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We got to a truck, and he finished the call with, “You can stay on speaker with your sister, but when we get to Roussou, you both need to shut the fuck up.” He unlocked his truck, opened the door and didn’t wait for me to climb in before he hurried to his side of the truck.
I climbed in, shutting the door as he was already starting the engine.
I asked into the phone, “Did you get all that?”
“Yes,” Lo said in wonderment. “With bated breath too.”
Roger added, “We got it because Luna ran in and hit record on my phone. I was still searching for it when he got to the second town’s police department.”
“Thanks, Luna.”
“Oh, she’s gone,” Lo sniffed. “We need to get them to bed, but I can’t leave this room. I’m so wired. Also, I hope Brett’s okay.”
The guy cast an annoyed look at my phone, and his mouth flattened, but he didn’t say anything.
I frowned. “We’re not usually like this. It’s just—the thought of Brett being in trouble isn’t totally computing with us. It’s Brett.” That knot was back and sinking lower in me. “And also—”
The guy shook his head, holding up a hand. His voice came out softer, “I get it. The shit you’ve been through and a stranger’s busting down your door? I get it.”
I finished, “—the quickest way to draw me out of a hotel room is to tell me someone I love is in trouble. I needed to wait a little bit, think it through. The door part without the chain was a drunken mistake.”
He cast me a sideways look, his hand resting on the steering wheel. “There’s a case of coffee in a can at your feet. Drink as many as you need to sober up. Will briefed me a little on what’s going on and he said that although Brett sounded okay when they got off the phone, he wouldn’t put it past him to do something stupid. Hence his call to me. When I called Brett, he wouldn’t pick up.”
“Billie,” Lo said, her voice now very somber. “Get off the phone with me and call your man.” She ended the call from her side, and I had so much dread and fear and panic and all of it was now hitting me at once because I wasn’t the one in trouble. Brett was, or might be, and I’d wasted time in getting to him.
I’d been so foolish.
I went to my call history, went down one name, and called my man.
Please, let us not be too late.
61
BRETT
I turned my phone off as I broke into Shannon’s trailer.
She wasn’t there, and based on the looks of it, she hadn’t been back in a long while.
I gave no fucks about breaking in.
Old cigarette stubs were in a can. The toilet hadn’t been flushed and stank up the place. Old needles were discarded on the table. Empty beer cans littered the floor everywhere.
Jesus Christ. This was where my sister lived? The last time I’d been at her place, it wasn’t like this.
I took pictures of everything, along with a video as I walked back through the place, before stepping out and relocking the place. Keeping the extra key, I walked back to my rental when a door opened behind me. “Little Monster? Is that you?”
Jesus. Little Monster. I’d not been called that since I was eleven, when I let the other kids call me that. That got changed to Monster in high school, and then all of it went away when Budd went away.
“Brett?” she asked again, trying to see me. An older lady’s head poked outside her door, her head lowered as if that would help her see who I was in the shadows.
I moved her way. She heard the crunch of my feet over the gravel and sticks. Her thin shoulders tensed, but as soon as I stepped into her own trailer’s light, she relaxed. She cast a hand over her graying hair, but it did little to tame the frizziness of the strands. It was still long, pulled back behind her. A smile spread over her face, moving her wrinkles aside. “It is you. How are you? You’ve gone and made us all so proud, you know. Our own boy, coming from this trailer park, going all the way to the big screen. The Super Bowl. Real proud.”
“Hello, Mrs. Neverroo. I thought you would’ve pulled out and gone to Arizona to live with your kids? You got grandbabies down there, don’t you?” Mabel Neverroo. She’d been one of the kind neighbors. She liked baking cookies, taking care of any kids in the park, in her own way. If we needed a place to crash after school, she’d let us watch her television as she put some popcorn in the microwave. She liked making lemonade too. It was one of her staples.
She laughed, her voice more gravelly than I remembered, and waved a hand toward me, still smiling. “Oh, you know me. I like my drink too much. I put up next to my kids, they’re in my business, telling me what’s healthy or not healthy for me. Love my grandbabies, but I like having my freedom at the same time.”
“You’re not tied down anymore? No more Wallace?”
