“He didn’t.” It would have been on the credit report if he had. “How about new consulting work?”
“That’s out, too. Even if he hustled two or three new jobs, it’d’ve taken him a lot longer than a month or two to raise that much cash.”
Which left what? A couple of possibilities, one of them—
“Brandy,” Janssen said abruptly, as if reading his mind. “Maybe she loaned it to him. It’d explain why he let her talk smack about his mother, wouldn’t it? Why he let her walk all over him?”
“It might.”
Janssen shook his head again. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “How does a guy like Brian, a good guy, all of a sudden get so screwed up?”
Runyon said nothing. The woman in the scarf, Bryn Darby, flicked across his mind. Most of us can’t even explain to ourselves why we screw up or get screwed up in all the ways we do.
He was starting to forget what Colleen looked like.
Always before he could close his eyes and she would appear bright and crystal sharp in his memory. Happy, sad, playful, serious, loving—all her moods, all her voices distinct down to the finest nuance, as if she were still alive and caught by time. She was still there for him now, but the images had begun to blur and fade at the edges. It happened all of a sudden, it seemed to him, like home movies shot with an old video cam that he’d watched one too many times. More and more, now, he found himself looking at his photos of her, the one in his wallet and the framed portrait he kept on the bedside table, to try to recapture the clarity. But it wasn’t working. Photos were static, without the movement, the words, the life force—the real Colleen—that had once dominated his memory.
It happened again that night in the apartment. He was in the kitchen making tea, he thought of her, he closed his eyes, and her face came to him in soft focus, as if he was looking at her through a thin mist. He went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, and stared at the framed photograph. Impulse drove him to the closet, where he kept the albums she’d put together before the cancer was diagnosed—snapshots taken at mountains, lakes, Seattle locations, Whidbey Island, Mount Rainier, Vancouver, Victoria Island. He sat with one of them open on his lap and paged through it slowly, looking only at those of her alone or the two of them together with her the most prominent figure. He went all the way through the album before he closed his eyes and looked at the memory images again.
Still the soft, misty focus. Blurred. Faded.
It scared him. He felt as if he were losing her all over again. First Colleen herself, now his memories of her. One day he might close his eyes and not be able to see or remember her clearly at all. If that happened, he didn’t know what he would do. He didn’t want to think about what he might do.
He put the album away, went into the front room, and turned on the TV. He was sitting there, staring at faceless people talking in a room, when his cell phone rang. The noise activated him again. Business—Bill or Tamara. An emergency, maybe, something to occupy his mind and his time, help him make it through another night.
But it wasn’t Bill or Tamara. A half-muffled man’s voice said, “Jake Runyon?” He acknowledged it, and the voice said, “If you want to know who hurt Brian Youngblood and why, ask Nick Kinsella. Nick Kinsella, Blacklight Tavern.” That was all. The line went dead.
Runyon switched off. No emergency, but at least now he had something else to think about. The muffling had been the result of a handkerchief or some other cloth draped over the mouthpiece, but it hadn’t done much of a job of disguising the voice. Enough of the thin, pale tone had come through to make it recognizable.
Brian Youngblood.
And why would Brian Youngblood want to tell him something anonymously that he could have volunteered straight out, over the phone or in person?
13
TAMARA
She spent Wednesday night with her folks in Redwood City, part of it in a big argument with Pop. Nothing new in that; seemed like she’d spent most of her life facing off with him about one thing or another. She loved him, he loved her, but they were oil and water when they were together and always had been. That was why she’d been such a stone bitch rebel as a teenager, defying Pop and jerking his chain every chance she had. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll drove him crazy, the main reason she’d been such a wild child on all three fronts.
What it boiled down to was, he resented her independence and she resented his need to control everybody and everything—her, Ma, Claudia, the Redwood City police department, the damn gophers and crab grass in his backyard. And when you threw in what Bill called the generation gap, you had a recipe for friction just about every time they saw each other. Big day if they agreed on anything. If she said the earth revolved around the sun, he’d find some way to argue the point and twist things around so she was wrong and he was right.