Free Laura Lippman by Tess Monaghan 04 - In Big Trouble (v5)

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    “You know how many kids I see in a typical week? Everyone who gets off the Greyhound thinks he’s going to be Austin’s next whatever. The place is like Hollywood in the forties. Everyone wants to live here.”
    “Really?” Tess had said. “I don’t.”
    He met her eyes then, in order to scoff properly. “As if you could .”
    “So what do you say?” Maury demanded.
    “To what?”
    “Barbecue or chili dogs. Ruby’s is right up here at the top of the Drag, if you don’t mind walking a little ways.”
    “The Drag?”
    “Guadalupe Street, the very concrete beneath your feet. Hey, is there anything you want to see on campus? We could cut through there, if you like. Maybe you could post WANTED signs or something on the community bulletin boards.”
    Tess looked at the utility poles of Guadalupe Street, so covered with fliers that they might be made of papier-mâché. “I don’t think so.”
    “Don’t you want to see the campus, anyway? See the Tower?”
    “The Tower?”
    “Charles Whitman, baby.” Maury’s eyes lighted up. “Did you know that there was, like, this whole family that was shot inside the Tower that day and they lay there—lie there? lay there—throughout the whole thing and one of them was alive .”
    “How interesting,” Tess said. Still, she understood why Maury would find such a tale fascinating, as long as it was in the abstract. Paradoxical as it might sound, it was often the very lack of experience that made people calloused. She considered telling him some of the things she had seen in the past year. A couple gunned down in their bed. A body in a ditch. A cab coming out of the fog to dispatch a young man in the prime of his life. All the “reality” shows on television couldn’t make you understand what it was like to be there at the exact moment when life ended, when someone’s soul, for want of a better word, ebbed from the body. But Maury was a boy, a handsome, happy boy who sold comic books for a living. He wasn’t remotely interested in reality, which made him a strangely agreeable companion.
    As she and Maury walked, she continued to scan the faces of the buskers and hustlers along the Drag. A young woman played her violin, a lovely classical air soaring over the street, but she didn’t even look up when coins dropped into her open case. They passed a little open-air market with glass and beaded jewelry, a textbook store crammed with burnt orange and white accessories. A young man sat on top of a trash can, whaling away on a set of bongos.
    A young man she knew. Well, she was overdue for one brilliant moment of plain, unadulterated good luck.
    “Gary!”
    It took him a second to register that someone was calling his name, and there seemed to be far too much subtext in the changes his expression went through on its way to recognition. Confusion, the momentary joy of spotting a familiar face in a land of strangers. Finally, he settled for something petulant and sulky.
    “Tess Monaghan. Fancy meeting you here.”
    “Ditto.”
    “So, what’s up?”
    “Maybe you can tell me. I’m looking for Crow.”
    “Good luck.” He unfold his legs, crawled down from the top of the trash can. “I haven’t talked to that fucker in weeks.”
    “What about Poe White Trash?”
    “Deader than its namesake. The name never did go over down here. The few times we got a gig, usually at some freebie festival, someone would call the Chronicle and complain about our name. ‘Inherently racist in its implication that other cultures don’t meet the same standards of normative behavior.’ Someone actually wrote that in a letter to the editor. Normative behavior. I thought it should be our new name.”
    “You’re kidding me.”
    “About the name, not about the letter. Welcome to PC city, hon, and I’m not talking about the computer industry.”
    “So the band broke up? Where did everyone go? Where’s Crow?”
    “ Crow broke up the band. Said he was going in a new