Chapter Callie #2
His eyes shift over her shoulder, to the doors of the station. Unlike Frank, Luke is a lone wolf, and she gets the sense that he’s not eager to strike up small talk with the likes of Collins or Mac.
“What if I need my car right now? Like, right fucking now?”
“I just need to get this wheel back on and you’re set.”
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 say no 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 drives she runs through her theories.
Maybe Sabrina Riley was just the first of many women on Fauver’s bad side and who had paid the 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 of mirth 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 word chief gives 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.”
It is interesting that Jenna used his garage’s line. If he is involved with the drugs, surely he’s not stupid enough to give out that number to people buying from him. But if Jenna were just dabbling, maybe had only heard Fauver was in the game, she would have called him straight up.
“Does someone else work for you? Anyone else who would have answered the phone?”
“Nobody.” Fauver turns to go back inside.
She grinds her molars so hard it’s a wonder she doesn’t feel a tooth crack. She shouts to his back. “Wait. While I’m here I’d also like to ask you some questions about Sabrina Riley.”
He stops and turns. “I don’t know who that is either, lady.” But there’s the slightest shift in his bearing. His fingers tense. His shoulders rise.
“You were arrested after the two of you got into an altercation in front of Hines’s Bait and Tackle in January, 1991. So you met her at least that once.”
“I don’t recall the incident.”
“You have absolutely no memory of getting into an argument with a teenage girl that led to your arrest? I have some trouble believing that.”
“What you believe isn’t my problem.”
“You must fight with a lot of women, then, if that particular day is so unremarkable. I noticed a few domestic charges on your record.”
“If you’re here about Angela you can tell her to go fuck herself. I haven’t seen or heard from her in four years.”
“Women who give you a hard time tend to go missing, it seems.”
This gets to Fauver. She can practically feel it, heat coming off him now, the twitch of his muscles. She’s hit a sore spot.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Angela ran off. I didn’t do shit to her.”
“No one has seen Sabrina Riley since ’91. Not long after your argument with her. I have a theory that she might have been hiding a pregnancy, and there’s word that the two of you were romantically involved.” It’s a leap, but she’s leaning on the dumb talk from the guys at the station.
“No way. That skinny little bitch? Couldn’t hide anything on her. She was all bones.”
Callie has to surpass the urge to smirk. This is where she wants him. Scared, slipping up. “So you do remember her?”
The color rises in Fauver’s cheeks. “She came after me, okay? I was minding my own business, forgot she even worked at that store, and she’s there screaming at me, going absolutely apeshit, saying I ruined her life.”
Callie makes another tally mark in the column for Fauver as the father. It makes sense, Sabrina would level that at him if he got her pregnant, left her without any help. Still, she wants to hear it from Fauver himself. “Why would she say you ruined her life?”
“She was crazy. I have no idea why she would say that.” She’s so tired of that word. Crazy Sabrina. Crazy Jenna. Crazy is a blank check men write themselves to deal with women however they want.
“What had your relationship been before that day? She wanted more from you and you broke it off? Let me guess, you were just trying to have fun and then she needed something from you and that pissed you off? What could have made you so mad, Fauver? That you went in the bait shop and broke that window? What did she do to you?”
Fauver opens his mouth, but then something over Callie’s shoulder catches his attention.
She turns in time to see a car in the parking lot of the garage.
It cools him off, the presence of another person, and he comes back into himself, gathers his thoughts.
A shrug of the shoulders, slight shake of his head.
The heat goes out of the moment, which is both good and bad.
He won’t fly off the handle, and he won’t let anything else loose.
“I’ve got things to do. And I’ve got no obligation to talk to you.
And for the record, she was the one who broke the window. ”
Fauver stalks away, ducks to speak to the driver in the lot.
He looks once, over his shoulder at her as she walks back to her car, angling his body to block her view of whoever he’s talking to.
He’s a big man, but still, she catches him accept an envelope from the driver and slip it into his pocket, the snake tattoo along his arm undulating with a smooth, unexpected grace.
Fauver disappears around the back of the house as she pulls away.
She thinks of what he said about Sabrina Riley having been thin.
How he didn’t think she could hide a pregnancy.
But some women, especially first-time mothers, don’t show for a while.
Jane had complained about it, sending Callie pictures when she was five, six months pregnant.
I thought I would look like a bountiful-mother-earth-goddess and I just look like I ate too many slices of pizza.
The timing, three months before the baby was found, makes it a little more of a stretch, but not impossible.
Sabrina could have worn loose clothing. And there was definitely something there, something he didn’t want to tell her.
How she had to back him into admitting any relationship with her.
To even knowing her at all. Why deny it, unless all these years later there was something he was ashamed of, guilty about? Something he was eager to hide.