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He dutifully extended his hand so she could see his newest ring, and she let out a squeal of delight that could have been heard all the way to Fenner’s IGA. “Gawd! It is just so beautiful I can’t stand it. Even prettier than the last one. Look at all those diamonds. Buddy! Bud-dee! Bobby Tom’s here, and he’s wearin’ his ring!”
Buddy Baines came slowly down off the porch where he’d been standing watching the two of them. For a moment their eyes locked, and decades of old memories passed between them. Then Bobby Tom saw the familiar resentment.
Although they were both thirty-three, Buddy looked older. The cocky, dark-haired quarterback who’d led the Titans to football glory had begun to thicken around the middle, but he was still a good-looking man.
“Hey, Bobby Tom.”
“Buddy.”
The tension between them had nothing to do with Bobby Tom having been there first with Terry Jo. Instead, their problems had begun because Buddy and Bobby Tom together had carried Telarosa High to the Texas State 3AAA Championship, but only one of them had received a full ride to U.T., and only one of them had made it to the pros. Even so, they were each other’s oldest friend, and neither of them ever forgot it.
“Buddy, look at Bobby Tom’s new ring.”
Bobby Tom slipped it off his finger and held it out. “You want to try it on?”
With any other man, he would have been rubbing salt into an open wound, but not with this one. He knew that Buddy figured at least a couple of those diamonds rightly belonged to him, and Bobby Tom figured so, too. How many thousands of passes had Buddy thrown to him over the years? Short, deep, down the sidelines, over the middle. Buddy had been throwing footballs at him since they were six years old, and they’d lived next door to each other.
Buddy took the ring and put it on his own finger. “How much does something like this go for?”
“I don’t know. Couple of thousand, I guess.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Buddy acted as if he priced expensive rings every day when Bobby Tom knew for a fact-that he and Terry Jo never had anything left over at the end of the month. “Do you want to come on in and have a beer?”
“I can’t tonight.”
“Come on, B.T.,” Terry said. “I need to tell you about my new girlfriend, Glenda. She just got divorced, and I know you’re exactly what she needs to take her mind off her troubles.”
“I’m real sorry, Terry Jo, but a friend of mine is missing, and I’m kind of worried about her. You wouldn’t have happened to rent a car to a skinny white lady with funny hair, would you, Buddy?” In addition to running the garage, Buddy had the town’s only rental car franchise
“No. She with those movie people?”
Bobby Tom nodded. “If you see her, I sure would appreciate it if you’d give me a call. I’m afraid she might have gotten herself into some trouble.”
He chatted with both of them a few minutes longer and promised to hear all about Glenda on his next visit. As he was getting ready to leave, Buddy pulled the Super Bowl ring off his finger and held it out to his former best friend.
Bobby Tom kept his hands at his sides. “I’m going to be real busy for the next couple of days, and I’m afraid I won’t get a chance to stop in and visit your mama right away. I know she’ll want to see that ring. Why don’t you hold on to it and show her for me? I’ll pick it up over the weekend.”
Buddy nodded as if what Bobby Tom had proposed was only fitting and slipped the ring back on his finger. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.”
With the possibility that Gracie had rented a car eliminated, Bobby Tom spoke next with Ray Don Horton, who operated the Greyhound depot, then Donnell Jones, the town’s only taxi driver, and, finally, with Josie Morales, who spent most of her life sitting on her front step keeping track of everybody else’s business. Because he’d played ball with so many black, white, and Hispanic kids, Bobby Tom had always moved freely across the town’s racial and ethnic boundaries. He’d been in most everybody’s house, eaten at all their tables, felt at home everywhere, but despite his network of connections, no one he spoke to had seen Gracie. All of them, however, expressed their disappointment that he wasn’t wearing his ring and everybody either had a girl they wanted him to meet or needed a loan.
By eleven o’clock, Bobby Tom was convinced that Gracie had done something stupid like hitch a ride from a stranger. Just the thought of it made him crazy. Most of the people in the state of Texas were good solid folk, but there were lots of certifiables, too, and with Gracie’s overly optimistic view of human nature, she was likely to have run into one of them. He also couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t tried to retrieve her suitcase. Unless she hadn’t been able to. What if something had happened to her before she got the chance?
His mind rebelled at the thought, and he debated stopping at the police station to talk with Jimbo Thackery, the new chief of police. He and Jimbo had hated each other’s guts since elementary school. He couldn’t remember what had started it, but by the time they’d reached high school and Sherri Hopper had decided she preferred Bobby Tom’s kisses to Jimbo’s, it had escalated into a full scale feud. Whenever Bobby Tom came back to town, Jimbo’d find some excuse to act nasty, and somehow Bobby Tom couldn’t imagine the police chief going out of his way to help him find Gracie. He decided to make one last stop before he threw himself on the dubious mercy of the Telarosa Police Department.
The Dairy Queen sat on the west end of town and served as Telarosa’s unofficial community center. Here, Oreo blizzards and Mr. Mistys managed to accomplished what all America’s civil rights legislation had never been able to achieve. The DQ had brought the people of Telarosa together as equals.
As Bobby Tom pulled into the parking lot, he saw a pickup held together with baling wire sitting between a Ford Bronco and a BMW. There were a variety of family vehicles, a couple of motorcycles, and an Hispanic couple he didn’t recognize climbing out of an old Plymouth Fury. Since it was a weeknight, the crowd had thinned out, but there were still more people inside than he wanted to face, and if he weren’t so worried about Gracie, nothing would have made him come here to this cemetery of his old glories, the place where he and his high school teammates had celebrated their Friday night victories.
He parked on the farthest edge of the lot and forced himself to climb down out of his truck. He knew that, short of using a loudspeaker, this was the fastest way to get the word out that Gracie was missing, but he still wished he didn’t have to go inside. The door of the DQ swung open, and a familiar figure came out. He cursed softly. If someone had asked him to make a list of the people he least wanted to see right now, Wayland Sawyer’s name would have been right on top of Jimbo Thackery’s.
Any hope he’d had that Sawyer wouldn’t notice him disappeared as the owner of Rosatech Electronics stepped down off the curb and halted, the vanilla cone in his hand stalling in midair. “Denton.”
Bobby Tom nodded.
Sawyer took a bite of ice cream while he stared at Bobby Tom with cool eyes. Anyone looking at Rosatech’s owner in his plaid shirt and jeans would have figured him for a rancher instead of one of the top business minds in the electronics industry and the only man in Telarosa who was as rich as Bobby Tom. He was a large man, not as tall as Bobby Tom, but solid and tough. At fifty-four, his face was compelling, but too rough-hewn to be classically handsome. His dark, wiry hair was cut short and threaded with gray, but his hairline had barely receded. It was as if Sawyer had drawn an invisible boundary on his scalp and declared that not a single follicle dare shut down behind it.
Since the rumors had surfaced about the closing of Rosatech, Bobby Tom had made it his business to learn everything he could about its owner before he’d met with him last March. Way Sawyer had grown up poor and illegitimate on the wrong side of Telarosa’s railroad tracks. As a teenage troublemaker, he’d been tossed into jail for everything from petty theft to shooting out porch lights. A stint in the marines had given him both discipline and opportunity, and when he’d come out, he’d taken advantage of the GI Bill to earn an engineering degree. After graduation, he’d gone to Boston, where, with a combination of intelligence and ruthlessness, he’d climbed to the top of the growing computer industry and made his first million by the time he was thirty-five. He’d also married, had a daughter, and divorced.
