Stephen White - Missing Persons

“I don’t especially want anything to do with this either, Sam. Since the day that Mallory fell off the face of the earth I’ve tried like hell to make this leave me alone. But it keeps tracking me down. From my point of view, you get close enough to this thing and you’ll find it has as many hooks as a square foot of Velcro.”

I slammed the door shut and he drove off.

The clock read just shy of 8:30 when I walked in the front door of my house. Emily greeted me exuberantly, but I found my other two girls sound asleep in the master bedroom curled into the familiar big spoon/ little spoon configuration. They were surrounded by that night’s bedtime books and Grace’s favorite stuffed animals. Our not-so-stuffed poodle, Anvil, was curled into a tight ball at Grace’s knees.

I was feeling remorse that I’d been missing out on the bedtime ritual so often.

Sound asleep at Grace’s bedtime was a little early, even for Lauren, but the energy depletion that she suffered as a result of multiple sclerosis wasn’t always easy to predict. If you asked her on a day when she wasn’t suffering any of the acute effects of one of the disease’s myriad symptoms, she’d tell you that what she hated most about the illness was that it made her days so much shorter. As each successive year took its toll, Lauren had fewer good hours, fewer strong hours, fewer waking hours, fewer hours when pain or weakness didn’t drive her to bed. Ask her what she’d most like to change about having MS, and she’d tell you she wished her days were longer. She’d tell you that on most days her energy lasts about as long as daylight endures on a December day in Anchorage.

This had apparently been one of those Yukon days. That’s what she called them. I’d call her from work and find her at her desk at the DA’s office. I’d ask how she was doing. Too often she’d say, “You know, babe. It’s a Yukon day.”

I rearranged the comforter so that it provided some cover for both mother and daughter, kissed the tops of their heads, lifted Anvil from the sheets, and led the dogs outside to pee. Once the odd canine couple had done their thing and our little parade was safely inside the house, I checked for a message from Raoul or, even better, Diane.

Nothing.

I scrambled a couple of eggs, folded them into some honey wheat toast, and carried my plate into the living room. I ate standing up at the big windows that faced down into Boulder, trying to spot the house where Jenifer Donald was visiting her grandparents, trying to spot the overpriced house with the water park up near the foothills on Twelfth, trying to spot the small house on Broadway where Hannah Grant had died.

Far to the west, on the other side of the vast mountains, I wondered if Raoul was on his date with the woman from Venetian security. Or was he still chatting up gamblers at the craps tables trying to find someone who remembered his wife?

And where the hell in all those lights were Bob and his cherry Camaro?

What answers, if any, were sitting in a Kinko’s box in my office?

My impulse was to charge downtown and find out.

I reminded myself that what Bob had written was part of a novel.

Fiction.

Stuff he’d made up.

Stuff I was supposed to wait to read.

Diane, in rare moments of candid self-doubt, would express astonishment that she’d ended up with Raoul. “Why me? Look at me. Look at him. Why on earth did he choose me?”

Raoul was an olive-skinned Spaniard with piercing eyes, a prodigious intellect, an entrepreneurial instinct for innovation, and a bloodhound’s nose for money. He had a smile as sweet as honey, and his thick hair looked black until the sun hit it just so and lit it up like golden floss. He could give charm lessons to George Clooney, put on continental airs when he felt the situation demanded, or pull on faded jeans and cowboy boots and slide right into a farmhouse discussion of southern Colorado water rights as though it had been his family that had cut the first irrigation canals into the dusty San Luis Valley.

In much the same way that the progeny of Holocaust survivors have been indelibly scarred by Germany’s twentieth-century embrace of the Nazis, Raoul had been bruised deeply-down to the place where tissue ends and the soul takes up corporeal space-by Spain’s fifty-year flirtation with fascism. Memories of long-absent relatives, and nightmared imaginings of what had happened to them at the hands of Franco’s Falangists, flowed through his blood like perpetual antibodies to authority.

The result? Raoul had wide shoulders, and a chip on them that was sometimes big enough to obscure his handsome head.

My impatience to hear an update finally compelled me to dial Raoul’s cell number before I climbed into bed. He answered after three rings.

“Yeah?” he said to the accompaniment of Las Vegas background sounds. Music, traffic. Something else-hissing, muted explosions. I wasn’t sure what it was.

The single word he’d spoken as he answered had carried a boatload of hope; every time his phone rang he was praying that the caller was Diane. To me, ironically, his hope meant that he hadn’t found her. My own hope, which was hovering like a flat stone skipping on a smooth lake, sank instantly to the muddy bottom.

“It’s me, Raoul. You didn’t find her.”

He said something in Catalonian. It sounded like “bandarras.” From the spitting tone he employed, I guessed it had been a profanity and that it didn’t really require translation, although I was always more than a little eager to add to my knowledge of the profane spectrum of his native tongue.

“Were you able to talk with that woman from hotel security?” I found myself shouting to be heard above the din.

“Marlina has a story,” he said. “Unfortunately, it takes her a while to tell it.”

“Yeah?” I didn’t get whatever he was saying.

“She’s from Mexico. What’s on her mind is about her brother and something that happened to him on the way from Chihuahua to Tucson. She needs to talk. With some women, it has to first be about them. She is one of those women. Fer un solo de flauta. Trust me, it’s the only way.”

Raoul spoke about women the way he spoke about IPOs and RAM. With authority. Again, I considered asking him for a translation of the Catalonian, but I didn’t.

“You haven’t learned anything?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

He sounded fried-Raoul’s anxiety seemed to be swelling with every conversation we had. The appearance of my voice, and not his wife’s, on the line had robbed him of whatever buoyancy had been keeping him afloat. I could feel the deflation in his spirits as hope leaked away; whatever vessel he was in was taking on water and he was getting tired of bailing.

“Did you find anyone playing at the craps tables who remembered Diane?”

“I set up a half-million-dollar credit line. I assumed that would give me a little bit of latitude in the casino.”

I couldn’t imagine. “Yeah? How much were you betting?”

“Five or ten. Sometimes twenty.”

Thousand. “You win anything?” I asked.

“I did all right,” he said. Raoul, I knew, would take no joy in a big pile of craps winnings. In his various tech businesses, he played for stakes that would make a huge pile of casino chips seem paltry by comparison. But given the events of the last twenty-four hours, Raoul would take some pleasure in the fact that he had taken the money-if it were a large enough pile-from the coffers of the Venetian.

“How good?

“I’m up eighty or so. The only luck I’m having in this town is at a craps table.”

I whistled. “Thousand?”

“Minus four. I tipped a couple of dealers. I’m hoping they’re appreciative, might let me buy them a drink.”