Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“I wasn’t thinking about any of that!” RuthClaire cried in frustration.

“That’s my point. It all worked on you subconsciously. Stop blaming yourself for somebody else’s villainy.”

Crawford tapped his pen on his notepad. “Puddicombe vanished after that brick-kiln business. His picture’s in every post office in the Southeast, but nobody’s seen him since.”

“Nancy Teavers has.”

“What makes you so sure?” Crawford eyed me from under his furrows. “For all we know, Mr. Loyd, the kid could be living in Acapulco.”

“For all we know, he could be sitting down there in Sinusoid Disturbances with a Mohawk haircut and a safety pin through his cheek. Nancy would have never planned something like this by herself. But Craig may’ve convinced her that this is how to pay back Adam and RuthClaire for E. L.’s death—even if he did bring it upon himself.”

“Adam has to be told,” RuthClaire said. “He has to know.”

Curious patrons, wraiths from the pit, had gathered around us to gawk and eavesdrop. At last, though, David and Evelyn Blau came out to us through these bizarre figures—with Bilker Moody and Crawford’s young partner right behind them. Mireles, the second cop, approached Crawford. “The ticket seller says the kidnapper—the female punk you described—began showing up for Fire Sine Fridays in June.”

“Alone?” said Crawford.

“She isn’t sure. It’s dark in there. The girl always paid her cover and went on in.”

“She just came on Fridays?”

“The ticket seller only works three nights a week, which helps pin it down. She remembers her coming especially for Fire Sine Fridays.” Mireles flipped open a notepad of his own. “The only time the suspect ever spoke, the ticket seller says, she asked if… uh, the Blau Blau Rebellion was doing a gig.”

“A gig ?” said David Blau distastefully.

“When she found out they weren’t,” Mireles added, “she didn’t bother to pay the cover. She left.”

“A fan,” Evelyn Blau said. “There’s loyalty for you.”

“And she came alone?” Crawford pressed.

Mireles had a thin, sallow face with eyes as brown as Hershey kisses. “It’s like I said, Sergeant, she was careful to appear to be alone.”

Bilker said, “I found a guy who’d seen her with somebody.”

Sirens wailed. Traffic on the nearby expressway and the bass notes thrumming through the nightclub made the whole hill quiver like a drum skin.

“One of the yahoos who kep’ yellin’ during y’all’s show,” Bilker said. “He got concerned when I told him what happened to Paulie. He said the freak that took him would sometimes sit at a table with a bearded fella.”

“More,” Crawford demanded.

“He tried to play it cool-punk, like—but he couldn’t quite get it on, the look and all—cowboy boots ’n’ jeans instead of tennis shoes and pleated baggies. Like a guy with an eight-to-five job whose boss would can him if he ever showed up lookin’ freaky.”

“Craig Puddicombe,” I said.

“ I’ve got to go see Adam .” RuthClaire dug her fingernails into my wrist.

“Somebody needs to go back to your house,” Crawford said. “There may be a telephone call. That’s almost always the next step, the telephone call.”

“Not if the motive’s revenge,” RuthClaire said. “They may just kill him.”

“Not too likely,” Crawford said. He explained that a kidnapping usually pointed to a less gruesome motive, like extorting a ransom. If Paulie’s abductors had merely wanted to kill him to punish his parents, they could have shot him from ambush. They could have run him and his guardian down with a car. They could have set off a bomb on the porch. Instead, they’d staged a crime requiring some knowledge of the kid’s mother’s movements, some fairly elaborate disguises and subterfuge, lots of patience, and an entire bistro basement full of luck. Tonight, everything, including Adam’s confinement in the Emory hospital, had come together for them. It was even possible that the accidental conjunction of all these elements had provided the couple an irresistible opportunity to act on impulse. Now, though, they’d try to cash in. Crawford staked his reputation on the inevitability of a telephone call demanding money and outlining a sequence of steps for delivering the ransom.

Caroline, who had held RuthClaire’s arm throughout this spiel, spoke up: “You’re not being clear, Sergeant. Do you think the kidnappers planned the whole thing in excruciating detail, or just got lucky and took the main chance? It seems to me that their initial motive might tip their ultimate behavior.”

“I’m not being clear , miss, because I’m not a mind reader. Maybe they planned everything in ‘excruciating detail’ for some other night, but got lucky this evening and jumped the gun. Same difference, as I see it. They’re gonna ask for money.”

There was more discussion. Bored now, the hangers-on on the sidewalk began to drift away. Vehicles eased along Spring Street and our own little alley in deference to the squad car at curbside. The night smelled of engine oil and abused asphalt. Neon streaked the floodlit edges of the sky.

The Blaus agreed to take RuthClaire home. Bilker would ride with them. Caroline and I would go to Emory Hospital to break the news of T. P.’s abduction to his father. The police would send detectives to the Montaraz house, both to protect its occupants and to monitor the kidnappers’ unfolding extortion strategy. If twenty-four hours went by with no break in the case, the FBI would soon play the most prominent role. Meanwhile, Crawford and Mireles would keep following up leads here at the nightclub. Elsewhere in Fulton County—as in DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett—sheriff’s patrols and municipal police forces would set up interlocking dragnets. Interlocking dragnets . That sounded good, but I reminded myself that no one knew what kind of vehicle Craig and Nancy had at their disposal. Surely, Puddicombe had not been able to keep E. L.’s pickup truck for the past year without incurring arrest. On the other hand, maybe he had changed its tag, jacked up its body, pin-striped its hood. I gave Crawford a description of the truck as I remembered it—a brief already on file with the GBI—and he in turn had it radioed around the greater metropolitan area. (Any white-haired young woman gunning through Avondale Estates in a Ram Charger would provoke immediate suspicion.)

Bilker told me where he’d parked my car. When I got the directions straight, Caroline and I told the others good night and walked arm in arm down the sidewalk and through an alley to a crumbling asphalt terrace. A smelly Dempsey Dumpster occupied most of this space. Bilker had left the Mercedes beside the dumpster with two wheels on the terrace and two on the alley’s broken cobbles. No one else had even considered contesting the spot. Ignoring the effluvia from the trash bin, I pulled Caroline to me and kissed her full on the lips. She broke away.

“Men have all the innate romance of doorstops.”

RuthClaire had said something like that to me back in December. I wrinkled my nose and looked around. “Not exactly the Moulin Rouge, is it?”

“Paul, please don’t fantasize a friendly fuck later tonight. I’m not ready for it. Even if I had been, this kidnapping would’ve changed that.”

A friendly fuck, I thought. Now there’s an expression RuthClaire would have never used. But hearing it spoken had an effect the reverse of what Caroline intended—it excited me. Maybe I was a bleary-eyed lecher for whom dirty talk is an aphrodisiac. Dirty? A single four-letter word of hearty Anglo-Saxon origin? Maybe, instead, I was a macho bigot who believed “bad language” was the province of males only. Me, macho? A bigot, maybe—but not a muscle-flexer. More than likely, I was simply unused to hearing “bad language” on a woman’s lips. The cultural upheaval of the past two decades had passed me by. I was a forty-seven-year-old southern gentleman only now getting straight the distinction in nuance between shacking up and living together .