Boston Noir [редактор Деннис Лихэйн]

EXIT INTERVIEW
BY LYNNE HEITMAN

Financial District

It had been one of those weird sticky cool summer days in downtown Boston, the kind that are as hot and humid as they’re supposed to be until the breeze blows in off the water and all of a sudden it’s freezing cold and the air stinks of salt and fish and brine. Sloan hates days that start out one way and then turn into something else. They make it harder to dress for work. She had spent most of last night trying to decide what to wear to the office today. Around 3 a.m., she’d settled on the pink summer-weight St. John knit instead of the blue Tahari because Mother loves the St. John. Says it makes her look svelte. Too bad Mother won’t get to see that she’s wearing it for her big day. She tugs the skirt up around her waist, but it sags back and settles on her hip bones. This suit has never really fit, and the dark blue Tahari would have hidden the bloodstains better.

The steady churning of the helicopters grows louder. Sloan flattens against the wall and peeks out into the night from behind one of Trevor’s fancy Japanese shades. With the interior lights blazing, all she can see is her own reflection staring back. More than once she has wanted to rip those silly shades from Trevor’s windows because who has an office on the thirty-seventh floor and covers up the view? Tonight, as flimsy as they are, she is glad to have them.

Her stomach cramps hard and doubles her over. She slides to the floor, which is where Trevor lies faceup, staring at the ceiling with the same look of surprise he died with. Sloan had never seen anyone die, not before today, but she’s been to plenty of funerals. She always assumed that the way you look in the casket is the way you looked when your life ended. But she’s had time to ponder this and it’s now making sense to her. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. The light goes out and there is no time, no spark, no thought or impulse left to change the expression of absolute terror or disbelief or regret-whatever you were feeling the moment the bullet entered your brain and blew half of it out the gigantic hole in the back of your skull.

Her cell phone erupts in what had been until today her favorite Bach sonata. She taps the earpiece. “You said I had twenty minutes.”

“You do, you do. I’m not trying to rush you. I’m just sayin’ it doesn’t mean we can’t do it in less. Or that we can’t spend the twenty minutes talkin’.”

“I need that time. I need to think. I need…” It burns where the earpiece’s hook has irritated the layer of soft skin around the top of her ear. These things were never meant to be worn for five straight hours.

“Talk to me, Sloan. What’s going on up there?”

She wishes she could see her hostage negotiator, but she doesn’t know where he is. He can somehow see her, though. She’s sure of it. Thinking about him watching over her makes her feel calmer, but he has the frustrating habit of asking the same questions over and over.

“I think you know, Officer Tarbox, that what’s-”

“When did we switch back to Officer Tarbox?”

“What’s going on in here, Jimmy, is the same thing that’s been going on for the past five hours, and you promised me another half hour ten minutes ago.”

“I’ll keep my word. You know I will. Have I let you down any? Have I lied to you even once? No. I’m just checking in to see how you are. I want to know that you’re okay and that everything’s still on track. If we’re not talkin’, I don’t know what’s goin’ on.”

“You just want to know how Beck is.”

“How is Beck?”

She glances over at Cornelius Beckwith Nash III, graduate of Exeter, Yale School of Drama, and Harvard Business School; Olympic rowing team alternate and scratch golfer; lead manager on the biggest portfolio of the growth team at Crowninshield Investment Management Company. Yet as impressive as he is, she’s not sure any of those experiences have prepared him for being lashed to a chair for five hours with a telephone cord and computer cables. He’s also sitting in his own sewage, which can’t be comfortable, but it was his own fault for coming into the office to investigate instead of running the other way. He’d soiled his pants almost the second he’d walked in. Between that and Trevor’s brains on the wall, the room smells worse than any paddock she’s ever been in. But you can put up with anything, Sloan has learned, if you have to. You just can’t put up with it forever.

“Beck is fine.”

“Good. That’s good. Can I talk to him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Because she doesn’t want to hear any more about little Max and littler Ian and if she takes off Beck’s gag, all he’ll do is cry about how his sons need him and how they’ll miss him, and she already knows everything she needs to know about little Max and littler Ian. They go to Fessenden, spend summers on Nantucket eating watermelon, and will one day grow up to be strapping blond boys of privilege from the finest business schools who, given the chance, will pass her by. Just as their father had. But she doesn’t like it when Officer Jimmy is not happy with her, so she gets up from the floor keeping her knees closed and turned gracefully to the side, heads over to Beck, takes off the earpiece, and holds it in front of him.

“Make some kind of noise.”

The corners of Beck’s mouth are split and caked with blood and dried spit where his $200 Zegna tie-gag is pinching. She knows he can moan-he’s been doing it on and off for hours-but right now he seems comatose, frozen with his eyes open.

She shakes the earpiece. “Do it.” But he doesn’t and now she has to figure out how to make him. She hates the idea of touching him. The gun would be good for that. It’s too heavy to carry around, so she keeps putting it down. Right now it’s on Trevor’s desk. But Beck is reading her mind. Before she even moves, he rolls out a few dry croaks and she wonders if the back of his throat is somehow pasted to the front.

“See?” She fits the earpiece back on her ear. “He’s fine.”

“All right,” says Jimmy the officer. “That’s good. Now we need to start talkin’ about how to resolve this thing. We’re at this five…going on six hours here, and you still haven’t told me what you want.”

“I was supposed to have half an hour to think about it and you only gave me ten minutes.”

“You know we can’t let this thing drag on forever.” Only he says forevah. For all the things she likes about Jimmy Tarbox, the one thing that grates is his accent. “Let’s talk about how to get you and Beck out of there without anyone else getting hurt. Let’s figure this out together.”

Sloan’s stomach has settled, which means she can fall back into pacing the comfortable loop that runs between the conference table and the bookshelves, past the leather couch, the grandfather clock, and Beck, behind Trevor’s desk, along his wall of photos, and back to the corner where the two walls of windows meet. Trevor is still wearing his raincoat and holding the handle of his soft leather briefcase in his right hand. Falling backwards, his left arm had hooked over one of his conference table chairs and pulled it down on top of him. His right leg is bent underneath him. He looks like a chalk outline. She steps over his head to get back on course.

