Knuckleduster Page 12

  “That’s good because you know what? I’m not a soldier anymore and neither are you. You can’t go around thinking everyone’s up to no good.”

  “And you can trust her? The girl with the stolen car?”

  “If you saw her after that asshole talked to her the way he did, you’d know she was trustworthy. For my sake, please calm down. Leave the people reading to me, okay? I do shit like this all the time. I can tell when someone’s trying to pull a fast one.”

  Thorp put his hands on his hips and sighed for what felt like a full minute, really pushing every ounce of air out of his lungs. He let his hands slap at his sides. “Okay, fine. I trust you.”

  “Good. Thank you. Jesus.”

  But without a moment’s peace, Thorp asked, “So, what do we know so far?”

  While drawing a deep breath, Brody organized his thoughts. “Well, I think Paige has a key to Nectar’s apartment, but she wasn’t going to cough it up when we first met. Now I think she’ll be more inclined to let me have it. Of course, we should consider the fact that she may be right.”

  “No,” Thorp said thoughtfully, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “I don’t think she’s out of town.”

  Brody groaned. “Give it a minute, okay? She’s a searcher, apparently. You can agree with that, can’t you? You know your sister. Paige says Nectar’s always trying to find the next thing to get into, fashion or lifestyle or career or whatever. Think about it. Doesn’t this seem kind of routine?”

  “She hasn’t been that way for as long as I can remember,” Thorp said.

  “Before Nectar talked to you about enlisting, when was the last time you spoke with her?”

  Thorp didn’t respond right away. This told Brody it hadn’t been only a couple of days or weeks. “Last summer. August, maybe. She came by to ask for some money.”

  “And what do you suppose that money was for?” Brody said leadingly. He continued when Thorp didn’t pick up on the tone. “She was probably going to go out of town for a while. Give it a few days. I need to get back to Minneapolis anyway.”

  “You’re going to leave?” Thorp took a step forward.

  “I have to. I need to check in with my probation officer and complete my community service sometime before I die.” He winked. “Otherwise they make you work it off in the afterlife, sweeping God’s floors and doing St. Peter’s laundry.” He tried to bring some joviality into the air, but he knew it wasn’t working.

  Thorp came closer, his breath rife with the last meal he’d eaten. “We have a lead now. You can get the key from Paige and check out Nectar’s apartment. This is what you do, isn’t it? The problem-solver man? The gumshoe Sherlock Holmes thing?” He gripped the lapels of Brody’s coat.

  Brody put his hands on Thorp’s and gently peeled them off. Brody looked into his friend’s eyes, which to him appeared to be colorless spheres swiveling around in their sockets. But he could still clearly see the desperation in Thorp’s mug. “Do you really want me to check out your sister’s apartment?” he said with weighty reluctance, trying to make it sound like a ridiculous request.

  Thorp’s face softened, a certain plunging relief coming across his forehead and laugh lines. “If you would, please, yeah. That’d be great. Even if you just find ticket stubs or something, at least then I’ll know for sure.”

  “Maybe you can come with me this time?” Brody suggested. Perhaps if Thorp was there to see for himself what Brody thought he would inevitably find—the plane tickets, the reservation of a rental yurt at some Iowa commune—he’d be less prone to fly off the handle with a barrage of questions.

  But the suggestion was barely past his lips before Thorp got an exaggerated look of panic on his face. Standing this close, the sonar could see Thorp’s eyes widen into saucers.

  “Actually, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I mean, I’d like to go with you and see … that you’re right, that everything’s fine—because I’m sure you’re right—but I got a lot of stuff to do around here.” He broke eye contact and stared into the middle distance. “I should stay here. Hold down the fort.” Nod. Nod. “Yeah, I think I’ll just stay here.”

  “Maybe some time away from here would be just what the doctor ordered,” Brody went on, careful not to gesture at any of the guns hanging from the walls around them. “It’d be good to have two sets of eyes when we’re looking around her place. It’d get done faster.”

