Brett Battles - No Return

“I’m sure he’s okay.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

But the silence that followed belied their confidence.

“If he comes back while I’m gone, call me,” Wes said.

“I will.”

He pulled the Escape keys out of his pocket and set them on the dresser. “In case you need to go somewhere.”

“What are you going to take?”

“The Triumph,” he said.

“Uh, excuse me. But do I need to remind you what the nice detective said last night?”

Detective Andrews. Driving without a proper license. Damn . He’d forgotten about that.

“You take the SUV,” Anna said, picking up the keys and handing them back. “I won’t need to go anywhere.” The corner of her mouth began to turn upward. “But if I do, I can just ask Danny’s friend for a lift.”

Wes laughed and opened the door. He then turned to Anna and gave her a kiss right there in the doorway where anyone in the parking lot could have seen.

She arched an eyebrow.

“What?” he asked, a portrait of innocence.

This time she initiated the kiss.

The Escape was parked right beside the Triumph.

Wes climbed into the driver’s seat of the SUV and started to close the door. That’s when he spotted something tucked between the motorcycle’s gas tank and handlebars.

He got back out and stepped over to the bike. The object was a yellowed piece of paper that looked like it came from an old newspaper. There were enough random gusts of wind in the desert that finding a piece of trash lodged in his bike wasn’t particularly surprising.

But he realized as he pulled it out that if it had been trash, it would have been battered and torn by the wind and the terrain. There were no tears in this piece of paper, no places where it was punctured by branches or rocks or God knew what.

There was something more telling, too. The paper wasn’t a crinkled ball or even a scrap. It was a neatly folded, three-by-three-inch square.

Wes flipped it around, looking at both sides, then, worried that it might fall apart along the creases, carefully teased it open. He was pleased with himself that he was able to keep it from falling apart. But this sense of satisfaction lasted only until he focused on the article inside.

At the top was a school photo of a thick-necked kid of probably sixteen or seventeen. Though it was black-and-white, it was easy to tell the kid had blond hair. It was also easy to tell, despite the smile on his lips, that he was a jerk.

Or perhaps that was only Wes’s interpretation, since he had known the boy.

Jack Rice.

The kids at Murray Junior High used to have a nickname for him. The Tormentor.

In the teenage years, brawn still ruled over brains, and since Jack had a lot of the former and very little of the latter, he was one of the kings. A Class A asshole, through and through.

Wes had stopped riding the bus to school in seventh grade because Jack used to get into the seat behind him and slam his fists into Wes’s back. Wes much preferred taking the extra time to walk the three miles instead of suffering from the pain of one of Jack’s blows for the rest of the day.

There was a headline below the photo:

LOCAL BOY NAMED TO ALL-DISTRICT JV TEAM

Wes didn’t read the article. He knew it wasn’t important.

But he also knew there was no chance this was trash, either.

This article had been left for him.

“He just left.” the man was back in his sedan, parked near where he’d been the night before.

He reached for his binoculars, then trained them on the woman’s room.

“No, she stayed behind.”

He focused on the room’s window, but the curtains were pulled, so he could see nothing.

“Not the motorcycle. The SUV.” He listened, then rolled his eyes. “Relax. He still found it.”

He set the binoculars back down.

“No, he didn’t seem happy at all.”

It took Wes seven minutes to get from the motel parking lot to the driveway of Lars’s house, his mission to find a hard drive all but forgotten. The truck that had been there the day before was gone, so Wes pulled in to its space and jammed the Escape into park.

The article he’d found on the motorcycle was clutched tightly in his hand as he marched up to the front entrance. Skipping the bell, he pounded on the door with his empty fist.

Nothing.

He pounded again, then strained to hear anything from inside. Silence.

He leaned over and rapped on the glass of the living room window.

Still no answer. Wes walked around the side of the house, unlatched the gate, and entered the backyard. The pool area was deserted, and a look through the back windows confirmed that the house was as devoid of people on this side as it had been out front.

“Can I help you?”

Wes nearly jumped at the sound of the voice. He turned and found a middle-aged man standing near the corner of the house, a rake held at his side.

“I … was just looking for Lars. He didn’t answer his door, and he’s supposed to be here.”

“You a friend of his?”

“Yeah,” Wes said, then added, “an old friend.”

The man looked at him for a moment, then nodded toward the front of the house. “His truck’s gone, so he’s not home.”

“Thought maybe he’d parked it in the garage,” Wes said.

“Never does.”

“Thanks.” Wes started for the gate. “Guess I’ll come back later.”

“Good idea.”

Once Wes was in the Escape, he pulled out his phone and tried calling Lars, but was sent straight to voicemail. Lars was either out of range or his phone was off-both real possibilities in this area of spotty signal strength.

He could be working. Of course, if that were the case, would he have suggested they get together early that afternoon? Unlikely.

Shopping, then? Maybe, but doubtful. Church? Not the old Lars.

What the hell else was there to do on a Sunday morning?

When the answer hit him, it was so obvious he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it right away.

Football.

Wes pulled out his phone and found an NFL schedule on the Web. Sure enough, the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing the early game. On the West Coast that meant game time was at 10 a.m.

Though Lars had grown up in the desert, he’d been born in Pennsylvania. And since his dad was a huge Steelers fan, the same mania had naturally passed on to his son.

If Lars wasn’t at home watching the game, he had to be watching it somewhere. A friend’s house? If so, Wes was going to be out of luck. There was another possibility, though.

He started the engine and threw the SUV into reverse.

He’d seen a few bars along China Lake Boulevard. If those didn’t pan out, there had to be others.

The plot of land Checkers Bar and Grill was located on had been empty in Wes’s day, and might as well have been empty now. There were only three cars parked in the lot, and none were Lars’s truck. A few blocks away was The Pile On. It had a dozen vehicles parked out front. Even better, two were trucks that were similar to Lars’s.

Wes parked and went inside.

A mixture of cheers and groans greeted him as he passed through the door. But they weren’t for him. Instead, they were aimed at several televisions mounted above the bar, each showing a different game. Wes scanned the crowd.

No Lars.

The next few places-including a stop at Delta Sierra-produced the same results.

It was in the fifth place, a sports bar off Ridgecrest Boulevard called Tommy T’s, built on the site of the old bowling alley, that he found his friend.

Lars was sitting at a table with Janice and Bob from the pool party, his eyes so focused on the Steelers game he didn’t even see Wes walk up. Pittsburgh had the ball and was barely ahead of Cincinnati, 14–12.