A Fistful of Rain

Joan left around nine-thirty, giving me a kiss and saying that she had to get to bed. I told her I’d call that weekend, and that we could finally go out to the dinner I’d promised her.

She liked that.

Once she was gone, I checked the street again, and again there was motion from the car, and I suddenly knew who it was. There were a couple candy bars left in the bowl, and some Shock Tarts. I picked it up and went down the walk and across the street. The car was a Ford, blue, one of the newer ones. As I was crossing the street, the driver’s window purred down, and I could see both of the occupants.

Marcus was behind the wheel, on my side.

“Trick or treat,” I told him.

He grinned. “That for us?”

“Sure.”

He reached into the bowl, picking out both the remaining pieces of chocolate, then handed one to Hoffman. Neither of them looked particularly upset that I’d seen them.

“Have a good Halloween?” Marcus asked me.

“Pretty good. I like the holiday.”

“You seemed to enjoy talking to the kids.”

“Why are you guys watching my house?”

Marcus looked over at Hoffman. Without looking up from the chocolate bar she was unwrapping, she said, “Why don’t you stop hiding behind Chapel and just answer our questions, Miss Bracca?”

“Because I don’t like the questions. Because I don’t have any idea where my father is, and I don’t know what’s happened to him.”

“That’s why we’re watching your house,” Marcus explained.

“Isn’t this harassment?”

“No, actually,” Hoffman said, and she finally looked at me. “It’s called investigating. Harassment would mean we didn’t have a reason to watch you. But you’ve given us that. This is what we call keeping a suspect under surveillance. You could help yourself and us if you just stepped out from behind your lawyer for a little while.”

“I like it behind my lawyer,” I said. “He blocks the wind. Why am I a suspect?”

“We figure you were at your brother’s place yesterday,” Hoffman said.

“I told you I wasn’t.”

“We figure you’re lying to us.”

“If I call Mr. Chapel and tell him you’re out here—”

“There’s not a damn thing he can do about it,” Marcus said.

“And exactly what am I suspected of doing this time?”

“Murdering Tommy Bracca,” Hoffman said.

It was cold on the street, and I hadn’t bothered to put my jacket on before I came out. It made me want to shiver, and I had to fight it.

“Still don’t want to talk to us?” Hoffman asked.

I went back into my house without answering her.

CHAPTER 31

It all looked worse for the fourteen years since I’d last seen it. The lawn, once perfectly mown grass, was now marked with bare spots of mud, dotted with tangled weeds. The house needed a paint job. Even the station wagon in the driveway looked the same, just older, more beat-up.

I got out of the Jeep and checked down the street, and the Ford was there, a couple houses down at the curb. It was sunny, bright autumn, and painful to my eyes. The sunglasses I wore today were on out of necessity, not anonymity. Marcus and Hoffman were wearing sunglasses, too. I wondered if they’d gotten any sleep, or at least, any more than I had. They’d still been parked outside when I’d gone to bed.

It was ten past nine, Thursday morning, when I walked up to the door of the home of Gareth and Anne Quick.

Wrapped in precisely the same heavy dread that had surrounded me the last time I’d reached this door.

Anne answered, and she, too, looked like the years hadn’t been easy on her. The last time I’d seen her was when she’d handed me over to the Children’s Services woman, to take me to the Beckermans. We’d spent two nights in a Best Western prior to that, and Anne Quick hadn’t talked a lot. It had been hard for her to accept what her sons had tried to do, what they had been trying to do for so long. I’m sure it was only because her husband had seen it that Anne even believed the boys had done something wrong.

The whole time we were at the motel, I got the feeling that she believed what happened had been, somehow, my fault.

Fourteen years later she looked smaller and harder, with wrinkles that wouldn’t stay concealed with Oil of Olay. Her hair was still black, but dyed; there was gray creeping in at the roots, like a tide that had come just a little farther than anticipated onto a shore. She was dressed for garden work.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Mrs. Quick,” I said, and I took off my sunglasses and dropped them in a pocket, sheepish. “I’m Miriam Bracca, I don’t know if you remember me.”

The wrinkles around her eyes bunched, as if in committee. She looked me over, and her mouth got tighter, more sour. She had one hand on the door, and from her grip, I thought she might be about to slam it on me.

“Yes, I remember you.”

“I was wondering if I might come in, speak to you and your husband? Is Mr. Quick here?”

“Of course he’s here.” She said it strangely, as if I should have known the answer already. “What do you want to talk to us about?”

“May I come in?”

She adjusted her hold on the door, and then she pulled it back, opening it wider, puffing a disgusted sigh. She waved me in as if it was easier than refusing me entry, then shut the door and came around, leading the way to the den. The interior, unlike the exterior, had gone through some changes. The architecture was early seventies, with a sunken den, and the carpet had been replaced, thicker than the old, blue instead of the tan I remembered. The couch had been replaced, was now a multisection modular monstrosity, the kind where segments can turn into recliners. Through the glass doors into the backyard, I could see the signs of gardening, preparing for the winter, torn-up plants, a wheelbarrow.

Gareth Quick was outside, on his knees, working with a trowel in the flower bed.

“The boys don’t live here anymore?” I asked.

“No.” Anne said it flatly. She pulled the sliding door open, adding, “Well, come on.”

I stepped onto the back patio. Gareth Quick looked up from his work, and his eyes went from me to his wife, and there was nothing in them but confusion. He settled the look back on me and smiled.

“You’re very pretty,” he said. “What happened to your head?”

“This is Miriam, honey,” Anne told him. “You remember Miriam, don’t you?”

“Miriam?”

“Yes, she lived with us for a while, when the boys were in high school.”

The smile stayed in place. He looked, unlike his wife, as if the years hadn’t had a physical effect on him. Even the haircut was the same, reminiscent of the military, close and neat. Like Anne, he was dressed for gardening, but unlike his wife, the clothes didn’t seem to settle correctly, a little baggy where they should have held tight, a little loose where they should have been snug.

Physically, he could have been the Parka Man, but I already knew it wasn’t him. It was his voice, it just wasn’t the same.

And there was absolutely no recognition of me in his eyes.

“The boys?”

“Brian and Christopher, honey. Our sons.”

Alarm crept laboriously across his face.

“What did they do?” Gareth Quick asked, and his voice dropped and wobbled, just the way it had when he’d found them dragging me through the hallway. “What did those little shits do to you, Miriam?”

“Nothing,” I assured him. “I’m fine, sir. It’s all right.”

There were tears in his eyes, and his chin had dropped onto his chest; he wasn’t even looking at us, now. He began to sob.

“What did we do?” he was saying. “God, what did we do that was so wrong, Annie? What did we do so wrong?”

“It’s all right, hon,” Anne said, and she dropped to her knees and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re at home, and I’m here, and there’s nothing to worry about.”

He pushed her hand away, his sobs racking his thin body.

“Could you wait inside?” Anne asked, without looking at me, without taking her eyes off him. “In the kitchen, maybe?”

I nodded and backed off, retreating to the kitchen. It had changed, the cabinets and counters replaced, even the table. I took a chair and waited, and the déjà vu stampeded, and for a moment, it was as if I had never left, all of the wounds raw and open.

It was almost twenty minutes before Anne came back, and she was leading Gareth by the hand. An open archway past the table had another view of the den, and she brought him past me, that way, and got him settled on the couch. He seemed perfectly fine with that, and she put the remote control in his hand, turned on the television, and the soft noise of morning talk bubbled into the space.

“I’ll be in the kitchen,” Anne told her husband.

He nodded, focused on the screen.

She joined me at the table. “Alzheimer’s.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, and started to add that I was terribly sorry, but she cut me off.

“How could you?” She checked over her shoulder, to make certain Gareth was still where she’d left him. He hadn’t moved. “Almost three years, now. He’s not going to be with me much longer.”

“You’re caring for him by yourself?”

“A nurse comes during the afternoons, when I have to go to work. I’m part-time, real estate.”

“I’m a musician,” I told her.

“Is that what you call it?” Her mouth got smaller, even more bitter. “I’d have thought ‘entertainer’ might be a better word.”

“I suppose you could call it that, too.”

“What did you want to talk to us about?”

I thought about spinning a lie, like I had with Sheila Larkin, but it was clear Anne Quick had very little patience, and what amount of it was left she needed for her husband.

“I’m trying to find Brian and Chris,” I told her.

“Why?” This time there was no mistaking the hostility.

“I need to speak to them,” I said.

“You going to sue them? Have them arrested? You looking for some sort of revenge?”

“No, ma’am, I just—”

“They were perfectly nice boys, you know, they were wonderful boys, until you came into our house. They were just wonderful young men, their father loved them so much, he worked so hard for them, to give them everything they needed. Then we took you in, and you destroyed it.”

I stared at her. Someone’s memory was playing tricks, and it wasn’t mine.

“The way you led them on,” Anne Quick continued, her voice like acid. “The way you teased them, they were boys, what were they supposed to think? And now you make a living doing just that, don’t you? Selling a whiff of sex, a little promise here and there, strutting around with a guitar and your drug-addict friends.”

My mouth had gone dry. Behind Anne, her husband was still watching television, head cocked to one side, eyes bright with fascination, oblivious.

“I never led them on, ma’am,” I said. “I never did anything to encourage them.”

“You believe what you want to, that’s fine. I’m sure you don’t think of yourself as a slut now. But you sure as hell were one then.”

I tried again, trying to ignore the hostility. “I didn’t come here to make any trouble, Mrs. Quick. I’m just looking to contact Chris or Brian, that’s all.”

“Why? To get them locked up again? To accuse them of attempted rape, to make a big story? Do you need more headlines?”

“They were arrested?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know.” She spat it at me. “Don’t act like you don’t know.”

“Are they in prison?”

That made her more defensive, as if she’d thought I’d expected that. “No, they’re not, thank you. They’ve been just fine and they’ve stayed out of trouble, so they don’t need you making it worse.”

“Because if they’ve been in prison,” I said, “I’d hate to think that was my fault.”

Anne Quick gave me a suspicious appraisal. “What does that mean?”

“If it was my fault, I mean. If something I did got them in trouble. I’m . . . well, I was hoping I could make it up to them.”

“And how would you do that?”

“I’m rich,” I said.

The hard little eyes seemed to brighten momentarily. Green-eyed monster, I thought. Not jealousy, but greed.

“You’re going to give my sons money?”

“I didn’t want to insult them,” I said. “Didn’t want them to think it was charity. I was thinking of it as a gift.”

She needed a couple of seconds to chew on that. On the couch, Gareth had started flipping channels.

“I can’t imagine it’s easy taking care of Gareth like this,” I told her. “You must be working very hard.”

“All the time.”

“If you’d let me, maybe I could help you out with that, too.”

“I don’t want charity, either.”

“Of course not. But you and Gareth, you opened your home to me, and I owe you for that. I’d really like to make it up to you.”

“Would you, really? Or is it just that you think you can buy what you want?”

I gambled, then, pushing my chair back and getting to my feet. “I’m sorry to have insulted you this way, Mrs. Quick. I’ll go.”

She didn’t move and she didn’t speak, so I headed out of the kitchen, had gotten all the way to my hand on the doorknob before she called after me to stop. I heard her coming, hurrying to catch up to me.

“I apologize,” she said, and it looked like she was choking down rotten meat. “It’s just . . . it’s been very hard, you can imagine.”

“I understand.”

“If you’d be willing to help . . . ?”

“The medical bills,” I said. “Would you let me cover those?”

“You’d . . . you would do that?”

“I don’t want to see Gareth suffering,” I told her, and it was the honest-to-God truth. “I’ll have my attorney contact you, he’ll arrange to have the bills come to me.”

She didn’t speak for a few seconds, possibly because she couldn’t. She finally had to nod.

“And the boys,” I said. “Where can I find them?”

“They’re outside of Junction City, that’s near Eugene.”

“Do you have an address?”

“I’m sure I do around here somewhere.”

“If you can get that for me,” I said. “And if you don’t mind me using your phone, I’ll call my attorney, see if we can’t get this bill thing handled right now.”

Anne Quick, my new best friend, offered to dial for me.

CHAPTER 32

Junction City was about another fifty miles or so south of Salem, still heading along Interstate 5. I left Anne Quick talking to Chapel on the phone, and was back on the road before ten, with the Ford following as I went. Once again they weren’t trying to be hidden. They knew I saw them there, and they didn’t care.

The weather was holding, and the drive wasn’t too bad, except for the part passing Albany, when the stink of the paper mill fell over the road like a shadow of death. When Tailhook first started getting gigs outside of Portland and we’d drive down to perform in Eugene, we’d try to see who could hold their breath the longest going through the zone. Van always won.

Junction City is a big name for a little community, mostly farming, just northwest of Eugene, in the peppermint fields. I reached it just past eleven. It’s rural, with the slightest of downtowns, and the bare essential of amenities, and I stopped at a mom-and-pop convenience store on the side of the road. I parked on gravel and hopped out, feeling the bruise on my side tighten as I moved. Inside, I bought myself a bottle of Arrowhead and got directions from the middle-aged man behind the counter to the address Anne Quick had provided. He was wearing coveralls and a flannel, and he eyed me and my earrings with some suspicion before determining that I wasn’t here to undermine his way of life. I didn’t correct his assumption.

The Ford pulled up while I was getting the directions, and Marcus and Hoffman got out. Marcus made straight for me at the counter, then asked the man if there was a bathroom he could use. I almost laughed aloud.

“Don’t leave without me,” Marcus threw over his shoulder at me, then went to use the facilities.

Hoffman was stretching by the car when I came outside, arching her back with her arms extended over her head. When she stretched, I could see the gun in the holster on her waist. I unlocked my door and was about to get into the Jeep when she said, “Christopher Quick.”

I closed the door again, looking at her over the hood, waiting.

“Son of Anne and Gareth.” She dropped her arms, put the weight of her gaze on me. She still had her sunglasses on, hiding her eyes, but I felt it just the same. “Brother Brian. Both recent guests at OSP.”