  A strange chuckle escaped Thorp’s throat. It had a hitch in it, like the laugh itself was stumbling and fighting to retain balance in its convincingness. “No, no, that’s quite all right. I’m fine here. You go. Yeah. I’ll … I’d be better here. I won’t get in the way here.”

  Brody decided it would be fruitless to press it any further. “Okay. Your call. And when I find the receipt from the airline, you’ll let me go home?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Thorp waved a hand at him. “You make it sound like I have you chained to the radiator or something. But if you find out for sure where she’s gone, I’ll be happy and leave you alone. I’ll calm down. I promise.”

  “All right,” Brody said with finality. “Let’s go upstairs and see what you can do with this lens charger theory you’re cooking up and I’ll talk to Paige about that key.”

  They exited the basement armory. Brody was relieved. Being around those guns and ammunition made him feel like at any moment his old drill instructor was going to burst out of the woodwork and order him to get down and give him thirty.

  13

  The afternoon brought colder winds, more promise of snowstorms peeling across the Great Lakes with their eye set firmly on Illinois. Up to this point, the general mood of the house had been uncomfortable, but when Brody looked outside and saw the road was rapidly being blanketed in snow and not even the fields across the way could be seen through the onslaught of flakes, he asked Thorp how often plows came through here. Thorp just laughed.

  When Thorp headed outside to the roof to make sure snow wasn’t collecting around a section of shingles he claimed to already be in sorry shape, Brody took the time alone with Paige to ask if she’d be all right with bunking down here for the night. She agreed, and when her gaze flicked to the front window, Brody estimated she was considering the risk of driving back or surrendering to spending the night and sleeping in the car.

  He offered her the bedroom he was using. She seemed reluctant but took him up on it and went upstairs.

  For the remainder of the night, it was quiet. He kept Thorp’s ordi off and listened as Thorp moved the aluminum ladder from one part of the house to another. He heard Thorp struggle up the ladder and the careful scrape of a shovel on shingle. Despite not wanting to be out in the cold any more than he already had been today, Brody went outside to see if Thorp needed any assistance checking the roof’s weak spots.

  Silhouetted against an overcast evening sky, painted there on his two-story stage, Thorp seemingly took clumps of snow at random and flung them from the roof. It was like watching a squirrel overturning clumps of dead leaves in a patient search of hidden caches only he could find.

  “We’re going to stay the night,” Brody shouted to his friend. He hoped using the word we would avoid any aggression toward Paige.

  Thorp stopped his strange dance of launching this snow pile, then this snow pile. He leaned on the handle of the shovel and peered down over the gutters at Brody. “Okay. Where is she going to … ?”

  “I gave her my room.”

  “But what about you?”

  “I can take the couch. No big deal.”

  “Did you want dinner or anything?”

  “I’m all right. You need help up there?”

  Thorp looked over his shoulder. “No,” he said, drawing the word out, “I think I got the big spots. Gonna go around to the other side in a minute and check over there.”

  “Well, I’m going back inside. Just stomp or something if you change your mind, okay?”

  Thorp smiled, nodded. “I got it under control. I go through this every
year.”

  Brody waved at Thorp and went inside, brushing the snow from his shoulders and hair. He flopped down on the couch and lifted the lid on Thorp’s ordi. He craved a separation, a mind-numbing sitcom to jam a wedge between the day’s events and what he hoped could be a restful night’s sleep.

  Unable to see anything on the monitor, he used voice commands to start the video streaming app. He found himself not paying attention to the show. He had to rewind it three times to catch a punch line, and even when he understood the joke, he didn’t laugh. Soon he just stared at the screen that appeared blank to him, pretending he could see the people talk and fling one-liners at one another, not even attempting to comprehend what was going on. Laugh track, segment bumper, ad for toothpaste, more unfunny obvious setups and bad punch lines. Still, it was better than silence.

  When sleep started to creep in, he rolled over and his elbow collided with something beneath him. He stuck his hand down into the crumb-filled recesses of the couch, and it glanced across the bothersome object and froze when the message of what his fingertips were feeling made it to his brain. He withdrew the cylinder, the wire coming uncoiled from around it and the plug landing on his chest.

