Bad Moon On The Rise (11 page)

Marcus brought me something pink in
the kind of expensive, long-stemmed cocktail glass that only a
childless gay man could keep unbroken in his house for more than
two weeks. The drink was tart and tasty and lethal. It went
straight down like a shiny pink ribbon of peace, soothing my
anxiety all the way to my chubby, tingly toes. “This is strong
stuff,” I declared. “Keep them coming.”

Marcus kept them coming. I read and
got drunk for a couple of hours, escaping in alcohol and work.
Somewhere along the way, I fell asleep—or passed out, depending on
your perspective.  I woke the next morning with my skin stuck
to the leather sofa like it had been super-glued on, a cashmere
throw carefully tucked in around my shoulders and a stoned cat
sleeping right on my crotch. Too bad it had stopped purring
somewhere along the way. It would have been the biggest thrill I’d
had down there in months.

I smelled fresh coffee down the hall
and staggered into the kitchen.

“
So where are you going to
start?” Marcus asked as he handed me a cup of coffee and politely
ignored the fact that I looked like Blanche Dubois on a bad
day—compared to his Denzel Washington on the very best of
days.

“
Find where the mother has
been and you will find out where the son has gone, Grasshopper,” I
decreed as I sipped coffee that had been excreted by fetal
Madagascar monkeys or some such nonsense. Man, did it taste good,
monkey shit or not. Curiously, I had no hangover. I never did at
Marcus’s apartment. It was as if he had the power to banish
anything so tacky as a hangover from the utter swankness of his
place.

“
And where has the mother
been?” he asked mildly as he spooned no-fat yogurt and fresh
raspberries into a bowl. He pushed a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts
across the counter toward me. “Here. I got you these. Knock
yourself out. I’ve got insulin, too, in case you need
it.”

“
Piedmont Technical
College,” I told him. “That’s where she’s been. I can account for
her whereabouts pretty much the entire time except for a little
under a year when she was going there, and it was pretty recently.
She seems to have been in and out of some women’s prison in the
mountains on drug charges, and there’s no way I can get in there.
So I’m going to start with the college and see what
happens.”

“
Did you find anything
else?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t make much
sense. Her prison records say she was a model prisoner. She was
released early for good behavior. Her parole officer says she was
clean and submitted to drug testing voluntarily. Her friend Everly
swears she was doing great. But then I find her with a needle
sticking out of her arm, and I’ve got a crack head who swears she
was back to dealing, and…” I shrugged. “Somewhere in between those
two versions of Tonya is the unknown person who took her son. The
kid is with someone. I can feel it. He’s alive and someone took
him.”

Marcus was staring at me from over his
cup of coffee, saying nothing.

“
What?” I
asked.

“
Be careful,” he warned
me.

“
I’m always careful.” I
suddenly felt grumpy and didn’t know why. “What? You afraid the
registrar at Piedmont Tech is going to leap across the desk and hit
me with a thirty-pound print-out?”

“
I wasn’t talking about
that,” Marcus said calmly.

“
Then what were you
talking about?” I demanded.

“
When you let your
personal feelings get in the way,” he said, “you tend to make bad
decisions. Very bad decisions. Do you want me to give you some
examples?”

“
No, I do not. Point well
taken.”

Marcus smiled. “I’ll make you some
eggs.”

“
No, thanks,” I said. “I
think I’m ready to move on.” I wasn’t talking about the case, but
he knew that.

“
You sure?” he
asked.

I nodded. “I don’t know how far I’ll
get. I just know I’m ready to get started.”

I have looked for a lot of people in
my lifetime. Mostly people who don’t want to be found. So I know
that it’s remarkably easy to disappear, if that’s what you really
want. Anyone can try on a new identity, and people move around so
much these days no one even notices when they go. Departing
neighbors become like ghosts, leaving little more than wisps of
themselves behind. All of which meant that chances were good my
trip to Piedmont Tech to find out about Tonya Blackburn’s time
there could be a complete waste. But I had to try.