“You gonna tell me what they went in for?”

“Aggravated assault and attempted rape, the both of them. Why are you talking to the Quicks?”

“You’re not supposed to be asking me questions,” I told her.

“Yeah, but here, out in these peppermint fields, you can’t really hide behind your counsel, can you? Why the Quicks?”

“I stayed with them for a few months when I was a kid. They were one of the foster families I was placed with.”

“Thought that was Beckerman.”

“The Beckermans were the last family I was placed with. Before the Beckermans, there were the Quicks. Before Quick, there was Larkin. And in the beginning, there was Bracca, Thomas and Diana.”

She took it in, then glanced in the direction of the store. Inside, Marcus was at the counter, picking out a piece of beef jerky.

“I was going to call you,” I said.

Hoffman turned her sunglasses back to me. “If I’d known you’d become a suspect again, it never would have happened.”

Marcus came out of the store, then, before I could respond. He handed a bottle of Arizona green tea to Hoffman, opened an RC cola for himself, then settled on the hood of his car, grinning at me.

“Lot of commuting just to dispose of a body,” he told me.

He so obviously didn’t believe that was what I was doing, I almost laughed.

“You tell us why you want to talk to the Quicks, we’ll do it for you,” Hoffman said. “We’re detectives, we could detect. We could determine you’re not a suspect, but instead the kind of person who wants to help us.”

“You don’t know I’m going to talk to the Quicks.”

“You’re not in Junction City to enjoy the air.” Marcus took a deep inhale. “God, I fucking hate peppermint.”

“At least it’s not Albany,” I said.

“You don’t want to talk to these guys without us there, Miss Bracca,” Hoffman said.

“Why not?”

“These are not nice boys,” Marcus said. “Christopher and Brian, they take drugs and they get violent and they have impressive records for such young men. Christopher and Brian have ties to God’s Army.”

“They’re a band?”

“They’re a militia,” Hoffman said.

“White racists, fighting for God’s People against the Forces of Darkness,” Marcus added. “That would be people like my lesbo partner here, and me, a government patsy, and you, you drug-taking promiscuous rock star, you. Declared war on the false government of the USA when abortion was legalized. Don’t like blacks, Jews, Catholics, the whole rigmarole. And they probably won’t like you very much, at all, come to think of it, since you’ve got miscegenation of the races going on, what with a black man playing drums.”

“They used their time inside to get in good with some of the more passionate racists,” Hoffman said. “Yet another success of the penal system.”

No wonder Anne had been so hostile, I thought.

“So you see why we’re kind of concerned with you going to talk to these guys alone,” Hoffman added.

“Did your father maybe know Chris or Brian while at OSP?” Marcus asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“Pity. See, if he had, we’d call that a lead. And if you could confirm something like that, well, it would make our job easier.”

“I don’t know who Tommy knew in prison.”

“Then why do you want to see these two?”

“That’s none of your business, and I see a pay phone over there, I can call my lawyer.”

“Where’s your father?” Hoffman asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And you’re not looking for him? That’s not what this is?”

“No, it’s not.” I pulled my car door open again, climbed back into the Jeep. “Now, sing along with the chorus, you know the words: If you have any further questions, you can talk to my attorney.”

The Quick brothers lived down a dirt track off Prairie Road, behind an expanse of peppermint field, in a house just outside a line of pine trees.

I say house, but I’m being generous, because what I really thought when I first saw it was shack. There were power lines coming to it through the trees, electricity and telephone, perhaps, and maybe there was running water, too, but none of those things changed my assessment. The road went from paved to dirt on the way in, a long straight line that wasn’t dusty only because there’d been recent rain.

More than the out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere feeling that came from the sprawling fields and the distant hills was making me nervous as I pulled up. If Chris and Brian had both been at OSP, that tied all of us together, them, Tommy, me, maybe even Mikel. While I had no idea what prison was actually like, it didn’t seem impossible that Chris or Brian or both had learned who Tommy Bracca was, that it had come out in some conversation or some interaction that the Miriam Bracca they knew as boys was his famous daughter.

It didn’t take much imagination to see them hatching a plan, then, trying to find a way to use the information to make some money. If they’d gotten out around the time Tommy had, then all either would have needed to do was wait until I came home, and then they could get the whole thing rolling. Pictures and kidnapping and all of it, all wrapped together. Maybe the pictures had been one plan, and Mikel had learned about it somehow, so they’d killed him.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that I was headed straight into a lot of trouble. If Chris or Brian was the Parka Man, then they’d already proved themselves dangerous, already proved they weren’t afraid to kill. It meant they knew enough to plant cameras in my home, to get past my alarm, to take pictures of me while I slept.

The thoughts lingered, expanding with horror as I realized how bad things could have gotten. Whichever Quick had forced me into his truck at gunpoint, whichever Quick had been in my home, he’d had me alone and defenseless and, once, even completely unaware. Jesus, one of them had finally gotten me out of my clothes. If he’d wanted more than just a scare or a photograph, nothing would have stopped him from getting it.

The Jeep popped and slid along the ruts in the road. At the end of the drive there was a clearing, with a rusted hulk of a tractor and a stack of empty and perforated oil drums vaguely framing the front of the shack. I pulled in and parked and waited a few moments, and there was no motion from the door, no signs of movement beyond the two scum-stained windows.

I didn’t see the Ford anywhere in my mirrors.

There was an odor in the air as I stepped out of the Jeep, foul and heavy and eliminating the scent of the mint all around, and I could see wisps of smoke rising from behind the house, farther in the trees. The only sound came from the Jeep as I shut my door, and then that died away, and there was nothing else.

I took a breath to steel myself, nearly gagged on the stink in the air, and started for the shack. It was bright and the sun was almost directly above me, but it wasn’t doing much to warm me. When a blackbird bolted off a branch in one of the nearby pines, I nearly shrieked, expecting three dozen more to come and suddenly swarm on me. Shades of a Hitchcock movie—cold and still and menacing.

The door was wooden and loose on its hinges, and a red and white plastic sign ordered me to keep out, and another hung below it, warning me not to trespass. I knocked tentatively on the door, anyway.

The door swung open at my touch, then stopped inches into its swing. Through the parting I could see a corner of the shack opposite me, a metal bed frame with a sloppily dressed mattress. Shelves hung to the walls, with books and magazines.

I thought about calling out their names, or maybe identifying myself. Then I thought that I wasn’t keeping out, that I was probably trespassing, and that maybe advertising that fact wasn’t the smartest move I could make.

The door didn’t budge when I gave it a little push, so I pushed it harder. This time it gave an inch, then seemed to push back, so I pushed it a last time and, before it tried to return, slid through the gap and let it fall shut behind me. The change in light was more dramatic than I’d anticipated, and it left me blind for several seconds, blinking away the autumn glare, trying to adjust to the dimness inside.

When my vision returned, the first thing I focused on was the light source, a computer monitor glowing on a workbench. It was a big screen, maybe nineteen inches, and running a screen saver, a parade of naked women, none of them obviously me. The PC was next to it, on the table, and flanking the other side of the monitor was a flatbed scanner. A set of cables ran from the back of the PC to the side of the table, unattached, waiting for attention.

Behind the monitor, on the wall of the shack, were clippings and papers. Most of them I couldn’t make out, but there was a picture of Tailhook that I recognized, torn from some magazine. One of the publicity stills from the press kit that went out when Nothing for Free was released, the same one I had in boxes in my basement closet. Beside it was a printout, what looked like a copy of the tour schedule. Tacked to the wall, made out of nylon or maybe cloth, was a small red flag. A black swastika rode high in the center, and beneath it two stylized lightning bolts, in silver.

And there was a copy of Picture Three.

I took a step forward to get a closer look, and nearly tripped, and that’s when I discovered why the door wouldn’t open properly.

The body was on its side, facing the front of the shack, its legs crossed but extended, as if trying to run to the grave. Both hands were extended in the same direction, as if trying to clear the path. When the door had swung in, it had been blocked by the leg. A black puddle had spread out from the middle of the back, down to the boards that served as a floor, filling the seams between each plank. Flies buzzed over the puddle, sluggish and a little bored.

It wasn’t Tommy, and it wasn’t Mikel, but for that first awful instant it was both of them. Then I was certain it was Tommy, and I was sure it was my fault, I’d screwed up again, and I lurched forward and went to my knees, not thinking and not caring. My gorge rose, and it was the only thing that was keeping my voice from rising, too.

This man’s head was shaven, his forearms tattooed, his face too young; he wasn’t Tommy. There was enough in his death that I could remember him from life, could see him running away from me, down my street in the middle of the night. From fourteen years’ distance, I could see Chris Quick, and he had died with the same fear on his face he’d worn when his father had caught him trying to rape me.

I’d come down in the puddle, felt the blood soaking through my jeans, and it wasn’t Tommy and it wasn’t Mikel, but maybe it was my mother, and I could smell the grass and the beer and the gutted pumpkins and the cigarettes and the truck. I could see my father, his look of horror; I could see Mikel, his look of despair.

The door knocked me as it was shoved open, pushing me and the body aside, and I toppled dumbly, wincing into the sunlight. Flooded with backlight, there was a new man in the doorway, and at first I thought he was wearing a parka, but there was no hood, only long hair flopping loose onto the shoulders of his jacket, and the sunlight licking around his legs showing a camouflage pattern, and his boots were black and high.

It was the same man who’d been in my bedroom the night I’d returned home.

I realized that at the same moment I realized he was holding a rifle in both hands, and that the rifle was pointed at me.

“Fucking cunt,” Brian Quick told me, and he brought the gun up to his shoulder.

CHAPTER 33

I could smell the pine and the mint in the air, crisp and clean odors suddenly revealed beneath the stench of blood and the chemicals brewing behind the shack. I could hear the sound of traffic on the Coburg Road out of Eugene, even though that had to be over a mile away.

I could see this man, maybe four years older than me, barely older than Mikel, the mass of metal in his hands, solid and unforgiving, pointed at me.

This isn’t real, I thought. This cannot be real, this is another memory I’ve manufactured, another fiction created, but this cannot actually be happening to me. I am a musician, I play guitar in a band, I drink and I pass out and feel sorry for what a fucking good life I have.

I do not have guns pointed at me, I am not a detective, I am not a cop, I am not supposed to be here.

And the rifle was now at his shoulder and his mouth was opening to say something else, but the words I heard didn’t come from him, they came from farther away, louder than before.

“Drop that weapon! Drop that weapon fucking now or I drop you! Drop it!”

“Mim! Mim, stay down!”

Brian Quick balked, staring at me on my knees in his brother’s blood.

“Drop it NOW!” Marcus screamed.

The rifle came down, hit the floor without a clatter, like a brick.

“Back it up! Back it up, hands high!”

Brian was looking at me, I could feel it, but with the sunlight behind him, I couldn’t make out his face, see if there was fear or excitement or anger in it. His hands had come down to drop the rifle, and he’d begun to step back, and Marcus was still yelling at him to reverse out of the shack, to do it slowly, to raise his hands. Brian started to follow the last order, but his right rose slower than his left, crossing inside his body as it came up instead of moving straight, and I gave it full-throat, everything I’d ever used onstage, everything Steven had ever taught me about using my diaphragm, and then some.

“Gun, he’s got another gun!” I screamed, pulling myself out of the doorway, tumbling over Christopher Quick’s corpse, and there was a shot that seemed so loud I figured the shack would fall down around me from the percussion.

To my side, behind where I’d knelt, a circle opened in the wooden wall, spitting splinters and showing green leaves beyond.

There were more shots, two or four or three, I couldn’t count them they came so fast, and they didn’t come from the same places. New circles opened in the wood around me and I cowered against the dead man, hiding my head and trying to breathe and not get killed. More shots came, but from a different direction, answered from the opposite, maybe behind me, now, but I didn’t move, I didn’t think I could.

It got quiet again. It stayed quiet.

I didn’t move. My blood-soaked jeans were making me cold, my bruised side ached, but I didn’t move.

I kept seeing Mikel and Tommy and my mother and the truck.

“Mim? Mim, where are you?”

I forced my arms apart, unwrapping my head. Hoffman was in the doorway, her gun in her hands, pointed at the ground. She saw the movement, focused on me.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said, like she’d been kicked and hadn’t seen it coming.

I was starting to push myself up but she took a step forward, pushing me back down with one hand, putting her gun away with the other, shouting for her partner.

“Marcus, ambulance! We need an ambulance! Jesus, don’t move, Mim. Goddamn you, where’re you hit? Where’d you get hit?”

I kept pushing her hands away, and she kept batting them aside and trying again, and I flailed, finally managing my voice again. “Not! I didn’t! Not me!”

She caught it at last, stopped, grabbed my wrists.

“Not me,” I said. “Him, it’s his blood. His blood. I didn’t get hit.”

Hoffman looked at me like this was another of my lies, too, like she couldn’t believe I was this stubborn. I shook my head and indicated Chris’s body, and she didn’t let go of my wrists, just used them to pull me to my feet as she got to hers.

Marcus filled the doorway, breathless. “Sheriff’s on his way, and an ambo . . .”

Hoffman propelled me toward him, releasing her grip. “Cancel the ambo, add a coroner.”

I stepped out, into the hot daylight again, Marcus guiding me by the shoulder. There was already the sound of a siren in the distance, maybe more than one. When I looked down at myself, I saw that the front of my jeans was soaked, and the bottom of my shirt.

Marcus led me back to the Ford, using his free hand to dial his mobile phone. When the call connected he spoke in fluent cop, using numbers and words like “homicide” and “medical examiner” and “fugitive” before he was through. Once we reached the car, he opened the rear door and had me sit on the backseat.

“Sure as hell looks like you got hit.”

“Not me,” I said, and pointed back to the shack. “Chris Quick.”

“That makes the one who was shooting at us brother Brian?”

