moment he saw his shadow in the brief flash of its headlights…only whose shadow
was it? Dykstra’s or Hardin’s?
Johnny Dykstra’s, he decided. Hardin was gone now, left behind thirty or forty miles
back. But this had been his night to give the brief (and mostly humorous) after-dinner
presentation to the rest of the Florida Thieves, and he thought Mr. Hardin had done a
fairly good job, ending with a promise to send the Dog after anyone who didn’t
contribute generously to this year’s charity, which happened to be Sunshine Readers,
a non-profit that provided audiotape texts and articles for blind scholars.
He walked across the parking lot to the building, the heels of his cowboy boots
clocking. John Dykstra never would have worn faded jeans and cowboy boots to a
public function, especially one where he was the featured speaker, but Hardin was a
different breed of hot rod. Unlike Dykstra (who could be fussy), Hardin didn’t care
much what people thought of his appearance.
The rest-area building was divided into three parts: the women’s room on the left, the
men’s room on the right, and a big porchlike portico in the middle where you could
pick up pamphlets on various central-and south-Florida attractions. There were also
snack machines, two soft-drink machines, and a coin-op map dispenser that took a
ridiculous number of quarters. Both sides of the short cinder-block entryway were
papered with missing-child posters that always gave Dykstra a chill. How many of the
kids in the photos, he always wondered, were buried in the damp, sandy soil or
feeding the gators in the Glades? How many of them were growing up in the belief
that the drifters who had snatched them (and from time to time sexually molested
them or rented them out) were their mothers or fathers? Dykstra did not like to look at
their open, innocent faces or consider the desperation underlying the absurd reward
numbers—$10,000, $20,000, $50,000, in one case $100,000 (that last one for a
smiling towheaded girl from Fort Myers who had disappeared in 1980 and would now
be a woman in young middle age, if she was still alive at all…which she almost
certainly was not). There was also a sign informing the public that barrel-picking was
prohibited, and another stating that loitering longer than an hour in this rest area was
prohibited—POLICE TAKE NOTICE.
Who’d want to loiter here? Dykstra thought, and listened to the night wind rustle through the palms. A crazy person, that was who. A person to whom a red button
would start to look good as the months and years snored past with the sound of
sixteen-wheelers in the passing lane at one in the morning.
He turned toward the men’s room and then froze in midstep as a woman’s voice,
slightly distorted by echo but dismayingly close, spoke unexpectedly from behind him.
“No, Lee,” she said. “No, honey, don’t.”
There was a slap, followed by a thump, a muffled meat thump. Dykstra realized he
was listening to the unremarkable sounds of abuse. He could actually see the red hand
shape on the woman’s cheek and her head, only slightly cushioned by her hair (blond?
dark?), bouncing off the wall of beige tile. She began to cry. The arc sodiums were
bright enough for Dykstra to see that his arms had broken out in gooseflesh. He began
to bite his lower lip.
“Fuckin’ hoor.”
Lee’s voice was flat, declamatory. Hard to tell how you could know immediately that
he was drunk, because each word was perfectly articulated. But you did know,
because you had heard men speak that way before—at ballparks, at carnivals,
sometimes through a thin motel-room wall (or drifting down through the ceiling) late
at night, after the moon was down and the bars were closed. The female half of the
conversation—could you call it a conversation?—might be drunk, too, but mostly she
sounded scared.
Dykstra stood there in the little notch of an entryway, facing the men’s room, his back
turned toward the couple in the women’s room. He was in shadow, surrounded on
both sides by pictures of missing children that rustled faintly, like the fronds of the
palm trees, in the night breeze. He stood there waiting, hoping there would be no