Jack and Mr. Grin (6 page)

When he reached the back room, he saw her standing in the middle of the room, holding her left wrist with her right... looking at her forearm. He thought he knew what she was looking at before asking, “Can I see?”

Her eyes were huge, her eyebrow ring now nearly meeting her hairline.

“What the fuck?” she said.

“When did this happen?”

“Just now.”

“You’re kidding.” He thought her shout had been one of surprise more than pain given the rest of her prickly accoutrements and many other tattoos and piercings that were probably not visible.

“No. I was getting ready to come back up front and I felt this stabbing pain like something was biting me and I pulled up my sleeve and there it was.”

It was exactly like the one on Moran’s arm. A vertical rectangle with a horizontal line bisecting it, turning it into two squares. And it definitely looked more like a branding than a tattoo. He couldn’t see any ink. Just angry red welts. Five altogether.

“What the fuck is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. How
could
I know?”

“I don't know,” she mumbled, continuing to look at her new brand. “I just thought maybe you would.”

“I haven’t a fucking clue.”

He could tell by looking at her she wasn’t telling him something. Some people made good liars. Some people wore their lies on the crease of their brows and the depth of their eyes. Maria was one of the latter.

“What is it?” he asked, putting a hand on her shoulder, feeling the heat coming through the thin cotton of her shirt.

“When it happened... I had a...
vision
of you. Like I saw your face very clearly in my head.” She bit her lower lip. “That’s happened before but this was... different. Like I immediately associated the pain with your face.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“
Interesting?
I want to know what the fuck it is.”

“It’s probably been there all morning and you just now noticed it. It’ll probably clear up. I wouldn’t worry about going to go see a doctor until tomorrow. See if it isn’t better.”

“I don’t like doctors.”

“Who does?”

“Now what aren’t
you
telling
me
?” she asked.

He couldn’t help but laugh. “What am
I
not telling
you
,” he said. “Oh, there’s a whole lot of shit I’m not telling you. I’m sorry. I really am but I can’t. Really, it would probably be best if you just forgot I came here today. Will you do that? Then maybe you, me and Gina can sit around in a couple of days and laugh about all this over some beers.”

“Okay. I just want to make sure no one’s in trouble. You kind of act like somebody who’s in a lot of trouble.”

“I might be,” he said. “Just... you know, don’t tell anyone what I asked about Gina. I don’t want it to get back to her if she’s not seeing anyone else. I don’t want to look like a jealous paranoid asshole. And if she is, it’ll really just be embarrassing...”

“I understand.”

“You should come by the house tomorrow. If you don’t hear from me or Gina before then, you should stop by tomorrow, maybe on your lunch break or something.”

“Jack, what the fuck’s the matter?”

“I can’t, Maria. I wish I could. Boy, I really wish I could tell you. I think I need to go. Take care. Call me on my phone if anything else...
strange
happens, okay?”

“I don’t have your number.”

He went over to the table, grabbed the
Rolling Stone
and a pen and scrawled his number across Bono’s forehead.

“There. Now you have it. Call me later.”

“Sure,” she said.

He thought about how important that later phone call might be. Once he knew where Gina was, he didn’t care what Mr. Grin said, he would tell anyone he knew because he might just need their help. He might need all the help he could get.

For the second time in ten minutes, he left the cafe.

Thirteen

He felt lost. Alton was not an enormous city or a small town. It was a mid-sized city. Nowhere near as large as Columbus or Cincinnati. He thought he knew where Ettinger was. He didn’t want to take any chances. A map was what he needed. And transportation. Transportation would have been a godsend. Well, he thought, there’s always the bus. He had never ridden the bus but he knew it was available if he needed it. He always noticed bus stops but figured, now that he needed it, there wouldn’t be one for miles. With his luck, he wouldn’t be surprised if all of the bus drivers had gone on strike.

Luckily, the rain had tapered off a bit. It was now more like a cool mist. This was probably going to give him a fairly horrendous cold.

But what would a cold matter if he didn’t live another day? What would a cold matter if he lost Gina forever? Not one bit was the only answer he could come up with.

He walked to the edge of the cafe parking lot and looked around. The cafe was in a strip mall with a lot of shops that were essentially useless to him. But there, across the street, was a gas station. Gas stations, especially the ones with brightly lighted convenient stores attached to them, were the answer to most of modern man’s needs and questions. Bathrooms, maps, food, coffee, cigarettes, gas— they had everything.

He headed in that direction. Gleefully, he noticed the tinted-glass awning of a bus stop in front of the gas station’s parking lot. If he was really lucky, the clerk would know what time the next bus ran. He gave himself fifteen minutes. If the bus was supposed to come within fifteen minutes, he would wait for it. If not, he would carry on. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and looked at the display on the front of it.

12:45.

It was hard to believe that less than two hours had passed since his horrifying telephone call. Consequently, that meant less than twenty-two hours remained for him to find Gina. And he still didn’t really know where to begin looking.

He walked into the gas station. The clerk, a dumpy lady in her forties, nodded her peroxided head. He raised his hand and approached her.

“Maps?” he asked.

“Right under you,” she said. Her name badge said ‘Donna.’ She had three blue stars below her name. He guessed that was good. Surely this woman with three blue stars would be able to help him.

“Thanks,” he said.

He found one that would help him. It was a thin fold-out type for Alton and surrounding areas. Most of the surrounding areas were cornfields.

He put the map on the counter.

“That it?” Donna asked.

