She’s raging. Every minute she has to wait is another minute she doesn’t know what’s going on with Jenna. She’s done circling Fauver—now she has reason to head right to his front door. She paces the lot while he finishes up, puts the wheel on, tightens the lug nuts, removes the jacks.
Luke stands, rubs his hands on the front of his jeans. His tools are packed, his job is done, and yet he looms there like he’s waiting for something else from her. Measuring something in her. Is it romantic, like Jane thought the other night?
“Something wrong?”
“My mom. She’s missing.” She doesn’t want to go in to details. The bag. The drugs. Her worst nightmare from childhood unfolding: everyone seeing the true disorder of her life, the shame that she’s never been truly able to shake off. Something to hold up against any mistake she makes and sayno wonder. And her mother finally gone for good.
Luke gives her another one of those long stares. In his stillness she swears she can sense a thought pass over him. Probably same as Latour and everyone else. That whatever is going on with Jenna, she deserves it. That she brought it on herself. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says eventually.
“I’ve got to go.” He steps aside so she can get in her car, and she slams the door hard, feeling his eyes on her again as she pulls out of the lot.
As she drivesshe runs through her theories. Maybe Sabrina Riley was just the first of many women on Fauver’s bad side and who had paidthe price for it. She’s certainly come across so many like him, men who manage to strew the wreckage of women’s lives behind them without any cost to themselves. And now Jenna got in his way somehow. Maybe Fauver sold to her and found out she was the mother of a cop. She’s seen people offed for less.
According to Google the garage opens at 9:00 but when she gets there at 9:30 the battered doors of the two-car bay are shut. There’s no light on in the office, or that she can see behind the glass panes plastered with old bumper stickers.
There’s a house set back behind the shop, a rancher with sheets tacked to the windows, a filthy storm door leading to a sagging side porch. She figures she came all the way out here. She gets out of the car, steps over broken wooden storage palettes and empty soda cans, searches for a doorbell and can’t find one, so knocks once on the doorframe, hard and quick.
At the second knock she hears a shout from inside the house. Footsteps, then silence. A creak from somewhere deep inside, more footsteps, retreating, silence again.
Then a voice, close, just over her shoulder, that makes her jump.
“What do you want?”
Callie pivots, finds herself standing just under Billy Fauver’s chin. He’s grinning, an ugly, snide smile. She takes a step back, stumbles a little. His grin gets even wider.
She expected him to look a fair bit older than in his mug shot, but even by her least generous assumptions, Billy Fauver is not a man who has aged well. He’s still big, broad, but with a hard old-man’s belly, the whites of his eyes crazed with veins. His hair both receding and greasy, stands up unbrushed and wild, and situated in the middle of that infuriating little smile is a gray tooth, dead at the root.
“Anyone with business at my house knows not to try the front door.” He crosses his arms. A snake tattoo curls from underneath the edge of his T-shirt, the jaw opening near the bones of his wrist.
“Mr. Fauver, yes?” He doesn’t say a word, doesn’t budge. “You still running the garage? Online it says you’re open nine to five.”
“You here for an oil change or something?” Again, that hint ofmirth in his voice. “Besides, everyone knows the internet is chock full of shit, right?”
He looks her up and down slowly, making sure she notices him studying her. A move she knows well by now, and still it makes her want to kick in the soft, rotten wood of his porch step.
“I’m Chief Callie Hauser and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
If the wordchiefgives him any pause he doesn’t show it. She needs it now, something she can hold between her and this man. Fauver says nothing, just clears his throat and hawks a plug of phlegm a few inches from her shoe.
“Have you seen this woman?” Callie holds up the missing poster.
“I don’t know her.”
“She called you. Three days ago. Did you speak with her?” According to Jenna’s call log Fauver had picked up and the call lasted a minute.
“I don’t know,” Fauver says, looking bored. He hands the picture back to Callie.
“Any guess why she called you?”
“Maybe she needed a car repair. I didn’t talk to her, though.” He smiles then, a smug little grin that makes Callie want to scream.
“Her car had recently been impounded. She hadn’t reclaimed it yet.”
“I’m not sure why you’re on my ass about this.”
“She’s missing, as you can see. You were the last person she had contact with before her phone died.”
“I said I didn’t talk to her.”