“I can’t come out. No one will understand what happened here.”

“I understand. I know you didn’t mean for all this to happen. You didn’t get up this mornin’ sayin’, ‘Today I’m going in to plug my boss.’”

“No.” God no. This was supposed to have been the best day of her life. After picking the St. John suit, she had fallen into bed and actually slept for two hours. Waking refreshed, she had decided to forego the planned cab ride and walk to work instead. She usually walked for the exercise, but today she had noticed things. People in soft pants and flip-flops out on the Comm. Ave. Mall with their dogs, yawning and standing by with their baggies until there was a pile to clean up. The flowers in the Public Garden. Even the accordion-playing busker on the Common sounded good to her. She’d seen him there often, sitting on the same low brick wall under a tree, squeezing out sad French ballads, collecting tips from the well-dressed army of posers and wannabes making its weary way to the Financial District for another day in the MUTUAL FUND CAPITAL OF THE WORLD! She had never given him a penny. She didn’t believe in rewarding mediocrity. Also, he smelled.

But today she had admired his work ethic. Today she had slipped a twenty into his collection cup because everything was good and everyone was kind and even living in Boston wasn’t so bad because today, after six long years in this second-rate backwater town, she would be named Managing Director. She would cross the magic line, get her ticket punched, and one day soon, get back home to New York where they would surely have to take her seriously now. Best of all, she would never again have to explain to Mother why Bo, James, and Danny had made MD before her. Sure they were two, four, and seven-and-a-half years younger, but they were also young, strapping boys from the finest business schools and the investment industry had no place for smart females-or any females-who didn’t answer phones, fetch coffee, or give blowjobs to important clients.

“Sloan?”

“What?”

“Am I talkin’ to myself here?” Officer Jimmy is making his point, but with a light touch, and she wishes she had learned how to be that way.

“You were saying it makes a difference if I hadn’t planned on shooting Trevor today.”

“Exactly. That it wasn’t premeditated. We can work with that, and we can do some things here so the situation doesn’t get worse than it is.”

Uh-oh. Here it comes. She knows what he’s about to say because he’s said it a hundred times already.

“The biggest thing is you got to let Beck come out.”

She breathes in deeply, pulling in the fetid and humid air that has filled the office ever since they turned off the air conditioners. As they always seem to, her grinding molars find the scar tissue inside her left cheek and the taste in her mouth changes. She’s bleeding.

“Why is everyone so concerned about Beck? Beck is fine. Beck is more than fine. He got promoted today. Or was it yesterday? He gets to be an MD, and do you know how long it took him? A year. I’ve been here six years and I’ve been up for MD the past four. Do you know who the biggest alpha generator around here is?”

“You?”

“For the past two years.”

“What’s an alpha?”

“Alpha generation…it’s just a way of showing who earns the most for the firm, who the best stock picker is, and it’s me. Do you know what they told me last year? ‘We can’t promote you because you’re too volatile. Everyone’s afraid of you.’ And the year before that? ‘We can’t promote you because you’re too quiet. No one ever knows what you’re thinking.’”

“Take it easy. I’m not trying to upset you. I’m trying to get you to think through this thing logically with me. People will be coming to work in a few hours. You and me, we have to be done and out of here by then.”

She takes a turn too fast and nearly bangs into the corner of Trevor’s desk. She uncrosses her arms and takes her fists from her armpits. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be strung along year after year, to get your hopes up and then get told…to have to sit and be told all the things that are wrong with you?”

“No, I don’t know what it’s like to be in your position-your work position or the one you’re in now. But I do know what it’s like to get passed over. I got passed over for this job six times.”

He’s saying all the right words. He’s saying he understands because that’s his job. But she hears it in his tone. You stupid bitch, he’s thinking. You had everything-the money, the Back Bay condo, the friggin’ horse farm in Millbrook. The shopping trips to London. And you do this? This is what you do? You stupid, spoiled rich little bitch.

She grabs the earpiece, holds it directly in front of her mouth. “I made two and a half million dollars last year. What did you make?” Hits the button to end the call, and just like that Jimmy Tarbox is out of her head.

But her head throbs. From the heat, maybe. Or dehydration. She pushes back against it with the heels of her hands against her eyes. She holds her jacket open and fans it, trying to air out. All night she’s resisted taking it off-she never takes her jacket off in public-but it has to come off. It’s too hard to breathe. What to do about Beck? She goes over and grabs the high back of his chair. It annoys her that he doesn’t flinch anymore when she approaches. She turns him to face the wall. He can stare at Trevor’s collection of golf photos.

Instead of gliding off, the jacket’s silk lining sticks to the damp insides of her elbows and she has to wrestle with it. Mother would be mortified. She settles it onto the hanger on the back of the door and stands with her arms wrapped around her. Spider-arms they used to call her, all the girls back at Monsignor Xavier Prep. She looks at Trevor’s face. What had high school been like for him back in Manchester or Sheffield or wherever he was from? Probably no one ever called him names, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know much of anything about Trevor.

Bony Sloany. That was another one. She had hated high school with every fiber in her bony body. Except for the stables. The horses and riding had saved her. These days, all that saves her is Rowan. She closes her eyes and tries to think of him. He can usually calm her down, but right now her head is too jammed.

When she opens her eyes, there is Beck. She should kill him. Put the gun to the back of his head, pull the trigger, and put him down, all without ever having to look upon his classically handsome face again. She’s already killed Trevor. Why not just do it now and let this end?

Because she hadn’t really thought it through with Trevor.

