Free The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney Page A

things like, you know, ‘Touch my cock’ and ‘Anal surprise.’ ­People were driving by and honking all day the next day, until I went out there and looked. And ‘Fur pie delight.’ That was another one.”
    Wyatt tried to control his eyebrow. “I see.”
    â€œDo you know what a pain it was for me to get on the ladder and move all those letters back where they were supposed to be? It’s already a pain, because I have to go up there and change the band names every Sunday night. But this happened every single night for a week! And the church down the street, the pastor, he called to complain. He thought I’d turned the place into a strip club or something.”
    â€œDid you call the police?”
    â€œThe police said it was probably just kids. They said there were gangs around here. The Southside somethings. The Southside Locos. They said I was lucky I didn’t have gang graffiti coming out of my wazoo.”
    â€œI’ll go out on a limb and assume that’s a paraphrase.”
    But since when, he wondered, had there been Latino gangs in Oklahoma City? Or had there always been Latino gangs and he’d just been too much of a clueless Northside teenager to know it?
    And while he was at it, since when did a lot of ­people work downtown, who might flock through the doors of the Land Run if Candace opened them for lunch? When Wyatt had left Oklahoma City for the last time, twenty-­six years ago, downtown had been a ghost town. Tumbleweeds rolling along Main Street, all the businesses moving north to new office parks in the suburbs.
    â€œSo the police just blew me off when I called them about the bird poop,” Candace said.
    â€œThe bird poop?”
    â€œThis was last week. I came out after work and my car was covered with bird poop. I mean totally! You couldn’t even see in the windows! It looked like a big piece of candy, that white candy I hate.”
    â€œDivinity,” Wyatt said. He didn’t like it either. “But Ms. Kilkenny, Candace—­”
    She thwacked him again. He hadn’t even seen her hand move. “No! I know what you’re going to say. No! The car parked right next to mine didn’t have any poop on it at all. Neither did the car on the other side. Explain that!”
    Wyatt stalled by taking a sip of his beer. Probably Candace had parked beneath a tree filled with birds. Probably kids had rearranged the letters on the signboard. Probably it was just the wind, sweeping down the plains, that had scattered the empty beer kegs.
    This was the kind of case that Wyatt had been forced to take when he first started out in the business. Missing toy schnauzers and nursing-­home feuds and, once, an elderly defrocked priest who was convinced that the mob had put a contract out on him because of a confession he’d heard—­in 1968.
    Oh, and cases like that—­nobody ever paid on time. Nobody ever paid in full. The toy schnauzer tried to bite you, and the elderly defrocked priest kept putting his hand on your leg.
    Wyatt took another long pull of his beer. He was going to make Gavin pay in full for this.
    â€œSo who do you think would want to do something like this?” he said. Other than, of course, the wind, the birds, and the Southside Locos. “Why would somebody want to do it?”
    She looked at Wyatt with curiosity, like she wondered how he managed to tie his shoelaces every morning. “If I knew that,” she said, “I wouldn’t need you.”
    Fair enough. Wyatt flipped the page in his notebook. “So you inherited this place?”
    â€œFrom Mr. Eddy.” Candace nodded. “He was such a sweet old dude. And he used to crack me up, all these funny stories he had.”
    She explained how Mr. Eddy had visited Vegas four or five times a year to play blackjack. He’d gone through a bad divorce a few years before and had no kids, he was a lonely old dude, he