Percival Everett - Assumption

“Did you get any of that, Bucky?” Ogden asked.

“I got all of it. Do you believe in luck?”

“Not really. Why?”

“Well, your blue Honda Civic showed up on the side of the road with a blown water pump.”

“Where?”

“Camel Rock.”

It was midnight when Ogden drove back through Plata on his way to Camel Rock on the other side of the pass. He’d decided that today was easily one of the worst in his life, a mix of embarrassment, failure, and shame. Fear would have been on the list had he known enough to feel it; instead, he was simply mad. He was exhausted, but he was not sleepy. The road seemed exceedingly long, but he was acutely aware of every curve, every set of headlights that flashed past him, and every set of taillights he passed.

Ogden exited the freeway and swung around past the casino. Under the absurdly bright lights of a Valero gas station, Ogden saw a state trooper’s car. The blue light on his roof was idle and the trooper was leaning on the front fender drinking a soda through a straw. Ogden parked beside him and got out.

“So, you had yourselves a murder up there,” the man said.

“Seems so. Did you find anything?”

“I was waiting on you before I opened it up. The way I see it, this is a part of your crime scene.” The trooper gestured that the car was all Ogden’s.

Ogden opened the driver’s side door and shone his light around. He sat behind the wheel. The seat was pulled up close, so Caitlin must have been the driver. He looked at the dash, opened the glove box and found it empty, except for some paper napkins and a service manual. He came out and put the beam on the partially raised hood. “You said it was the water pump?” Ogden asked.

The trooper pointed at the ground under the car. There was a pool in a depression of the concrete.

“I suppose you’re right.” Ogden knelt and looked at the mixture of coolant and water as if it might tell him something. He stood. “Let’s pop the trunk,” he said.

“Let’s use the key,” the trooper said. “It was still in the ignition.” He tossed the keys to Ogden.

“Okay,” Ogden said. He walked to the back of the car.

“What’s wrong?” the trooper asked.

“Oh, just everything.” Ogden opened the trunk.

“That’s not good,” the trooper said.

“That’s kind of the definition of not good,” Ogden said. He moved the hair from the face of the bound woman.

“You know her?”

“Her name is Caitlin Alison. Well, at least that’s what she told me and the sheriff.”

Ogden looked across the parking lot at the lights of the casino. Maybe there was a one-armed bandit with a one-handed killer sitting at it. He watched as the trooper called the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. This one would be their case. A good thing, Ogden thought. He didn’t want to investigate the murder he had, much less another one. But he would do just that. Both of them, tied together as they were. He imagined the man with one hand was well on his way to Albuquerque in the back of a pickup or in the passenger seat of a big rig, or lying dead someplace himself. Still, the casino was close enough he could see it. He wouldn’t bet that the man was there, but he had to look.

He walked over to the trooper. “Listen, I’m going to go up there and look around for the guy who was with her.”

“I don’t think you need to be here,” the trooper said. “They’ll know where to find you.”

“Sadly,” Ogden said.

The trooper laughed.

Ogden walked across the lot of the casino. It was a sad casino, he thought, as if someplace there was a casino that was not sad. It was only a few years old, but poorly designed; shoddy building made it look old, run down, even at night with the abundance of neon lighting masking the scars and flaws. There were consistent jobs for locals there, but no prosperity. He walked passed a couple of men who might or might not have been guarding the big double doors. He stepped up to them and looked at the beers in their hands.

“You guys work here?” Ogden asked.

“I do,” the shorter of the two said. He looked at Ogden’s uniform, seemed to know he was from another county.

“Did a guy come through here with only one hand? White guy, brown hair, my size.”

“You see a guy with one hand?” he asked his friend.

The friend shook his head.

“I have to say,” the man said, “I don’t really look at hands.”

“You should,” Ogden said. “That’s where people usually hold their guns.”

The men laughed.

“I’m going in to look around,” Ogden said.

“Look all you want.”

Inside, the harsh lights did nothing but highlight the sagging spirit of the place, the human drainage, as his father had called it. He wandered through the aisles of slot machines, the cigarette smoke, the sour smell of alcohol wafting from half-empty plastic cups and stale clothing, out of pores. Ogden looked at hands. He had never really looked at hands before either. They were all so different and everyone had two of them, except for two Indian Korean War vets; one had one hook, the other had two. He stopped by the security office and knocked. A round woman opened the door.

“Do you have cameras at the entrances?”

“Yes.”

“You think I can take a look at the last four hours of tape?”

The woman laughed. “We only keep two hours of tape before we loop it through again.”

“Okay, can I see that?” he asked.

“If the cameras worked, I’d let you take the tapes home and watch in your living room.”

“Oh.”

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“This is security?”

“Yeah. What are you looking for?”

“A man with one hand,” Ogden said.

“About your size?” the woman said.

“Yes,” Ogden said, incredulously.

She looked at the clock. “He came in about two hours ago.”

“Is he still here?”

“He might be,” she said.

“Might be?”

“Well, I’m the only one that stares at those damn monitors and since I’m standing over here having this little conversation with you, I ain’t exactly watching the monitors, am I? So, who knows who walked out that door?”

“I see. Where was he the last place you saw him and when?” Ogden looked back at the gallery.

“I watch them enter, I watch them exit.”

“No one watches the tables?”

“This ain’t Las Vegas.”

“I’m going to look around, thanks.”

The woman disappeared and left Ogden staring at the door. He turned and walked back through the aisles of slot machines to the restrooms. The man was in the building or had just left it or had left it awhile ago; Ogden trusted the security woman’s eyes. He was on edge now. His fingers were twitching. He went into the men’s room and washed his face. He waited long enough to count an even number of hands and then left. He went back to the entrance and looked out at the parking lot. The guard was still there.

“I’ve got twenty dollars for you if you help me search this place for a guy with one hand.”

“Okay.”

The twitching fingers were short-lived as two turns through the casino yielded nothing. The man had slipped out. Ogden had no idea which way to go. Had he boarded a bus, hitched a ride, gotten into a car with someone he knew? None of his guesses really mattered; all that mattered was that the man was good and gone and Ogden didn’t know where to search.

He walked back to the blue Honda. It was now an involved crime scene. The whole gas station was taped off and cops were everywhere. Ogden told the lead investigator all he knew while he watched the coroner pull out Caitlin’s body. The photographers recorded every angle of the scene. No one had seen the car abandoned; it had merely been sitting there too long. Ogden told the Santa Fe County deputy about the man with one hand and she wrote it down and said thanks. Ogden climbed back into his rig and drove north toward home.