I nodded. “They did the cameras, you can tell, you just look in there you can tell they did the cameras on me. And they were at my house, it was Brian the first time, the one who put me in the truck, he must have a truck around here, a Ford truck. The first time, not the second time, the second time it was Chris. I should have recognized them, I should have known, but they looked different. It was them.”

“You think Brian’s got your father?”

I started to nod again, then heard the word “fugitive,” just the way Marcus had said it on the phone, and I stopped myself before my chin came down, twisted my face so I wouldn’t have to look him in the eyes.

“Brian got away?”

“He won’t get far. You think he’s got your dad?”

I swallowed, hard, mostly to put my stomach back where it belonged. “I don’t know where Tommy is.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“I know.”

“You are fucking unbelievable—” he said, but then stopped, because the sirens had arrived. “Don’t move, Miss Bracca. Stay right here.”

I nodded, and the sirens cut off, and he went to speak to the new arrivals. I heard the frustration in his voice, could tell it was with me, and reaching its end.

But Brian had escaped, and unless Tommy was nearby, the cops weren’t going to find him, either. Which meant that the only hope in hell I had of getting Tommy back alive was to stick to the original deal, and to pray that Brian meant to do the same thing.

Beyond the Ford, descending on the shack, were deputies in khaki, gesturing to one another, talking earnestly to Hoffman and Marcus. They gestured to me, to my Jeep, to me again. They gestured to the shack. A couple of deputies ran off into the woods. They seemed very busy.

Fugitive. The word resonated, sounded true. Brian had to keep our deal, he had nothing left, I realized. He was wanted now, known now. He could run poor, or he could run rich, and with a million dollars, he’d get a lot farther. He had to keep our deal.

And I needed him to, more than ever before.

Because I’d been wrong.

Tommy hadn’t killed my mother.

CHAPTER 34

A deputy drove me in the back of his car into Eugene, to the sheriff’s station near city hall. When I asked about my car, he told me it was part of a crime scene, and that it would be towed into town as soon as they were done with it. I didn’t ask what that meant. At the station, he escorted me inside, and another deputy met us, this one female. She swabbed my hands, the same GSR test I was becoming way too familiar with, and I couldn’t read her reaction when she saw the results. When that was over, the first deputy left, and the second one took my statement.

She asked why I’d gone to see Christopher and Brian Quick, and I gave her the story I’d given Anne, that I was trying to track down my old foster family, to pay them back for the kindness they’d done me.

The deputy recorded it without editorializing, and if she didn’t believe me, she didn’t act like she cared either way. When we were finished, she told me to get comfortable, that there’d be more people who wanted to talk to me. I asked her if I could get cleaned up first, and she told me that would have to wait.

“Can we keep this out of the papers?” I asked. “I mean, my part?”

“Your part?”

“I’m kind of well-known.”

“Yeah, you kind of are. We’ll see.”

She went out, leaving me in the interview room by myself.

Nobody came to talk to me for another two hours, by which time I had just about gone crazy with the waiting. I’d started pacing the room, but that had very little entertainment value, and I was quickly exhausted. I sat at the table again, drumming my fingers, tapping my toes, and fighting the nagging that had begun in the car as I’d rode in from Junction City.

You fucking cunt.

You’ve sure grown up.

I don’t have perfect pitch, but I have a brilliant memory for sound. I can pick up a melody fast, normally after only hearing it once if it’s simple, two or three times if it’s complex. It doesn’t work for words, it doesn’t work for speech, but for tone, for melody, for notes, I trust it.

Trying to conjure Brian’s voice again, trying to see if it matched the one in my head, playing the two lines against one another, and they weren’t fitting. I imagined Brian’s curse spoken in a house, muffled behind a mask, softer, and all I got was that the octave was similar, if not the same, but that was it.

Which made me very nervous. Because it meant that Brian had someone else, someone besides his brother, that he was working with.

I’d begun to believe they’d forgotten about me when the door opened and Hoffman came in with a short Latino man, about her age, wearing a suit. He had a clipped mustache, and a thick neck, and the thickness seemed to run throughout him, along the shoulders and even down his arms to his hands. He had a stack of papers, and he pulled a chair and sat down, and Hoffman took another, on the end of the table, so she was almost between us.

“Miss Bracca, I’m Detective Munez. Thanks for your patience.”

“Have you found him?”

Munez shook his head. “We will.”

“You don’t think he’s going to go back to his place?”

“Not unless he’s exceptionally stupid. Right now Brian Quick is the prime suspect in the murder of his brother, and he’s wanted for the mass of charges he brought down upon himself when he opened fire on Detective Hoffman here and her partner. But it could happen. A lot of criminals are exceptionally stupid. This one seems a little brighter than most. Or at least more computer literate.”

“I saw the computer.”

He pressed his mustache down, as if it was in danger of coming loose. “It’ll go to the State lab, they’ll check the contents.”

“The Quicks were the ones spying on me,” I said. “They were the ones selling the pictures of me.”

“It’ll go to the State, like I said. They’ll let us know for certain. Could you tell me why you’d gone out to see those two?”

“I told the deputy already.”

“Yeah, I got that, but I’d like to hear it from you. Sometimes things get lost in these statements.”

I put on my helpful face, and told him pretty much the same thing I’d told the deputy.

“You were bringing those two money?”

“Not cash,” I said, as if the suggestion was ludicrous. “I was going to offer to help them out. I didn’t know what they were up to at all, I mean, if I had known they were the ones spying on me, I’d have called you guys or Detective Hoffman or someone. I just . . . I just thought they’d had a run of bad luck, you know? When I talked to their mother she didn’t say what they’d done, just that they’d been down on their luck.”

“Were they blackmailing you? About the pictures?”

“No, honest to God,” I said. “Or if they were planning to, they hadn’t started yet. They’d just been selling the pictures, I think. The only reason I came to see them was that I’d talked to Anne—their mother—earlier today. I found out that their father’s got Alzheimer’s. It’s been really hard on the family, I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help out.”

“Detective Hoffman here tells me that she advised you that both of the Quicks had a record, and that they were considered potentially dangerous individuals.”

“She did, yeah, but . . . they were my foster brothers. I never thought they’d be like . . . that, you know? And when I saw Chris’s body . . .”

“He was dead when you got there?”

I nodded.

“I imagine that was a surprise.”

“What was that smell?” I asked. “There was this awful stink, what was that?”

Munez glanced at Hoffman, who kept her gaze planted on me. “The Quick boys were entrepreneurs, it seems,” Munez said. “Aside from their cottage industry marketing dirty pictures of you, they were cooking crystal meth. Normally it gets brewed up in the high desert because the process stinks so bad. Setting up in a peppermint field, that’s almost clever.”

“If you say so. Next you’ll tell me they were forging bonds or something like that.”

Munez shook his head, chuckling, and made some notes. I risked a second glance at Hoffman. She was still watching me, no smile. She looked like she wanted to belt me, actually.

“Is there anything else?” I asked. “I’d kind of like to get home.”

“A couple more things, but we can get through them pretty quickly if you’re willing to cooperate.”

“Of course,” I said.

Hoffman snorted.

Munez said, “We’ve towed your Jeep in, but I’d like your consent to perform a search of the vehicle.”

“Sure. Can I ask what you’re looking for?”

“Methamphetamine. Chemicals or supplies used in the production of methamphetamine. Firearms. Large stacks of cash.” He smiled at me. “I somehow don’t think we’ll find anything like that, but we need to be thorough.”

“I understand. Do I just wait here?”

“It’ll only take a few minutes,” Munez told me, rising. “We’re going to need your clothes, I’m afraid. I’ll have a deputy bring you a change.”

“You need my clothes?”

“Evidence. The deputy will take you to a washroom, you can get cleaned up and changed.”

“Washroom would be great,” I said, and gave him the same smile he’d been giving me.

When they left, the female deputy came back with a bundle under her arm, and she walked me to the ladies’ room, stayed with me while I changed. I stripped off the jeans and shirt, then spent ten minutes getting the blood off my arms and hands before putting on the replacements. The jeans she gave me were blue and clean and enormous on me. I had to roll the cuffs up, and the waist kept slipping because she had to take my belt, too. The shirt was big, dark green, with the Lane County Sheriff logo on it, and comfortable. I wondered whose clothes I was wearing. When I saw myself in the mirror I looked silly as hell.

When I was finished, the deputy walked me back to the interview room without a word. Hoffman and Munez hadn’t returned yet. I tried to think if I had anything embarrassing in my car, if I was going to need an explanation. If they went through absolutely everything, I figured the worst they would find would be some bad Euro Pop CDs.

It took close to another hour before they returned, around three-thirty when Munez came back, Hoffman still with him. He brought his papers again, and they took the same seats.

“We’re finished with your vehicle, Miss Bracca,” Munez said. “You’ll be pleased to know we didn’t find anything questionable, and we rotated your tires for you.”

I laughed, and he grinned, pleased that I’d accepted his joke, then checked his notes once again. Hoffman shifted in her seat. He seemed to actively ignore her.

“So, what does this have to do with your father’s disappearance?” he asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Detective Hoffman tells me that this all has something to do with the fact that your father disappeared and your brother died and you being famous and like that and the pictures on the Net. She thinks maybe one or both of the Quicks knew your father at OSP. Your dad was an inmate there, wasn’t he?”

I shook my head, doing my best to look bewildered. “I don’t know anything about that. The first I knew that Chris and Brian had been at OSP was when Detective Hoffman told me.”

“Hmm,” Munez said, and scribbled some more notes, then took a moment to look over everything he’d written. Then he produced two typewritten pages and slid them to me. “Would you read these over, please?”

I read the pages. It was a typed statement about what had happened at the Quicks’. There was nothing I disagreed with.

When I looked up again, Munez slid me his pen. “If you agree with the statement, I’d like your signature and a date at the bottom.”

I gave him both, slid the pages and the pen back.

Munez checked them again, then tapped the sheets together on the tabletop, squaring the edges. “Okay, you can go.”

Hoffman snapped as if he’d lost his fucking mind. “What?”

He ignored her. “Thanks for your time, Miss Bracca. If we need to contact you, you’ll be at your home?”

“Yes, I gave the number to the deputies.”

“She’s a material witness,” Hoffman said. “Put her in a goddamn cell!”

Munez looked at her, and it was clear that no matter how much Hoffman had wanted to belt me before, I was maybe coming in second in the hostility department right now. It was clear, too, this wasn’t the first time they’d had this fight.

“Well, Detective,” Munez said. “If this was your case, then that would be your prerogative, wouldn’t it? But it’s not—what I’ve got is an officer-involved shooting with cops from way out of their jurisdiction, and an armed and dangerous fugitive rolling through mine. The Lane County D.A. isn’t going to let me hold Miss Bracca here just because you think she’s lying to you about something up in Multnomah, and I happen to think she’s told us everything she knows about Mr. Quick.”

“Then hold her for twenty-four.” I had to give Hoffman credit for stubbornness. “Suspicion of murder for Christopher Quick.”

“And risk a suit for harassment? C’mon, Detective. Even if her GSR hadn’t come back negative, you and I both know she didn’t cap him, the brother did. There’s nothing in her vehicle or on her person tying her to the crime, and as far as I’m concerned, her story more than checks out.”

“I’ve explained this. You’ve got the pictures, you’ve got the people who did it, you’ve got the fact that her brother was murdered last week, her father disappeared this past Tuesday—”

“Tuesday, huh?” Munez got his things together, then went and opened the door for me. I got up to join him.

“I just need you to sit on her for a couple of hours,” Hoffman told him. “You can do that much.”

Munez smiled tightly at me. “You get back to Portland, Miss Bracca, you might want to file a missing persons report about your father. Been gone since Tuesday, that’s nearly forty-eight hours. We’ll call if we have further questions, like I said. You can talk to the deputy at the desk about your vehicle, he’ll tell you where you can retrieve it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I heard Hoffman yelling at Munez through the door as I went down the hall.

The female deputy was at the desk, and she gave me my car keys and directions to where I could find it. I thanked her and made my way to the Jeep. Thursday late afternoon, Parka Man’s deadline was Friday at noon. I’d make it back in plenty of time, but climbing behind the wheel, I knew how close a call it had been. Maybe Munez liked my smile, maybe Munez didn’t like Hoffman, maybe Munez just couldn’t be bothered; whatever the reason, I’d gotten out lucky.

I pulled out of the garage, onto the street, and Marcus was there, and he raised a hand to flag me down. I stopped but didn’t get out of the car.

“Headed home?” he asked.

“Why? You gonna be back tonight?”

He made a slight, almost amused grunt, but there was a weight on him, now, a shadow, and he looked tired. “Somebody’ll be there. We’ve got a mountain or three of paperwork that’ll have to be filled out.”

“About me?”

“We fired several rounds at Mr. Quick as he was departing. The whole incident has to be accounted for.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“For?”

“I’m pretty sure you guys saved my life.”

“And here I was about to tell you how close you came to losing it.”

“Trying not to think about that.”

“You know, Miss Bracca, it wasn’t just you who almost died. Quick was throwing those bullets our way when the shooting started.”

“I’m glad he missed.”

“Not as much as we are.” There was no mirth in it. “Don’t you think it’s time you stopped dicking us around?”

The sky had gone to a late-afternoon blue, and there was purple rising to the west with the sunset, rain-heavy clouds. I hoped it would hold off until I was home.

“No, huh?” Marcus asked.

“You want to ask me anything else,” I said, “you’ll have to talk to my attorney.”

Marcus stepped back from my door. “We will. See you tomorrow, Miss Bracca.”

He went back inside, and I went for the interstate.

CHAPTER 35

First thing I did when I got home was get out of my new clothes and into a hot shower. I’d gotten stuck in traffic coming into town through the Curves, the winding portion of Five that descends through the South Hills before you hit the Marquam Bridge, and that’s when the sky had really opened, and I’d begun to feel an itchiness along my legs, and I’d convinced myself it was Chris Quick’s blood, dried and flaking on my skin.