Chances were certain that the official
people there—the registrars, professors, guidance counselors and
staff—would be absolutely no help when it came to knowing more
about Tonya Blackburn. I would not even waste my time trying. But I
also knew people almost always hung out with other people just like
them. That was the way of the world. Sometimes you met people who
were exceptions, like me, but most people stuck to their own. Which
meant, if I wanted to find out more about Tonya Blackburn’s life, I
needed to find the older students at Piedmont Tech. I was certain
that someone still there had to have known her. The college was
over two hours away from the trailer where I’d found her, and that
was driving like a bat out of the hell the way I did. Tonya had
driven a broken down old truck that hadn’t passed an official
inspection in a couple of years. There was no way she had commuted.
And she’d attended during the time Trey was living with his
grandparents, which meant she’d shared an apartment with someone
or, more likely, a lot of someones, to keep it as cheap as
possible.

If they were there, I would find
them.

Piedmont Technical College was little
more than a collection of unremarkable brick buildings and asphalt
parking lots in the middle of ordinary former farm lands west of
the Haw River. It had carved out a reputation for producing
graduates in health services who actually knew what they were doing
and actually wanted to work. A lot of the rest homes and hospitals
in North Carolina hired as many Piedmont Tech graduates as they
could each year to occupy the lower paying, but not quite lowest
paying, jobs they had. It was a good place to go for two years if
you needed a degree, especially one from this country, and you were
ready to settle down and work hard when you got out.

Tonya Blackburn had been ready to
settle down. I knew from the records Marcus had obtained for me
that she had been training as a lab tech during the nine months she
had spent at the school. I also knew she’d gotten good grades
during her first stint there. I just didn’t know why she had
withdrawn before the end of her second attempt at completing the
program or where she had gone to next.

I set up shop outside the one place I
figured most students had to pass through sooner or later—an
on-campus convenience store manned by a grumpy Indian woman who
wore an orange sari and looked like she would rather be staring out
over the Ganges River instead of the Haw. She recognized the photo
I showed her of Tonya—Burley’s money had inspired Marcus to print
me out a plethora of official snapshots of her—but that was all she
could tell me. Well, that and the fact that Tonya liked to drink
Dr. Pepper with a pack of boiled peanuts almost every
afternoon.

She couldn’t tell me who Tonya had
hung out with, or why she had left, and she didn’t act like it
mattered much to her.

I bought a supply of diet sodas, pork
rinds and a consolation pack of Hostess Sno-Balls, then claimed a
bench outside the store and settled in for a long afternoon’s worth
of work. I had my system down pretty well. I’d wait until a older
student drew near, let them go into the store, then accost them as
they were leaving and ready to rip into whatever pack of junk food
they’d just bought. I’d show them the best photo I had of Tonya,
recite her class schedule during her last semester and wait for
them to insist they’d never seen her before in their
lives.

Most of them were lying, of course. Or
at least a good quarter of them were. They figured I was a
determined bill collector or a process sever or someone who worked
for The Man. Some of the ones from foreign countries, and there
were quite a few, wouldn’t even talk to me. They scurried away like
I was with Immigration. But I knew that if I kept it up, and stayed
right where I was, I’d flush out a friend of hers sooner or later,
someone who’d be alerted by one of the dozens of people I had
talked to first before they’d come marching over to find out what
the hell I wanted with Tonya.

Sure enough, a little after three
o’clock, a friend of Tonya’s who was willing to go on record as
such, came stomping up the brick path toward me. Even for me, she
was a little intimidating—close to six feet tall, skin as black as
coffee, muscles as prominent as most of the WBA. She was in her
late thirties but she moved like a panther and I was pretty sure
she was prepared to kick my ass if I so much as looked at her
sideways. Her braids danced and swung as she marched up that path
toward me.

