Let us jaunt backwards, safe in the arms of Retro-Spectacular, Time-Traveling Dumbass, to the night before.

She came through the door like a storm on fire, and there you were at the desk, legs up, smoking one last cigar before calling it a night. The heat and the force blew you backwards until you were right up against the bones of the wall and she was right up against your leg with her fever-hot hand pressing down hard on your thigh. You knew she was trouble; all women are trouble, and she was all woman. She had hair and legs. She had hair on her legs.

Ok, all right, try it again. A touch more veracity, perhaps.

So:

First night back in Tulsa, you always go to the park. You don't know why.

(You know why.)

It is exactly the same as it was when you were a kid, probably exactly the same as it was fifty years ago and will be fifty years in the future. The jungle gym is still rusty, the fountain is still aggressively merry, the pavement is still unstained. You stand there in the dark and smoke a joint and try not to feel melodramatic, and you are unsuccessful. Big surprise.

(There are a thousand ways to do this. What if you don't do any? What if, at the entrance of the labyrinth, you stop and turn around instead of charging in?)

You take your shoes and socks off and step into the fountain.

It's so cold that your eyes close in relief, because even after midnight, the Oklahoma June is sweltering. The whole city catches fire every morning and the ashes smolder all damn night, thick and ugly in your throat every time you breathe in.

You are thinking about breathing, here in this fountain, and the alarming simplicity thereof. You are thinking about the sounds beneath the water and the silence above it. You are thinking about screaming.

But you don't. You keep your mouth shut and your hands open, bend down to touch the water. It's so cool between your fingers that it feels like a blessing. It feels like a gift.

Irony shoves you out of the fountain. You stumble over the edge onto warm concrete, and when you look up there she is, her own bare feet dragging in the dirt beneath the swing where she sits so perfectly still that you think you're dreaming. (When you dream, no one ever moves. Her hair would be carved in anthracite, stone still in the empty wind. Break off a piece and it crumbles. Blood drips onto your palm.) You can't look away. The moon is not out and all the streetlights here are broken. She sits in darkness.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire, goes that voice inside your head. Hush, hush. You walk toward her, still barefoot, because even now you don't think about things like broken glass on a playground.

You mean to say hello, or howdy or hey or something in the realm of normal, but it comes out crooked and strange, it comes out:

"Are you all right?"

Her laugh is a moon within her, illuminating her shoulders and throat. Just for a second, half of a second, they flash white at you in the darkness. Your hand closes on the chain of the swing beside hers.

You never thought Angela was particularly pretty, just glass-eyed and jagged and mean, but in this moment here before you she looks like something out of a painless dream. And you wonder how someone with such short hair can look like a river goddess, mythic and Greek, like she just stepped out of a forest with leaves in her hands to beckon you into another time. You put your hand out without thinking, a response to an offer she has not made, and maybe this is a night for miracles, because she takes it.

Her palm is so callused that you look up in surprise.

"Mopping," she says, and pulls it away. The goddess flees wing-footed back into the woods, and suddenly there you are with Angela Shepard who has hated you since middle school, who works nights cleaning office buildings downtown. Who should at this moment be inhaling fumes and emptying trash cans and not looking up at you like you're the one who should not be here.

(Maybe you shouldn't.)

"Sorry," you say dumbly, like you dirtied the floors yourself. She rolls those iron eyes and there's that old smirk again, and you're in the hallway of Will Rogers with her laughter reverberating in your cherry-red ears. Oh, Retro-Spectacular. What if, just once, you used those powers for good?

Too late. Your ears are so hot it's a wonder they're not glowing, but hell, it's not like you can see them. Maybe they are.

Angela leans back in the swing and stares directly at you, and you find yourself sniffing the air like your childhood hound, searching for a whiff of alcohol around her, but you can't smell anything except hot concrete and rust. She's not drunk. She's just sitting there as silent and as still as she was when you were in the fountain, presumably watching with the same blatant intensity, and something about it makes you want to jump out of your skin and run until you can't breathe.

You could. You already held her hand. There are no rules to this. You are not fourteen and terrified of girls who smile mockingly when you look at their legs in their too-short skirts. You could turn around and walk away and probably never see Angela Shepard again, and who cares?

Who would care?

"Sorry about your brother," you say softly. Angela's hair, chin-length and curlier than Curly's ever was, slides down her cheeks as her head moves forward. She pushes back with her legs and begins to swing, changes her mind and checks the movement. Tilts her head upward and looks at you.

"Are you?" It is, believe it or not, the least malicious tone you have ever heard her use. It's soft and honest and gentle and so far beyond strange that you sit down in the swing next to her and put your chin in your sweating hand.

"Yeah," you say honestly, without so much as a thought of being offended at the question. "Yeah, I really am."

"You look like shit," she says in that same gentle voice, and you really do. You know that. "You should go home."

You really should. But you know that too.

A soft wind kicks up, hot air over hot skin, and you wish you were in the fountain. Irony kicks you in the middle of the back and you swing forward, return, forward, return. Never actually going anywhere. How fitting.

