Chapter Three: Sad Clown
I imagined a lot of different scenarios regarding my return to town. However, I hadn’t prepared for a literal carnival.
I smelled it before I saw it. The salty aroma of funnel cakes, vomit, and yesterday’s garbage wafting through the air. Then the neon lights of the ferris wheel, and the screams from the idiots being slingshotted around on the tilt-a-whirl. For a moment, I was transported back to a different time. Back when Donny and I used to sneak in through the barbed wire near the show barns to get around paying the entrance fees.
I never really liked the rides, but in a small town, you take any opportunity for entertainment that life hands you. Even if it’s clowns.
Which is what I saw as I pulled into the gas station. A fucking clown filling up his tiny clown car, smoking a cigarette, while his seven co-clowns crammed into the front and back seats argued over who got to honk the horn and engaged in general fisticuffs and elbow throwing. The head clown was at least six four and three hundred pounds, and he was painted sad.
I find sad clowns less creepy. If I were a clown, you bet your ass I’d be sad too.
Aggie Sistrunk waited impatiently behind his clown car, honking her own horn and revving the engine of her cotton candy pink Range Rover, which was inexplicably covered with pictures of My Little Pony and a gigantic painting of Pinky Pie on the hood.
The big clown ignored her until she pulled out a 38 special and slowly chambered its bullets. The other clowns began honking more feverishly, then threw the car into gear and peeled out, dragging Sad Clown and the gas nozzle behind them. Aggie and I locked eyes. She blew imaginary smoke from the barrel of her gun, then pulled forward to the working pump.
Jack crutched out of the gas station, shaking his head and muttering to himself. “Third time this week.” He went to the edge of the parking lot, where the clowns had abandoned the nozzle and hose and dragged it back. I could see it had been reattached with duct tape before, and as I approached I saw a hand-written sign on the pump: CLOWNS MUST PREPAY.
I left him filling Aggie’s tank and walked into the store. Behind the counter, Jerry was playing with an Etch-a-Sketch. I grabbed a bag of chips and approached the front, where I stood waiting for him to notice me. I cleared my throat and tapped my fingers. He continued to etch his sketch.
“What are you drawing?” I didn’t care. I just wanted a pack of smokes and his undivided attention for two damn minutes.
He flipped his drawing face down onto the counter, then looked at me through narrowed eyes and pursed his lips. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“That’s the thing, Jerry. I wouldn’t. But I do want to know other things. Things about Vanessa.”
Jerry instantly perked up. “The real Van, or Rerun?”
“Either. Both.”
“Yeah, I don’t know anything.” He started shaking the Etch-a-Sketch vigorously, then playing it like a tambourine.
I was losing patience. By all appearances, he and Vanessa were friends. He might have been the last person she talked to before they took her. I’m not one to cast judgments, but I have no idea what she saw in this moron.
“Cut the crap, Jeremy. I’m sick of the act.”
He blinked at me. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I looked you up. Toulouse? Not hard to find a missing person with a middle name like that. It’d be a shame if someone were to collect on that reward.”
That wiped the dopey look off his face. He glanced around to see if anyone had heard; his eyes lingered a little too long on the lawn gnomes. He gestured to the storage room. “Let’s discuss this in my office.”
Okay. Maybe it wasn’t an act. But I planned to use his help regardless.
As I sat in the small storage closet surrounded by mops, brooms, a hammock, and eight gnomes lined up on a shelf at eye level, I couldn’t help but notice a sickly sweet aroma pervading the air. I looked around and discovered several bouquets of decaying flowers that appeared to be funeral arrangements. I shifted my eyes to Jerry, who studiously picked lint off his shirt and then flicked it in my general direction.
“The gnomes have to go.” They were creeping me out, but I wasn’t about to let him know that. “They might be bugged.”
“The gnomes aren’t bugs! I mean, at least I don’t think they are. The customers have complained about them biting though…” Jerry trailed off, then stared at the ground and muttered something under his breath that sounded an awful lot like “mosquignomes.”
I rolled my eyes to the sky, willing myself to have patience with this idiot. “I didn’t say they were bugs. I said they might be bugged.” I grabbed a couple of gnomes and threw them haphazardly into a nearby box. Jerry sat there, watching me. “Are you going to help?”
“Let me get my mittens.”
“For Christ’s sake.” I put them all in the box, then hefted them outside of the broom closet and carried them to the cooler. When I returned, Jerry was swinging in the hammock and smoking a cigarette, oblivious to the ash that was flying in the air. I dragged a small stool over to him and waited. He kept swinging. I pulled out a missing poster with his face plastered on it, and the swinging stopped.
