clearly motivated. It only took two attempts. The Starburst dropped into the hopper. He reached down and pulled out the yellow pack with a flourish.

Charlie was game, but she warned, “I should probably confess that I had my head in a toilet twenty minutes ago.”

“They put a lock on the door after the last time, anyway.” He pressed his hand to her forehead. “You feeling okay?”

“I think it’s PMS.” She bit open the pack of candy. “Listen, I need to run a name past you.”

Ben’s mouth moved as he chewed at the tip of his tongue. They had been doing their respective jobs for four years, but he was a prosecutor and she was a defense attorney; they still hadn’t quite worked out how to help each other while still maintaining their professional sides.

“It’s not a criminal case,” she assured him. “At least, not my part in it. I’ve got a girl who wants to be emancipated from her guardians.”

He sucked air between his teeth.

“Yeah, it’s not a great situation.” Charlie tried to peel the wrapper off a red Starburst. “I was upstairs filling out a document request on a structured trust. The guardians are her grandparents. It sounds like they’re into some bad things.”

He took over for her on the candy wrapper. “What bad things?”

“Pills, I gather. And alcohol. And money from the trust. It sounds like they’re going to milk it dry before she’s of age.”

“So, she can pay you?”

“Ehn.” Charlie shrugged, giving what she hoped was a winning smile.

Ben said, “Dexter Black.”

“Not my client.”

“Yeah, I noticed that when Carter Grail brought him into the office for a talk. Any idea when he’s going to pay you?”

“Babe, if my clients paid me, we’d probably end up taking a long vacation to somewhere like Costa Rica, and you would get really sunburned, which raises your risk for melanoma, which is the deadliest form of skin cancer, and then I would have to kill myself because I can’t live without you.”

“Okay, that makes a lot of sense.”

Charlie could see that he was trying. “I’m not one hundred percent certain that she’s not being abused.”

“Shit.”

“Well, she didn’t tell me that she was being abused. She actually denied it, but…” Charlie shrugged again. She wasn’t clairvoyant, but she’d had a bad feeling when she’d heard Flora’s denial. There was a fleeting look in the girl’s eyes, like she had been trapped in a corner and didn’t know how to get out. “Even if it’s not true, she’s in trouble, and I feel like I have to at least try to help her.”

Ben didn’t hesitate. “Then, either way, I have to support your decision.”

She had no idea how she’d managed to marry such a wonderful man. “We’ll pay off our student loans one day.”

“With our social security.” Ben held up the candy. Charlie opened her mouth so he could drop it in.

He asked, “What’s the girl’s name?”

“Florabama Faulkner.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Seriously?”

“Kid never had a chance.” Charlie chewed the Starburst a few times before sticking it up inside her cheek. “Grandparents are raising her. She gave me their names, but I got their address from the Girl Scout rolls.”

“That sounds vaguely illegal.”

“I took a pledge to be a sister to every Scout, so it’s basically like spying on my sister.”

“I’m going to distract you with my hands while I try not to think about you wearing a Girl Scout uniform.” Ben took out the tiny spiral notebook he always kept in his suit pocket. He showed the cover to Charlie: Captain Kirk looking serious about some Starship business. He edged the compact pen out of the spiral. He thumbed to a blank page.

She said, “Leroy and Maude Faulkner. They’re living down from Shady Ray’s.”

His pen didn’t move. “In the cinder-block apartments?”

“Yep.”

“That’s a bad place to raise a kid.”

“They used to live on the lake. I’m assuming that trust fund mixed in with their addictions made it easy to make some bad decisions. Belinda says the grandmother showed up in a Porsche once, stone drunk.”

“What kind of Porsche?” Ben shook his head. “Never mind. I get what you’re saying.”

“Flora wants to go to college. She wants to make her mom proud, to honor her memory. That probably won’t happen if she stays with her grandparents.”

“Probably not.” Ben scribbled the names and closed his notebook. “Word around the office is the entire apartment building is under surveillance. The cops are being really secretive about it, but I saw some photos on the wall in Ken’s office. Addicts live there along with a handful of terrified, law-abiding citizens who can’t afford better. There’s a meth lab in the vicinity.”