When I was dry and dressed again I checked my voice mail, and among the garbage was a message from Chapel. He wanted to see me first thing tomorrow morning, and said that Hoffman and Marcus had been in touch.

I fixed myself dinner, a pot of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and I really wanted a drink or three, but kept myself to a couple of cigarettes and a diet Coke. I’d given things a lot of thought on the drive up from Eugene, and the only conclusions I’d come to were that I didn’t really have any conclusion at all, and I was getting very scared, indeed.

If Brian Quick was the Parka Man, and if he was on the loose, then he now needed me as much as I needed him. But if he had another accomplice aside from his brother, then maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Why Brian had shot Chris, I didn’t know, but greed seemed like a good motive for it. Remembering Anne’s reaction to the scent of my money in the air, there was certainly a precedent for it in the family.

Maybe Brian had decided he didn’t want to share a million dollars with his brother.

So the question really was, did I believe that Brian Quick and the Parka Man were the same person? And I just didn’t know the answer to that. If I trusted my memory, the voices didn’t match.

It was obvious that Brian and Chris were responsible for the pictures. They’d been at my home the night I’d returned from the tour, Chris inside, working on the cameras, Brian waiting outside. And when Brian had seen me, he’d seen all of their preparations for my return vanishing with my untimely arrival. He’d been so focused on keeping me out of the house, he’d panicked, and that’s how I’d ended up in the truck without my clothes. It explained why he hadn’t escalated; a rape would have sent me to the hospital, and maybe even more. All those cameras would have gone to waste.

Greed.

One or both of them had gotten into my home on several occasions, frequently enough to plant the cameras, to set up all the wiring and things that Burchett and his crew had discovered. If Brian could do that, then he could certainly bypass my alarm and take a fancy infrared photograph of me, then get out again without waking me up.

So there was evidence Brian could plan, he could do that. Yet he hadn’t anticipated me showing up in Junction City, and when I had, his first instinct had been to open fire, a panic response, like the night I’d returned home. He’d reacted as if cornered.

That wasn’t the Parka Man at all. The Parka Man had planned everything to the last detail, had predicted how I would react to the photograph, had been waiting for me at Mikel’s place when I arrived.

Which brought me back to the accomplice angle, but now I was out of luck. There was no one left. “You’ve sure grown up,” the Parka Man had told me, but everyone who knew that was accounted for. I’d seen Gareth Quick, and his Alzheimer’s had seemed real enough, especially when coupled with Anne’s hostility. Chris was in a Lane County morgue, and Brian was God Only Knew Where, intent on keeping the cops from sending him back to OSP. The Larkin brothers were supposedly in Alaska, and while I only had Sheila’s word for that, hatching a plot from Nome that would be contingent on knowing when I was in Portland just didn’t seem plausible.

What I needed to do was remember. Remember who it was I’d overlooked.

Who I’d forgotten.

The debate started around nine-thirty, while I was sitting in the living room with the Taylor, trying to rediscover what I’d wanted to play the night before. It wasn’t going well, and the more I fought it, the worse it went. My fingers ached, and wouldn’t take instruction right, gone sloppy, missing strings, too far from the frets. I was bearing down on the back of the neck too hard, and my left thumb started aching immediately, but instead of relaxing my hand, I fought it and gave myself more pain.

Then I lost my pick in the hole, and I had to shake it free of the chamber. When I finally got it out and tried again, I discovered I’d knocked the guitar out of tune, and almost every string had gone sharp, and the discord felt like it went straight up my spine.

Then I broke the high E on the Taylor.

I sat there with the silent guitar in my hands, feeling everything crashing over me. The smell of mint so strong I thought I would gag. Tommy, wherever he was, if he was still alive, and if he was, maybe that was worse, Steven, ashes, floating on the Pacific, and Mikel in his best suit in a box in the ground.

And I wanted a drink so bad, there didn’t seem a point in staying sober.

I wanted to get the bottle of Jack out of the pantry and pour myself a glass and blast myself into oblivion, and I couldn’t even do that, because once I had one, I knew I’d have another, and another, and another.

I’d never seen my father drinking liquor, only beer. It was my mother who had drunk Jack Daniel’s, always on the rocks, always in a dark glass, so she could pretend it was iced tea.

I was a liar.

I was an alcoholic, just like my father, just like my mother.

Maybe it was just time to admit that I was my parents’ daughter.

There was knocking on the door and I went to answer it, then stopped halfway down the hall. I checked from the window of the living room, pressing my face against the cold glass, and I could see a car parked across the street, and I could make out a woman on my porch, waiting at the door.

“Dyke Tracy,” I said, when I opened up. “What a surprise.”

“You drunk?”

It was a stupid question. I had the glass in my hand. “Go away.”

“We need to talk.”

“Oh?”

“Please.”

It was the way she said it, nothing behind it or in it except fatigue. I knew the feeling.

“Yeah, come in,” I said. “Fix yourself a drink. There’s even beer in the fridge, untouched, pristine. Are you off duty? You can drink off duty, right?”

I went to my cigarettes and lit one, watched as she moved through my kitchen. She went to the fridge and looked inside, brought out a bottle of beer. I clapped one hand on the counter in approval, because I didn’t want to spill my glass. She’d gone with the IPA.

“Click would approve,” I told her.

“You’re hammered.”

“Nailed, baby.”

She set the bottle on the counter. “That’s not terribly smart, Mim.”

“I’m not terribly smart, Tracy.” I took a gulp of my drink, maintaining eye contact. “Bet you don’t think I’m drinking iced tea, do you?”

She didn’t answer.

“It’s Jack rocks. It’s a man’s drink, but strong enough for a woman,” I said. She didn’t laugh. I finished what was in my glass, then went for the bottle to refill.

“They rushed the job on that computer they took from the Quicks’ place,” she told me.

“Shack. Not a place, a shack. I’ve been in places, they don’t look like that.”

“They found multiple files, images of you. They were in different stages of being doctored up like the ones that already went public.”

“I look forward to seeing them.”

“Thing is, according to Burchett and his people, there should be a couple gigabytes of video of you, just the raw video. There was no sign of it on the computer.”

“Maybe it was boring, so they deleted it.”

“They can check for that. It wasn’t there.”

I shrugged and sipped.

“I have a theory,” Hoffman said, after a moment.

“I have one, too,” I told her. “It goes, dinosaurs are thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin at the other end.”

“You quote Monty Python when you’re drunk?”

“It’s a theory.” I sat at the table, a little heavier than I had wanted to.

“I think the person who killed your brother is the same person who took your father,” Hoffman said. “And I’m beginning to think that’s not the same person who took the pictures. Brian and Chris, they were planning on their little spy game back at OSP. Chris took computer courses in prison, Brian studied to be an electrician. I think they only planned to spy on you, maybe ultimately to blackmail you.”

“They teach courses on kidnapping at OSP?”

“Not officially.”

“So what the fuck is your point?”

“I don’t think your father wanted to go with the person who took him. I think this person is the reason you’ve got a bruise on your throat and a cut on your forehead and swollen knuckles on your hand, and he’s why you spent today running up and down the I-Five corridor. I think you’ve been trying to figure out on your own who that person is, and that for some reason you think it’s someone from your days in foster care. That’s why you went out to see the Quicks, and that’s why you were trying to be so subtle about what we might have found at his place. Forging bonds. You were fishing.”

I looked at the ash forming on the end of my cigarette. She seemed to have paused for a breath, so I took another drink from my glass.

“According to my theory, you’re trying to get cash together, a lot of it, more than you can get easily by yourself. That’s why you went to see Graham Havers. I thought you were surprised to see us there, but now that I think about it, I think it scared you.

“Which means you’re coming up on the deadline, either expecting a call shortly, or maybe you’ve even received it, though given how shitfaced you are, I hope not the latter. Whatever, this call has instructions, telling you where to bring the money, where to find your father.

“Now, speaking personally, I like this theory, and, incidentally, so does my partner. We both like it a hell of a lot more than trying to fit you for a murder we’re not even sure has been committed, and that, if it has, we’re pretty damn certain you did not do. And this theory, it explains a lot of your behavior in such a way as to make it, if not excusable, at least explicable.”

“That’s a good word,” I said, dropping ash onto the table. I drained my glass and got up, went for a refill. “Explicable.”

“Any comment?”

“No.” I emptied the last of the bottle into my glass.

“No, my theory is crap, or no, you have no comment?”

“If you have questions you want to ask me—”

“Talk to your attorney. We’ll be doing that tomorrow. Right now, right here, I want to talk to you.”

“You are talking to me.”

“It’s a little one-sided.”

I got indignant. “I’m participating.”

“I almost got killed today,” Hoffman said. “Never had someone shoot at me before. But I almost got killed today. My partner, too. You could have died, too.”

“These things you say, they are all true.” I grinned. “Dyke Tracy.”

“Goddammit, Mim!” Her cheeks looked flushed. “Being lied to, it’s part of the job. But I have never encountered someone as stupid as you about helping herself. If I’m right, if you tell me that I’m right, I can get the FBI in on this, we can get a wiretap set. This kidnapper calls, we’ll be all over him. But if you keep this up . . . you keep this up, people are going to die.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and I didn’t even try to make it sound like I was telling the truth.

“Why won’t you let me help you?” She was almost pleading. “Why won’t you tell me what’s going on? What could this guy have over you that’s keeping you so scared and so silent?”

“You keep coming over to talk to me at night,” I said. “Even when you’re being Dyke Tracy, you come over here at night. Why is that?”

“I’m trying to solve your brother’s murder. I’m trying to find your father!”

I shrugged. “I thought maybe it was because of the thing you have for me.”

“That ‘thing’ is rapidly disappearing.”

“Really?” I put my glass on the stove, by the empty bottle, and took a couple steps toward her. She was standing in the corner, where the counter turned, the microwave behind her. The clock read seventeen minutes past eleven. “I mean, really? Because at Van’s party, it seemed like a very serious thing to me.”

“Knock it off, Miss Bracca.”

“Oh, Miss Bracca, huh? No thing, but I’m Miss Bracca, now?” I stopped right in front of her, looking up. “I thought you wanted me.”

The muscles in her jaw flexed as she closed her mouth. I liked her lips, decided to taste them again. When I tried to put my hands on her hips, she caught my wrists, pushing my arms down.

“C’mon, now you’re just playing hard to get,” I told her.

Hoffman tried moving me back, to get out of the corner. I let my weight come forward and my arms spread out. She had my arms extended out like I was playing airplane pretty fast, but I just kept falling forward, giggling, and she had to let go of my wrists to catch me when I pitched into her. I tried to get my mouth on a breast, through her shirt, and she shoved me back and then I was upside down, and looking at her ass. That was really funny, especially when my head started banging against it as she took me up the stairs.

She dumped me on the bed, and I tried to stop laughing and say something more, but then I started to not feel too good, and I had to close my eyes and hold my breath. That seemed to help for an eternity, and then, in the sudden dark, I realized what it was I’d just done, and then it wasn’t just my stomach that felt like it was going to erupt.

I tried getting up and slipped out of the bed, onto the floor on my side. My shoes were off, and my socks, and my feet were cold. The room was dark, and I realized my eyes were open, and that the lights were off.

“Tracy?” I called.

There was no answer.

I hoisted myself using the side of the bed, lurched for the bathroom. On my way in, I caught sight of the cable box, and the time.

It was twenty-two minutes past three.

When I made my way back to bed, it was a quarter to five.

I buried my head in my pillows, and fell asleep, waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

In daylight, I spent most of an hour worshipping the Porcelain God and regretting everything, every goddamn thing, I’d ever done, before I could begin to function properly. When I was finished I saw that I was still in my clothes from the night before, and my head was pounding, and I could feel my pulse beating in my thumbs. Undressing took time, and I nearly nodded off again in the shower, and when I realized that, I panicked and fell in the hurry to get out and get dry.

By the time I was dressed and ready to move, the clock was reading 10:48 A.M. I was heading out the back door when the telephone started ringing.

I hesitated, trying to figure who it was, and the thought that it was maybe the Parka Man was what finally got me to answer it.

It was Joan.

“Mim? I didn’t wake you?”

“No, I was on my way out, actually.”

“I can call back. . . .”

“I’ve only got a couple minutes,” I said.

She didn’t seem to have heard me. “It’s about Steven, I wanted to talk to you about . . . I was going through his things this morning. I haven’t touched them since he died and I was thinking that I should . . . I was really thinking that tomorrow I should start cleaning things out.”

I felt the pressure of the clock, the absurdity of having this conversation at this moment. Over the line, I heard voices, not kids but adults, and wondered if she was calling me from school.

“If you would come over?” Joan asked. “Give me a hand? I’d . . . I think I could use the support.”

“I’ll try,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t.

Her voice got harder. “It’s not the same as a funeral, and I know he wasn’t Mikel, but I’d think you could find the time if you wanted to.”

“No, absolutely. I’ll be there.”

It wasn’t that she heard insincerity; she heard the haste, and took that the wrong way, too.

“I suppose I’ll see you then. If you remember.”

She hung up, and I hung up, and felt the wound like an acid burn, lingering.

But there wasn’t time.

I had to get to the bank.

CHAPTER 36

Catherine Lumley moved to greet me with a big smile and an outstretched hand.

“Wonderful to see you again, Ms. Bracca.”

I know it was just the hangover, but it hurt my eyes to look at the smile. “We’ll be going upstairs, to Alex’s office.”

“Alex?”

“Rodriguez, your banker.”

She took me off the floor quickly, through a doorway and up a carpeted flight of steps. “You have something to carry the cash?”

I patted the strap on my shoulder, for my backpack. “All set.”

“Wonderful,” Lumley murmured.

We came into a quiet hallway with doors along both sides, and at the third down on the right, she stopped and tapped gently, not with her knuckles, but with her lacquered fingernails. I didn’t imagine anyone within could have heard the sound, but there was an answering voice immediately, telling us to come in.