“Where’d you find that?” He snatched for the piece of paper, but I held it out of range of the hammock. “Aww. They didn’t even use a good picture of me!”
It was true. The picture on that poster looked nothing like Jerry. He was wearing what appeared to be a suit and tie, and his hair was straight and slicked over to one side. He looked like he was heading to a kegger at his frat house, and he was at least ten pounds heavier in the photo. Pastier too. It’s no wonder no one could identify him. The Jerry sitting in front of me looked like this frattie’s older stoner cousin.
“I’m not looking to collect a reward, Jeremy. But you have information I need, and I have information you want kept quiet. You help me find Vanessa, and I’ll make sure no one can find you.” I felt a single bead of sweat roll down the center of my back, but willed myself to appear calm. I needed Jerry’s help a lot more than I cared to admit.
Jerry seemed to contemplate the offer for a minute, and began swinging in his hammock again. Finally, he sat up and looked me dead in the eye. “I’ll help, but on one condition.”
“I don’t think you’re in a position to be making demands.” But he was. Vanessa was out there, and he might hold the key to finding her.
He crossed his arms. “I just wanted to see if I could have a walkie-talkie. I’m tired of radios where nobody talks back.”
I pretended to think about the demand. “I guess you can have a two-way. But if you use it for anything other than this mission, I’ll take it from you so fast it’ll make your head spin.”
Jerry perked up. “Then it’s a deal, Aaron.”
“My name is Eric. You can call me that or Riggin.”
“Wait, * ‘Riggin’? * Are you related to Van? Do you know her?”
This partnership with Jerry might be the death of me. Or him. Time will tell.
We walked out of the supply room to see Jack calmly putting out a fire behind the counter. “What have I told you about leaving lit cigarettes on that pile of flammable rags in the bucket behind the counter!?”
“Why you just gonna assume that it was me who did it?” Jerry asked before putting a smoke to his lips and taking a drag.
Jack furrowed his brow, then pointed the extinguisher our way and sprayed him in the face.
“I don’t know what the big deal is. I’ve lit way bigger fires in here before.” Jerry wiped the extinguisher gunk from his eyes and calmly put the saturated cigarette behind his ear for later.
At that moment, I heard a familiar laugh. “This is a hell of a sight.” I turned to see O’Brien leaned against the front door, surveying the scene with cool eyes.
“Hey, Amy,” Jack said, “I handled the fire. You didn’t have to come out here.”
*Amy? Since when did she let anyone call her Amy? *
“Figured I may as well. I got a report of a suspicious vehicle parked at the station.” She turned her gaze toward me. “I didn’t know you were coming back.”
Shit. Is this something I should have told her? I mean, she had done me a few favors the last time I was in town, but… “I figured it was safer if you didn’t know I was back.”
“You have a tendency of announcing your presence. It wouldn’t have been long.”
She had a point. “Are you here to arrest me?”
“You doing anything illegal?” She looked at the smoldering ruins of the fire, then back at me.
“Not yet.” I said my goodbyes to Jack and Jerry, then left the store. O’Brien followed me out.
“You’ll want to be careful this time.” She spoke quietly, but there was urgency in her tone. I hadn’t noticed it before, but her Brooklyn accent was stronger when she was nervous.
I figured someone was listening in. At this point, I always figured someone was listening. So I spoke to her--and to them. “I’m prepared to be careful. But I’m not leaving until I get what I came here for.”
She straightened up. “And what’s that?”
“Vanessa.”
I left her shaking her head, and watched in my rearview as she grabbed her radio and spoke into it. It was time to start phase one of my plan.
I picked up my phone.
When I was preparing to return to this shithole of a town, I knew I’d have to be armed with more than whiskey and luck. This meant planning and research. I started with the most obvious piece of the puzzle: Spencer Middleton.
Spencer indicated he knew who I was, and he knew my brother well enough to call him by name. I had no clue who he was or what his story might be, but I made it my mission to find out. Spencer didn’t make it easy. He was a good ten years younger than me, which was why I didn’t know him in school. Cursory glances at newspaper archives showed he was not on the honor roll--big surprise there--but I found one small clipping about his deployment when he would have been about 18 years old.