“They can’t find it?” Meth labs were usually found in trailers or recently blown-up basements.

Ben said, “I gleaned from the photos that they think whoever is cooking the meth is doing it out of the back of a panel van.”

“That sounds stupid and dangerous.”

“The cops will catch them the minute the van explodes.” He tucked the notebook back in his pocket. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Just thinking about my mom a lot. Flora’s mother died when she was young. It stirred up some things.”

“What can I do to make you feel better?”

“You’re doing it.” Charlie stroked her fingers through Ben’s hair. “I always feel better when I’m with you.”

They both smiled at the corny line, but they both knew that it was true.

He said, “Listen, I know I can’t keep you away from those apartments, but don’t go there alone, okay? Ask to meet them somewhere neutral, like for coffee at the diner. Whatever is going on at that place has to be dangerous. The county wouldn’t be spending the money for surveillance otherwise.”

“Understood.” Charlie smoothed down his tie. She could feel his heart beating beneath her palm. She pressed her lips to his neck. The skin prickled to attention. She traced her mouth up, whispering in his ear, “I promise you’ll get a rain check on the supply closet.”

“Chuck,” he whispered back, “this would be so hot if you didn’t have puke in your hair.”

Charlie swung by the house to take a shower and change before going to the cinder-block apartments. She had indicated to Ben an understanding that she should stay away from the place, but Ben probably knew that Charlie wouldn’t stay away, so going there was actually living up to a long-held promise in their marriage: the promise that she would do whatever the hell she wanted.

She was happy to exchange her grown-up, career-day clothes for jeans and one of her Duke Blue Devils basketball T-shirts. Considering how much she and Ben owed the law school, she was surprised they hadn’t been forced to wear sandwich boards until the loans were paid off.

The time was close enough to lunch for her to be hungry, so she ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and half a bag of Doritos while she dialed into the messages on her office phone. Charlie had a court appearance Friday and there was a last-minute motion to be filed. A judge was asking for a brief on a point of law that would not help her client. And because her life wasn’t difficult enough, she had a call from her credit-card company that was likely not a warm thank you for being a valued customer.

Charlie searched the filing cabinet and found the previous month’s bill, which, according to her handwritten note on the statement, had been paid a day late, but that didn’t usually warrant a call. They were fifteen hundred dollars away from their limit.

Charlie called Visa on the number from the message. She was searching her wallet for her card when her cell phone rang. She kept her home phone to her ear while she answered the other one.

“Miss Charlie,” Dexter said. “Please don’t hang up.”

“I think you meant to call Carter Grail.”

“Come on, now, don’t be like that. You told me to call the dude.”

“Because you owe me two grand.” Charlie listened to the Visa hold Muzak, a sax rendition of REM’s “Losing My Religion”.

Dexter said, “Lookit, Miss Charlie, I’m’a pay you Tuesday.”

Charlie thought of Wimpy, who was always offering to pay people on Tuesday for a hamburger today, and then she realized that she was still hungry. “Dexter, I’ll be really happy if you pay me, but I can’t give you any legal advice until you do.”

“But, lookit, it’ll help you, too, ’cause like I said, I get paid, then you get paid.”

“I’m not allowed to bargain with you like that. It gives me a vested interest in the outcome of your—shit.” Her Visa card wasn’t in its usual slot in her wallet.

“Miss Charlie?”

“I’m here.” She rifled her wallet, her stomach in free fall until she found the Visa crammed between the dollar bills in the folded part.

The YWCA bathroom. Her purse spilled onto the floor.

Flora must have put the card back in the wrong place.

Dexter said, “I just need you to tell me can I do this thing I’m gonna do, and would I be okay if I didn’t do the thing, like, exactly, because see, the person I’m dealing with, well, shit, let’s just say they don’t play.”

“I can’t negotiate for you in bad faith.” Charlie saw the trap she’d walked into, because now she was giving him legal advice. “I’m not negotiating for you, period, Dexter. I can’t tell you how to break the law. And if I was your lawyer, I couldn’t put you on the stand knowing you were going to lie, and I couldn’t allow you to sign a plea deal knowing that you intend to obfuscate.”