Alexander Rodriguez was much younger than I expected, only thirty or so, and looking like he took his job very seriously. His tie was navy blue and boring, the knot at his throat so small, I wondered if it was actually a clip-on. He rose from behind his desk as we entered, and came around the corner, leaning forward with a hand outstretched.

“Miss Bracca, very pleased to finally meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

“Do you need anything? Water or tea?”

The hangover was making my mouth grow wool, and my headache was committed, so I nodded, which actually, physically, hurt. “Water.”

“Cathy?”

“I’ll be right back,” Lumley told me.

She went out as Rodriguez motioned me to one of the two chairs in front of his desk. I took the backpack off my shoulder and let it rest against my leg, and Rodriguez went back to his seat, moving some paper. One short stack he slid toward me, with a thick pen.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s the Currency Transaction Report. If you could just review the information, make any notes if something needs to be changed.”

I looked at the top form, saw the words “Internal Revenue Service,” and got immediately worried. “The IRS?”

“It’s a formality, part of the way they regulate cash movement,” Rodriguez said. “They’re worried you’re a drug dealer.”

“No, just a musician.”

“Same thing to them, maybe.” He smiled, friendly. “It just tells them where the cash is going when it leaves the bank. Very simple in this instance, since you’re both the withdrawer and the recipient.”

I skimmed, saw that my personal information had been recorded, my full name, where I lived, my Social Security number. Nowhere was there a check box for “using money to pay kidnapper” or anything like that. The form didn’t even need my signature, so I slid it back to Rodriguez, and he added the sheet to the stack on his blotter.

Lumley came back with a plastic bottle of water, and they both watched me, polite smiles in place, as I opened and drained it. Rodriguez handed me another form, this one a withdrawal request.

“Just fill it out like you would normally,” he told me.

While I did so, he got up and opened a filing cabinet in the corner, and was back at the desk when I finished. I signed my name precisely, and he took the request and pulled a card from my file, and I realized he was comparing signatures. When he noticed me watching, he dipped his head apologetically.

“We have to be thorough.”

“It’s nice to know you’re taking such good care of my money,” I told him, although the care he was taking was starting to make me nervous.

But both he and Lumley brightened with the compliment, and I realized just how worried they were about losing my business. Rodriguez tucked the signature card back in my file, replaced the file in the cabinet.

“If you’ll wait here,” he told me, “we’ll be back with the money. It won’t take more than ten minutes.”

“I’ll be here.”

They left, and I looked at the clock on the desk, then checked it against the watch on my wrist. The clock said it was eighteen minutes past eleven, but my watch said it was only a quarter past. I tried taking some calm breaths, telling myself that I had plenty of time to get back home before the call or whatever it was I was waiting on from the Parka Man. My stomach felt raw, and I wondered if draining the bottle of water had been such a good idea.

The door opened, and Lumley entered first, carrying a counting machine in both hands. She set it on the edge of the desk, ran the cord to the outlet in the wall. Rodriguez followed her, carrying a canvas sack with printing on the side, the name of an armored transport company.

“This is going to take another few minutes,” he told me. “We need to make certain of the count.”

Rodriguez set the bag in his chair and began pulling out stacks of bills, hundreds, one after the other. They were wrapped with paper bands around them, marking denominations of ten thousand dollars. Lumley had switched the counting machine on, and it was humming slightly. He unwrapped the first bundle, and fed it into the hollow on the top of the machine, and the hum grew louder, and the bills began snapping forward. He fed another bundle, and another, and the paper kept flowing, and Lumley gathered the stacks and wrapped them in their bands again, setting them aside.

It took another fourteen minutes before they were positive they had six hundred thousand dollars in cash. Sixty stacks of hundred-dollar bills, bundled one hundred bills each.

“All yours,” Rodriguez told me.

I opened my backpack and began shoveling the money inside. If they thought I was eccentric before, this confirmed it, and they watched, bemused, as I fought to get the last three bundles to fit. The zipper on the backpack stuck as I was trying to run it closed, and I had to muscle it before I could get the bag shut. Then I hoisted it on my arm, felt the weight pull on my shoulder.

Lumley offered her hand first, murmuring that if I needed anything else, I shouldn’t hesitate to contact her. I told her I wouldn’t, and appreciated all of her help.

It was Rodriguez who walked me to the door, saying, “You’re going to want to take that someplace safe immediately. It’s an awful lot of money to just be carrying around.”

“I’ve got it covered,” I told him.

He gave me his hand. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he said.

Back at home, I switched on the porch light, then went down to the basement and the Fender amp, pulled the duffel bag free, then got the boxes of press packets out of the closet. On the floor, between guitars, I transferred the six hundred thousand in my backpack into the duffel, and it fit with room to spare. I closed the bag and hoisted it, trying to guess how much it weighed now. Definitely more than the Tele, that was for sure. I had to guess it was close to forty pounds.

The clock in the kitchen was reading three minutes to noon when I came back up, and I saw the empty bottle out where I’d left it the night before. I dropped it in the trash and got the Johnnie Walker out of the pantry, cracking the seal as I went to check the living room window. I pulled some of the heat into my chest, then looked out in time to see the Ford pull up.

Marcus and Hoffman had followed me to the bank, but when I’d emerged, they hadn’t been in their car, and I’d made it home without them in my shadow. It didn’t take Mozart to figure out what they’d done, that they’d stepped inside and had a brief word with Lumley and maybe even with Rodriguez. I doubted either banker would have given the detectives the exact amount I’d withdrawn, but it didn’t matter. It was just one more piece to support Hoffman’s theory.

She was at the wheel this time, and I could see her speaking into a radio as I took another drink, feeling the warmth crawl into my limbs. Marcus, beside her, was leaning around, to take a look at the front of my house. I thought about stepping out and offering Hoffman an apology for what I’d done, the way I’d behaved, for all of it, and knew it wouldn’t do either of us any good. The only thing that would make it better would be me getting brave, telling them that it would happen today, that it would all be over soon.

But I couldn’t, so I took another swallow, surrendering, and all I could think of was how certain the Parka Man had sounded when he told me he would know if I talked to the cops, how he knew people, how I should lie to them. They expected that, he’d said, and Hoffman had echoed him just the night before, already used to my string of lies.

When I thought about it some more it made me bring the bottle down and backpedal from the window.

I was crazy, I had to be wrong, but when I took the Quicks away from the equation, put the spying and the cameras and the pictures all to one side and Mikel and Tommy and the kidnapping on the other, it made even more sense. It explained why Tommy had been so worried for me, why he’d tried to warn me after Mikel’s funeral, and why he hadn’t given Hoffman and Marcus anything when he’d been arrested. It explained how Parka Man could get into my house, not once, but twice, how he could deactivate my alarm without me or anyone else knowing.

Why the Parka Man was doing what he was doing, I had no idea.

But now I knew who he was, I was certain. If I could find him, if I could find where he had Tommy, then there might be a chance. I had to make a plan, to come up with a plan. All I needed was a little time.

Then the phone started ringing, and there was no time left.

CHAPTER 37

“This is going to be real simple,” the Parka Man said when I answered the phone. “Simple and quick. You want your daddy, I want my money. The sooner we finish, the happier we’ll both be.”

“I want proof he’s alive,” I said. “I want to hear him tell me he’s all right.”

“In a moment. Right now, you’re going to listen carefully to the following instructions.”

It felt like his words were swimming around in my brain, and I didn’t know if it was the alcohol or the fear or the still-fresh realization of who he really was. The thought that I would accidentally blurt out his name came over me, and I knew that if I let it slip, Tommy was as good as dead.

“First thing you do is lose the cops,” he said. “I don’t care how you do it. Once you break the tail, you get on the MAX, you take it out to PDX. Just ride it straight out there, don’t talk to anyone. Get off at the airport, then you take a cab, you go to downtown. You’re getting out at the corner of Northeast Everett and Third. There’s a bar, midway down the block. You go in there. At three o’clock, exactly, you get yourself a drink from the bar.”

“MAX, airport, Everett and Third, bar, drink. Then what happens?”

“Be there and find out. And be there without company, or it’s off, and your daddy never sees the light of day again.”

It was the way he kept repeating it, as if I hadn’t understood it, as if I hadn’t lived the past three days with the fear of what he’d do to Tommy in my heart and head at every moment.

“I’ve got your cash,” I said. “Now you put him on, you cocksucker, you let me hear his voice, right now, or you get nothing.”

He chuckled. “You sure you want to make that threat?”

“You want the money, asshole?”

There was another chuckle, but not as amused, this time, and then a rustle. I heard labored breathing.

“Tommy?”

“Miriam?” His voice was thin, as if he’d gone without water.

“God, are you all right?”

Another rustle, and the Parka Man came back.

“Three o’clock,” he said, and hung up.

For almost five minutes after he had cut the connection, I just stood in the kitchen, just stood there, thinking. Trying to find a way to get what I wanted, what I needed, without getting myself and my father killed. Because it was clear, so clear now, what he was going to do, what he had to do, if I was correct.

If Tommy knew who the Parka Man was, if Tommy knew he’d killed Mikel, then Tommy was dead as soon as he had the money. Which meant that by the time Tommy got in Charon’s line, he’d find that his daughter was already crossing the Styx; no way in hell was this guy going to let me live after he had the cash. If he was going to tie up his loose ends, he’d tie all of them up, and that meant me, too.

For a morbid moment, I wondered if he’d try to make my death look like an accident. How hard would it be? Musicians die with changes in the seasons, and it wasn’t as if I’d been living a very clean life. Maybe that was why he was having me come to a bar. Pour a bottle down my throat, the rest would be easy.

Maybe I’d get a tribute album, or fan pilgrimages to my grave.

Chapel’s office was downtown, I remembered. I’d have to cover a couple blocks on foot to do what I wanted to do, but it was possible, and if everything went well, it wouldn’t blow the schedule.

I grabbed the backpack, stuffed full, and the Taylor in its case, and went out to the garage, trying to get into the Jeep without Marcus or Hoffman getting a look at what I was doing, struggling with the weight. At first, it seemed like taking the car wasn’t maybe the best idea, that perhaps I could try to go it on foot. But the way Hoffman and Marcus had always been covered, the way there’d never been a gap in the surveillance in front of my house, made me think that there were probably cops out back, too. They wouldn’t have been doing their job if they were only watching the front door.

So I’d stick with the cops I knew. After all, they’d come this far with me.

It was twenty-six minutes to one when I pulled out, heading downtown, jockeying with the lunch hour traffic. I didn’t try to switch lanes or speed up or slow down, nothing to get them worried. It didn’t matter; they were already worried, and the one time I caught them close behind me, close enough to see them reflected in my rearview mirror, Marcus was grim behind the wheel, and Hoffman was again on her radio.

If there were others following me, I couldn’t spot them. Another thing I couldn’t control.

We crossed the river on the Steel Bridge, and it started to rain, spatters on my windshield that the wipers couldn’t quite cope with, as if it wasn’t sincere enough to require their best efforts. I turned at the light on Broadway, then again on Market, and pulled into the underground garage at Chapel’s building. When I took my ticket from the dispenser, I could see the Ford idling near the top of the ramp.

Come on, I thought. Follow me.

The bar went up, and I pulled forward, winding farther down, past rows of parked Beemers and Lexi and Acuras, then through a forest of SUVs. I found a space on the lowest level near the elevator bank, got out with my backpack, and locked up.

There was no sign of the Ford.

This is not going to work, I thought, as I got into the elevator. I am fucked, and this is not going to work.

My hands were shaking when I punched the button for the tenth floor. I had to shove them into my pockets to keep them out of sight, and when the elevator stopped in the lobby, I was glad that I’d done it.

Marcus and Hoffman got on the elevator.

“This is a surprise,” I said.

They didn’t answer, just went to the back of the car, fitting in behind me. It was funny in its own way, how none of us was even bothering to pretend anymore.

We rode another four floors, and the car stopped once more, and two men in nice suits got on, talking anxiously about what the market had done in Japan that morning. They got off again at seven, and when the doors were again closed, I turned to face Hoffman.

“I was a total asshole last night,” I said. “And I’m very sorry.”

“Passive-aggressive and apologetic,” Marcus remarked. “You’re very talented, Miss Bracca.”

“That’s what they say.” I was still looking at Hoffman. She was staring back, and I wasn’t even certain she’d heard me.

Then the elevator stopped and we all got out, and they followed me into the offices of my attorney. Marcus and Hoffman waited near the back of the reception area while I approached Joy at the desk. She got to her feet when she saw me.

“Is Fred expecting you?”

“I hope so. He left me a message last night.”

“Why don’t you have a seat, I’ll tell him you’re here.”

There was a clock in the room, hanging over a Tailhook poster, one I hadn’t seen before. In this one, I was standing beside Van, with Click on a riser just behind us. The clock told me it was seventeen minutes past one.

It was reading twenty-nine to two when Joy, back at her desk, answered her phone, and then told me Mr. Chapel would see me now. I rose and joined her, and Marcus and Hoffman stayed put, unhappy with the situation. They wouldn’t be kept at bay for long.

When we were out of the reception area and winding through the halls, I told Joy that what I really needed was a bathroom, and could she direct me to one. She veered off course, leading me to the restroom.

“I’ll wait for you,” she told me.

“No, don’t do that.” I gave her my best embarrassed grin. “Make me feel like a total princess, you have to wait for me while I pee.”

She laughed, like I knew she would.

“I know the way,” I said. “I can manage the rest.”

“I’ll let him know you’ll be right there.”

“Great, thanks,” I said, and then went into the bathroom before she could say anything else, locking the door behind me. I stood with my back to it, listening, and I didn’t hear her leave, but I didn’t hear anything else through it, either, so it didn’t mean much.

Thirty seconds, I told myself. Give her thirty seconds, then go. More than that, Hoffman and Marcus will barge in. Less, she’ll still be there, waiting.

I watched the second hand move on my wrist.