She’d caught him trying to sneak out of the building without talking to her. Not even sneaking. Just walking out as if she hadn’t been sitting in her office all day waiting for his call. As if she hadn’t skipped her daily caramel latte to cut down on trips to the bathroom. As if she hadn’t spent the long hours of the afternoon rocking back and forth at her desk, staring at the blinking cursor on her Bloomberg screen, and pleading with God not to let it happen again because she could feel it happening again. Falling and falling, waiting to hit the concrete, picking up speed with every second that ticked by with no call from Trevor. So she had prayed, asking God not to let her have anything else taken away.

And then she’d heard the vacuum cleaner, and the vacuum cleaner only ran on her floor after 7 o’clock in the evening. She’d come out of her office to find the entire floor abandoned except for the summer intern-Hailey? Hallie?-huddled over the printer. She’d moved toward Trevor’s office, slowing down as she went, not knowing if she was more afraid to find him there or gone. He was there, all right. Impossible to miss. Blustery blowhard Trevor holding forth. The voice on the other side of the conversation hadn’t been as loud, but she had recognized it. Trevor and Beck talking, voices brimming with excitement and manly good cheer. The tone had been clear, but the words were covered by the sound of the approaching vacuum. She’d thought they might be talking golf.

Her phone is singing again. She reaches for the earpiece and finds nothing but ear. Can’t remember taking the thing off. She follows the Bach and finds her cell on the conference table.

“Hello?”

“How you doing, kid?”

“Fine.”

“How’s Beck?”

“Same.”

“I have to ask you to stop hanging up on me. The bosses are getting sick of this thing. You’ve got bosses. You know what I’m sayin’, right?”

He’s skipping over the fact that her boss is a corpse in a $6,000 Brioni suit and a TAG Heuer watch and that she’s the one who made him that way. He’s acting as if she could surrender to him and then go home tonight, eat a banana for dinner, maybe walk over to Emack & Bolio’s for a scoop of fat-free vanilla yogurt in a cup. Make it last for an hour while she sits and watches the cool kids on Newbury Street smoking and laughing and texting. Then she could come in to work tomorrow, maybe wearing the dark blue Tahari, and show up at the morning meeting as if nothing had happened. Of course, Beck would be the new MD on the growth team, or maybe they would just slot him into Trevor’s job as CIO and promote some other strapping young boy from a fine business school to MD. Pick any of them-Justin, Peter, Shamir. She’d still be a senior portfolio manager. She would always be a senior portfolio manager, which was why she’d had no choice but to take the.22 out of her bag and shoot Trevor through the head.

“I have to ask you this to make sure,” Jimmy says. “Don’t get upset, but your father keeps calling from New York. Are you sure you don’t want to talk to him?”

She knows why Daddy is calling and she knows why Mother isn’t. Mother is lying perfectly still in some dark room with a damp cloth on her forehead and a few dozen milligrams of Percocet coursing through her veins. Daddy would be more worried than upset. Worried about his cash flow. “Doesn’t matter what they call you,” he always tells her, usually in front of her MD brothers, “as long as the bonuses keep rolling in.” Bo, James, and Danny were too smart or too selfish or both to keep investing in his hedge fund, which really meant tithing over some growing percentage of her annual bonus and calling it an investment so that Mother wouldn’t be humiliated by another of Daddy’s busted ventures. Eventually, Daddy had stopped asking her brothers for money. “They’re married,” he’d told her. “They have families of their own to feed.”

Sloan’s legs feel like dead weights, so heavy. She walks to the couch and crashes down. “I don’t want to talk to him, and if you make me, I swear I will hang up and you will never hear from me again.”

“I can’t make you do anything, remember? You’re in charge. We’re doing things your way.”

“Then stop asking. Tell him to stop calling.”

“Consider it done. Is there anyone you want to talk to? Who’s this Rowan?”

She smiles, envisioning Officer Jimmy thumbing quickly through a stack of background information on her that someone has dumped in his lap. “My horse.”

“Your horse?” There is shuffling and mumbling. “Okay, I see it here now. Holy smokes, he’s a beauty. Is he at your horse farm?” More shuffling. “Where is this Millbrook anyway?”

“ New York.”

“ New York is a big state and I’m sitting here without my Google.”

That’s a lie. He’s probably sitting there with every possible source of data at his disposal, but she doesn’t mind playing along with Officer Jimmy. “It’s in the eastern part of the state, close to the Connecticut border.”

“How long’s it take you to get out there?”

“Three and a half hours.”

“You just go 90 west?”

“To Route 22.”

“Yeah, I have no idea where that is.”

“If you keep going on 22 you get to Poughkeepsie.”

“If you say so. How often do you get out there?”

“Every weekend.”

“Wow. You must really like the place.”

There isn’t a word strong enough to describe how she feels out there. Millbrook is her escape. She makes the drive every Friday after work, rain or shine, happy or sad. She stays through Sunday night and drives straight to work on Monday. There is space out there. There is grass and air that smells nice. In the winter there is clean snow that stretches on forever.

And Rowan.

She closes her eyes and conjures him. She smells his barn and feels him moving under her hands as she curries his withers. The grooms always put him on the crossties to clean him, but not Sloan. She scratches all his favorite places and smiles when he curls his neck around to give her a playful nudge every time she finds another with the hard bristles. Then she rides him and feels his calm and coiled anticipation as he gathers himself for a jump, then the explosion, the thrust high into the air and that feeling of flying, just Rowan and her, her face so close that his mane brushes her cheek.

She pushes at the tears with the back of her hand and gets to her feet. “I’m turning off the lights. It’s too hot in here. I’m also putting up one of the blinds, just so you know.”

“Just so you know, I don’t control the snipers. I’m not the one in charge of the scene.”

“I don’t even have the gun. It’s on Trevor’s standing desk.” She looks around for her earpiece so she can have both hands free, hopes the battery hasn’t run down.

“What the hell is a standing desk?”

“All the CIOs have them. It’s a power thing.”

“What’s a CIO?”

