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So many cars are parked along the bottleneck on Southwest Coronado Street that Peter has to leave his at the bottom of the hill and hike to the adult video store. This isn’t the first time he’s been here, but he’s never seen over three cars parked in the lot at a time.
Granted, every other time he’s come, it’s been when he realizes his porn collection needs beefing up. That rarely happens during peak business hours.
The video store’s employees huddle outside the crime tape looped around the lot. The manager is a tall, sinewy man with meticulously groomed corkscrew hair. He invokes the spirit of the brutish high school quarterback he probably used to be as he shouts at the officer in charge of keeping his crew off the property. The pale, pink gloss glistening off his manicured fingernails, and his perfectly arched eyebrows make him just femme enough for the gun-toting man in blue to not take him seriously.
The manager is surrounded by his staff of misfit girls, all gorgeous in their own nonconformist way. They crowd together under half-length coats and shredded jeans, dressed for a shift in a hundred-degree showroom. No one seems to have forewarned them about the twenty-four-degree winter day they stand in.
Peter ducks under the tape right in front of them, close enough that his goose down coat brushes the manager. Watching him saunter onto the lot they’re exiled from breathes new fire in the manager’s declarations of injustice and he yells that he’ll sue the city.
Shaking his head, Peter doesn’t think the guy understands how criminal investigations work.
Oliver stands in the middle of the roped off parking lot, gleefully watching chaos ebb and flow around him. A combination of search and rescue volunteers and city police move in hurried fits around the property as they try to stay warm. Peter wonders why none of them are waiting from the comfort of their cars, but the grin on Ollie’s face is evidence he demanded they stay in the elements with him. Inspector Douglas and Special Agent Jones are on the far end of the lot. Peter heads their direction.
“Hey,” Peter’s breath comes out in a fog over the zipper of his upturned collar. “Sorry for being late. I didn’t realize everyone was waiting on me.”
Inspector Douglas wears no fewer than three coats. He’s so tightly packed into the third one that he can’t get the zipper shut, making him look more obese than he is. “Oliver says he won’t start without you. Until someone takes off to find a heater. Then, he pretends he’s ready for us to look around.”
“Your dad is a fucking asshole,” Mac says. She’s looking more comfortable than most, tucked in a fitted ski jacket with a thick wool scarf and her signature felt cap. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Peter glances around to see everyone has moved closer, hoping the search will get going so they can all go somewhere warmer. He jogs over to his dad. “You ready?”
“Good to see you, Son!” Ollie lifts handcuffed hands over Peter’s head and slides them down his back in a prison style bear-hug that feels more tender than it probably looks. “I’m ready. Are you?”
Peter pulls himself out of his dad’s embrace. He tips his head to the side in a gesture for his father to get started. “I’m working things out with that plan we talked about a few weeks ago.”
“That’s excellent, Hen. I’d take you out for a drink to celebrate, but I’m afraid Inspector Douglas and little Miss Jones probably won’t let us go to a bar. How about if I tell you a story, instead?” Oliver walks toward the front of the store. Peter follows him, and about fifteen shivering people wander behind them both.
“At the height of my taxidermy, I had a lot of spare parts. Skeletons, mostly. Usually they were complete, so I cleaned, assembled, and sold them to collectors and vet schools. But sometimes I ended up with partial remains and pieces too damaged for display.”
Ollie stops on the sidewalk and takes a seat on the curb. Peter settles next to him, doing his best to ignore the searing cold that jumps through his jeans. Everyone hovers just out of earshot, far enough away to keep Peter’s father talking.
“I held on to those spare bits for a long time. The dump doesn’t take them, and there’s just so many coyotes a man can bury in his own backyard. Then, one night, I’m here talking to the supervisor...” Ollie’s voice fades as he squints beyond the yellow tape blowing in the wind. He points to the current manager who is snuggling with some of his employees under a lap blanket someone must have had in their car. “Not that guy. Back then, this place was run by a man with distinct tastes.”
Peter blinks, hard. The corners of his eyes ache with the effort. “Christ, Dad. You didn’t supply a necrophiliac with love slaves, did you?”
“No. What kind of psycho do you think I am?” Oliver shoves his hands in his pockets. Peter looks at him long and hard. Ollie frowns and lifts his shoulders ambiguously, then turns a sour gaze back on his son. “How many times do I have to tell you that Christ doesn’t approve of you using his name like that?”
“Sorry, Dad.” Peter’s muted apology gets lost in the down of his jacket.
“As I was saying...” Ollie looks up at a volunteer who’s come too close for comfort. When their eyes meet, the cherub-faced woman’s skin blanches. She scurries backward. “The manager had a taste for oddities, and he had a legitimate landscape concern. He wanted to spruce the lot up so the locals would see this place as a high-end establishment. We worked out a deal for him to use my cast-offs as gravel filler.”
