“What’s up, Tab?” Bellows said as they hugged.
“Glad to be out, that’s what’s up,” Tabloski said as Bellows cranked up and drove off.
They small-talked, about what had been happening on the streets of L.A. since Tabloski was locked up, but then the conversation shifted as both Bellows and Pauley knew it would.
“So, where is she?” Tabloski asked. “I wanna go there first.”
Bellows glanced at Pauley through the rearview. Neither man answered the question.
“What’s with the deaf and dumb act?” Tabloski asked. “Where is she? I’m not resting until that bitch is dead.”
“Think that’s a good idea, Tab?” Pauley asked him.
“What do you mean?” Tabloski asked him.
“You just got out. Something happens to her on the same day you get out ain’t gonna look too good to the authorities.”
“Who gives a damn about the authorities? And I don’t care how it looks! We got a plan. We’re sticking to the plan. Besides, don’t forget who you’re talking to. I know how to dress it up to look like an accident. I know how to have my alibi in place. Don’t forget who you’re talking to. Now where is she?”
Bellows looked at Pauley, again, through the rearview.
Pauley exhaled. “We don’t know,” he said.
Tabloski looked back at him. “What do you mean you don’t know? I ordered you to keep tabs on her. I ordered that!”
“And we did keep tabs on her,” Pauley said. “Didn’t we, Bells?”
“We kept tabs on her,” said Bellows. “Every so often we checked her out. After Darryl got iced, she moved around a lot. But we always found her. She was always around L.A.”
“So what happened?”
“She changed locations again. She just took off. You know how dames are. But we’re on it.”
Tabloski shook his head, and then punched the dashboard with his fist. “We got to find that bitch!” he said angrily.
“Don’t worry,” said Pauley. “We’re already on it. We’re find her. We always do.”
But that was little comfort to Tabloski. From the moment he walked into that prison to the moment he walked out of it, his entire existence was focused on handling her. His old man was convicted and died in prison, thanks to her.
Now it was her turn.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Two months came and went. During that entire time, Boone was singularly focused on beating back the drug epidemic that continued to infest his town. Young people were still dying. Old people were still angry. Rival dealers were killing each other over turf and it was becoming more than a small town should have to handle.
Boone was doing all he could. He arrested drug dealers and users alike, and he didn’t care who they were. Which didn’t endear him with community leaders nor his cousin the mayor. Everybody insisted that he should arrest the dealers, and that he needed to go easy on the users. The users, they insisted, needed medical attention, not jail. That was the pitch.
But Boone struck back. Where was all of this concern for users, he asked them, when Hemingway had a crack epidemic? Everybody insisted back then that he arrest the dealers and users alike. Lock’em all up and throw away the key, was the pitch back then. Look at the crime and destruction those people were bringing to their beautiful town. But now that the opioid crisis was infecting their young people and not all of those people of color, they suddenly wanted sympathy and treatment, not jail, for the users? And they expected Boone to go along with that?
Not Boone Ryan.
He didn’t go easy on crack-heads during that epidemic. He wasn’t going easy on opioid-heads during this epidemic.
And, as if he didn’t have enough on his plate to worry about, he still couldn’t take his mind off of Charly.
He picked up that phone to call her every single day since their dinner date. But he knew it was the wrong thing to do. She might have been the kind of woman he needed, somebody mature and stable and smart and fun. But he wasn’t the kind of man she needed, somebody still having one-night stands and still partying like it was nineteen-ninety-nine and he was some frat boy, not a man in his forties. He was all wrong for her. That was why he didn’t call her.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t on his mind. She was. Almost constantly. But he was a busy man. Work consumed him.
At Saint Chris, Charly was busy too. After two months on the job, she was feeling it now. She felt she was in a groove and in a good place jobwise. She was, as her mother used to say, getting the hang of it.
She’d also admit that she was a little disappointed that there was never any further “dates” with the chief. And she knew, on his end, it could have been any of a number of reasons why he decided against pursuing her: she didn’t give him any on that first date when he obviously wanted some. She wasn’t his type. He’d rather eat nails. It could have been any reason.
But whatever the reason, she knew she couldn’t dwell on it. On the one date they did have, two different women came to their table, with both bitter that he wasn’t taking them out to dinner, either, and Charly wasn’t about to become like them. She knew from the moment she saw Boone Ryan that he was the last man on earth she needed. His decision to stay away from her was exactly what she needed. She wasn’t mad at him. He was showing her who he was, a man not interested in commitment, and she was going to believe him.
For a solid two months straight, they only saw each other in passing. And always in a public place. Always in a situation where they’d speak and keep it moving. Like at her first faculty meeting.
The faculty assembled in the teacher’s lounge, with bodies leaned around the wall, as Fritz Hollingsworth, Boone Ryan, and the school’s principal, Dr. Paul Dorsett, were talking amongst themselves in front of the group. Charly had been on the job for a little over two months and she had her hands full. But unlike her first few weeks where she’d been inundated with policy books and regs, with learning the campus buildings and the executive officers, it was almost exclusively now all about the kids. Dealing with the less-than-saintly student body was her main task. And if she thought public school kids had issues, she had to think again. They had nothing on the kids at Saint Chris!
But because Amos was still incarcerated, and because the principal returned from his vacation insisting that he needed to get up to speed on all that had happened while he was away before he could help her learn the ropes, she relied on her previous tenure as a dean and did her job. But she knew it wasn’t the best that could be done because she lacked too much information. Many times, she was flying by the seat of her pants.
But when she walked into the teachers’ lounge for the mandatory meeting and saw that Chief Ryan was one of the three men up front, and despite the fact that he hadn’t tried to hook back up with her at all, she still was glad to see him. She knew it sounded crazy, but he represented a friendly face to her. Like a breath of fresh air. The only friendliness, other than Amos Yerkson on her first day, that she had experienced during her entire time in Hemingway.
When she entered the faculty lounge, Boone was still up front talking to Fritz and Dr. Dorsett. But as Fritz continued to talk, Boone’s eyes moved to Charly immediately on her arrival. He couldn’t stop taking peeps at her as she sat at a table midway from the front. He noticed how the talkative faculty members at that table suddenly stopped talking altogether when she sat down, as if she was somehow intruding. Some of them wanted the job she had, and Boone knew that was partly the reason for their coldness. But others were just plain rude to any outsider anyway, Boone also knew. Her first couple months in town, he decided sadly, were apparently still rocky.