Then I unlocked the door and took a breath, stepped out as if I knew where I was going and what I was doing. The receptionist had gone, and the only people in the hall were occupied with their own affairs, and paid me no attention. I set off toward Chapel’s office, heard his voice, strained, coming from the area of Joy’s desk. I didn’t stop, hoping that he’d keep Marcus and Hoffman busy, but it still took me almost three more minutes before I found the fire door and my way to the stairs.

The latch echoed in the stairwell when the door shut behind me, and as soon as I heard it click shut, I started running, one hand on the rail, the other on the backpack strap, trying to keep it on my shoulder. I went fast, two, three steps at a time, too ambitious, and I almost fell twice, but I didn’t slow down, and I sure as hell didn’t stop. The hangover swelled in my head. Marcus and Hoffman wouldn’t take long to figure out I was ditching them, if they hadn’t figured it already, and the best I could hope for was that they’d go back to my car, thinking that’s where I was headed.

Their bad luck that Portland has such a wonderful light-rail system.

There were two men standing in the rain, watching the ramp into the garage when I came out of the building, and I guessed they were cops, and turned my back to them before I had a chance to find out. Hoofed it across the street, my shoulders aching with the weight of the backpack, then jogged to the MAX stop. I made it by ten of two, and there was a train waiting, and I jumped on without paying the fare, working my way to the front of the carriage and dropping into a seat. It wouldn’t be a problem until I was past the Lloyd Center, since fares in downtown were waived, but I didn’t think I’d have time to hop out and pay then, either, and the thought that I might get caught only compounded my anxiety. It would be just my luck to have ditched the cops only to get picked up again for not paying public transportation.

It didn’t happen, and I made the train switch and all the way to the airport without trouble. Halfway to PDX, I started looking around the car, wondering if maybe he was on board, if he was watching, but after a minute realized that was futile. I doubted he was actually following me; the runaround was more to make certain I didn’t get any ideas, I supposed. Like I was going to start doing that at this late date.

Like I’d recognize him without his ski mask and parka, anyway.

The rain was coming heavier when I got off at the airport, and I swung through baggage claim and back outside immediately, heading for the cab stand. There were three people in line, and my watch was reading two forty-one, and the tremor in my hands was getting worse. I wanted a drink, settled for a couple drags of a cigarette, and got a Broadway Cab to take me back downtown.

“Third and Everett,” I said.

The driver, already behind the wheel and pulling us into traffic, glanced at me in the mirror. “You mean Twenty-third and Everett, yeah?”

“No, I mean Third and Everett.”

He started to argue, eyes on me in the mirror, then shrugged. If the strange white girl wanted to go to the heart of bum central, that was not his problem.

“Hurry,” I told him.

Everett straddles the dividing line between Old Town Portland and Chinatown, and there are storefronts all around the area that date back to the turn of the century, and in some cases, earlier. I almost missed the bar, because I was late by my watch, and now even more frightened that I’d fucked everything up. The rain was coming down in sheets, cold and solid, like walking through a car wash, and I had to go down the block twice before I was certain I had the right place, an unmarked and smoked-glass door sandwiched between a porno shop and a Chinese antiques store.

Inside was everything you’d expect, dark and a little dank, with the bar along the left side, and booths along the right, and enough room between the two that I could fit, if I walked sideways. I was soaked to the skin, and the straps of the backpack had dug into my shoulders so hard it felt like my arms would go numb. I was shivering, and it wasn’t the chill that was giving me goose bumps.

The bartender was a woman, alcoholically aged, trapped somewhere between forty and seventy, with drawn skin and gin blossoms on her face. She stared at me and I thought for a moment that she knew who I was.

“Jack rocks,” I said, and dug out a twenty, slapping it on the bar.

She took the bill and grunted. My watch was reading six minutes past three. Rainwater dripped down my neck, and I could feel it soaking the back of my shirt. The fingers on my left hand had started throbbing again. There were only two other patrons in the bar, and both of them would have scared me if I wasn’t already so preoccupied with other fears.

The door opened as I waited for my drink, and Brian Quick entered, soaked from the rain.

I turned hastily away, felt the panic claw at my heart. If I was right, he shouldn’t be here, this didn’t concern him. And if he was here, then I was wrong, and everything I was planning was worthless.

I heard him move to the bar, demand a bottle of beer, and the bartender snarled back at him to wait a fucking minute, then slapped my change down in front of me, planting my glass on top of it. I took the drink in a gulp. It was watered down, and if it was Jack Daniel’s to start with, I was Nina Simone, but it lit a raw fire in my chest, and made me think it was what I needed.

Brian Quick received a bottle, focused on the television hanging over the corner of the bar. He could have been just another midday alcoholic for all the interest he had in the world around him.

I picked up my change, began folding it into my pocket, and saw a small slip of notepaper wedged between bills. I pulled it free, glancing again toward Brian, caught him taking a pull of his beer.

The paper read BACKROOM.

The door was set in the wall behind the final booth, and it opened into a storage room full of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves. I took a last look over my shoulder before pushing through, and the bartender was enraptured by the glowing box again, but Brian had twisted on his stool, watching me go. When I stepped in, I didn’t see any lock for the door. A couple of kegs stood in a corner, and a single, naked bulb gave the only illumination. There was no one to be seen, and I thought I’d trapped myself, had started to turn around and head back out when I saw the other door, only about half-height, between two sets of shelves. The door was metal, old, and slightly ajar.

It opened into a chute of some kind, and there was a ladder propped against the wall. I looked down, and in the dim light saw a rough dirt floor maybe fifteen feet below. The walls on either side of the chute were stone, and the air smelled stale and perpetually wet. When I listened, I could hear the echo of water dripping onto stone.

There wasn’t any more time. I adjusted my backpack, and slipped through the opening onto the ladder, feet first. The alcohol wasn’t doing its job, and even when I gripped the rungs tight, forcing my injured fingers to close around the wood, they still kept shaking.

In the room above and behind me, I heard the door swing open, Brian coming from behind.

I’d been right about one thing. Whoever was doing this, they planned to leave me dead.

And they’d picked a perfect place to do it, a place where perhaps hundreds had died before me.

This was the Portland Underground, sometimes called the Shanghai Tunnels, and the reason that the City of Roses had earned the dubious honor of being called the Worst Port in the World. No one knew who had first constructed the tunnels, but they’d begun operation around the 1850s as a means to hold and move, to buy and sell, human beings. Thousands of men and women had disappeared through them during their days of operation, either taken by force or drugged into submission, dragged off the streets, most never to be seen again. It was a business, run by men called crimps, who would sell males as sailors and the women as prizes. They called their earnings blood money, and sometimes took as much as fifty dollars a head. Captains in port would request a crew, and the captured men would be drugged yet again, then loaded onto the ships this time to awaken in the Pacific, sold into slavery, on their way to ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong and Macao. Some eventually made their way home, voyaging for years to pay for their return. Most never made it home at all.

When I was sixteen, I’d written a report for school about the tunnels. I’d gone to the library and looked at microfilm of newspapers from the 1930s, read the accounts of men like Bunco Kelly and Stewart Holbrook. The tunnels had reportedly been in operation into the early 1940s, and I’d had nightmares that they were still used, that I would be walking downtown and the ground would open in front of me, and I would be put in a cage and chained and sold to a harem somewhere.

Somehow, that seemed more appealing than what I was facing now.

I hit the bottom of the ladder, trying to find the source for the light. It was out of sight, around a bend, a soft glow that made the tunnel seem darker. The sound of the water was louder here, and there was a wind that raced along the stone, whining for attention as it found me and slid up my legs and down my shirt. The water on my back got colder, and the shakes got worse.

Above me, I heard the metal door swing open, hit the stone wall with a clang.

I put one foot carefully in front of the other, trying to remember how to breathe as much as walk, moving toward the light. My steps made echoes.

I was ten feet or so from the bend when he came around the side, setting a battery-powered lantern on the ground. He was dressed the same as he had been all the times before, still wearing the black mask. His hands were out and empty, and he seemed larger than he had before, and I stopped cold when I saw him.

“You were late.”

I nodded.

He raised a hand and indicated the backpack on my shoulder. “Toss it over.”

My voice sounded hollow and ethereal when I said, “I want my dad.”

“Toss it over here.”

In my jeans, my knees felt like they were turning to gelatin, trying to slide down my shins. I let the backpack slide off my arm, let the strap fall into my hand.

Behind me, Brian Quick said, “Half of that’s mine.”

The gun came out from beneath the parka as if it were a living thing, ready to leap on command, and it was up and pointed before I could begin to react. But not before Brian, apparently, because he shoved me hard to the side, snatching the backpack free with his other hand, and I hit the wall on my shoulder and bit back a cry.

The only thing that made the pain easier was that the Parka Man was now pointing his gun at Brian Quick.

Brian Quick, however, had brought a gun of his own.

“The fuck is this?” Parka Man asked. I thought it was directed at me.

“I’m your partner,” Brian said, before I could speak. “I’m the guy who’s made it easy for you so far.”

“Is that so?”

“You killed her big brother, asshole. You killed her brother, but instead of cops coming after you, I’ve had them chasing after me. I gave you room to work.”

“I didn’t ask for your help.”

“You got it anyway. How much you hitting her for? Fifty K? A hundred? We split it down the middle, right now, we never see each other again.”

Parka Man didn’t move, and neither did his gun. Unlike Brian, he held it in both hands, his knees bent in a slight crouch.

I tried to straighten up, using the wall.

“You fucking don’t move, bitch,” Brian snarled, adjusting his grip on his gun. His tongue stabbed out, wetting his lips. “You and me, we’re not done.”

“You’re the pervert,” Parka Man said. It came out soft, but there was no mistaking the realization in his voice. There was no mistaking the mirth, either.

“I’m no perv, asshole,” Brian said, agitated. His hand was beginning to jump, and I wondered if he sampled the product he and his brother used to cook. “I’m a goddamn entrepreneur, I had a fucking sweet system going, then you came along and fucked it up.”

“Did I?”

“Fuck you, man, I’ve got the money here, you want to take a shot? I fucking bought you time! We split this straight, fifty-fifty.”

“No.”

“Dammit, I fucking earned this, this is mine! I take half, at least I’m left with something!”

“You’ve already got something,” Parka Man said. “You’re still breathing.”

Brian fired.

The gunshot was so loud it made my whole head ring, and I saw the Parka Man stagger back, and I thought that was it. I turned my back to the wall, started to push off it, driving toward Brian, knowing I was next, knowing he wouldn’t wait, couldn’t afford to count.

I was looking right at Brian when the bullets hit him. He had started to turn, and the first shot hit him in the side and made him bend, and then the second hit his neck, and made him twirl and spray. I faltered, catching myself, scrambling to reverse my balance and momentum all at once, and I fell backward, into the wall again.

On the ground, Brian’s right arm twitched.

I covered my mouth, turned away, and Parka Man was back on his feet, one hand clapped to his chest. Through the black parka, I could see a fuzz of white. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear him, the gunshots still playing in my ears.

Parka Man gestured at Brian with his gun, then at me, and I understood that nothing had changed, that he intended us to resume where we’d been interrupted.

I stepped over to the body. Brian had fallen on the backpack, and I had to roll him to free it. I couldn’t look at his face.

“We’ll try this again,” I heard the Parka Man say. His voice sounded strained, fighting pain. “Send it over here.”

I used the strap, tossed it toward him. It landed short about four feet, and the thud echoed on the stone.

Parka Man reached for the backpack, leaning forward and down, and it was clear just from his body language that I didn’t threaten him at all, that he was sure there was nothing I could do to him physically. I hated him for being right.

He knew something was wrong the moment he lifted the backpack, and I wondered if Brian hadn’t ruined it for me, if he hadn’t turned things so sour that Parka Man would lose his temper and send me bleeding to the floor, too. When he ran the zipper back, I could see the violence in the movement, the mounting suspicion. Once the backpack was open, he stared at the contents for a moment before turning it upside down and emptying it out. The sound of the paper hitting the dirt floor of that tunnel was like distant slaps, and it echoed like a blow against soft flesh.

Then he just stood there, staring down at the photos, the black-and-white promo shots, me and Click and Van, Tailhook triumphant together. I’d raided every press kit, filling the backpack to capacity, and the images slipped like a glossy puddle around his feet, reflecting the shadowy light.

“Is this supposed to be funny?” Parka Man asked me. “Is this supposed to be a joke?”

“I want my dad,” I said. “You don’t get shit until I get my dad.”

He dropped the backpack, brought the gun up in both hands. “You get your father after I get my fucking money, not before!”

The shout made me wince, took a couple of seconds to echo away. The muscles in my chest were trembling, now, I felt like all of me would start to shake apart at any second.

Somehow, I said, “I want my dad. You don’t get shit until I see him, until I see him walking away from you.”

“Little Miriam, you’re about to become little dead Miriam.”

“You shoot me you get nothing, you did all of this for nothing.”

“Where’s my money?” he screamed.

“Somewhere else! Somewhere else, you kill me, you don’t get it!” I was screaming back at him, just as loud, and certainly far more hysterical. “Where’s my dad?”

He ran his thumb over the back of the gun, and there was a metal sound, clicking.

“Fucking kill you right here, little girl.”

I closed my mouth, willed myself to keep breathing.

“Then do it,” I told him. “Just do it and don’t waste my time anymore.”

The gun rose slightly, then settled on me again, and I saw the tension ride up his arms, saw his eyes readjust inside the hood, and I thought that this time he was going to go all the way. This time, I would die.

But he didn’t shoot. Instead, he said, “Your daddy’s just fine, Miriam. He’s just fine, I’ll let him go as soon as we’re done.”

“You’re going to kill him as soon as we’re done. You’re going to kill me, too. I’m not the sharpest fucking tool in the shop, but I’ve figured out that much. So you have to decide something, you have to make up your mind. You want the money or don’t you?”

“You’re so sure you’re a dead girl, why you willing to deal?”

