Rolly spent Tuesday night in the backseat of his car, a ’92 Lincoln with gold detailing on the hood, the only one in his fleet of ten that his regular crew is not allowed to drive. Around one in the morning, he’d dropped off his last fare, a Wolcott campaign straggler who spent most of the drive to West U. on his two-way pager, and then he swung by his garage on Telephone Road, to change his clothes and pay the staff, two hundred cash to each of his drivers. He put a cooler of beer in the backseat, and a bag of peanuts and some Fritos from the vending machine in his front pockets, and then he drove south to Jay’s office on Brazos, parking, for the purposes of surveillance, a half block from the nearest streetlamp. He killed the engine and cut the Lincoln’s headlights, settling in for his night watch. He munched on salted peanuts and juiced the battery on his mobile phone, plugging it into the cigarette lighter. He has a gal he’s seeing out to Hitchcock, halfway to Galveston; she doesn’t sleep but a few hours a night and is always up for a call from Rolly. He can’t predict where the romance is headed. Hitchcock is forty minutes away, an hour in traffic, and his little miss is without a car or a bus pass. She stays in a two-bedroom house with her daughter and two of her grandkids. He swore he would never mess with an older woman, but this one is six feet in heels with a tight little ass, and she has his nose so wide open he can smell a raindrop from two miles away. He knows he’s in deep trouble.
He was dialing her number when a suspicious car came up Brazos, cruising to the north. It was a Nissan Z, black, and Rolly got three digits off the license plate as the car, unexpectedly, slowed in front of the gate to Jay’s office. Before he could catch the other three numbers, the driver cut the Z’s front and rear lights. The door swung open, and someone got out, a man cutting a tall, lanky figure. He paced in front of the gate, as if scoping the place, as if he expected something was about to jump off. Rolly felt for the grip of the Colt .45 in the waistband of his black Levi’s. But stopped himself when he realized Jay had given him no clear instruction as to what to do in the event he ran into trouble. Calling the cops was not Rolly’s style. But neither did he want to start something out here without knowing what he was getting into. He cleared the Motorola’s screen. But before he could call Jay, he heard the car door slam. The driver of the Nissan Z revved the engine and quickly sped off, heading in the general direction of downtown. Rolly managed to eye another piece of the license plate’s puzzle. This morning, he ran the four digits by a friend at the Department of Public Safety; 5KL 6 matches the first four digits of only one black Nissan model Z in the entire state of Texas, registered to a Jon K. Lee in Houston. “Might be nothing,” Rolly says on the phone now.
Jay, who doesn’t like to talk while driving, has pulled off the 610 Freeway, the first exit past the bridge over the Ship Channel, less than a mile from the village of Pleasantville. He’s idling in the parking lot of a Circle K. On the back of a receipt, he writes the name and address of Jon K. Lee. “Funny thing is,” Rolly says, “he filed a notice with the Department of Public Safety that his ’96 Nissan Z was stolen last month.”
He must be calling from the tiny office in his garage. In the background, Jay hears the thump of a car’s stereo. When not on a call, his drivers play cards mostly, smoke and drink. The garage has the feel of a barbershop or a fraternity house, a place where men and boys go to willfully lose track of time. Jay makes a note about the stolen car. “ ’Preciate it, man,” he says.
“Not a problem, Counselor.”
Jay turns off his car phone, stowing it and its long cord in the compartment beneath the Land Cruiser’s armrest. He goes into the convenience store and buys himself a Coke. The place has already put up Christmas decorations, cheap tinsel and paper wreaths hanging from the ceiling. It’s still three weeks from Thanksgiving, on its own a rough current to cross for two kids who lost their mother, but nothing like the emotional shit storm that’s waiting for all of them come December. Last year they rented a house in Corpus. Unplugged the TV and went fishing every day. Evelyn stopped speaking to Jay for a week. She’d had a tree out, everything ready at her place. But he never showed.
From the parking lot, he turns onto Clinton Drive. At the Gethsemane Baptist Church, he turns left on Flagship, coming into Pleasantville at one of its southern borders, arriving, within a few turns, at the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke, the spot where, as far as anyone knows, Alicia Nowell was last seen.
Jay slows at the intersection.
The streets are empty tonight, and the scene in his rearview mirror is dim. Behind him, Ledwicke, the neighborhood’s major north-south connecter that leads to the Samuel P. Hathorne Community Center, the pool, and the football field, ends at the edge of a wide area of wild woods. It’s a rare block of undeveloped land in a city that wears its disdain for proper zoning as a badge, its belief in industrial growth as a democracy’s birthright, penciled in just behind the pursuit of happiness. Pleasantville, in particular, has become surrounded by industry over the last twenty years, ever since the 610 Freeway was built against the residents’ strident opposition. Besides the chemical plants that moved in, there’s now a Budweiser brewery nearby and a six-acre factory that produces plastic packing materials, all on what used to be open prairie.
Elma Johnson’s house stands on Guinevere, facing south. It’s a cream-colored four-bedroom with Tudor accents and a Carolina cherry tree in the front yard. Jay’s been inside once before. In her living room, he sat over her kidney-shaped coffee table as she’d signed the voluminous plaintiffs’ forms, joining, at that point, sixty-seven of her neighbors and friends. From her kitchen window, she was the last to see the girl. Alicia was standing on the corner where Jay is parked now, maybe fifty feet from the tangle of trees in the open field, a dark maze of thorns and brambly vines. There’s a soggy creek that cuts through the woods there. If Jay hadn’t spent nearly ten grand earlier this year having it tested for the chemical SBS, or polystyrene-butadiene-styrene, the accelerant in last year’s fires, he’d never have known it was there. It’s completely hidden from the street, the reason someone chose it as a final resting place for the first two girls.
Jay still remembers the second girl.
She slipped away, must have been, the day Bernie checked in for her last stint at St. Luke’s, on the cardiac floor that time because oncology had no more beds. Tina Wells had gotten off the school bus one afternoon and never made it the thirty or forty yards from the bus stop to her front door. Her mother, on the evening news, couldn’t speak. It was Pastor Morehead, from the Pleasantville Methodist Church, who spoke for the family.