“Obfuscate,” he repeated. “Yeah, I know that word from The X-Files. Did you see that episode? Dude stuck this metal thing up people’s noses and sucked the color outta their skin.”

“Teliko,” Charlie said, because her husband was a geek and they had every season of The X-Files in both VHS and DVD. “Dexter, is there something that I can help you with that won’t involve me breaking the law, or advising you on how to break the law, or wasting the minutes on my cell-phone plan, or all three?”

“Uh…”

Charlie yawned. She suddenly felt exhausted. “Dexter?”

He waited a few more seconds, then asked, “What was the question again?”

Charlie hung up her cell phone.

Static filled the home phone at her other ear. The recording advised her that her hold time to speak with a Visa representative was only sixteen more minutes.

Charlie put the phone back on the hook.

She jammed the Visa bill into her purse for a later follow-up. She looked at the couch and thought about how nice a nap would be. And then she remembered Flora’s situation. Charlie’s calendar was generally full, but she had kept today light because she’d planned on an assortment of eager Girl Scouts wanting to ask her tons of questions about how to make their lives as awesome as Charlie’s. If she was going to figure out how to help Florabama Faulkner, today was the only day she could do it.

She grabbed the Doritos on the way out the door and drove with the bag between her legs, carefully handling the chips, making a mental list of things she needed to do.

First, she would talk to Flora’s grandparents and see if the situation was as bad as the girl claimed. The question of abuse was still unanswered. Maybe Flora had been honest in the bathroom and there was nothing untoward going on. Or maybe she was willing to sacrifice the truth in order to keep her grandfather out of jail. Or maybe Charlie had watched too many made-for-TV movies. Whether it was pills or neglect or abuse, the fact that Flora was actively working to keep her guardians out of jail said a lot about the girl’s character.

Next on the list, she would need to get some idea of Nancy’s living situation. That was the name of the girl whose parents had offered to take in Flora. Charlie had their address courtesy of the list Flora had made at the Y this morning.

The last thing on the list was to talk to Flora’s boss at the diner to make sure the girl was gainfully employed. Or maybe it wasn’t the very last thing. If there was extra time, she could make some calls from home to interview a few of Flora’s teachers. Charlie had cut her teeth working juvenile cases. She knew that teachers saw a hell of a lot more than the average person in a child’s life, even the parents.

That was a lot to fit into one day, but talking to people, sussing out the truth, was the hard part. The rest was just paperwork.

Charlie felt her stomach rumble. She felt sick, but she also felt hungry. She did the math again in her head, reminding herself that her period was due any minute now, that the spotting and the cramping and the soreness in her breasts and the PMS-induced hunger were all pointing to the same damn sign they pointed to every month.

She ate a handful of Doritos as she passed an open semi-trailer filled with chickens. The chickens stared at her, but Charlie’s thoughts were squarely on what Belinda had said about how being pregnant changed everything.

Charlie supposed that was the point, that things changed when you had a baby, but from what she had noticed, it was like any big life event: either it brought you closer together or it pulled you apart. Ryan, Belinda’s husband, had done a tour in Iraq as some kind of technical support person. So, he’d been in the desert, but not in the middle of combat. For a while, it seemed like he only came home to yell at the television set and make Belinda pregnant. War had changed him. Not just war, but the niggling suspicion that the war he was fighting was more like running in quicksand. The sense of futility was only part of the problem. The other part was the nature of his extended deployments. His long absences had given Belinda time to get used to making all of the decisions. When Ryan came back with different ideas about how things should be run, the tension had spilled over into every aspect of their marriage.

To Charlie’s thinking, their main issue was usefulness. Both Belinda and Ryan wanted to have a purpose, to give their family direction, and both of them were making each other miserable because they couldn’t share the responsibility.

Charlie laughed at her Oprah-esque observation. She had to blame her mother for this line of thinking. Charlie’s childhood had been shaped by her mother’s constant refrain—

If you’re not being useful, then you’re being useless.