The tremor was in my voice, and I hoped he bought it simply as fear, and not as something more. “Because it’s a million dollars, it’s cash, and with it you can go anywhere you want, wherever you want. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. I just want my father back. So we meet someplace, you pick where, but it’s in public, someplace you can’t shoot me, someplace you can’t shoot him. And when I see him, when I see my dad walking away, you get your money.”

He didn’t respond and the gun didn’t move, and I tried to get my breathing back under control, tried to slow it down, afraid I’d hyperventilate.

“You think I’m stupid?” he asked, finally. “You let this prick follow you, you think I should trust you?”

“I don’t know about Brian,” I said. “I didn’t know he was there, and I swear I don’t know how he found me, I don’t know why he was here. I’ve got you your money, like I promised, that’s all that matters. You can have it, but I want Tommy. Pick the place. I can have the money there in an hour, I swear to God. Anyplace you want, just in public, just bring my dad.”

“We play this your way, I’ve got cops coming out of my ass before the money’s in my hand.”

I shook my head, desperate for him to believe me. “No! No cops, God, I don’t care about the cops! This is about my dad and your money, that’s all this is about!”

Again, he went silent, and this time, I did, too. There was nothing more to say to him. I’d dropped the score in front of him, shown him the parts, and either he’d play or he wouldn’t, and I couldn’t press him anymore. But he was thinking about it. Trying to find a way to have his cake and eat it, too.

“Five o’clock,” he said, deciding. “Pioneer Courthouse Square, five o’clock. Be on the south side, the steps. I bring Tommy, you bring my money.”

I nodded, hardly able to speak, and he lowered the gun and turned, and went away, his steps floating back along the stone, hiding in the echoes of the water, mingling with the memory of crimps and blood money deals, old and new.

CHAPTER 38

I went to the Jeep first, still parked in Chapel’s garage, and got the Taylor out of the back. There were no cops as far as I could see, but it didn’t change the fact that I felt like I was being watched as I walked with the guitar case to the Starbucks on the corner of Morrison and Broadway, on the northwest corner of the Square.

Once inside, I got in line to get a cup of coffee. The shop was busy, with a mix of men and women, teens to fifties. The majority were high schoolers who’d come downtown to get an early start to their weekend; the rest professionals, out of offices a few minutes early, stocking up on caffeine before the commute home, or shoppers, ready to hit the boutiques in the nearby Pioneer Plaza.

Nobody was paying me any attention. I bumped one of the kids with my guitar, gently, playing at an accident, then offering an apology. The kid didn’t even look back at me.

Van never had this problem, she could draw eyes to her without effort, and hell if I knew how she did it. Now, here I was, finally wanting—needing—the world’s attention, and if I was on radar, it was as a soggy chick with an old guitar case.

When the barista, twenty-two at the most, handed me my java and change without even a flicker in her face, I realized what I was doing wrong. I went to sugar the coffee, keeping my head down this time, and avoiding eye contact altogether. One of the teens was stirring cream and cinnamon into a foamy drink in front of me, and I did the guitar move again, the nudge. This time I didn’t apologize, and focused on my coffee.

It took him twenty seconds.

“Excuse me,” the teen said. “Aren’t you Mim Bracca?”

I hemmed, then sighed and nodded.

He grinned. He’d been in a group with four others his age. They were a mixed group, pretty clean looking, three boys and two girls, and as soon as I’d confirmed I was who they’d thought I was, they all surged forward, as if to take a better look.

“I love ‘Queen of Swords.’ ”

“Are you feeling better? They said you were sick, MTV said you were sick.”

“God, all that stuff about your brother and those pictures, I’m so sorry, that so blows.”

“Is that your guitar? Of course it is, I mean, are you going to play? Are you playing somewhere?”

“I have all of the albums, all of them, I mean, I was a fan before you guys were popular.”

I smiled and nodded and said, “Hey, yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot, that’s wonderful to hear. Yeah, actually, I was thinking I’d do some playing.”

More questions, more babbling, more attention. Half of the clientele belonged to me, as Graham would have said. My demographic, and the more I talked to them, the more pressed forward to listen.

I asked the young man, the first one, what his name was, and he looked so pleased and surprised that I cared, I almost felt guilty.

“Ray,” he said, almost as if he’d forgotten it himself for a moment. “I’m Ray.”

“I’m Ted.”

“Lynn.”

“Grace.”

“Aidan.”

“Deedee.”

“Roxy.”

“Shawn.”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Mim.”

They laughed, warmly, and I smiled with them, then made a show of checking my watch. “Damn. I’ve got to meet a guy on the steps.”

A chorus of “ohs” and “wells” and sighs, the brush with fame apparently over.

“You guys really like the music?”

Nods and “yes” and “hell yeah” and “totally” and even a “you guys rock.”

“You know, I’m working on something,” I said, reluctantly. “I’d love to hear what you guys think. Can you give me twenty minutes and meet me down there?”

Ray, the young man who had found me first, took command. “Twenty minutes? Hell yeah, we’ll totally be there.”

“About five o’clock,” I said.

Eager faces, more nods, and I told them I would see them shortly, and when I stepped outside, easily half of them were already dialing their mobile phones, calling their friends, telling them to hurry. Outside, there was no glimpse of Hoffman or Marcus, and no one in a black Columbia Sports Wear parka. The rain had all but stopped, and so had the wind, and people were lowering umbrellas, shaking them out as they hustled along the sidewalk.

I understood why he’d picked the location. Pioneer Courthouse Square is an open city block, red brick, and on its east side it faces the old Pioneer Courthouse. It’s flat, but built on a slope, and tiers—or steps—run along its north, west, and south sides, descending to the open floor. There’s no specific entrance to the Square, and no exit, and you can get in or out from any point with ease. Traffic runs along all four sides, one way, with the westbound MAX trains running up Morrison and the eastbound ones coming down Yamhill. People loiter in the Square, people cut through the Square, people stop to chat in the Square. They come with lattes and chai teas, they buy hot dogs and crêpes from the vendors.

Now the Square was mostly empty, with pedestrians stepping around puddles as they moved through it. In another few weeks a Christmas tree would go up, and a month or so after that, the place would be packed for New Year’s Eve. There would be pageants and fairs for those who had acquired permits, and people would come, because it was one of the most popular places in town.

He could come from any direction, leave from any direction. From any corner, he’d be able to take in all of the space. He’d spot me in an instant and I would never know, because I didn’t even know what he looked like outside of a ski mask and black parka. If he didn’t like what he saw, he could leave without even breaking stride. Those were his advantages, why he’d chosen this space.

I could only hope that they didn’t outweigh my own, a growing mob of teenagers clustered in a Starbucks, watching me through the windows.

I took a seat on the south side of the Square, on the steps about four rows from the bottom, setting the guitar case to my side. The brick was cold and wet. The clouds had gone higher, but the sunset was making it difficult to gauge them. I didn’t want it to rain; guitars like to stay dry.

I’d dropped a new set of strings in the case, so I got out the Taylor and replaced the missing E, thinking that Steven would be chewing my ass if he didn’t see me replace the other five, too. But I didn’t have time, and if he had been there and known what was happening, maybe he would have forgiven me. It took all of six minutes to get the string placed and tuned, and I put the Taylor away and shut the case when I was finished.

My hands weren’t shaking anymore. I thought about lighting a cigarette, sat watching the people pass. Up at the Starbucks, the cluster of teens had emerged. The group had already doubled in size, and the mobiles were still going. Modern communication, letting all their buds know about my impromptu concert. All were trying not to be obvious about looking my way.

For my sake and theirs, I hoped they would be convincing.

Four minutes to five, by my watch.

A police car went by, driving up Morrison. It was the second I’d seen in the past three minutes. It was moving slowly, but that was probably due to traffic. I craned my head around, trying to see if there were others, and then I saw Marcus standing at the northwest corner, near Starbucks.

No, I thought. God no, please no.

Hoffman was at the northeast corner, the one in front of me, to my right.

They had to have picked me up when I’d gone back for the Taylor. They had to have been watching the car, knowing I’d come back for the guitar.

I checked the other corners, southeast and southwest, saw men and women loitering, talking. Which were cops?

I looked back at Hoffman, but she wasn’t looking my way, watching as a MAX train came to a stop on Morrison.

They had the same problem I did, I realized. They knew they were waiting; they just didn’t know who they were waiting for. Like me, the lack of knowledge trapped them. Parka Man would have to make the first move.

But there was no sign of him. I’d hoped he’d take my terms, that he’d decide the money was his first priority, that Tommy and I only came second. It had seemed to make sense when I’d conceived it: he would hesitate, then decide killing us could come later, after he’d secured the cash. I’d put his greed ahead of his self-preservation.

Apparently, I’d been wrong. Now, Tommy would be dumped in the Willamette, and some night soon, I’d wake up in the dark to find a gun at my head again. Only this time the photographs would be taken hours later, and by technicians who had maybe been to my house once already.

A new train pulled to the stop on Morrison, began kicking out passengers. I glanced at my watch, read a minute past five. The desire for a drink seemed to rise with the cold beneath me.

When I looked up, a man in a black parka was coming down the stairs on the opposite side of the Square. He was taking them slowly, one at a time, pausing after each, and after the third, he stopped and surveyed the area, and then his gaze snagged on me.

Even fifty feet away, Tommy didn’t look good. He tottered unsteadily, as if drunk, as if he might lose his feet at any second. But it was him, and he was alive, and beneath the swollen bruises visible on his face, I saw him try to smile.

Despite it all, I smiled, too.

There was the splash of a foot in a puddle from behind me, and I felt the spatter touch my neck and cheek. In my periphery, I saw a man’s knees as someone settled himself on the step behind me, to my left, and in the distance, on the corner, Hoffman turned my way, saw the same thing, but she didn’t move.

The man pushed the guitar case with his toe.

“Don’t turn around,” he said.

Tommy was still standing where he’d stopped, maybe under instructions not to come any closer, not to leave. His feeble smile had vanished.

The man brought his head low, closer to my ear. “I’ve got a gun at your back,” he said. “Any tricks, boom boom boom.”

My fans were still at the Starbucks, now almost thirty of them, maybe more, and I looked their way. Ray, their leader, saw me, and it confused him. Then he checked his watch and gestured to the group, and they began coming toward me, loping down the steps.

“Where is it? Is it in the case?”

I reached out and flipped the locks, then lifted the lid, showing the contents. The Taylor lay in its bed of worn velvet, beautiful. I took it out, and rested it on my knee.

The kids were off the steps, coming toward me, grinning and joking and happy. Tommy hadn’t moved, and across the gap, I saw his concern. Marcus was coming down from the sidewalk, making for him. Hoffman was standing still.

A pressure dug against my back, high on the right side, below my shoulder blade. The voice was a hiss.

“Dammit, where’s my money?”

I didn’t say anything, fighting my injured fingers into position. Ray, leading his group, stopped in front of me, and I lost the view of my father, of Hoffman. More than thirty of them, and a couple latecomers running our way, desperate to reach us in time to hear the show. Some began swiping pooled water from the steps, taking seats, smiling and murmuring.

The pressure against my back increased, and his mouth came lower, and I felt stubble brushing my ear. “Make them go away,” he whispered. “Goddammit, make them go away or I’ll shoot you right here.”

“No,” I said, and if the gathered crowd hadn’t heard the threat, they certainly heard me say that, and several turned accusing eyes on the interloper at my shoulder. I lowered my head, checking my fingering, and pulled the melody I’d been fighting the last few days free from the Taylor.

“We’re not early, are we?” Ray asked.

“You’re right on time,” I told him, letting my fingers wander the strings, letting the music come. “Everyone? This is Detective Wagner.”

Everyone said hello to the man behind me, the man holding the gun on me. The pressure in my back sharpened for an instant, and he thought about doing it, then, I know he did. It took a second more before he realized exactly what I’d done, and that if he pulled the trigger now, he’d never get away with it. Even if my murder meant nothing, he’d have thirty fanatics to contend with, and all of them now knew his name, whether he denied it or not. They’d heard me, and they would remember.

“Do me a favor, Ray?” I asked.

Ray loved that I knew his name, it was in his face. He had blue eyes, and they adored me. “Anything.”

“You see a guy in a parka behind you?”

Ray turned, and in the space between him and the others, I saw Marcus with an arm around Tommy, helping him off the steps and to the street.

“Just that guy,” Ray said. “That the one you mean?”

Behind me, I heard Wagner shifting again, maybe getting ready to leave.

“That’s my dad,” I told Ray.

Wagner moved the gun from my spine to my neck, and it wasn’t as cold as I remembered it this time. The teenagers needed a second, realizing, and then it started, and there was a cry, and they began scrabbling away.

Wagner dropped his hand onto my shoulder, taking my jacket in his fist, trying to pull me up. “Come on.”

I started up, still holding the guitar. In front of me, Ray and his friends were backing off, confused and bewildered and terrified.

“Come on, you’re coming with me,” Wagner said again, harsher.

“No,” I repeated, and I pulled forward, and his grip came away.

“I’ll kill you.”

I turned and looked past the gun, and met his eyes.

It was the same man. Older and sadder, maybe, but fear can do that to you. His mouth had gotten smaller and the muscles in his face had grown looser, and he’d lost hair as much as he’d lost dignity.

“You damn bitch,” he said, and his voice cracked. “You damn bitch, you’re as stubborn as your damn father, why couldn’t you do this? Why couldn’t you just let me have this?”

I just stared at him, not answering. Behind, all around, there was motion, voices, action, but it was fading, the world contracting to encompass only me and my guitar and an aging cop with his gun.

“You owed me this,” he spat. “All I wanted was the money, all I wanted was what I was due. Damn you! You wouldn’t have any of this if it hadn’t been for me! You would be nobody if I hadn’t done what I did for you and your brother!”

“You did nothing for us.”

“I saved you, I protected you! You fucking think I didn’t know who was behind the wheel? You think I didn’t know who was lying, what really happened? I took your father away so you could have a goddamn life!”