“Chief Investment Officer.” She finds the earpiece on the floor near Beck’s chair and switches the call over. “But Trevor didn’t want one like everyone else, so he…actually, he had his assistant Nicole do all the research and she found this mahogany antique that was used by Charles Dickens. It cost the firm over $100,000 to have it restored and shipped from London.”

“A hundred grand? Jeez, that would have covered both my kids’ college tuition.”

The light switch is by the door. This time as she passes Trevor, she reaches down and tips the chair off of him, setting it back on its feet. She flips the lights off and feels instantly better, cooler. She rolls up one of the fancy shades and then, what the hell, does them all. She opens all the windows of the corner office to the nighttime view. It is magnificent, even at 2 o’clock in the morning. She feels as if she’s floating out over the harbor, just another of the lights moving across the water. They must be ships, those lights, and she wonders what life would be like living on a moving vessel. Logan has airport lights: red ones, green ones, bright beacons, flashing fast and slow. The runway lights look like jeweled bracelets laid out on a black velvet pillow.

The glass window feels cool, so she presses her cheek against it, the side without the earpiece. “Will the snipers shoot me?”

“Why would they shoot you while we’re still talkin’? And so long as you’re leaving Beck alone? How is Beck? Does he need any water?”

“Do you care what happens to me?”

“I’ve spent all night talkin’ to you. What do you think?”

“I think you care about what happens to Beck.”

“I do. And I care about what happens to you. That’s no bullshit. I want you to walk out of there.”

Trevor’s body is hard to see in the dark, but she knows it’s there. “Why would you care? Why would anyone care? I’m a murderer.” She’s been trying all night to feel the weight of that word and how to wear it. Mostly she feels how Mother will wear it.

“Listen, kid, I deal with all kinds in this job. I can tell the wackos and I can tell the ones that just got pushed too far. You get pushed around and pushed around until you can’t do it anymore and then something happens. It’s just a wrong-place-wrong-time-bad-chain-of-events kind of a deal, and if one thing had gone different yesterday, maybe none of this happens. Am I right?”

The sky is another sight to behold. The moon lights the clouds from behind, making them seem transparent and solid at the same time as they rush through space.

“What are the names of the islands, Jimmy?”

“What islands?”

“Isn’t there something out there called the Harbor Islands?” She’s seen them a thousand times from Trevor’s office.

“Sure, but there’s somethin’ like forty”-fawty-“of ’em out there. You never went to any of them?”

“I never did. Tell me some of the names.”

“Long Island, Sheep Island…There’s a little one called Grape. I went swimming once with my brothers at Spectacle. It used to have great beaches, but then the city used it for dumping all the Big Dig dirt, so I don’t know what it’s like now. Deer Island is where they have the shit plant.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sewage plant. One of the Brewsters has the oldest lighthouse ever. Georges Island has a Civil War fort. I went to both of those on school field trips when I was a kid. There’s a Sarah’s Island. I always remember it because that was my ma’s name.”

“Where are you from?”

“ Haverhill.”

“Where are you right now?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

She scans the building at State Street and Congress, the only one tall enough for him to be looking down at her. But it’s a huge black mirrored tower that reveals nothing. “Can I see you?”

“I’ll spend all the time in the world with you, but you gotta let Beck come out of there. And you need to come out too. What you have to keep in mind is that you’re still young and you deserve to come out of there in one piece. You need to give yourself that chance.”

Another requirement. Another trade-off. Another contingent offer. She slides down the window and sits with her back to the north, looking out over the water. “Was it supposed to rain today, Jimmy?”

“If it was supposed to, it never did.”

“It just struck me as so odd that he was wearing a raincoat because I hadn’t heard anything about rain today and the whole time we were having our meeting he never took it off.”

“Trevor?”

“I was standing outside his office listening to him talking to Beck. And then Beck came out and I wanted to go in. I assumed it was my turn, that he was just running late with his meetings. I didn’t want to look too eager, so I went to my office and packed my things and came back.”

“Make it look all casual, huh? Like you were just leaving and stopped by.”

“I was standing there trying to get up the courage to walk in, then he walked out and nearly ran me over. He wasn’t happy to see me, I could tell, but he wouldn’t show it. You know what he said? ‘Brilliant!’ As if it was a stroke of grand good luck that I was standing right there. ‘Of course I’m still here, you bastard. You told me yesterday not to leave today without seeing you because you would have good news for me, which is why I spent the entire day locked in my office afraid to go to the bathroom, because I was waiting for you to call me, you pompous, self-centered ass.’”

“You said that to him?” Officer Jimmy’s voice holds a hint of respect, and for a moment Sloan feels as if they really are buddies in a foxhole. But she hadn’t actually said any of those things to Trevor.

“We came into the office and he stood behind his desk.”

“His hundred-thousand-dollar standing desk?”

“I’ve never seen him use that. No, he stood behind his sitting desk, but he didn’t sit and I could tell he didn’t want me to sit, but I did anyway. Then he opened his desk drawer and without looking reached in and took out an envelope, and I tried as hard as I could to come up with a good reason why my bonus check was the only one left in the drawer, and why it was after 7 o’clock and the only reason he was talking to me at all was because I’d caught him trying to slip out, and why if it was good news he hadn’t already given it to me.”

“I hear you.”

“When he pushed the envelope across the desk, he gave me one of his looks where he cocks up an eyebrow. ‘I think you’ll be very pleased with that.’” She tries to capture not just his accent, but his condescending tone. “I just sat there with this pain in my stomach and a horrible sensation running up and down my back and I thought…I really thought I was just going to die sitting right there waiting for him to tell me.”

“You sound like you were in shock.”

“But he just stood there, still in his raincoat, doing one of those things where you glance at your watch without wanting someone to see that you’re doing it.”

“Prick.”

“Then he said, ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ and I said, ‘I didn’t get it, did I? I didn’t get MD.’ He looked at me and I could see what he was thinking right on his face. You bitch. You ungrateful little cunt. I know that’s what he was thinking because I’ve heard him say that word before and he wasn’t even trying to hide it, how much he hated me. How much he loathed me for not letting him go home or to the cigar bar or…wherever. That’s when I knew.”