  Brody held it before him and ran his fingers across it. Just a piece of heavy-duty plastic, with a roughened exterior for easy handling, a plug on one end for a USB connection, and a place where a hard drive could be unscrewed and slid out.

  He wondered where his cylinder was. Dropped into a drawer in some unmarked building, the repository for every recorded second of warfare. He wondered if it picked up all sounds or just that of gunfire. On the far end of the cylinder was the microphone, safely fenced in behind a thick layer of metal mesh. Would his voice be on his? He imagined what it might sound like ten years ago, if it would be higher than it is now, a few thousand cigarettes ago. If his screams sounded afraid and cracked … or if he hadn’t screamed at all. He couldn’t remember if he had. He remembered pain, heat, and other sensations, but he would never know for sure without going over his own cylinder’s contents.

  Brody aimed the cylinder so the narrow end was pointed down and shoved it back into the couch. He kept pushing until it was successfully buried, where there were only crumbs and shadows. Where it belonged.

  In the morning, Brody showered in the downstairs bathroom, got dressed in his slacks and white button-down shirt, and while getting his tie straight, headed upstairs to see if Paige was ready to leave. He knocked, then eased the door open. The sheets had the form of a body pressed into them, and the pillow was dented.

  He went downstairs and stepped outside to ensure she hadn’t taken the Fairlane back to the city without him. The sonar found the car, painting it onto the black landscape before him as its rudimentary shape, and then found Paige on the front porch swing, smoking a cigarette, her legs pulled up to her chest.

  “Thought I’d ditch you?” she asked.

  “Honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had.”

  She sniffed, a tiny laugh that didn’t say if she agreed or disagreed.

  Brody stepped closer to her, his boots knocking on the planks of the porch. He leaned on the railing and studied every blade of grass tall enough to stand above the snow that’d fallen through the night. Beyond the road, the automated farming equipment was back to work. The seeder made its pounding rounds slowly around the field, leaving a cloud of carbon in its wake and seeds shot into the earth that would wait out the winter and germinate when they were good and ready come spring. Arties followed to make sure all was going to their owner’s specifications.

  “Do you have somewhere to go that’ll be safe?” It was a question he had asked countless times to many, many other women. It was a collection of words that came out of his mouth with such frequency that it may have been as mundane as saying hello or good morning.

  “Seb doesn’t know where Mom and I live.” Paige brought the cigarette to her lips, took a quick drag, and let it go without inhaling. It drifted away from her mouth quickly, scattered by the cold wind. “I’ll go back to the apartment, wait it out a couple of days until he cools off. We’ll pay him like we always do, apologize, and maybe give him extra to forget about what happened at the diner,” she said as if she regretted Brody doing what he did, that she would’ve preferred to take the beating from Seb.

  Brody felt a minor jolt of anger tighten in his chest but let it go by way of concentrating on the roaming seeder machine. He had to choose his words carefully around her. He still wanted something out of her that in all likelihood she wouldn’t give up easily. Tact, Brody reminded himself. Forget the anger.

  Nathan’s voice and the advice it had imparted to him the last time they had a little chat came to him. “I think you should call the police,” Brody said. “Seb isn’t going to lose interest in money if he knows he can get it out of you with the use of a few choice words. He’ll keep going to that vein as long as it consistently pays out.”

  “I know. Eventually he might say the wrong thing to the wrong guy at the wrong bar, and he’ll get his. But guys like him rarely ever get their due when they should. Odds are, he’ll end up living forever.”

  “Do you have a key to Nectar’s apartment?” he asked again. From what Paige had just said about Seb, he figured now was the time to strike. It felt kind of low doing it when she was vulnerable, but he wanted her to consider that her friend could be in trouble. And if so, she should cough up the keys so her newfound protector could snoop.

  “Yeah,” Paige said, making no motion to reach into her pocket for her key ring.

