The smell of the gasoline was overwhelming, dense and wet, clinging to the inside of her head and lungs. She couldn’t begin to sort out his words. She thought she was going to faint. She felt his fingers sinking into her shoulders. He shook her as though waking someone from a nap. “Talk to me.”
“Thank you, Vick,” she said. “But you must let me alone.”
He pressed his face into her hair. The rain was slacking, the windshield clearing. Then his breath left the nape of her neck.
“I’ll take you home now,” he said. “You can call the cops, or you can trust me to take care of what happened here. I hear your father is a war hero. Maybe he’s got some ideas of his own, the same kind I got. Hop in my car. Don’t dishonor what we got here.”
What we got here?
She opened the door and got out, her purse and her book bag gripped to her chest. Her blood had pooled in her legs; her body had turned to lead. He was getting out of the backseat, unable to hide his male arousal, his hair as slick as sealskin, his teeth showing behind his disfigured lip, his visible eye glimmering like a stone at the bottom of a dirty fish tank. “Hey, where you going? I’m not an ogre! Don’t treat me like this!”
She began running toward the intersection, gaining the curb, running along the edge of the vacant lot toward the lighted houses on the next block. She heard him open and slam the door of his car, then start the engine, pressing on the gas while in neutral. The moon had broken through the clouds, flooding the sidewalk and the vacant lot and the oaks and the yards with a glow the color of pewter. She ran into the lot so he couldn’t follow her with the car; she jumped across weed-spiked piles of building debris, a moldy mattress with a used condom on it, a pile of broken glass, the carcass of a dog whose skin had turned to a lampshade. She passed a horse shed built of slat wood and RC Cola signs and gained another sidewalk and ran across a lighted intersection into a neighborhood thick with live oaks and magnolia trees, the wide front porches hung with flower baskets and gliders and wind chimes, all the iconic images that should have offered reassurance and sanctuary but tonight did nothing of the sort.
She had given herself over to her worst imaginings, but she didn’t care. They were preferable to the memories that three men had just visited upon her and from which she would never escape. She didn’t look back until she had rounded the corner of the next block and saw her house. There was no traffic anywhere, nor anyone on the sidewalks or front porches or even in representation on a window shade, as though the earth had been vacuumed of humanity and turned into a stage set.
I TOOK OFF FROM work and stayed with her the next day. A tow truck pulled the Epstein car to the shop. Mr. Epstein talked to some uniformed cops, then to a plainclothes detective. None of them seemed convinced of Valerie’s account. Vick Atlas had a penthouse apartment in the Montrose district but had not been seen by anyone in three days. The father’s lawyer said he was in Mexico. No one answered the phone at the family compound in Galveston. Two days after the fake cops had terrorized Valerie, Detective Merton Jenks showed up at her house while I was there. I hadn’t thought I would ever be happy to see Merton Jenks again. When he knocked on the door, the living room shook. I answered the door. He took one look through the screen and said, “I should have known.”
“That doesn’t seem quite fair, sir,” I said.
“Where’s the girl?”
“Her name is Valerie.”
“Go get her. Her old man, too.”
“He’s not here.”
“Great,” he said in disgust. He opened the door and came in without asking. “Where is she?”
I called upstairs. Jenks’s eyes kept boring into my face, the source of his agitation a mystery, at least to me.
“Nothing I say to you kids seems to get across,” he said. “There’s not a lot of sympathy for you downtown. The consensus is trouble either follows you or you go out and find it. Right now I’m the only friend you’ve got.”
“Sir, they almost set her on fire.”
He walked to the stairs and hit on the banister with his fist. “We need you down here, Miss Epstein. Let’s go.”
“Why don’t you show some respect?” I said.
“You’d better shut up.”
“When you guys get scared, you take out your anger on people who have no power,” I said.
“W
hen’s Goldie going to be here?”
“Mr. Epstein?”
“Who do you think?”
“He’s at work,” I said.
I realized he wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was staring up the stairway at Valerie. She was wearing jeans and sandals and a tan cowboy shirt with rearing horses sewn on the pockets.
“I’m Detective Merton Jenks,” he said. “I want to get a confirmation of your account and ask you a few questions. It won’t take long, miss.”
“Did you find Vick Atlas?” she said.