“What did you know?”

“That I was never going to get MD.”

Sloan pushes herself up from the floor, but falls back against the window. Her skirt comes all the way up her thighs as she tries to find her balance. No food for almost two days. No water since early afternoon. The heat. It’s all starting to catch up with her and she’ll pass out soon. She finally makes it to her feet.

“No matter how good I was, no matter how much money I made for them, they were going to keep telling me I was this close and to hang in there and that next year would be my year. And then next year would come around and they’d promote someone like Beck because they like Beck and they can talk about golf with him.”

One by one, she pulls the shades down.

“What are you doing up there, Sloan. What’s going on now?”

Maybe she’s memorized this room, because how else can she walk across the office through the dark without bumping into things? She finds the gun on the standing desk.

“Talk to me, kid. I need to hear you.”

“Trevor told me he had this wired. He told me there was no way I wasn’t getting it, that this was my year. When I reminded him of this, he said, ‘Who can fathom what goes on behind those closed doors? Certainly I can’t. One answer goes in and a different answer comes out. It’s damn confounding, damn confounding, but you can’t take it personally.’”

“He’s still a prick, but what are you doing?”

“That’s when I started to think about it. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to grab him by his tie and squeeze until his head popped off, which wasn’t a real option. But I did have the gun.”

“Do you have the gun now?”

“You know how you just said that if one thing had gone differently yesterday, maybe none of this would have happened?”

“Yes.”

“It was Sunday. The thing that happened. I had to use the gun on Sunday in Millbrook. It was still in my travel bag. I forgot to take it out, so there it was.”

Officer Jimmy says nothing for a few seconds. “You didn’t hurt anybody out in Millbrook, did you?”

The tears come again. She tries to hold them back-she’s never cried in front of anyone-but it’s no use, and then she’s wailing into Officer Jimmy’s ear. “The only one who got hurt out there was me.”

She’s standing behind Beck now, looking over his shoulder at Trevor’s framed photos on the wall. There’s a light from somewhere, because she can see it clearly, the one he was most proud of: Trevor with Nick Price. The first time she’d ever heard of Nick Price was the first time she’d been in Trevor’s office, the day of her first interview. The pro golfer, he’d explained, patiently filling in the unfortunate gaps in her knowledge. “Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet” is what he’d said. Later she’d learned that it was what he said to everyone who came into his office. Price had written in bold black strokes across his own red shirt, To Trevor, Keep your head down, my friend. All the best, Nick.

Sloan couldn’t hear anything, too much noise outside, but she could see Beck struggling. He couldn’t see her, but he must have sensed her standing behind him with the gun. “He won the British Open,” Sloan says, repeating to Jimmy what Trevor had said to her at just the wrong moment, in just the wrong tone. If he had just taken off his raincoat…

“Who did?”

“I was sitting in my chair completely devastated. I couldn’t stand to look at Trevor, so I looked past him and I must have been staring at Nick Price and it occurred to me that Beck had gotten MD.” Her hands shook so much she had a hard time releasing the safety. “I didn’t get MD. Beck did. That’s what they were talking about. That’s what they were laughing about.”

“I’m hearing you, Sloan, but you have to slow things down. Do me a favor and take a breath. Please.”

“I’ve decided what I want, Jimmy.”

“Tell me.”

“I want you to mix my ashes with Rowan’s.”

Officer Jimmy is breathing harder now. She pictures him standing, maybe doing some pacing of his own. “Don’t start talkin’ like that. No one’s going to be ashes at the end of this because then I’m going to look bad and neither one of us wants that.” He tries for one of his light chuckles but it’s not like before. “Besides, you don’t want anything happening to that beautiful horse of yours.”

“He’s dead.”

For the first time in their conversation, Officer Jimmy has nothing to say. Then, finally, “What happened?”

“He spooked. He ran into a car and I had-” She tries for a breath, but it catches in her chest. “I called the vet but it took too long and he was so broken and suffering too much and I couldn’t watch him like that so I had to-” Her head pounds with the effort to get each word out, but she’s determined. No more requirements. No more contingencies. “I put him down. He was never going to be all right again. I had to put him down.” This time when she takes a breath the air goes deep, and she feels calm. Rowan could always calm her down. “His ashes are in the box on the table in my condo.”

“Okay, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking there’s nothing left for you, right? You’re thinking there’s no way outta this, but it’s not true…”

Jimmy’s voice fades away. When did this gun get so heavy? She can barely lift it. “Do one other thing, Officer Jimmy.” She presses the barrel against her forehead, puts both thumbs on the trigger. “Please tell Trevor’s family that I’m sorry.” She closes her eyes and thinks about Rowan.

“Go! Go! Go! Go!”

The door explodes behind her. Her hands stop shaking. She holds the gun steady and pulls the trigger.

ANIMAL RESCUE
BY DENNIS LEHANE

Dorchester

Bob found the dog in the trash.

It was just after Thanksgiving, the neighborhood gone quiet, hungover. After bartending at Cousin Marv’s, Bob sometimes walked the streets. He was big and lumpy and hair had been growing in unlikely places all over his body since his teens. In his twenties, he’d fought against the hair, carrying small clippers in his coat pocket and shaving twice a day. He’d also fought the weight, but during all those years of fighting, no girl who wasn’t being paid for it ever showed any interest in him. After a time, he gave up the fight. He lived alone in the house he grew up in, and when it seemed likely to swallow him with its smells and memories and dark couches, the attempts he’d made to escape it-through church socials, lodge picnics, and one horrific mixer thrown by a dating service-had only opened the wound further, left him patching it back up for weeks, cursing himself for hoping.

So he took these walks of his and, if he was lucky, sometimes he forgot people lived any other way. That night, he paused on the sidewalk, feeling the ink sky above him and the cold in his fingers, and he closed his eyes against the evening.