Angela Shepard is burning. There is something inside her that vibrates at a frequency you cannot see, but oh, you can feel it. Sitting there next to her you can feel it, you can feel it down in between your ribs, down where you still feel things like that. And you want to ask again if she's okay and you know it's stupid and pointless and of course she's not okay, no one comes to the park at two in the morning if they're okay. Ah, there's the streetwise detective. Figured that one right the fuck out, huh?

"Sure you're all right?" you hear it before you realize you're going to say it, but there it is.

Angela turns her delicate head fully toward you, and you still yourself like it was a command. You sit so still you can hear your heartbeat. It sounds like waves in the distance.

"You ever think about Alaska?" she asks quietly. "All that snow, all the time? All that sunlight?"

"From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire." Frost again, you unoriginal fucker. It slips out without your permission, or at least your approval, and you find yourself glaring at Angela like it's her fault. Like she drew it out of you by magic.

Her eyelids lower and the perfect lines of her lips twist upward in a half-grimace, half-smirk that shouldn't strike you the way it does, but it might as well be a baseball coming over the plate at seventy five mph. You never were much good at this kind of thing.

"You thinkin' about fires, Curtis?" she drawls, laughing and half-lidded, a trickster goddess in the forest. Snap your fingers and you wake up in a pile of briars. Close your eyes and it's winter.

She swings sideways and brushes her lips against your shoulder; swings away again, laughing. And shit, maybe Frost wasn't such a bad idea after all.

"I ain't gonna fuck you," says Angela.

In your mind, leaves rustle and a pair of eyes blink out at you behind them. In your body, your feet scrape ruts into the dirt beneath you.

"All right," you say, ears lit up like a Christmas tree. Somewhere, all the other reindeer are making it a point to exclude you.

"I ain't gonna fuck you," she repeats, a hint of humor in it now that you didn't catch before. "But I'll go get a drink. You want to go get a drink, Ponyboy?"

It's the way she says your name that does it. It's the downy feel of the little breeze on your fingertips and the total lack of anything hard or cold or sorry in the way her voice moves toward you. It's the moon coming out from behind the clouds for the first time in what feels like eons.

You hold out your hand. Angela takes it, and together you get up and walk off to retrieve your shoes.

...

You had a drink. Buck's was even stranger than you remembered, with Buck long dead and Bobby Darin, of all things, on the blaring radio. All the guys you used to know as the regulars are either in prison or Vietnam, all the girls married or gone. It was just a bunch of high school kids you didn't know, which made you feel like enough of a creep to high-tail it out of there after one beer. Angela did not follow. When you left, she was still dangling her legs off of a bar stool and radiating something indefinable into the space around her. She didn't watch you go.

And that's it.

So not much to go of off, is it, when it comes to finding a girl you didn't know was missing until her brother pointed a gun at you? Not much to even think about, alone here in the alley, except maybe going and hotwiring Annie's car so you can beat it out of town before the sun comes up. And how you'd have to come back eventually and Tim would be waiting, and your brothers would have to fish your lifeless ass up out of some ditch like an overgrown trout, white-eyed and swollen. What a catch.

Your eyes (still green) shut of their own accord, and instead of brick and trash and darkness there is Angela's white throat lit up from the inside, laughing. Your torso lurches like you're going to burst out into a run, like a shot just went off behind you and there's nothing but the harsh breathing of other runners and the smooth red track flying up before you.

You haven't run in six months.

Suddenly all that cheap beer from Rolly's tap is on top of you, and you're pushing your back into rough brick and trying not to throw up. Two-Bit is fine, Two-Bit is fine. Johnny is dead. Dallas is reincarnated as a junkyard dog somewhere in Mexico. Everything is normal and okay, and you're not going to throw up. You're not. Come on, Curtis. Come on, now. Use those dilapidated lungs for something other than cigarettes and calm the fuck down.

Ok.

Here's what you know: there's a girl missing. You saw her last.

Here's what you can assume: Tim checked her house and her work and all the normal places she would be. There must have been some expected communication between them that didn't happen, or he wouldn't have been in this alley ten minutes ago.

Here's what you don't know: Whether Tim actually did any of those things, what with his new shift from Crazy Motherfucker to No, Actually Crazy Motherfucker and all. Whether Angela had plans to run away or kill herself, whether any of her friends would know. Whether she has any friends.

So, first things first (you maven of organization) you have to find someone who does know some of those things. Tim and Curly are out of the question, neither of your brothers would know, Two-Bit is still laid up, Steve's in Colorado with the army paying for his college. You can't think of a single girl who would know; you can't think of a single girl Angela Shepard spoke to in high school.

Well. You can think of one. And you can think of where she is. And you can think of all the reasons not to, but why fucking bother, really, when there is one pretty good reason in the forefront of your mind, and also you feel like you could actually run for the first time in a long, long time.

So gird your loins, fucker, and get those car keys while you can. It's time to go to the YWCA.