Looking around at the landscape, Peter finds thickets of ivy. Even in the bitter cold, the plants are green and thick around the base of a handful of mature trees that have survived the hill’s development. Most places, he can’t see dirt, and it looks as if the ivy shoots straight up out of the pavement. Where there isn’t ivy, there are clumps of evergreen bushes growing six feet high and twelve across.
There isn’t a piece of gravel in sight.
“What bones are you talking about, Dad?”
“Vertebrae, mostly. A few knuckles and kneecaps may have made it in. Depended on what I had on hand. There was a while there where I was processing a lot of deer and moose. Moose vertebrae are something else. Big and bulky. He loved them. They really stood out in the mix.” Oliver spreads his hand out and Peter can tell he’s seeing the image of a giant backbone in his palm.
“How many bones did you sell him?” Peter wants to push his dad to tell him who they’re in a frozen parking lot to find. He knows Ollie will keep talking about his history with the property, though. He can’t blame the man for savoring the opportunity to enjoy some time out in the open air.
“A hundred buckets full, or more. It took several months. Little by little, I’d bring them up here, and he’d pay me twenty bucks a bucket.” Ollie looks at Peter as if he’s just discovered winning numbers on a lotto ticket. “Can you imagine? Twenty bucks a pop for stuff I couldn’t get rid of otherwise.”
Peter suppresses a sarcastic comment. A normal father might tell this same story, but be talking about selling buckets of scrap nails. Or vinyl records. Peter doesn’t think his dad will ever understand it’s not normal to have five-gallon buckets of bones just lying around.
Ollie notices Peter stiffen up. He pulls a hand out of his jacket pocket and pats him on the back. “Anyway, that was years ago. Look around now.” He glares at the current staff. “They’ve let this place go to the dogs.”
A sigh rolls out in the frozen air. Peter couldn’t hold it back any longer. “It’s a jack-off store, Dad. People don’t come here for the landscape.”
Oliver plugs one nostril and blows a wad of snot out the other. It must be a trick he picked up in prison because Peter’s never seen him do anything so disgusting in his life. The elder man grunts. “Well, it wouldn’t kill them to put some effort into it.”
Inspector Douglas materializes in front of them. He’s so close that the tips of his shoes touch Peter’s. He would pull his back, but he refuses to let the inspector feel superior. Peter pretends to cross his legs and kicks him in the shin. Dougy glares at Peter as Oliver cackles.
“Well?” The inspector places his hands where Peter imagines his hips might be. It’s hard to tell under all his layers, especially since he isn’t gifted in the hip department to begin with.
“Dad sold the manager a bunch of bones left over from taxidermy projects. The guy used them as gravel in the landscape.” Peter watches Dougy scan the imposing bushes and sprawling ivy the same way he had minutes before.
“How many?” Dougy crouches in front of them. His breath smells like rubbing alcohol and sausage.
“He says a hundred buckets full.” Peter looks at his dad. “Right?”
“Maybe more. They weren’t all human, Inspector Douglas. I promise.”
“How many people, Oliver?” The inspector’s face goes red from the effort of squatting. He and Oliver lean together as if they’re old friends. For a minute it seems they might clasp hands and embrace like frat brothers at a forty-year class reunion.
Peter looks over the lot at Special Agent Jones, who watches with a questioning expression. He lifts his hands and mouths, Don’t ask me. She shakes her head and turns to talk to a volunteer.
“It’s hard to say, really. It was toward the end of things. I’d kept a lot of bits and pieces.” Oliver averts his gaze from Peter, as if embarrassed for his son to know this detail. “If I had to take a guess... fifteen to twenty individuals. Mostly male.”
Peter stares at his father in disbelief. Oliver looks over the yellow caution tape and seems to shrink. He’s a man who failed his purpose and will never get a second chance. “You can’t save everyone,” he whispers.
Inspector Douglas looks weary, like all he wants in the world is to go home. His knees pop as he stands. He takes a moment to flex his joints, then turns on his heel and barks out orders. “Everybody grab a shovel from the SAR truck. Fan out and start digging. Pull up every plant, bush or weed. Dig until you find gravel. We’re looking for anything that might be bone. If you aren’t sure it’s human, pull it anyway. We’ll sort through it later.”
Special Agent Jones approaches, shaking her head. “You want them to dig in this weather? What if the ground’s frozen?”
Dougy wags his puffy cheeks. “We’ll tape everything off and come back when the winds change.” As Mac steps away he calls, “And radio for them to bring prisoner transport back around, will you? We don’t need Mister Landscape Artist hanging about now that we know what we’re looking for.”
Peter puts his hand on Oliver’s knee. His father leans against his shoulder with his own. They sit a while as the crews get to work. Snow flutters through the air and Peter looks to the clouds. He blocks out the noise of the people.
For a moment, he’s just a boy. Oliver is merely his dad. And they’re simply together, watching the winter snow.