There was a taste in my mouth, metallic and sharp. The gun in Wagner’s hand was almost vibrating, his face twisting.

People shouting. Movement in my periphery, men and women in blue and in plainclothes, holding guns of their own. Someone was screaming my name.

“You killed my brother,” I said.

“He didn’t give me a choice!” The gun no longer wavered.

A voice told him to drop it, loudly. Another one told me not to move.

“You owed me,” Wagner said, quietly. His eyes danced around, as if seeing the trap for the first time, seeing the teeth of it closing around his life. He brought his eyes back to me.

“You owed me,” he said again.

Then he brought his other hand up, and the cops who had the shot took it, then.

The echo was louder than any audience had ever been as it caromed off the brick all around me.

CHAPTER 39

This is the song I can never write, because I lie the way we all do, because I lie about the obvious, I ignore all the facts in favor of a more comforting fiction. The way Wagner and Brian and Chris Quick did. All of us creating fictions, making reality out of a fistful of rain.

Like Mikel in the pickup truck, and Tommy getting out to raise a fist at my mother for blocking the drive. Mikel not wanting to see that again, not wanting to be helpless one more time. Mikel, in driver’s ed, thinking he knew enough, sliding along the seat and pulling the shift down to drive, looking over his shoulder.

Thinking he was in reverse.

The engine falls silent.

The girl feels weightless and dizzy, and doesn’t remember turning to look at what has happened. She doesn’t know if she is running or walking or floating to the entrance of the garage. She cannot hear the sound of her father opening the cab of his pickup, tearing at the handle in grief and rage, and she cannot hear the words her brother is mumbling and crying as he is torn from behind the wheel to sprawl on the glistening grass.

She cannot hear her father cursing and pleading, her brother’s apologies turning him younger than even the girl herself.

Most of all, she cannot hear the sound that her mother is making, caught between the wheel and the ground.

She whirls away, but when she looks down the length of the driveway, she sees a spread of blood merging with the rainwater in the gutter.

Her father reaches for his boy and girl, but only the boy is rescued in the strength of that arm.

The sunlight vanishes behind a freshly loaded cloud.

It starts to rain again.

When Chapel arrived at the police station he made me go over the whole thing, then made me do it again for Marcus and Hoffman. They didn’t need much from me; they’d already spoken to Tommy. It was Chapel himself who explained where Brian Quick had come from.

“He was in my office when you came by,” my lawyer said. “He’d called, said he had information about the video taken of you, that he was willing to sell it to me for a nominal fee. He pretended he was the middleman, claimed there was raw video stored on some portable hard drives, that he could get hold of them very easily.”

“We found them on Brian’s body,” Hoffman said.

“We’d like them destroyed.”

“They’re evidence.”

“Then as soon as you’re done with them, I want them returned to Miss Bracca.”

“Brian was in your office?” I asked.

“That’s why I kept you waiting,” Chapel said. “Needed to move him to another room. I didn’t want him seeing you. When Joy buzzed me that you were in reception, he must have heard it. I went to find him after you’d run off and he was gone, too. I can only assume he followed you.”

“Or got out ahead of her, followed her then,” Marcus said.

“Possible.”

“Way we’re looking at it now, Brian had a falling-out with his brother. Probably about just what to do with the video. Chris was the tech head. If he had decided to write the whole thing off, all he had to do was delete the drives. We’re thinking Brian killed him to keep that from happening, to keep his brother from destroying his big payday.”

“Then you pulled up,” Hoffman told me. “And Brian recognized the vehicle, thought it was his chance to make that money.”

There was silence in the room for a minute.

“Are you charging her?” Chapel asked them, going back to business.

Marcus chuckled. “We’re thinking of slapping a fine on her, for playing in the Square without a permit.”

“She can go,” Hoffman said. There was no smile. “Her father’s been taken to Legacy Emanuel.”

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Couple cracked ribs, some broken fingers, a lot of soft-tissue damage. He’ll be laid up for a few days. The worst of it is dehydration. Wagner didn’t provide much in the way of bread and water.”

Chapel rose, waited for me to follow him. I didn’t move yet. Instead, I said to Marcus, “I want to thank you.”

“You could have avoided all of this,” Marcus said. “All you had to do was tell us the truth.”

“I was scared Wagner would find out.”

“He probably would have,” Hoffman said. “He still knew people in the department. But we’d have stopped him anyway.”

I nodded, and then all of us, Chapel, Marcus, Hoffman, and myself, went to meet the press.

There were questions, so many questions, and reporters, too many reporters, and they wanted to know all of it, everything that had happened. It took most of an hour for the press conference to run its course, and Chapel had instructed me to stay quiet for the most part, until the end, when I read a statement he’d prepared about how glad I was that my ordeal was finally over, how happy I was that my father was okay, and how sad I was that Mikel was dead.

When I was asked about rejoining the Tailhook tour, Chapel said, “Miss Bracca’s going to be taking some time off to recover from the events of the last two weeks.”

When I was asked about the pictures, Chapel said, “No further questions.”

Saturday morning I went to see Tommy. He was in a room with two other patients, in bed and awake. The bruises on his face were purple and black, and he had stitches on his lip, heavy with dried blood. When he tried to smile at me, the stitches pulled, and he had to stop.

“I’ve been lying here, wondering if you’d come by. Wondering what you’d call me when you did.”

“I was thinking of sticking with Tommy.”

“This guy, Steven, he must have been some guy.”

“He was.”

“I’m glad you had that. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

I pulled up a chair, dropping the magazines I’d brought him on his stomach. He set them aside, turning his head to look at me.

“The detectives, they’ve told you what I said?” Tommy asked.

“I came to hear it from you.”

Tommy felt the edges of his mouth for fresh blood before answering. “Ran into Wagner by accident. He’d known I was out. I’d given Mikel’s number and address for my own when I registered for unemployment. I was at my meeting, I go to an AA meeting up in the northwest, by the synagogue up there, and he was there when I came out one night. He must have followed me from Mikel’s but he didn’t say, he didn’t say much of anything.

“Just that he had done me a favor, and he felt he was owed something for it. That it must be nice having a daughter who was so talented and so pretty and so rich. I told him all that was in spite of me rather than because of me.”

He stopped, looking up at the ceiling. I used the pitcher on the stand to pour him a cup of water. He drank it slowly.

“Go on,” I said.

“He said he wanted money, that he could make things bad for me if I didn’t get it for him. He said, since my daughter is so rich, she can spare some money. Not too much, he told me. Maybe fifty thousand. She’ll hardly miss it.”

“I hardly would have.”

Tommy rolled his head, meeting my eyes. “I told him I didn’t talk to you, I hadn’t talked to you for fifteen years. He said he didn’t care. He said it’d be easy to hurt you, that it wouldn’t take much. Someone famous, he said, it never takes much. Just some smack planted in your house, an anonymous call, that would be all he needed to do. He said he probably didn’t need to plant anything, the media would destroy you.”

“That’s why you came to see me,” I said.

Tommy took another drink of water, then settled against his pillows. When he went on, he picked a spot on the ceiling to speak to, not me.

“I just . . . I told myself I just wanted to see you, with my own eyes. Not on a television, not in a magazine. It went so badly, and you started shouting, you started offering me money, and I had to get out.

“I was so angry. I kept blaming you, kept thinking I should just take the money like Wagner wanted, that it would serve you right . . . and I hated myself for even thinking that. So I did what I always did when I hated myself. Not right away, I had to work myself up to it. But that Friday, I couldn’t find a job . . . and I started drinking. And you know how that goes.”

I did. “Was Mikel there?”

“I went out to buy more beer. When I got back, he was dead.”

“Wagner told you he’d shot him?”

He shut his eyes, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “He said he’d come by to see what was taking me so long. Mikel recognized him. Wagner said he attacked him, he laughed about it, said it was funny that my drug-dealer son was more concerned about protecting his family than I was. They fought, and Wagner shot him.”

We both fell silent.

“I had to hate you,” I told him. “Do you understand that? I had to blame you for everything you took away, because I didn’t want to give you the credit for anything I have. But Mikel never would have done time, Tommy. No judge would have sentenced him for a mistake. He was a kid, a scared kid who made a stupid mistake, that’s all. He never meant to hurt anyone.”

“You knew.”

“I remembered.”

Tommy shook his head. “Wagner wasn’t anything. He did us a favor. I wasn’t a good parent, and that wasn’t going to change. A good parent doesn’t beat his wife and doesn’t drink until he passes out and he doesn’t take drugs. A good parent doesn’t pour her bitterness on her children, deny them pleasure because she’s had it denied to her. We were destroying your life.”

“You gave me my life. You gave me my first guitar.”

“A piece of shit Silvertone in a house with a mother who would never let you play it.”

“You’re the one who gave me music, Tommy.”

“That’s not all I gave you.”

That afternoon, I finally went to Joan’s and helped go through Steven’s stuff, and we finally had it out, she finally let all the anger loose. I took it and gave none of it back, because I deserved it, and when Joan was finished we both could finally share the grief each of us had been holding in for so long. We had dinner at Riyadh’s, ate kafta patties and falafel, and I told her about everything that had happened. She held my left hand in hers, examining my fingers.

After dinner I dropped her at her home, then went back to mine, eager to be warm and safe. The million dollars was still in the duffel, and I thought it was stupid as hell to just leave it there, but there wasn’t anything I could do with it until Monday morning, when the bank opened again.

I thought about calling Hoffman, and decided against it.

Instead, I plugged the Tele into the VOX AC-30 and worked on some exercises, trying to speed my fingers along their recovery, and when I was tired and happy, I went up to the kitchen for a smoke and a drink, to celebrate my job well done.

It was Monday afternoon when I came to, lying on the kitchen floor, half-naked and feeling more than half-dead. When I managed to start moving to survey the damage, it shocked me. The kitchen was a mess, and the living room, and the music room.

The Taylor was in fragments on the floor by the foot of the stairs, strings and splinters, neck snapped from body, utterly beyond repair. Marks on the banister and the pads on the floor showed where I’d struck the instrument again and again, battering it apart.

I sat on the bottom step, staring at the corpse, and I tried and tried and tried, and I couldn’t imagine why I would have done such a thing. There was no reason, none at all.

Just seeing that Halloween pumpkin I’d carved with my mother, how I’d shattered it against the door of our house when the police had taken my father away.

Van called me that night, from Glasgow. I was at the sink, a cigarette in my mouth, bottle in my hand, trying to accept the rest of my hangover, and the ring sliced through all of the noise like it was made especially for my suffering. When I answered, I was surprised it was her.

“You have a minute?” Van asked.

I shut off the tap and said, “Sure. How’re you doing?”

“How’re you?”

“Turned a corner,” I told her.

“That’s really good to hear.”

There was a transatlantic pause.

“Clay’s not working out,” Van said.

“I’m surprised.”

“He just doesn’t have what it takes. He’s got chops in the studio, Mim, but you put him onstage, he’s like furniture. If you heard what he was doing to your arrangements, you’d cry.”

“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

“No, it’s that bad, Mim, it really is. Graham and I were talking, and Click, too, and we’re supposed to be playing a couple gigs in the Midwest starting Wednesday, then on through the South. We were wondering if maybe you could meet us in Chicago.”

I looked at the row of bottles on my counter.

“I can’t.”

“If you’re angry, if you’re holding a grudge, I can understand why you’d be doing that. But this is about the band, and we can’t keep putting Clay—”

“You were right to send me home, Van.”

“What?”

“I said you were right, and I need to stay here, now. I need to dry out, I need to learn how to stay that way once I get there. I’m hoping that by June I’ll have it mastered. Until then, call Birch, or someone else.”

She gave me more of the transatlantic silence.

“I have to do this,” I told her.

“Good luck,” Van said.

I hung up, went back to dumping the last of my bottles down the drain.

Tuesday morning, I picked up Tommy at the hospital. He was expecting me to take him straight to Mikel’s, but I told him first things first, and drove him over to a shop on Hawthorne that I liked, called Guitar Crazy.

I bought him a used Taylor acoustic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The technical aspects of this book were many, and those who contributed their time and knowledge are too numerous to name. That being said, special thanks must go to the following:

The members of Audio Learning Center: Chris Brady, Paul Johnson, and most particularly, Steven Birch. Wonderful musicians all, talented beyond compare, and each generous to a fault. To Steve in particular, thanks for everything, from the first steps to the final lap. Shameless plug for their album Friendships Often Fade Away.

Special indebtedness to one of the most fabulous couples it has been my pleasure to know—Judd Winick and Pamela Ling, M.D. Unique insight, brutal honesty, great humor, and yes, I know it’s not so much a visual tremor as a verbal tic, but it’s so much more dramatic when it’s written that way.

To Nunzio Andrew DeFilippis, who leapt for the over-the-wall catch and made the save not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions. Like the ladies before her, Mim loves you.

Thank you to Gerard V. Hennelly, without whom no acknowledgment would be complete. You know dangerous things, and are always willing to share. Thanks as well to Nancy Hess, for taking the time to speak with a total stranger, and better, to speak honestly.

To John W. Patton and Courtney Dreslin; the former for taking time better spent at better tasks to research the hypothetical, and to do so very thoroughly; the latter for not only fielding the first questions, but enlisting the former in answering the second . . . and third . . . and fourth . . . ; additional legal thanks to Harvey Mittler and N.M.R., and to Brad Meltzer, for pointing the right way.

To the Cats at Oni Press—Joe Nozemack, Jamie S. Rich, and James Lucas Jones—break out the reading pants.

To Matthew Clark, for patience.

And finally, to Jennifer and Elliot. I’m back. Sorry I was gone so long.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GREG RUCKA was born in San Francisco and raised on the Monterey Peninsula. He is the author of several novels, including four about bodyguard Atticus Kodiak, and of numerous comic books, including the Eisner Award–winning Whiteout: Melt and Queen & Country. He resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Jennifer, and their son, Elliot.

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