The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [29]
“I’ve seen a lot of kids like him,” Jerry said. Jerry Gaiter had been a high school physics teacher before he became an investigator for the Clark County DA’s office. “They’re all the same, as predictable as math. Most rich folks never surprise you at all.”
Bea tried to call Nada to tell her about Meadows. They hadn’t spoken since the previous morning, the day after Bea opened her eyes and found the folded paper with the twenty-five-dollar chip inside and the phone number that led Jerry the investigator right to Kerry Meadows’s hidey-hole.
She also wanted to pass along a message from a Chicago cop named Kloska, who claimed he was looking for Nada and that it was important, something to do with an investigation. Bea remembered that Nada’d said someone was following her, that she even thought someone had been in her apartment, and after talking with Detective Kloska in Chicago, Bea convinced the LVPD to send a cruiser by her building every few hours.
Rubbing Nada’s chip with her fingers, following a little scratch across its surface with her thumb, Bea was sick and sleepless with worry.
Nada’s phone rang and rang and rang and rang.
11
NOT FOR the first time in his life, Bobby Kloska felt older than he was.
The naked body in the bed next to him was to blame. Carrie was a student at Columbia College, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. Her skin was smooth and uniformly untanned all over and she wore hardly any makeup, because there were no imperfections to mask, nor was there a single favored feature to highlight. She was pretty in an entirely unmemorable way. In the bar, he had started talking about the heat and the sun and he told her he hoped that she wore big hats during the day, because her face was like a priceless painting in a museum that needed to be placed away from windows and shielded from UV rays. Later, when he was fucking her, his feet apart, standing beside her raised bed, she on her back, calves around his waist, he placed his hands on top of her and noted the contrast between the skin on her belly, which had performed little work except as a medium for navel piercings, and the skin on his hands, which had seen one tour of battle after another, skin that had been scraped and scarred and twisted and bitten. Skin that had been punched and that had punched back harder. Skin that had swelled and tanned and calloused itself around his fingers until it had formed a pair of natural gloves. The armored hands of a good cop.
He held her gently, fearing his old, rough mitts might scuff her like heavy shoes on a new floor.
But that wasn’t even what made him feel old.
Posters were what made him feel old. She had posters on her wall. Not even in frames, just tacked and taped and pasted to the wall. Posters for movies he didn’t know, bands he’d never heard of. Pictures of kittens, for Chrissakes. HANG IN THERE! one cat poster urged as Bobby thrust against her and she crossed her ankles behind his back and shrieked and moaned—sincerely or not—underneath him.
Hang in there. Fuck you, fucking cat.
The pyramid of numbers on the card from Marlena Falcone’s wallet were almost all he’d thought about for two days. Well, that wasn’t true. He’d thought about sex and gin and cigarettes and the scorching heat and the White Sox’s wounded rotation and his kids and pieces of half a dozen open cases he and his partner were actively working. There was Marlena Falcone, but also a Juan Doe who had washed up on Oak Street Beach and a badly burned body in a Dumpster arson in Wrigleyville. Kloska had asked the private clinic where Falcone worked—Executive Concierge—for any files relating to Canada Gold, and they had been, as Kloska put it to his lieutenant, “communicative but uncooperative.” Some muckety over there said they needed to take doctor-patient confidentiality