He was used to it. He was used to it. It was okay.

You could make a friend of it, as long as you didn’t fight it.

With his eyes closed, he heard it-a worn-out keening accompanied by distant scratching and a sharper, metallic rattling. He opened his eyes. Fifteen feet down the sidewalk, a large metal barrel with a heavy lid shook slightly under the yellow glare of the streetlight, its bottom scraping the sidewalk. He stood over it and heard that keening again, the sound of a creature that was one breath away from deciding it was too hard to take the next, and he pulled off the lid.

He had to remove some things to get to it-a toaster and five thick Yellow Pages, the oldest dating back to 2000. The dog-either a very small one or else a puppy-was down at the bottom, and it scrunched its head into its midsection when the light hit it. It exhaled a soft chug of a whimper and tightened its body even more, its eyes closed to slits. A scrawny thing. Bob could see its ribs. He could see a big crust of dried blood by its ear. No collar. It was brown with a white snout and paws that seemed far too big for its body.

It let out a sharper whimper when Bob reached down, sank his fingers into the nape of its neck, and lifted it out of its own excrement. Bob didn’t know dogs too well, but there was no mistaking this one for anything but a boxer. And definitely a puppy, the wide brown eyes opening and looking into his as he held it up before him.

Somewhere, he was sure, two people made love. A man and a woman. Entwined. Behind one of those shades, oranged with light, that looked down on the street. Bob could feel them in there, naked and blessed. And he stood out here in the cold with a near-dead dog staring back at him. The icy sidewalk glinted like new marble, and the wind was dark and gray as slush.

“What do you got there?”

Bob turned, looked up and down the sidewalk.

“I’m up here. And you’re in my trash.”

She stood on the front porch of the three-decker nearest him. She’d turned the porch light on and stood there shivering, her feet bare. She reached into the pocket of her hoodie and came back with a pack of cigarettes. She watched him as she got one going.

“I found a dog.” Bob held it up.

“A what?”

“A dog. A puppy. A boxer, I think.”

She coughed out some smoke. “Who puts a dog in a barrel?”

“Right?” he said. “It’s bleeding.” He took a step toward her stairs and she backed up.

“Who do you know that I would know?” A city girl, not about to just drop her guard around a stranger.

“I don’t know,” Bob said. “How about Francie Hedges?”

She shook her head. “You know the Sullivans?”

That wouldn’t narrow it down. Not around here. You shook a tree, a Sullivan fell out. Followed by a six-pack most times. “I know a bunch.”

This was going nowhere, the puppy looking at him, shaking worse than the girl.

“Hey,” she said, “you live in this parish?”

“Next one over. St. Theresa’s.”

“Go to church?”

“Most Sundays.”

“So you know Father Pete?”

“Pete Regan,” he said, “sure.”

She produced a cell phone. “What’s your name?”

“Bob,” he said. “Bob Saginowski.”

Bob waited as she stepped back from the light, phone to one ear, finger pressed into the other. He stared at the puppy. The puppy stared back, like, How did I get here? Bob touched its nose with his index finger. The puppy blinked its huge eyes. For a moment, Bob couldn’t recall his sins.

“Nadia,” the girl said and stepped back into the light. “Bring him up here, Bob. Pete says hi.”

They washed it in Nadia’s sink, dried it off, and brought it to her kitchen table.

Nadia was small. A bumpy red rope of a scar ran across the base of her throat like the smile of a drunk circus clown. She had a tiny moon of a face, savaged by pockmarks, and small, heart-pendant eyes. Shoulders that didn’t cut so much as dissolve at the arms. Elbows like flattened beer cans. A yellow bob of hair curled on either side of her face. “It’s not a boxer.” Her eyes glanced off Bob’s face before dropping the puppy back onto her kitchen table. “It’s an American Staffordshire terrier.”

Bob knew he was supposed to understand something in her tone, but he didn’t know what that thing was so he remained silent.

She glanced back up at him after the quiet lasted too long. “A pit bull.”

“That’s a pit bull?”

She nodded and swabbed the puppy’s head wound again. Someone had pummeled it, she told Bob. Probably knocked it unconscious, assumed it was dead, and dumped it.

“Why?” Bob said.

She looked at him, her round eyes getting rounder, wider. “Just because.” She shrugged, went back to examining the dog. “I worked at Animal Rescue once. You know the place on Shawmut? As a vet tech. Before I decided it wasn’t my thing. They’re so hard, this breed…”

“What?”

“To adopt out,” she said. “It’s very hard to find them a home.”

“I don’t know about dogs. I never had a dog. I live alone. I was just walking by the barrel.” Bob found himself beset by a desperate need to explain himself, explain his life. “I’m just not…” He could hear the wind outside, black and rattling. Rain or bits of hail spit against the windows.

Nadia lifted the puppy’s back left paw-the other three paws were brown, but this one was white with peach spots. Then she dropped the paw as if it were contagious. She went back to the head wound, took a closer look at the right ear, a piece missing from the tip that Bob hadn’t noticed until now.

“Well,” she said, “he’ll live. You’re gonna need a crate and food and all sorts of stuff.”

“No,” Bob said. “You don’t understand.”

She cocked her head, gave him a look that said she understood perfectly.

“I can’t. I just found him. I was gonna give him back.”

“To whoever beat him, left him for dead?”

“No, no, like, the authorities.”

“That would be Animal Rescue,” she said. “After they give the owner seven days to reclaim him, they’ll-”

“The guy who beat him? He gets a second chance?”

She gave him a half-frown and a nod. “If he doesn’t take it,” she lifted the puppy’s ear, peered in, “chances are this little fella’ll be put up for adoption. But it’s hard. To find them a home. Pit bulls. More often than not?” She looked at Bob. “More often than not, they’re put down.”

Bob felt a wave of sadness roll out from her that immediately shamed him. He didn’t know how, but he’d caused pain. He’d put some out into the world. He’d let this girl down. “I…” he started. “It’s just…”

She glanced up at him. “I’m sorry?”