“
What the hell do you want
with Tonya?” she demanded before I could say a word.

There was only one way to play it.
“Tonya’s dead,” I said.

That stopped her in her
tracks.

“
I’m sorry,” I
added.

She sat on the bench and folded her
hands in her lap. She didn’t seem too surprised. “How?” she
asked.

“
Drugs.”

“
No way. You sure it was
her?”

“
I saw the body. And now
her son is missing. I’m trying to find him.”

“
Her son?” The woman
looked relieved. “We’re talking about two different people. Tonya
didn’t have a son.”

Now I was the one who was surprised.
Tonya had bragged about Trey to a lot of people. He was the best
thing she’d ever done. I knew she’d have told people here about
him.

“
I’m talking about her,” I
said, showing the woman Tonya’s photo. She looked at it for a long
time.

“
That’s Tonya all right,
but I didn’t know she had a son.” She sounded hurt. “Why wouldn’t
she tell me about him?”

 “
I don’t know. But
it’s probably important. His father wants to find him. I’m trying
to find out where he may have gone.”

“
I didn’t even know he
existed,” she said sadly. I held out my bag of pork rinds and she
took a few absent-mindedly, her chin propped on one of her hands as
she chewed thoughtfully. “I lived with her and I didn’t even know.
You think you know someone and then…” She shook her head and
sighed. But then she told me a lot about Tonya that I didn’t know.
That she was a neat freak and thoughtful and paid her own way and
never bogarted anyone else’s groceries. That she was funny and
watched a soap opera every day at four and wasn’t gay but didn’t
seem to have a problem with women that were—but who would after
spending time in a women’s prison? Which she knew Tonya had. And
she said that Tonya had a wicked sense of humor. “But she wasn’t
mean,” she added. “She never made fun of other people for a laugh.”
She stared at me for a long time, as if she had just noticed me.
“Are you sure it was drugs?” she asked.

“
I don’t know,” I said
honestly. Then, because she had been so honest with me, I told her
all about how I had found Tonya and how the scene had somehow
seemed staged. “I’m not sure I buy it,” I admitted.

“
It was that boyfriend of
hers,” the woman said suddenly. “You talk to him?”

“
What boyfriend?” I asked.
“What did he look like?”

“
He was white,” she said.
“White and kind of tall and in good shape. I thought maybe he was a
cop.”

“
He could walk?” I asked,
visions of Burly betraying me, of him somehow knowing about Tonya
and their son together flooding through me irrationally.

The woman stared at me like I was
wearing a tank top in a snow storm. “Could he walk?” she
repeated.

“
Never mind. When did you
see him?”

“
Right before Tonya left
school.”

“
Can you tell me about
that?” I asked. “Why did she leave school? Did you know she was
going to or did she just disappear?”

The woman shrugged. “A little bit of
both.” She stared at me again, trying to decide if she liked me or
not. But I’ve learned that when people size me up like that, they
usually come down on the side of liking me, because, up close, I
look like them: like someone who’s never caught a break in her
life, like someone who is always barely one step ahead of the
landlord and maybe even the law.

“
Look,” she said after a
moment. “I’ll be honest with you. We were good friends our first
semester. We shared an apartment with four other women, and we all
liked each other, but when we came back after the semester break…”
she hesitated. “I think maybe Tonya started selling drugs and I
wasn’t the only one living there who thought that.”

“
You said there was no way
she’d have died from drugs.”

“
I didn’t say she was
doing them, I said I thought she was selling them. Pills. I found a
lot of them once, she left them in the bathroom in a bag, and she
was getting a lot of people calling her day and night. I’d see her
meeting people I didn’t know for just a couple of minutes at a
time. And she had a lot of cash on her, a lot of cash. So I figured
it out pretty quick. I’ve been there. I grew up on the south side
of Greensboro. I know what’s going on. And I didn’t like it. I was
getting ready to call her on it and make her move out when she
disappeared.”