Was Charlie being useful? Flora was so eager to carry out the life that her mother had envisioned. Charlie felt that same sense of urgency. Was she honoring her mother? Did her life have purpose?

It sure as hell lacked focus.

She’d been so zoned out that she had passed right by the cinder-block apartments.

“Shi-i-i-it,” she drew out the word as she glanced behind her, catching the two-story building in her side-view mirror. She pulled a wagon wheel of a U-turn across the empty four-lane highway and pulled up at the two-story cinder-block building tucked down in a ravine behind a long stretch of busted guard rail. To her surprise, she saw that the apartments had a name. A discreet sign welcomed visitors to the Ponderosa. Ropes twined around the border in homage to the Bonanza TV show, but this was no place for Little Joe to hang his hat. Unless he wanted to crack open a light bulb and smoke a bowl.

The majority of the parking spaces were filled with beat-up old cars; not a good sign, considering most people should be at work this time of day. She drove to the end of the parking lot on the off-chance she would see the Porsche that Belinda had told her about, but Charlie’s three-year-old Subaru wagon was the sportiest car around. She took a space near the exit, thinking that was smart in case she needed to make a quick getaway. She remembered what Ben had said about the building being surveilled. It made her feel safer, knowing that some cops, somewhere, were watching her back.

Or, if you looked at it another way, they were watching her go into a place known for drug traffickers and junkies.

Charlie stared up at the sad, squat building. Twelve units total; six on the bottom, six on top. Cinder-block walls painted a dull gray, a rusty railing lining the second story, rotted-out wooden doors with faded plastic numbers, a low roof with a rotting overhang. Every door had a plate-glass window next to it, and every window had a whining air conditioning unit underneath. A steep pathway led to a filthy-looking pool. Unlit tiki torches circled the chain-link fence. The place reminded her of the airport motels her mother had forced them to stay in every vacation because they were cheap and close to mass transportation. Charlie’s clearest memories of Disney World were her night terrors that the wheels of an airplane were going to hit her head while she slept.

“What do you think we’d get in the lawsuit?” her father had asked when she had shared with him the reason for her screaming.

Charlie pulled her purse onto her shoulder as she got out of the car. Hot air hit her like a slap to the face. She was sweating by the time she turned around and locked the car door. The smell of fried chicken, pot and cat urine—which was either from a bunch of cats or from a bunch of meth—stung her nostrils.

According to the Girl Scout roll, the Faulkners resided in unit three on the bottom floor, smack in the center, which was probably the worst of all worlds. Neighbors on each side, always waiting for the other shoe to drop upstairs. As she walked across the parking lot, she heard the distinct bass of Petey Pablo’s “Freek-A-Leek”.

Earring in her tongue and she know what to do with it…

The music got louder as Charlie navigated the broken sidewalk.

With my eyes rolled back and my toes curled…

“Ugh,” Charlie groaned, repulsed by the words and also irritated that she knew them by heart. She hated to trot out one of those in my day sentences, but she could still remember how reviled Madonna was for singing about her feelings of renewed virginity.

Without warning, the music stopped.

The silence tickled the hairs on the back of Charlie’s neck. She had the distinct feeling of being watched as she walked along the uneven path to unit three. The wooden door was warped, painted a dark red that did not hide the black underneath.

She raised her hand. She knocked twice. She waited. She knocked again.

The curtains rustled. The woman’s face behind the glass looked older than Charlie, but in a hard way, like the few years had been spent on a construction site or, more likely, in prison. Her eyeliner was a thick black line. Blue eyeshadow. Heavy foundation reminiscent of the coating of Doritos dust on Charlie’s steering wheel. She wore her shoulder-length bleached blonde hair in a “Barracuda”-era Nancy-Wilson-style feather.

She saw Charlie and scowled before closing the curtains.

Charlie stood on the hot sidewalk listening to the air conditioning units grumble in the quiet. She looked at her watch. She was wondering if she had been given the brush-off when she heard sounds from behind the door.