Bob looked at the puppy. Its eyes were droopy from a long day in the barrel and whoever gave it that wound. It had stopped shivering, though.

“You can take it,” Bob said. “You used to work there, like you said. You-”

She shook her head. “My father lives with me. He gets home Sunday night from Foxwoods. He finds a dog in his house? An animal he’s allergic to?” She jerked her thumb. “Puppy goes back in the barrel.”

“Can you give me till Sunday morning?” Bob wasn’t sure how it was the words left his mouth, since he couldn’t remember formulating them or even thinking them.

The girl eyed him carefully. “You’re not just saying it? Cause, I shit you not, he ain’t picked up by Sunday noon, he’s back out that door.”

“Sunday, then.” Bob said the words with a conviction he actually felt. “Sunday, definitely.”

“Yeah?” She smiled, and it was a spectacular smile, and Bob saw that the face behind the pockmarks was as spectacular as the smile. Wanting only to be seen. She touched the puppy’s nose with her index finger.

“Yeah.” Bob felt crazed. He felt light as a communion wafer. “Yeah.”

At Cousin Marv’s, where he tended bar 12 to 10, Wednesday through Sunday, he told Marv all about it. Most people called Marv Cousin Marv out of habit, something that went back to grade school though no one could remember how, but Marv actually was Bob’s cousin. On his mother’s side.

Cousin Marv had run a crew in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It had been primarily comprised of guys with interests in the loaning and subsequent debt-repayal side of things, though Marv never turned his nose down at any paying proposition because he believed, to the core of his soul, that those who failed to diversify were always the first to collapse when the wind turned. Like the dinosaurs, he’d say to Bob, when the cavemen came along and invented arrows. Picture the cavemen, he’d say, firing away, and the tyrannosauruses all gucked up in the oil puddles. A tragedy so easily averted.

Marv’s crew hadn’t been the toughest crew or the smartest or the most successful operating in the neighborhood-not even close-but for a while they got by. Other crews kept nipping at their heels, though, and except for one glaring exception, they’d never been ones to favor violence. Pretty soon, they had to make the decision to yield to crews a lot meaner than they were or duke it out. They took Door Number One.

Marv’s income derived from running his bar as a drop. In the new world order-a loose collective of Chechen, Italian, and Irish hard guys-no one wanted to get caught with enough merch or enough money for a case to go Federal. So they kept it out of their offices and out of their homes and they kept it on the move. About every two-three weeks, drops were made at Cousin Marv’s, among other establishments. You sat on the drop for a night, two at the most, before some beer-truck driver showed up with the weekend’s password and hauled everything back out on a dolly like it was a stack of empty kegs, took it away in a refrigerated semi. The rest of Marv’s income derived from being a fence, one of the best in the city, but being a fence in their world (or a drop bar operator for that matter) was like being a mailroom clerk in the straight world-if you were still doing it after thirty, it was all you’d ever do. For Bob, it was a relief-he liked being a bartender and he’d hated that one time they’d had to come heavy. Marv, though, Marv still waited for the golden train to arrive on the golden tracks, take him away from all this. Most times, he pretended to be happy. But Bob knew that the things that haunted Marv were the same things that haunted Bob-the shitty things you did to get ahead. Those things laughed at you if your ambitions failed to amount to much; a successful man could hide his past; an unsuccessful man sat in his.

That morning, Marv was looking a hair on the mournful side, lighting one Camel while the previous one still smoldered, so Bob tried to cheer him up by telling him about his adventure with the dog. Marv didn’t seem too interested, and Bob found himself saying “You had to be there” so much, he eventually shut up about it.

Marv said, “Rumor is we’re getting the Super Bowl drop.”

“No shit?”

If true (an enormous if), this was huge. They worked on commission-one half of one percent of the drop. A Super Bowl drop? It would be like one half of one percent of Exxon.

Natalie’s scar flashed in Bob’s brain, the redness of it, the thick, ropey texture. “They send extra guys to protect it, you think?”

Marv rolled his eyes. “Why, cause people are just lining up to steal from coked-up Chechnyans.”

“Chechens,” Bob said.

“But they’re from Chechnya.”

Bob shrugged. “I think it’s like how you don’t call people from Ireland Irelandians.”

Marv scowled. “Whatever. It means all this hard work we’ve been doing? It’s paid off. Like how Toyota did it, making friends and influencing people.”

Bob kept quiet. If they ended up being the drop for the Super Bowl, it was because someone figured out no Feds deemed them important enough to be watched. But in Marv’s fantasies, the crew (long since dispersed to straight jobs, jail, or, worse, Connecticut) could regain its glory days, even though those days had lasted about as long as a Swatch. It never occurred to Marv that one day they’d come take everything he had-the fence, the money and merch he kept in the safe in back, hell, the bar probably-just because they were sick of him hanging around, looking at them with needy expectation. It had gotten so every time he talked about the “people he knew,” the dreams he had, Bob had to resist the urge to reach for the 9mm they kept beneath the bar and blow his own brains out. Not really-but close sometimes. Man, Marv could wear you out.

A guy stuck his head in the bar, late twenties but with white hair, a white goatee, a silver stud in his ear. He dressed like most kids these days-like shit: pre-ripped jeans, slovenly T-shirt under a faded hoodie under a wrinkled wool topcoat. He didn’t cross the threshold, just craned his head in, the cold day pouring in off the sidewalk behind him.

“Help you?” Bob asked.

The guy shook his head, kept staring at the gloomy bar like it was a crystal ball.

“Mind shutting the door?” Marv didn’t look up. “Cold out there.”

“You serve Zima?” The guy’s eyes flew around the bar, up and down, left to right.

Marv looked up now. “Who the fuck would we serve it to-Moesha?”

The guy raised an apologetic hand. “My bad.” He left, and the warmth returned with the closing of the door.

Marv said, “You know that kid?”

Bob shook his head. “Mighta seen him around but I can’t place him.”

