The next morning we were up and ready for the bus early. Naturally, the bus didn’t actually start moving until much later. I had the letter in an envelope, and whenever a member of the crew was standing around, catching a smoke, or otherwise not immediately engaged in crew business, I sidled up.
Nobody recognized the envelope. Nobody remembered taking any fan mail at the show the night before. Nobody even seemed to remember whether they handled the fan mail back at the hotel. Nobody was even real sure how it was distributed.
I grew frustrated with the way I was getting shut out, and I decided to take a more proactive approach. When the bus pulled off the highway into a large rest stop complex, I had dialed in “liquor stores” to Google Maps before we’d even stopped.
My initial plan was to simply grab a bottle of whiskey, but I’d forgotten about Virginia’s laws and the existence of ABC stores. The nearest one was three miles away and across some rough country.
I wasn’t the kind of runner who was going to make that and be back for the bus. Instead I settled for grabbing a case of Miller Lite and four packs of Marlboro Reds from the convenience store.
Having never been one to indulge the nicotine habit, I was shocked at the amount of cash I handed over. Then I thought about how much I’d pay to Eddie the weed-farmer/savant the next time I had a couple of days clear and wanted to get pleasantly deranged and figured it was about right, all things considered.
As I started to climb back on the bus, Daphne glared at me.
“We don’t like drinking on the bus,” she said.
“Good thing I’m not planning to drink any of this on the bus, then.” I’d bought it warm anyway, and while I didn’t have anything against the odd Miller Lite when I wanted a cold beer, the emphasis needed to be on cold.
I tucked it under my seat and settled in for the ride. On previous days I had tried interviewing other wrestlers on the bus, and absolutely none of them would speak to me. Daphne, I think, had instructed them to give me the cold shoulder. I am persistent, but I’m not Sisyphus. I would push on that particular boulder if I had to, but I wasn’t going to try and force it just yet.
There was no show that night, so once we’d eaten—Grant at Wendy’s, me from the jar of almond butter I’d opened yesterday—I got him settled in the room with the same rules as the night before, and proceeded to get the cans of beer cold, fast. I filled the sink up with ice from the machine, stuck the beer in a can at a time, and spun it.
“What are you doing,” Grant said, looming in the bathroom entrance.
“Physics,” I said. “Liquid in motion will change temperature more quickly than liquid at rest.”
“Huh.”
Armed with approximately six cold beers and eighty cigarettes, I went in search of information among the crew. I looked for Braddox first and foremost. If that guy didn’t know every detail of how the mail got distributed—of how every piece of equipment and paper and gear that went to or from the venue or in or out of one of his vehicles was dealt with and disbursed—I’d eat my hat.
The way the wind tugged at my head, getting cold, reminded me that I should probably get a hat.
I found Braddox lingering by the truck in the parking lot with a few of his crew.
“Well, if it ain’t Mr. Biker, the gigantic pain in my ass,” he said.
I only grinned in response. Then I held out a beer. He took it in one hand and opened the ring with just his thumb, which was, frankly, one of the most impressive things I’d ever seen a man do.
“Hoping to talk to you about how the fan mail gets sorted and collected.”
He took a slurp from the top of the can and stared at me.
“Look, they tell me the crew collects mail at the shows.”
“Do they?”
I sighed. I set down the bag with the beer, and pulled one of the packs of cigarettes out of my pocket and offered it to him with the top open.
He took one and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “I’m more of a Camel man,” he said. He pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit up. I put the pack away and let him smoke and drink for a minute.
Then I brought out the envelope and held it up where he could see it through the plastic bag.
“This was waiting at the hotel yesterday. Surveillance there isn’t bringing me anything. Any idea if it was collected at the show?”
He held out a hand, smoke streaming from the corner of his mouth. I let him take the bag and he held it up close to his eyes, squinting.
“Dunno,” he said. He held the envelope back out.
“Is this entire company determined to be as unhelpful to my investigation as possible?”
“Look, kid,” Braddox said. “I’ve got one job to do. Get everything off the truck, then get everything back on the truck. That’s it. Is anything missing from the truck? Then I’ll care.”
“So how does the mail collection work?”
“Same way the fucking ballots work I guess, for the MVP bonus cash and shit. They just stuff it into one of those boxes anytime during the show. They’re at all the exits. We give all that to the security people and they sort it.”
“Why does security sort it?”
He shrugged. “Anthrax? Mailbombs?”
I sighed. “I sincerely doubt that DWF employs anyone with the chemical or biological warfare expertise necessary to detect anthrax in a letter. Explosives, maybe,” I added, with a shrug. Braddox laughed.
“Look, kid,” he started again, and I fixed him with about one-third of a hard look. He laughed that off. “Alright. Not kid. Is it Jack, or Dixon, or what?”
“Let’s go with Jack.”
“Jack, you’ve been given a job to do. I get it. But the company ain’t gonna make it easy for you. All they want is that kid to get through the tour alive. You manage that, they’ll pay you, you go home. Chances are ain’t no one gonna try and make good on these threats. Why not just go along for the ride?”
I struggled to come up with an answer for that. Clearly that was the easy route. Just lay back, be reactive to any unlikely threat, and collect a nice big check at the end of it all.
“Just not how I work,” was what I settled on, though I thought it failed to fully convey the personal philosophy behind it. The philosophy that had me living on a houseboat, with no assets, no degree, and only a tenuous connection to something called a career. That wasn’t much. But it was all I had.
“I get it,” Braddox said. He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and finished off the beer around it. Then he slapped me on the shoulder with his empty hand. “You ever looking for more honest work, you come talk to me. Can always use somebody got legs and shoulders like yours.”
“Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure exactly where “roadie for a wrestling show” rated in my fallback plans if private detective stopped working for me. Probably below line cook in a chain restaurant. But above re-enlisting.
It was time to go see Daphne.