Finding his military records had been another matter completely. Roach had a guy, and he hadn’t come cheap. What wasn’t redacted painted a picture of a sociopath who knew how to work the system. His first year in the army, he received a few write-ups and letters of reprimand showing his inability to “work with his fellow soldiers.” He performed three tours in the middle east, but all towns were redacted and his missions were marked as classified. He was promoted several times, then his file had hundreds of pages that might as well have said “Fuck you, Eric Riggin” on them, because they were completely redacted. The last page of the file showed Spencer had been honorably discharged from the military a couple of years ago.
I attempted to obtain his medical records, but aside from his routine vaccinations and yearly physicals and occupational testing, he had nothing in his file. Either this guy never got sick...or his medical records had also been tampered with. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Spencer had some mental issues; it wouldn’t surprise me that he had gone out of his way to avoid anyone who might have diagnosed him with whatever personality disorder he so clearly had.
I couldn’t find any information about his family; seemed to me that after he had been deployed, they hauled ass out of town without a forwarding address. Yearbooks showed he had a younger brother and sister, but they didn’t turn up in any of the standard PI searches. Maybe they had gone underground; maybe they were underground.
He had told me he conducted interrogations on members of Al Qaeda, and I had no reason to doubt him. Mental and physical torture seemed to be his forte, and if I encountered Spencer Middleton again, it might be worth it to study up on psychological warfare. I didn’t imagine there was much I could do if he elected to torture me before snuffing out my candle, but what information could he possibly want from me? No, he liked to watch people squirm, and he preferred to be in their heads while doing it.
My tongue instinctively sought out the crater in the back of my jaw and a metallic taste flooded my mouth despite an absence of blood. He had gotten into my head last time--literally and figuratively. I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of letting it happen again.
I moved on from Spencer Middleton to the clerk from the gas station, Jack. His last name, I discovered, was Townsend. 26 years old. Unmarried. Diagnosed with a rare sleeping disorder at 18. Saw doctors once a month out of town for treatment. He had been working at that shitty station since graduating high school. No family. No pets. No girlfriends or boyfriends. Depressing as fuck.
Jerry’s file, on the other hand, read like a comic book. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Went to college for political science, joined a frat, and then one day, replaced one cult for another and --poof-- vanished. Parents attempted to locate him but were unsuccessful. Police hands were tied because he was an adult. He somehow ended up at that gas station none the worse for wear despite the fact that the “fellowship” he joined turned out to be suicidal maniacs. Given the interactions I had with him previously, I guessed stupidity or luck had kept him alive. Or a bit of both.
I knew that something had changed about the place where I had grown up; it used to be weird, but it had surpassed the strange and moved into the realm of unadulterated derangement. I had falsely attributed its lack of presence on the grid as being a shithole before I returned, but I began to suspect through my studies that someone had systematically removed any trace of its existence from the internet. I delved deeper into the dark corners of the web, hoping to discover who wanted this town kept a secret. All articles regarding its presence seemed to dry up approximately nine years prior. Any archives stopped abruptly around this time. I wasn’t sure of the significance of this brick wall, but I figured it was in some way associated with all the crazy shit that had taken root in the meantime. I hadn’t bothered to use Roach’s guy for this one. This information wasn’t hidden, waiting to be uncovered.
It was never written in the first place.
My phone, still in my hand, started to ring, startling me out of my reverie. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered anyway.
“Riggin.”
“Hello, Detective.”
“Roger?” What the fuck was he calling me for?
“No, it’s the tooth fairy.”
“How’d you get my number?”
“Let’s just say that numbers are easy to come by; forgiveness, not so much.”
“I’m guessing you’re not calling to extend an olive branch.”
“I’m calling you because you’re in my debt, and I aim to collect.”
“Spencer’s gone. I don’t know what you expect from me.”
“That’s your problem. You don’t know anything, but you’re always talking. It’s about time you learn how to listen.”
I gritted my teeth. I didn’t have time for Roger’s bullshit. I had to give it to him, though. This number and phone were brand new. He was nothing if not thorough.
“What’s the favor, then?”
He laughed. “Favor? As in singular? Surely you know how to count, Detective. You owe me three, and that’s being generous. One, the favor you originally agreed to. Two, the favor you made me waste on Deputy Franklin. And three, the favor I called in to get you your meeting with Spencer in the first place. You’re lucky I’m not charging interest.”
“Yes, your magnanimity knows no bounds.”
The line went dead. Typical. One more thing to worry about while I was trying to take care of business. Maybe Spencer would find Roger before he cashed in those favors. Maybe I would find Spencer first. This answered one question though: it didn’t appear that Roger was going to interfere with my investigation.
Unless, of course, it benefited him. Then all bets were [off.]
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Credits
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