Ah, so that answered that question.
“Go home. Mow the lawn, or something.”
“I already did that,” Ralph said, getting up. “Cleaning out the cellar comes next.”
“Fine, better get to it.” Geller paused at his office door. “And Ralph . . . I’m sorry about all this. Sorry as hell.”
People keep saying that, Ralph thought as he went out into the afternoon heat.
9
Yune called at quarter past nine that evening, while Jeannie was in the shower. Ralph wrote everything down. It wasn’t much, but enough to be interesting. He went to bed an hour later, and fell into real sleep for the first time since Terry had been shot at the foot of the courthouse steps. He awoke at four on Friday morning from a dream of the teenage girl sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders and pumping her fists at the sky. He sat bolt upright in bed, still more asleep than awake, and unaware he was shouting until his frightened wife sat up beside him and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“What? Ralph, what?”
“Not the strap! The color of the strap!”
“What are you talking about?” She shook him. “Was it a dream, honey? A bad dream?”
I believe there’s another dozen thoughts in my head lined up behind each one I’m aware of. That was what she had said. And that was what the dream—already dissolving, as dreams do—had been. One of those thoughts.
“I had it,” he said. “In the dream I had it.”
“Had what, honey? Something about Terry?”
“About the girl. Her bra strap was bright yellow. Only something else was, too. I knew what it was in the dream, but now . . .” He swung his feet out of bed and sat with his hands grasping his knees below the baggy boxers he slept in. “It’s gone.”
“It will come back. Lie down. You scared the hell out of me.”
“I’m sorry.” Ralph lay down again.
“Can you go back to sleep?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did Lieutenant Sablo say when he called?”
“I didn’t tell you?” Knowing he hadn’t.
“No, and I didn’t want to push. You had your think-face on.”
“I’ll tell you in the morning.”
“Since you scared me wide awake, might as well do it now.”
“Not much to tell. Yune tracked the boy down through the officer who arrested him—the cop liked the kid, kind of took an interest, has been keeping track. For the time being, young Mr. Cassidy is in the foster care system down there in El Paso. He’s got to face some kind of hearing in juvenile court for car theft, but nobody knows exactly where that will be yet. Dutchess County in New York seems the most likely, but they’re not exactly champing at the bit to get him, and he’s not champing at the bit to go back. So for the time being, he’s in a kind of legal limbo, and according to Yune, he likes that fine. Stepfather tuned up on him pretty frequently, is the kid’s story. While Mom pretended it wasn’t happening. Pretty standard cycle of abuse.”
“Poor kid, no wonder he ran away. What will happen to him?”
“Oh, eventually he’ll be sent back. The wheels of justice grind slow, but exceedingly fine. He’ll get a suspended sentence, or maybe they’ll work out something about time served while in foster care. The cops in his town will be alerted to his home situation, but eventually the whole thing will start up again. Kid beaters sometimes hit pause, but they rarely hit stop.”
He put his hands behind his head and thought of Terry, who had shown no previous signs of violence, not so much as bumping an umpire.
“The kid was in Dayton, all right,” Ralph said, “and by then he was getting nervous about the van. He parked in a public lot because it was free, because there was no attendant, and because he saw the Golden Arches a few blocks up. He doesn’t remember passing the Tommy and Tuppence café, but he does remember a young guy in a shirt that said Tommy something-or-other on the back. The guy had a stack of blue papers that he was putting under the windshield wipers of cars parked at the curb. He noticed the kid—Merlin—and offered him two bucks to put menus under the wipers of the vehicles in the parking lot. The kid said no thanks and went on up to Mickey D’s to get his lunch. When he came back, the leaflet guy was gone, but there were menus on every car and truck in the lot. The kid was skittish, took it as a bad omen for some reason, God knows why. Anyway, he decided the time had come to switch rides.”