AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It looked to me like it was filled with people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. If they were criminals, they weren’t very good ones.
There were three buzzers alongside the door to number 93. The names on the buzzers were Goldwink, Thomas, Warnick. No Beedle. I tried the door. Locked. I pushed the buzzer for Goldwink. No answer. No answer for Thomas. Warnick opened his connection with static.
“What?” Warnick yelled when the static died down.
“I’m looking for Carpenter Beedle,” I said.
“He’s not here,” Warnick said. “He moved back with his mother.” The connection cut out.
Grandma and I returned to my car, and I paged through Beedle’s file.
“We’re in luck,” I said. “His mother signed for his bond. She secured it with her car. She lives on Maymount Street.”
“That’s off Chambers,” Grandma said. “Your cousin Gloria used to live there when she was married to husband number one. He turned out to be a real stinker.”
I cut back to State Street and got a hollow feeling in my stomach when I drove past Connie’s gas station. No word from Lula. No text message or phone call from Connie. I took Chambers to Maymount and parked in front of the Beedle house. I called Connie and didn’t get an answer. Her voice mail didn’t kick in.
“If she was in an accident and was in the hospital we would have heard by now, so I don’t think that’s it,” Grandma said. “There’s been a lot of aneurisms going around lately, but we would have heard about that too. That leaves two possibilities. The first is that she got fed up with everything and she’s on her way to Hawaii. The second is that she got taken to the mother ship by aliens. I just saw a special on UFOs, and it was real convincing.”
My possibilities were just as irrational, and I hoped just as unlikely. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad had gone down and Connie was in the middle of it.
The Beedle house was a small, pale yellow bungalow with a red front door. A rusted Nissan Sentra was parked in the driveway. Grandma and I went to the red door, and I rang the bell.
“Should I draw my gun?” Grandma asked. “How’s this gonna happen?”
“No gun,” I said. “We’re going to politely request that Carpenter goes with us to get rebonded.”
“What if he doesn’t want to go?”
“I’ll try to persuade him.”
“Is that when I get to draw my gun?”
“No! No gun.”
A woman in her midfifties opened the door and looked out at us.
“Mrs. Beedle?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I gave her my nonthreatening, casually pleasant bounty hunter smile. “I’m looking for your son, Carpenter. I work for his bail bonds agent.”
“Such a nice man,” she said. “He was so helpful. He personally came to the police station to see that Carpenter was released. He walked him out the door and made sure we safely got into our car.” She stepped aside. “Come in. Carpenter is in the kitchen. He’s getting ready to go to work. He’s a bum.”
“Panhandler,” Carpenter yelled from the kitchen. “It’s the second-oldest profession.”
Carpenter was at the kitchen table. His brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and he had a three-day-old beard. He was wearing a wrinkled, washed-out flannel shirt and baggy sweatpants. He had a filthy sneaker on one foot and an orthopedic sandal on the other. He clutched a coffee mug in his right hand.
Grandma looked down at the orthopedic-sandaled foot. “I read where you shot yourself in the foot,” Grandma said. “Where’d the bullet go in? Did you lose any toes?”
“No,” Carpenter said. “I took a chunk out of the side and broke a bone.”
“At least it’s not your gas pedal foot,” Grandma said.
“I told him over and over not to carry a gun,” Mrs. Beedle said. “Does he listen to me? No. So, this is what happens.”
“It was an accident,” Carpenter said. “It could have happened to anybody.”