“I think so.”

She gave him the total and he reached for his wallet. He didn’t have any cash. He hardly ever carried cash anymore. Just some coins that hadn’t fallen out into the washer yet. He gave Donna his credit card.

Damn. Lack of cash might be a problem if he was going to ride the bus. Last he’d heard, buses did not take credit cards. Although, to his knowledge, they might be the last places on earth not to do so. He would have to hope he had more coins.

“What time does the bus run?”

“Oh...” Donna seemed surprised. She handed his card back and pushed a piece of paper toward him to sign. “I think it runs about every half hour or so.” She laughed. “Can’t say for sure. Ain’t never rode it.”

“So... it’ll probably be back around one or so?”

She craned around and looked at the clock behind her.

“I reckon,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“Oh, you don’t happen to have an ATM, do you?”

“We do but it ain’t got no money in it.” She gestured to the useless machine in the back. “Never has no money in it.”

He imagined her thinking money magically appeared in the machine.

“Well, have a nice day,” he said, trying not to let his frustration show through a friendly smile.

He took the map and left the store. The paper turned immediately soggy upon stepping outside. He made his way over to the bus stop, grateful to be in the little plexiglass vestibule. He was the only person in it. He sat down and spread the map out before him. It had a street index, which helped a lot. Ettinger wasn’t that far away at all. It was at the far side of his neighborhood, toward downtown Alton. He had been a street over when he went to Granger Ranger’s that morning.

He looked at the map, studying the complexity of it. Gina and Mr. Grin could be anywhere, he thought. If they were still in
Alton
at all.

Some part of him still kept expecting to wake up.

He decided to spend his time waiting for the bus studying the map. Familiarize himself with the city. Basically, since moving in with Gina, he had driven to The Tent and back. That was it. When he was a teenager, exploring the roads, it had been in the small farm town of
Glowers Hook
. Those were the roads he “knew like the back of his hand.” Alton’s roads, well, maybe he knew those like the back of his foot or some other part of his body that spent most of its time covered up.

The layout was pretty simple.

From the city’s center, a grid of streets ran north to south and east to west with clever names like
First Street
and
Second Street
. Not quite as large as New York, Alton’s only went to Fifth Street. To the east of downtown was the industrial sprawl that made
Alton
prosper. Steel mills, paper mills, rubber factories. And the slums. The little houses that were no bigger than trailers. And trailers... there were plenty of those, as well. He and Gina had lived in one for a year before finding their current home. To the south were the more affluent suburbs. These had names like The Oaks, The Woodlands,
Alton
Heights
. To the north, roughly where he now sat, were the perfectly middle-class suburbs that took up most of Alton’s geography. To the west there were very few roads. He figured most of that area was woods and fields.

He never really had much of a reason to go to that section of Alton, although he
had
been there before. With Gina, of course. He remembered a huge meadow and some train tracks. The train tracks were curious. There were two abandoned engines on the tracks and it looked like they had collided. The fronts of both engines were sort of rumpled and he had found this amazing. One of the engines still had a boxcar attached to it. This was where Gina had taken him. They had spread a blanket out in the boxcar and made love in a late summer sunset.

If they made it through this, he thought, he would take Gina back there and propose to her.

Screeching brakes snapped his memory back to the immediate present. He quickly and imperfectly folded the map back up and walked up the rubberized steps of the bus. He didn’t have any idea how much it cost to ride. He dug in his pocket, thankful for the handful of change there. Without counting it, he dumped it into the machine by the hirsute, heavily-tattooed driver and something dinged. Apparently he had met the minimum.

“I don’t give change,” the bus driver said.

“I know,” Jack said. “Does this go by Ettinger at all?”

“Fifth stop,” the driver said. He pulled his hat down low over his brow and pulled the pneumatic lever that sent the doors hissing shut.

There were five other people on the bus.

Jack walked toward the middle. The middle seemed like a safe place. To his left, three rows back, an old woman sat with a plastic scarf over her perm. She looked up at him as he passed, and crossed herself. That was unnerving, he thought. It made him think of
Dracula
, when Harker boards the wagon that takes him to the castle. Or maybe it was just because he looked so bad, trudging through the rain all morning.

Sitting down, he knew better. That old woman had seen something in his eyes. Something hunted. Something very afraid.

Staring out the window, he watched the suburbs roll past. Street upon street of medium-sized houses. Medium-sized houses in a medium-sized town. All of them were virtually the same save the paintjob and the landscaping. Then an idea struck him.

Wherever Mr. Grin and Gina were, it most probably wasn’t in one of these houses. That would be too risky. He had heard her scream, loud and piercing. That would arouse some kind of suspicion in a neighborhood like this. In a neighborhood like the one Tim Fox lived in. Of course, that was assuming Tim Fox was home. He might not be. He might be Mr. Grin. Jack tried to match the Mr. Grin he saw in his mind with the younger Tim Fox he’d seen in pictures. There was maybe something familiar there, like his mind was trying to find someone. Like it was
really close
to finding someone, but he couldn’t come up with a place. Couldn’t come up with a name.

The bus went through its stops and Jack sat in the seat, tension tightening his neck, throbbing in his temples.

By the time the bus reached its fifth stop, he almost had himself convinced it wasn’t even worth bothering Tim Fox. It was a stupid idea. He was part of Gina’s past. Probably never even thought about her anymore. And he may not even want to give the time of day to the man who had quite possibly taken Gina from him.