All White Girls. Michael Bracken
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than to convey messages.
Rickenbacher didn’t pay any attention to the street before him as he fiddled with the radio to tune in a plaintive Janis Joplin song, and he missed the corner stop sign hidden behind a parked delivery truck. A woman jogged out in front of Rickenbacher and he glanced up just in time to slam on the brakes. His van lurched to a stop inches from her.
The woman turned to him as she ran slowly past, glaring at him but unable to see into the darkness of the van. The sight of her face burned Rickenbacher’s memory like acid. He hadn’t expected to see her again, had never intended to see her again, had no reason to see her again. Yet, there she was, jogging past him, her heavy breasts bouncing with each stride despite the tight-fitting sports bra, the cheeks of her ass slapping together under her sweat pants, her dishwater blonde hair pulled back in a loose pony tail, her face bathed in sweat. Twice before she’d entered his life and twice before she’d left it.
Jesse.
And then she was gone, swallowed by the darkness before he could call out her name.
* * * *
As one of the city’s invisible horde of delivery people, no one ever glanced at Kat a second time when she breezed past. She wore her hair cut into a wedge so that it wouldn’t blow around under her bicycle helmet, rarely wore make-up because the wind and the rain wrecked havoc with it and gave her a clown’s mask, and during the month she’d had the job she’d turned a layer of fat into hardening muscle that her knee-length biker shorts and her skin-tight sports bra failed to conceal.
As the elevator doors closed, she saw the man exiting room 4B, but she didn’t pay much attention to him, her gaze sliding over his face, the gloved hand gripping the door knob, and the bulge in the pocket of his overcoat. A greasy-haired blond with an upside-down cross tattooed on the back of his left hand had just pissed her off by closing his hotel room door in her face without tipping her and without so much as a thank you. The city had more than its share of creeps and she seemed to meet most of them.
The man exiting 4B carefully pulled the door shut and, unaware that he’d been seen, walked quietly to the staircase, taking the stairs down two at a time until he reached the ground floor. He had disappeared before the aging elevator wheezed open and Kat made her way outside to the ten speed mountain bike she’d chained to a hydrant.
CHAPTER 2
Rickenbacher suppressed a belch, then rolled over and retrieved the ringing phone from the stand next to his bed. The answering machine in the living room wouldn’t pick up until the sixth ring and he didn’t want to wait for it. He closed his eyes against the sunlight streaming into his room through a gap between the curtains. Into the receiver, he said, “Rickenbacher.”
Hubert Cove identified himself, then asked, “Any luck?”
“Some. Not much.”
“You’ve been at it for a week.”
“This is a big city.”
“Then make it smaller.”
Rickenbacher didn’t respond. He suppressed another belch.
“Just find her.”
Rickenbacher heard the click as Cove broke the connection. Then he rolled over, replaced the phone on the night stand, and lay on his stomach, his head turned to the side to stare at the broken paneling on his bedroom wall. A moment later he kicked his legs free of the tangled, sweat-stained sheets, then twisted until he sat upright on the edge of the bed. The sudden surge of movement did nothing to still the thunderstorm in his head nor did it quell the hurricane in his gut.
He’d finished an opened bottle of Jack Daniel’s he’d found in the cabinet under the kitchen sink when he’d finally returned home the previous evening, mourning a past that he’d long ago tried to forget, and his awakening had reminded Rickenbacher that he wasn’t as young and as tough as he’d once been. Lately, he lost more often than he won when he went ten rounds with Jack, and the hangover coursing through his body reminded Rickenbacher that he’d lost another fight.
He pushed himself off the bed and stumbled into the bathroom where he stood under a cold shower for almost half an hour before he made any effort to bathe.
Later, having dressed and having prepared himself a breakfast of lukewarm coffee, Rickenbacher sat at his kitchen table and thumbed through the slim folder of information Hubert Cove had sent. Inside were additional copies of Katherine Cove’s high school graduation photo, a newspaper article that listed her as second place winner in a locally-sponsored essay contest, a photocopy of the neatly-typed letter she’d mailed to her father the day she’d left home, and the report a well-known licensed detective agency had prepared for Katherine’s father before he’d fired them. Rickenbacher reviewed his notes, the seemingly meaningless jumble of words he’d jotted down to remind himself of the things her father had told him, of the things her high school teachers and friends had told him, and of the things he’d figured out on his own as he’d filtered through everything he’d learned since her father’s first phone call.
Katherine had been an average student, though she’d done particularly well in her English classes and always seemed to be reading. She attended church each Sunday with her father, often helping care for the younger children after children’s church. She’d dated a few times, but had never gone steady; had a date for Homecoming but not for the Senior Prom. Her friends had figured her to get a job at the new Wal-Mart after graduation and be married with children within five years. What none of them had expected is what had happened. She’d taken a bus to the city using a ticket she’d paid for with money saved from various baby-sitting jobs.
When he closed the folder and tossed it across the kitchen table, Rickenbacher knew no more about Hubert’s only child than he had known when he’d looked at everything the previous morning. During the week since Cove’s original phone call, Rickenbacher had exhausted the obvious sources of information. He’d tracked Katherine’s driver’s license through the Department of Motor Vehicles, but she’d not submitted a change of address, nor had she ever received any moving violations; he’d tracked her social security number through both the Social Security Administration and the state’s Department of Employment Security, but they had no record of her ever obtaining legitimate employment; neither of the city’s two largest credit agencies had any record of her; she’d not obtained a phone in her own name; nor, according to Lieutenant Castellano, had she ever been arrested in the city.
Rickenbacher didn’t like dead ends—dead ends had a bad habit of leading to dead people. And he didn’t like Hubert Cove. Even though they’d never met, even though all he knew about Cove was the sound of the man’s voice, his dislike for incompetent agencies that did little and charged heavily, and the fact that his checks didn’t bounce, Cove grated on his nerves. If he’d been hired for any reason other than the disappearance of Cove’s daughter, Rickenbacher would have refunded the advance to be shed of the man.
Instead, he pushed himself away from the table and up from the yellow vinyl kitchen chair, rinsed his coffee mug under cold tap water and set it upside down on a faded dishtowel next to the sink, then retrieved a sky blue windbreaker from the coat closet to pull over his bulky sweater. From his collection of nearly a dozen hats, Rickenbacher selected a dark blue baseball cap devoid of logos and pulled it snug over his head, covering the bald spot whose very presence annoyed him almost as much as Hubert Cove.
The apartment door opened directly to the outside and Rickenbacher carefully secured the dead bolt behind him before looking over the second-floor railing and down at the parking lot where his Pontiac 6000 used to be. Three weeks earlier the car had disappeared during the night and pieces of it had probably made their way from a local chop shop to service stations and auto parts stores all over the midwest. The dark green Dodge van now in his parking space had belonged to his brother-in-law until Rickenbacher had peeled five crumpled hundreds out of his wallet and had taken possession away from the wiry young auto mechanic his sister had married seven years earlier. The van—all he could afford when the insurance company’s check did little more than pay off the outstanding loan balance on the Pontiac—had quickly become familiar.
The