A chain slid back. A deadbolt was turned. Then another one. The door opened. Tendrils of cold air caressed Charlie’s face. The whining a/c competed with OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” playing somewhere in the darkened room. The woman at the door was wearing jeans and a cropped red T-shirt with a Georgia Bulldog on it. A half-empty bottle of beer was in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Her fingernails were filed to long, sharp points, the polish bright red. She reminded Charlie of the trashy Culpepper girls who had relentlessly hounded her throughout high school. The woman had that look about her, like when the shit went down, she was ready to scratch out some eyes or pull out some hair or bite down real hard on an arm or a back if that’s what it took to win the fight.

Charlie said, “I’m looking for Maude or Leroy Faulkner.”

“I’m Maude.” Even her voice sounded mean, like a rattlesnake opening a switchblade.

Charlie shook her head. There had to be two different Maudes. “I mean Flora’s grandmother.”

“That’s me.”

Charlie’s chin almost hit the ground.

“Yeah.” She took a hit off her cigarette. “I was seventeen when I had Esme. Esme was fifteen when she had Flora. You can do the math.”

Charlie didn’t want to do the math, because grandmothers had buns and wore bifocals and watched Hee Haw. They didn’t sport cropped shirts that showed pierced navels and drink beer in the middle of the day while OutKast played on their boom box.

Maude said, “You gonna keep wasting my air conditioning or you gonna come inside?”

Charlie stepped into the apartment. Cigarette smoke hung like dirty yellow lace in the air. There was no light except for what came in through the slim part in the curtains on the front window. Brown shag carpet cupped the soles of her sneakers. The cluttered kitchenette was part of the living room. The bathroom was at the end of a short hall, a bedroom on either side. Clothes were everywhere, unopened cardboard boxes, a sewing machine on a rickety table shoved against the wall by the kitchen. A large television set was jammed into the corner by the front window. The sound was muted as Jill Abbott screamed at Katherine Chancellor on The Young and the Restless.

“Leroy?” the woman said.

Charlie blinked her eyes until they adjusted to the darkness. Across from the TV was a dark-blue couch. A large man overflowed from the matching recliner. A metal brace encapsulated his left leg. He had likely been handsome at some point in his life, but now a long, pink scar ran down the left side of his grizzled face. His lank, brown hair hung to his shoulders. He looked either asleep or passed out. His eyes were closed. His mouth gaped open. His red University of Georgia T-shirt matched the woman’s. His jean shorts were not the usual knee-length variety, but cut short enough so that they did not impede the metal brace, which meant they were also short enough to offer up a display to whoever walked through the door.

“Jesus, Leroy.” Maude punched his arm. “Tuck your ball back in. We got company.”

Anger flashed in Leroy’s rheumy eyes, then he saw Charlie and the look was quickly replaced with one of contrition. He mumbled an apology as he turned in his chair and made some discreet adjustments below the waist.

Maude flicked her silver Zippo, lighting a fresh cigarette. “Goddamn idiot.”

“Sorry,” Leroy apologized to Charlie again.

Charlie did not know whether to smile or run for the door. Peep show aside, there was something off-putting about Flora’s grandfather. If he had been handsome in his youth, it was the skeevy kind of handsome where you didn’t know if the guy was going to ask you to dance or follow you to the parking lot and try to rape you.

Or both.

“All right, missy.” Maude blew smoke toward the ceiling. “What the hell do you want?”

“I’m Charlotte Quinn. I spoke with—”

“Rusty’s gal?” Leroy smiled. His bottom lip caved in where his teeth should’ve been. Given his age, she assumed this meant he’d graduated from pills to meth. “I think the last time I saw you was before your mama died. Come closer so I can get a look at ya.”

Charlie stepped closer, though every muscle in her body told her not to. It wasn’t just the skeeviness. There was a sickly, chemical smell about him that she recognized from her clients who were detoxing at the detention center. “How do you know my dad?”

“Had me some troubles in my youth. Then I got straightened out, and this happened.” He indicated his leg. “Ol’ Russ helped me wrangle with the insurance companies. Good man, your father.”