  “Do you think I could borrow it?”

  Paige leaned forward to glance in the front window of the house. She lowered her voice. “Something’s weird with Thorp. You should go home, put his number on your block list, and forget about it. With him, it’ll just be something else next week. He’s out here with all those things in the backyard … I mean, it’s so obvious that … Look, I know he’s troubled and I’m not making fun of him, but this is going to turn ugly—for you too—long before it gets better. Of course, that’s just how I feel about the whole thing.” She shrugged, eyes closed. “I don’t know. I’m in a weird mood today.”

  “Listen. I’m not going to steal anything or go through her underwear drawer. I just want to see if there’s an airline stub or something.” Brody lowered his voice as well. “If I find something like that, Thorp will lay off and I can go home with a clear conscience.”

  “So you don’t really care where Nectar is?” Paige sneered. “You’re only doing this as a favor to your war buddy because he saved your life?”

  “No, I do care where she is. But I’m like you. I don’t think she disappeared or anything. As soon as I can convince him that, the sooner this will be over and we can all move on with our lives.”

  Paige leaned to one side and wedged a hand down her jeans pocket and pulled out a large, jangling collection of keys. She found a square brass key and rotated the ring until it came free. She held it by the very end, extending it toward Brody.

  He took it, looked at it, seeing Nectar’s apartment number stamped onto one side. He removed his own keys, which were minimal in comparison to Paige’s collection, and slid it onto his key ring. “This will get me not only into her apartment but through the front door?”

  Paige nodded, pulling her legs back up to her chest.

  He felt a strange stirring. The key was progress, sure, but at what cost? Another step into Thorp’s rabbit hole, another cinch tighter around his neck that would never let up until he knew the truth and everything was put back in its appropriate place, resolved.

  Brody stuffed his hands into the pockets of his peacoat. It was overcast and it felt like snow, even more than it had this morning. “Do you need to get home?”

  “I should to check on Mom.”

  “I’ll give you a ride,” Brody said, turning on his heel. “Just a minute, okay?”

  Paige lit another cigarette and said with surprising levity, “Take your time.
”

  Brody searched the house and found Thorp wasn’t upstairs, on the ground floor, or in the basement. The kitchen table was still cluttered, but it had fewer pieces of random electronics on it. He went out the sliding glass door, through the collection of decommissioned military vehicles, and out to the barn.

  As he crossed the backyard, a gust of wind tore by, the promise of impending snow even more evident. But it wasn’t a chill that drove a frigid finger trailing up his spine, just a general vibe of something malevolent. He actually stopped in his tracks and turned around and glanced over his shoulder. The vehicles all stood with their broken glass, hanging-open doors, dangling straps, buckles clinking. He continued the rest of the way to the barn, ignoring the unsettled feeling.

  Inside, the warm, dusty stink of animal and hay overwhelmed Brody, causing him to stifle a cough. The particles of dust in the air could be seen drifting in the glow of the hanging overhead lights. He took a second to look at the horses, mapped in crude polygons like an early video game. Of the four stalls, only two had horses in them. The remaining stalls were piled to the ceiling with electronic junk, old appliances with faux wood-grain housings, the green-on-black primordial examples of digital displays, analog dials, bulky monitors of the cathode ray tubes variety, and a heap of circuit boards corralled by miles of spooled wire. Some things he recognized from the service, but a vast majority of it he did not.

  He got to the back area where a rustic workbench assembled from two sawhorses and a plank of stained plywood was set up near a collection of stable-clearing shovels and spools of thick rope and chain. Seeing the stockpile of gizmos in such close proximity to the farm tools was a strange contrast, even for Thorp. Brody got a glimpse of his friend’s mind here, the way Thorp sorted things, how all tools belonged together regardless of their intended use.

  Thorp stood next to a machine the size of a freezer chest, repeatedly kicking down an L-shaped lever jutting out from its side. With each kick, the machine lit up temporarily and then darkened, giving off a cough of tiredness. Thorp noticed Brody standing in the doorway and stopped.