A Small Gray Dot

“Your sister’s not prone to sudden impulses, is she?” She was twenty-one, that was still plenty young and the young could sometimes do really stupid things for which they’re later sorry.

She was shaking her head. “I’m not saying she couldn’t do anything dumb, but Morgs is pretty level-headed. Her impulses are limited to something such as buying three pairs of shoes on a whim, or overindulging in potato chips. Like I said, she’s grown and she’s spent a night away from home on occasion, sometimes more than one, but I want to emphasize: she calls when she does that.”

I studied her. There was a first time for everything, and young females have sometimes done stupid things for, say, a new boyfriend. Still, it didn’t appear she had simply run off. Maybe she was somewhere that didn’t have a phone.

I nodded. “Okay.”

Before taking the case, I gave her my terms and my price – it was best to get that out of the way first – to which she agreed, even to the bit about what happens if I found her sister in a morgue somewhere, or if she didn’t want to come back.

I got a few more facts from her, things that didn’t show in the photograph: height, weight, any birthmarks, tattoos, that sort of thing. She gave me the name of the nightclub to which her sister said she was going, and though she didn’t know where they lived, the names of the friends with whom she had gone. I could start at the club. Perhaps one or the other of those friends would be there again.

I gave her a card with my phone number so she could call me if she heard from her sister, and she pulled out a walkie-talkie and in a few minutes, Buster, now one of her personal bodyguards, stepped in. He grinned as he reached into his jacket and handed me an indecent amount of cash.

“When will you get started, Mr. Murray?” she asked as she prepared to leave.

“Right away, Ms. Effingham.” I didn’t say it to her but when someone has been missing for over a day, someone who always stays in touch but hasn’t, it’s best to move as fast as possible. There was also the fact that they weren’t from Charlotte. That meant the young woman might not be familiar with which sections to avoid.

She studied me, then she smiled. “You may call me “Madison”. May I call you “Tennessee?”

I returned the smile. “Madison it is, and yes, you may.” I saw interest in that look, and yes, she was fine, but I never went to bed with a client. That could cause complications. Especially if the case didn’t end well. “I’ll be in touch.”

I began that evening, as soon as she left, and that night was when I learned of her sister’s probable whereabouts. I’d lucked out at the nightclub and found those two friends of hers. That is, if one could call it luck that I was going to have to go to Blue Heaven.

Her friends, having only recently moved to Charlotte, hadn’t lived here long enough to learn about that particular neighborhood. They didn’t know that it might not be the best place to visit, so therefore, they didn’t advise her not to go. That they didn’t know wasn’t surprising since no one much talked about it.

I knew finding someone in that confusing and shifting place could prove to be difficult, more so than usual, but I’m stubborn about some things. I’d never before cancelled simply because it might get hard, and I didn’t intend to start.

Chapter Twenty

SINCE I WOULD HAVE TO GO AT NIGHT AND getting in through the regular entry after dark posed a problem, that brings me to another disagreeable feature about Blue Heaven: the gully surrounding the place was full of the blighted vegetation that showed up after the Event.

I couldn’t speak for the rest of the world but none of the blighted patches in the city proper were as extensive as that around the Blue Heaven neighborhood, and I’d never run across any that widespread in any other parts of the country to which I’d been, either.

For Blue Heaven, the blight was a six hundred foot wide section of strange withered trees, scrubby weeds, and bare soil. This cheerless band of wasteland encircled the entire neighborhood and set it off from the rest of the city. Other than through the entrance, the only way in was across some section of that strip. Hardly anyone tried going in that way because, going through that grim stretch was almost certain to get you killed.

It meant you not only had to fight your way across six hundred feet of nastiness, but if you made it past that, you had to figure out how to get through, or over, the vine covered eight-foot stone wall that also surrounded the place.

The thought of going into a blighted area wasn’t anything that had ever crossed my mind, nevertheless, the next night, which, since it was January, was miserably cold, I found myself stealing across that piece of nasty. You do what you have to do and I didn’t have a choice as it was my only other way of getting in since I didn’t want to be stopped and questioned, and at the main entrance, there were always a couple of big shit-witted goons occupying the guardhouse twenty-four seven.