A Small Gray Dot

I checked to see if I needed a license to track – I didn’t as long as I wasn’t a bounty hunter – and set up business in my flat, where I curtained off the kitchen end of the front room and used the rest as an office. I got a real desk, too. It was my father’s and was old and scratched, but it was sturdy and serviceable. A friend of Lowell’s with a pick-up truck went with me to the old house to get it. It was a pain getting it up the narrow stairs and into the apartment, but once in, I cleaned it up, sanded and re-stained it, and it looked good. It made the office look more professional. Small, but professional.

I decorated the windowless room with some of Missy’s painting. Not the one of Zoni, which I kept in my cramped bedroom, or the small ones of our parents but three others that were impressionistic. They were nice – one was a painting of an actual window looking out on a meadow that ran to a forest. I put a sign on the door that said simply, “Tennessee Murray, Tracker”. Lowell put a sign with a big arrow on it pointing up the stairs that led from the smoke shop to the flat that said, “Tracker Up”. Lowell was a bit of a comedian.

I learned tracking was a job that could be erratic but it paid better for my services than any of the other jobs I’d held, so it became my main line. It wasn’t easy a lot of the times and it kept me on the move but I found that being on the move kept my mind better occupied than street sweeping, dishwashing, or any of the other jobs I’d held. It gave me focus and I gradually learned to walk the edge between the apathy and the rage.

Chapter Twelve

WHEN I SAY I BECAME THE BEST TRACKER out there, it’s not a brag just a fact. Dead or alive I always found them. There were even a couple that involved abductions by a noncustodial parent and one involving a gang-related kidnapping. I got them back safely.

Finding someone could be hard, and at times, damned hard, and telling a client the worst when the object of my search wasn’t in good shape wasn’t easy. It always brought back the memory of my cousin Will. For those, I always offered to forfeit the rest of my fee.

Giving up money. A foolish thing to do I suppose, but I felt it was the least I could do. I don’t regret it. Fortunately, there weren’t many like that.

I learned early on, that as a tracker there were times when I’d have to fight. I’d never considered myself to be a fighter and as a middle-school teacher, fighting wasn’t anything I needed to do so I wasn’t that good at it. Having been on the track team in high school and college, I ran every day for exercise and was in reasonably good shape. I could move fast, but sometimes, running wasn’t possible.

Nothing brought that home to me more than what happened during my third tracking case where a client hired me to find his missing fifteen-year-old sister. I found her in Atlanta. Her so-called boyfriend whom she’d thought was twenty turned out be a thirty-year-old man. He also turned out to be a pimp. Of course, the brother didn’t know all that, I’d learned it after I began my search.

He had convinced the girl that he loved her and would take care of her. She, being fifteen and infatuated with him, and mad at her brother because he said she was too young to have a twenty-year old boyfriend and wouldn’t allow her to date him, ran off with the guy.

Teenagers. Especially teenaged girls in love.

I tracked them to Atlanta. I asked around and found he’d put her to work on the streets to make money for him. After learning the particular corner she worked, I spotted her and pulled up to the curb. She ran over to my car.

She was dressed in high-heels, tight jeans and a low-cut black top, and wearing a ton of eyeshadow and make-up slathered on her face. Her bow-shaped mouth sported bright red lipstick. Her long, dark brown hair flared around her shoulders. She was obviously trying to look older, but she looked like a twelve-year-old who’d gotten into her mother’s make-up.

“Fifty dollars, mister,” she said in a tremulous voice.

I looked at her and shook my head. She took it for a refusal. A frightened expression formed on her face and she shot a quick glance to her left where a guy was leaning against the side of a building about a half block away.

“Please, mister, if I don’t make some money tonight, I… I’ll get in trouble. C’mon, I’ll do whatever you want…”

Through all the crap she’d smeared on, a dark bruise showed on one cheek. I considered that she might be disillusioned with the boyfriend who’d taken her two hundred and fifty miles from home and wouldn’t allow her to go back. It was obvious that she was afraid of the bastard.

That pissed me off but all I said was, “Do you want to go home, Marilyn?”

She drew in her breath and her eyes went wide. “How… how do you know my name? Who are you?”

“My name is Tennessee,” I said, “and Cameron is looking for you. He said to tell you that all is forgiven and he just wants you to come home.”