I knew it would never happen, but what the hell, Greg and his friends were paying. “Show me the videos, and I’ll give you another grand when I’m done with them.”
She nodded and took me back to the camera room. It had once been a nice-sized closet, but now it was so crowded with gear and supplies that my shoulders touched the shelves on either side when I sat in its lone chair. Shirley grabbed a box of disks off a shelf, rifled through them, and handed me one. She pointed to the only empty player. “Knock yourself out.”
I started the disk and the little monitor above the player came to life with a soundless image of the rear parking area. I hit fast forward and watched long stretches of empty ground broken occasionally by cars speeding up and men jumping out of them and running out of this camera’s view and to the rear door of the house. Finally, one of the men was Jim. I reversed and took it slowly until I had the moment when he drove up. I paused on the best shot of his vehicle coming down the drive. It was an old yellow panel truck, the paint doing a good enough job of covering whatever its sides had once said that I couldn’t read the words but a bad enough job that I was sure there had been words. I moved the images forward slowly until I got a clear shot of the rear of the truck as Jim parked it and was getting out, then paused the image.
Jim had been careful, careful enough to throw off almost anyone who would be looking for him, but he was not so careful that I couldn’t get what I wanted. Mud covered the license plate numbers, but not completely, so you couldn’t read the numbers but the mud would still look like a legitimate accident should anyone stop him. Clearly visible, however, was the state name and symbol: Florida. I knew he would steal plates from where he wanted to be, because the theft would get reported here in North Carolina but take a while to find its way to the local cops, and in the meantime the vehicle would blend in where he was headed.
He was going home.
I ejected the disk and took it back to Shirley. I handed it to her with another ten hundreds sitting on top of it. “Thanks, Shirley.”
She put the money into the pocket along with the earlier bills. “No problem, Stark.”
I stopped in the doorway of the office as I was heading out. “You could get out, Shirley. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know. This might be what it takes.”
I looked at her and knew that her head might know what she could do but that her spirit had never known, would never know. I didn’t mind the money, though; I’d love to be wrong, to see a miracle one day. “Sure thing, Shirley.”
Out in the car I called R.C. He picked up on the first ring but said nothing; had he spoken, I would have known something was wrong. I told him to look for warehouse rentals in St. Pete and gave him the description of the truck.
“What is St. Pete?” Greg asked.
“A city in Florida,” I said. “Where Jim and I grew up. Where I believe Jim is now. And, where we’re going.”
* * ** * *
Louise and I were in the second to last month of our senior year at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill when we got the news about Jim’s parents. Jim and I had kept in touch by e-mail since he went to Florida State and I followed Louise to UNC, but we had visited rarely. Louise was staying over at my apartment—she wasn’t willing to upset her parents by actually living with me—so we were both caught off-guard when he showed up at my place.
When I let him in, Jim collapsed onto some pillows on the floor in my small living room. “Have you heard?” he said.
I looked at Louise to see if she knew something I didn’t, but she shook her head. She still had the same mass of hair I’d noticed in high school, and I still loved the way it danced when she shook her head.