Flesh And Blood

Silent, talking to himself. Assessing the possibilities I’d inflicted upon him.

I might’ve felt guilty, but my mental camera was working overtime too, flashing images of Jane Abbot’s gray-green corpse. Then: the trussed bundle of ruin that had been Lauren’s final pose.

I tried to switch cha

Mothers and daughters. Entire families, disappeared…

Past Haseltine the traffic eased up. Milo said, “Finally.”

The same soil-and-paint smell, the same irate dogs.

When we reached the chain-link around Lyle Teague’s property, the sun was a brick-colored skullcap on a flat, gray pate of horizon, and the smear of illumination in the lower sky had dulled to excremental brown.

Grimy chemical light revealed the shabby neighborhood at its worst. A few kids with shaved heads lounged in front of the apartments across the street, slouching and drinking, enjoying delusions of immortality. Their grins shifted to fear and distrust as we pulled up. When Milo parked a bottle shattered against the curb. By the time we got out of the car, the kids were gone.

The beefy padlock on Teague’s front gate was in place, but the pickup with the chrome pipes and the overgrown tires was missing, and we had a view of the carport littered with machine parts and broken toys.

“Gone,” I said.

Milo peered through the chain-link diamonds. “This one I don’t scale. Let me call his number.”

As he reached for his cell phone, the house’s front door opened a crack, then wider as Tish Teague stepped out into the dirt, holding the hand of a brown-haired girl around five years old. The child’s eyes were open, but she looked sleepy. The second Mrs. Teague wore a baby blue tank top and too-tight white shorts that sausaged her hips. Her bra strap did the same for her torso, turning her into a mass of soft rolls supported by pasty, dimpled legs. Blue tattoo on the left biceps. Her hair was drawn up at the top, rubber-banded into an off-center thatch.

Milo waved, but she just stood there, bland, pale pudding of a face aiming for stoic.

“Mrs. Teague,” Milo called. “Is your husband home?”

Headshake. Her mouth formed “No,” but the sound failed to make it across the yard.

“Where is he, ma’am?”

Instead of answering Tish returned inside, came back minus the child and with her hair loosened. Walking halfway across the dirt, she stopped, folded her arms under her bosom, and shouted, “Hunting.”

“Hunting what?”

“Usually he brings back birds. Or a deer.”

Milo muttered, “Dan’l Boone.” To Tish: “Where’s he hunt, ma’am?”

“Up near Castaic. What do you need him for?”

“Doing some follow-up, ma’am – May we come in?”

“Follow-up on what?”

“Your husband phoned me today, and I was getting back to him. How long’s he been gone?”

Tish blinked three times. “Coupla days.”

“So he must’ve called me from somewhere else. He have a cell phone?”

“Nope.”

“But he did take camping gear.”

“Yeah.”

“Guns too.”

“He’s hunting,” said Tish.

“What, the shotgun?”

“I don’t know what he takes. He wraps everything up in plastic. I don’t pay attention to guns – Why all these questions?”

“Just curious.”

“What, you’re saying Lyle could shoot someone?”

Milo paused. “Has that been on your mind, ma-”

“No way,” she said. “He keeps that stuff just for home protection and hunting – that’s all, and I like that. He’s a good man, why’re you hassling him?”

“I don’t mean to hassle, ma’am. So you haven’t heard from Mr. Teague in two days?”

“I told you, he don’t have one of those.” She pointed to the cell phone. Her tone said the deficiency was a crime for which someone needed to be blamed.

“Hmm,” said Milo. “Well, he did call me.”

“Well, he didn’t call me.” Tish aimed for defiance, but her gray eyes filled with hurt. She stepped a few yards closer. “Sometimes he uses a pay phone – What did he want?”

“To talk about Lauren.”

“Her? What for?”

“She was his daughter, ma’am.”

“Not if you asked her.”

“What do you mean, ma’am?”

Crossing her arms, she covered several more feet, stopped well before the gate. Bare feet, toes grayed with dust. The nacre of chipped pink polish glinting through. “She wasn’t nice to us.”

“Lauren wasn’t?”

“Not to me or him or the girls.”

“I thought she brought the girls Christmas presents.”

Tish smirked. “Oh, sure. Big deal. She comes in wearing her cool clothes and her cool makeup and hypers them up with all that candy and junk, and then when she leaves I’m nice enough to thank her and say she can take home some of the apricot pie I baked from fresh apricots because that’s the kind of person I am, she laughs at me and looks down at the pie slice I’m offering her and says, ‘No, thanks.’ Like I stuffed shit in a crust or something. Then she says, ‘At least you’ve got better ma

Tish’s lip trembled. “Just like that. Nasty mean. One minute she’s playing with the girls, and then she’s insulting us. I could’ve trashed her back, but I just said, ‘Well, sorry you don’t like apricot pie. Good-bye.’ And she laughed again and was like, ‘I came here ’cause I’ve got class – something you’ll never know, chubby.’ Then she prancie-pranced out the door.”

Tish released her arms, let the wrists go limp. “She prancie-prances around like she’s doing one of her strip dances – which is the class she had, a stripper and a whore. So who’s she to be snobbing and styling on me? I was so mad, it gave me a migraine, but at least she was out of here. Then, just as I’m closing the door, she turns around and starts coming back, and I’m like, Okay, Tish, you controlled yourself good, but she’s asking for it. I really thought we were go

“She didn’t come back.”

“She didn’t come back all the way – just stopped in the middle, right back there.” Gesturing behind her. “Then she gives me a look and laughs and shakes her ass outta here. Laughing – loud, so the neighborhood could hear. That’s what she was after – to humiliate us.”

Milo said, “So what do we do for the next round of yuks?”

“Try to find Lyle?”

We got in the unmarked, and he drove back to Ventura Boulevard. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s call out the hounds and track the sonofabitch. And when we find him, we’ll have a weenie roast and tell ghost stories. While we’re at it, we can work in some fishing.”

“Fishing and hunting,” I said. “Wonder how many firearms he’s packing.”

“Given that bad eye of his, he wouldn’t be much good with a bow and arrow.”

“Jane’s dead, and he just happens to be gone,” I said.

“I’ll call the sheriffs up at Castaic, see if they can locate him, but I’m not putting in a requisition for a search party. Lyle may have all the charm of a warthog with piles, but at this point, before the ballistics and the registration on the gun that did Jane come in, he’s no suspect. And her other husband is. Ruiz and Gallardo should have word soon enough on all of it.”