Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

“If we’re not in the way…” Liz answered.

Neal gestured to the bed. Liz and Lombardi sat down and put their hands in their laps.

Neal searched the room. It was a relief to be doing something practical, something quiet, something he was good at. He went through the drawers and the closets carefully, slowly.

“Are you in the habit of searching Allie’s room, Mrs. Chase?”

“Wouldn’t you be, Mr. Carey?”

“But you haven’t removed anything.”

“No.”

Neal opened the top drawer of Allie’s dresser and ran his hand along the inside top. He felt the edge of the tape and gently pulled it off. He smelled the two joints.

“Emergency stash,” he said. “Expensive stuff, too.”

“Money is not Allie’s particular problem in life,” Liz said.

Didn’t used to be, Mrs. C.

Searching the contents of the drawer, Neal asked, “Did you used to take away drugs you found here?”

Liz nodded. “We fought about it.”

“What about the prescription stuff?”

“Same thing, once we caught on.”

Neal finished with the drawers and moved to the closet. Allie had a few clothes. Neal flipped through the dozen or so jackets before he found another strip of medical tape stuck to the inside lapel of a nice little denim job.

He removed the three joints from the tape and flipped them to Lombardi. “Hawaii Fourth.”

He didn’t find anything else until he got to the portable Sony TV. He twisted the fine-tune dial off and found the Valium that had been glued to the inside rim.

“Not to worry,” he said. “They use the same kind of paste you used to make in kindergarten. You can eat a quart of it and you won’t get sick.”

“I never dreamed…” Liz Chase was shaking her head.

“You’re not a pro, Mrs. Chase.”

Neal moved into Allie’s bathroom. The medicine cabinet alone took almost half an hour and yielded nothing very interesting. Likewise, the underside of the bathtub rim. Neal emptied the sink cabinet and crawled underneath. He found Allie’s major stash in a small plastic trash bag taped to the bottom of the sink.

“Jackpot!” he called out.

Liz Chase stood in the doorway. “What?”

Neal sat on the floor, rooting through the bag. “Well, we have your uppers, and your downers, and some grass and hash, and a little coke.”

“My god.”

“It’s not all bad news. No needles.”

Neal handed her the bag and smiled. “May I take a look at Allie’s car, please?”

“It’s in the garage.”

It had a lot of company. There were seven cars in the garage. Allie’s was a modest Datsun Z. The others were all sleek little sports jobs that Neal didn’t recognize. That wasn’t too hard, though. Neal didn’t know too many cars that weren’t on the IRT.

“John was very interested in cars for a while,” Liz explained. “As a matter of fact, so was Allie. It gave then something they could share, I think.”

“Everybody needs a hobby.”

Neal started with the glove compartment, just in case there was a note in there nobody had noticed. Maybe a note that read, “I’m in such and such a place and here’s my address and phone number.” He didn’t find it. He found the usual glove compartment crap. A couple of road maps, a service manual, an open package of cherry Life Savers, lipstick, an emergency pack of cigarettes, a comb, a brush, a pint bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.

He felt around between the seats for “she went that-away” clues and didn’t find any of those, either. He also didn’t find any dope of any kind, which sort of surprised him. It was dark by the time he finished.

Neal sank back into the bathtub that came along with the guest room. He had filled it with steaming hot water to try to ease the ache in his body and his soul. The first sip of scotch spread a soothing warmth through his insides, and after a few minutes he was able to pick up his paperback copy of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and lose himself in the eighteenth century. Which was his life’s goal, anyway.

He relished the quiet. Chase and Jimmy Cricket had headed back to Washington for one of those crucial votes. The missus was preparing herself for yet another fundraiser for an undoubtedly good cause. What had Dickens called it? “Telescopic Philanthropy”? Although Neal had to admit that given a choice between Mrs. Jellyby and Liz Chase, there was no contest. Anyway, she’d hoped that he “wouldn’t mind dining alone.” He didn’t. The cook laid on, with hopefully unintentional irony, a London broil, rice and asparagus, and followed it up with a raspberry tart. Neal washed it all down with the appropriate wine, and was about half-bagged when he hit the tub. After a chapter of Pickle, he laid the book down and thought things over.

Allie hadn’t planned to take off. No good doper leaves a stash like that behind if she’s thought about it. No, Allie was upset when she left. She’d made the decision in a hurry, impulsively, sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning. She’d given it a little more thought in the car and taken whatever stuff she had with her. But she hadn’t gone back to the house to collect anything else, which meant she was a piss-poor druggie, or she really didn’t want to go home.

Also, she wanted to stay gone. Most casual runaways, who are fed up with the discipline, or bored at home, or want attention, want to be found. Consciously or unconsciously, they leave clues all over the place. They also find that life out there is a lot worse than life at home, and they come back. Unless life out there is better than life at home. Or life at school, which was something he’d better look into, except he didn’t think he’d be allowed to. The Chases had simply withdrawn Allie in absentia as it were, to avoid a scandal. So forget that. But it impressed him that spoiled little Allie hadn’t reached for the plastic, or wired for money. She was gutting it out, and this was a girl who wasn’t used to gutting it out. So why?

He fiddled the hot-water tap with his foot. He didn’t feel like sitting up to reach it and it left his hand free to fiddle with the scotch. He wished he’d taped the afternoon’s interview, because there was something back there that was bugging him, really bugging him, and it was rattling around in the dimmer corners of his mind, just out of reach.

Neal checked his watch when he heard the knock on the bedroom door. It was a few minutes past two in the goddamn morning. He said “Come in,” anyway.

Liz Chase shut the door behind her. Neal wondered why she was wearing black silk to sleep alone in, but that was her business. The black turned her blond hair gold. She sat on the edge of the bed, pulled her legs up underneath just as she had that afternoon, and tugged the hem of the nightgown down around her knees. Then she just sat there looking at him.

Neal had read about this kind of thing in detective novels, but it never had happened to him. He didn’t think it was happening to him now, either, but his throat tightened up and he swallowed hard nevertheless.

“Yeah?”

“This is not easy for me.”

She bit her lip and nodded her head several times, as if she was trying to make up her mind.

“Allie has been with a number of men,” she said.

“There are worse things, Mrs. Chase.”

“Apparently… the Senator is one of them.”

Whoa.

Allie had left a note-in the car, where she knew her mother would find it, because she knew dear old Dad wouldn’t come looking.

It had been going on for years, since she was “old enough,” like ten, and it had started with fondling and extra-special hugs and bonus kisses. It hadn’t been all the time, just every once in a while, and she had been scared to tell. She had tried to tell Grandpa and Grandma that one time, but she couldn’t, she was so ashamed. “Please, Mom, don’t be angry, don’t hate me,” she wrote. And they had never done… you know… gone all the way, until last night and Daddy just wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t… and she didn’t know what to do. She just couldn’t face them, just couldn’t face her mother, and so she was taking off for good.