One for sorrow.
Hannah is kneeling on the sidewalk in front of Condor’s place, shading a gigantic chalk flower, which blooms next to a clutter of smiley faces, all of them pink or green. She has only two nubs of chalk left. I wave. She sits back on her heels to stare, wrapping her arms around her legs.
“Is that your car?” she asks.
“Just for the night. Pretty sweet, huh?”
Her eyes go from me, to the driver, back to me. “Are you famous?”
That makes me laugh. “Not even close.”
“I’m going to be famous someday.” She returns to her drawing, pushing hard on the chalk to scrape color onto the sidewalk.
“Oh yeah? For what?”
She shrugs. “Maybe dancing,” she says. “Or drawing. Or maybe for discovering aliens.”
“Aliens, huh?” In the house, Condor is framed perfectly in the window. It looks like he’s singing along to something on the radio. He’s shirtless. His hair is finger-combed; I imagine it still wet from a shower. I remember the pull of his lips, the way his hands felt holding on to my waist. “So long as you keep them away from me.”
“Aliens don’t hurt people, silly!” she says. She looks up at me serenely. “Only people hurt people.”
That’s the thing with kids: they’re way smarter than you think.
—
People do and say lots of crazy things in cabs, and private car services are no exception. Something about the division between the front seat and the back makes passengers think they’re invisible. And for that reason, drivers are gold mines of information. Prestige Limo shows up again and again in Optimal’s tax records. It’s a shot in the dark, but if Lilian McMann is right—if Optimal is wining, dining, and bribing politicians for favors—there must be evidence somewhere, and chances are the drivers have witnessed it, whether they realize it or not.
The driver is a woman, which I wasn’t expecting. I’m hoping that will make her more inclined to talk, but for the first half an hour I get nothing out of her but standard, monosyllabic answers.
You get a lot of customers back and forth to Indianapolis? Sometimes, ma’am. Where do you live? Not far, ma’am. How long have you been working the job? Four years, ma’am. You like it? Yes, ma’am. She might be a robot programmed with only a dozen replies.
I try again to land on something, anything, that will inspire her to talk. “Are you full-time with Prestige?”
On the subject of schedules, she warms up right away. “I do forty hours, sometimes more. But my schedule’s mine. That’s the good thing. I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old. I used to work at the Target but the day I had to leave my family on Thanksgiving to open was the day I quit.”
“And you never feel unsafe, driving late at night?”
“Oh, no,” she says quickly. “We don’t get that kind of customer, not at Prestige. It’s mostly repeats, especially this leg, between Optimal and Indianapolis. Can’t imagine making the commute every day myself…”
“Big tippers, at least?”
Finally, I’ve landed: she snorts. “Hardly. Corporate guys. You ever noticed the fatter a wallet, the less it opens?”
“Oh, I know. I used to be a waitress,” I play along. This is sort of true. I did spend a record two months working as a hostess at a hotel bar in Chicago before I got fired for going home with one of the regulars. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the fact that I wasn’t going home with the manager.
“Then you know. Some of these guys, they’re top, you know? I’m saying Washington, real movers-and-shakers, think their shit don’t stink.”
My pulse leaps. “Anyone famous?” I ask, trying not to sound too eager. But I’ve overstepped.
“I can’t say, ma’am.” She catches herself. “I do my job like everybody else. I get in the car, and I drive.”
I know I won’t get anything else from her, so I turn to the window, watching the fields run into a geometry of roads and housing and strip malls that announces the outskirts of Indianapolis. Half the evil in the world, I think, must be someone just doing their job.
Maybe it’s paranoia, but I have the driver drop me a good ten blocks from my destination and instruct her to wait. The neighborhood is nondescript, and well outside the central business district. I pass more than a handful of shuttered warehouses and storefronts boasting Available for Lease signs. A homeless woman roots around in a trash can.
Clean Solutions Management is wedged in the dingy second floor above an office-supply warehouse, and next to a vacant office that seems to have housed a divorce attorney at one point. It has no sign, nothing to announce its presence, other than a sticker peeling from above a buzzer that goes unanswered no matter how many times I ring.
“No one’s ever there.”
I turn and see a goateed guy smoking in the open door of the office supply. He looks, ironically, like he’s never seen the inside of any office: you can count the patches on his skin that aren’t tattooed.
“You know what they do up there?” I ask him.
He shrugs. His eyes sweep over my whole body, head to toe and back again, so slowly it’s like he’s making a point. “Imports-exports, or some shit like that,” he says.
“Imports-exports,” I say, as sweetly as I can. “Or some shit like that? Which is it?”
His cigarette hovers halfway to his lips. “It’s like that, huh?” He smiles as if we’ve been sharing a joke, then takes one long pull, directing the smoke away from my face like he’s doing me a favor. “Dude told me imports-exports. So I guess that’s what they do.”
“Dude?”
He shrugs. “Some douchebag in a suit.” He smiles again. His teeth are bad. “Is he your ex or something?”
I give him a look and his smile withers. “All right, look. He gave me his number, in case of delivery. To call when he gets a package, that kind of thing.”
“Does he? Ever get a package?”
“Sure,” he says. “I got one in the back right now. Haven’t brought it upstairs yet.”
He rolls his eyes when I just stand there expectantly. “Ah, shit. You ain’t a cop, are you?”
“Worse,” I say. I give him my best pretty-girl smile. “I’m a lawyer.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Barrens at just after eight o’clock on a Saturday is as close to hopping as it ever gets. I straighten up as we pass the Donut Hole: a handful of picketers are gathered in the parking lot, holding signs.
WHAT’S IN OUR WATER?
OPTIMAL POISONS, INC.
We’re past the protest almost before I’ve had time to register it, but it gives me a small lift of confidence. Optimal hasn’t bought everybody, at least—not yet.
Mel’s and the VFW bar spill patrons into the parking lot, keeping their doors propped open so the music flows out and the smoke flows in. A girl and her boyfriend are making out on the hood of the car. Her jean shorts hitched up where he’s grabbing her. Her arms wrapped around his neck. Laughing like crazy while their friends pelt them with bottle caps.
Had things turned out differently, I might be standing at the bar next to Kaycee Mitchell, bitching about work and kids and husbands, slugging down a couple of vodka crans and sneaking a cigarette when we got drunk enough.