“He’s a fucking nutbag. Lives in the next parish, probably why you don’t know him. You’re old school that way, Bob-somebody didn’t go to parochial school with you, it’s like they don’t exist.”

Bob couldn’t argue. When he’d been a kid, your parish was your country. Everything you needed and needed to know was contained within it. Now that the archdiocese had shuttered half the parishes to pay for the crimes of the kid-diddler priests, Bob couldn’t escape the fact that those days of parish dominion, long dwindling, were gone. He was a certain type of guy, of a certain half-generation, an almost generation, and while there were still plenty of them left, they were older, grayer, they had smokers’ coughs, they went in for checkups and never checked back out.

“That kid?” Marv gave Bob a bump of his eyebrows. “They say he killed Richie Whelan back in the day.”

“They say?”

“They do.”

“Well, then…”

They sat in silence for a bit. Snow-dust blew past the window in the high-pitched breeze. The street signs and window panes rattled, and Bob thought how winter lost any meaning the day you last rode a sled. Any meaning but gray. He looked into the unlit sections of the barroom. The shadows became hospital beds, stooped old widowers shopping for sympathy cards, empty wheelchairs. The wind howled a little sharper.

“This puppy, right?” Bob said. “He’s got paws the size of his head. Three are brown but one’s white with these little peach-colored spots over the white. And-”

“This thing cook?” Marv said. “Clean the house? I mean, it’s a fucking dog.”

“Yeah, but it was-” Bob dropped his hands. He didn’t know how to explain. “You know that feeling you get sometimes on a really great day? Like, like, the Pats dominate and you took the ‘over,’ or they cook your steak just right up the Blarney, or, or you just feel good? Like…” Bob found himself waving his hands again “…good?”

Marv gave him a nod and a tight smile. Went back to his racing sheet.

On Sunday morning, Nadia brought the puppy to his car as he idled in front of her house. She handed it through the window and gave them both a little wave.

He looked at the puppy sitting on his seat and fear washed over him. What does it eat? When does it eat? Housebreaking. How do you do that? How long does it take? He’d had days to consider these questions-why were they only occurring to him now?

He hit the brakes and reversed the car a few feet. Nadia, one foot on her bottom step, turned back. He rolled down the passenger window, craned his body across the seat until he was peering up at her.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”

At a supermarket for pets, Nadia picked out several chew toys, told Bob he’d need them if he wanted to keep his couch. Shoes, she told him, keep your shoes hidden from now on, up on a high shelf. They bought vitamins-for a dog!-and a bag of puppy food she recommended, telling him the most important thing was to stick with that brand from now on. Change a dog’s diet, she warned, you’ll get piles of diarrhea on your floor.

They got a crate to put him in when Bob was at work. They got a water bottle for the crate and a book on dog training written by monks who were on the cover looking hardy and not real monkish, big smiles. As the cashier rang it all up, Bob felt a quake rumble through his body, a momentary disruption as he reached for his wallet. His throat flushed with heat. His head felt fizzy. And only as the quake went away and his throat cooled and his head cleared and he handed over his credit card to the cashier did he realize, in the sudden disappearance of the feeling, what the feeling had been: for a moment-maybe even a succession of moments, and none sharp enough to point to as the cause-he’d been happy.

“So, thank you,” she said when he pulled up in front of her house.

“What? No. Thank you. Please. Really. It…Thank you.”

She said, “This little guy, he’s a good guy. He’s going to make you proud, Bob.”

He looked down at the puppy, sleeping on her lap now, snoring slightly. “Do they do that? Sleep all the time?”

“Pretty much. Then they run around like loonies for about twenty minutes. Then they sleep some more. And poop. Bob, man, you got to remember that-they poop and pee like crazy. Don’t get mad. They don’t know any better. Read the monk book. It takes time, but they figure out soon enough not to do it in the house.”

“What’s soon enough?”

“Two months?” She cocked her head. “Maybe three. Be patient, Bob.”

“Be patient,” he repeated.

“And you too,” she said to the puppy as she lifted it off her lap. He came awake, sniffing, snorting. He didn’t want her to go. “You both take care.” She let herself out and gave Bob a wave as she walked up her steps, then went inside.

The puppy was on its haunches, staring up at the window like Nadia might reappear there. It looked back over his shoulder at Bob. Bob could feel its abandonment. He could feel his own. He was certain they’d make a mess of it, him and this throwaway dog. He was sure the world was too strong.

“What’s your name?” he asked the puppy. “What are we going to call you?”

The puppy turned his head away, like, Bring the girl back.

First thing it did was take a shit in the dining room.

Bob didn’t even realize what it was doing at first. It started sniffing, nose scraping the rug, and then it looked up at Bob with an air of embarrassment. And Bob said, “What?” and the dog dumped all over the corner of the rug.

Bob scrambled forward, as if he could stop it, push it back in, and the puppy bolted, left droplets on the hardwood as it scurried into the kitchen.

Bob said, “No, no. It’s okay.” Although it wasn’t. Most everything in the house had been his mother’s, largely unchanged since she’d purchased it in the ’50s. That was shit. Excrement. In his mother’s house. On her rug, her floor.

In the seconds it took him to reach the kitchen, the puppy’d left a piss puddle on the linoleum. Bob almost slipped in it. The puppy was sitting against the fridge, looking at him, tensing for a blow, trying not to shake.

And it stopped Bob. It stopped him even as he knew the longer he left the shit on the rug, the harder it would be to get out.

Bob got down on all fours. He felt the sudden return of what he’d felt when he first picked it out of the trash, something he’d assumed had left with Nadia. Connection. He suspected they might have been brought together by something other than chance.

He said, “Hey.” Barely above a whisper. “Hey, it’s all right.” So, so slowly, he extended his hand, and the puppy pressed itself harder against the fridge. But Bob kept the hand coming, and gently lay his palm on the side of the animal’s face. He made soothing sounds. He smiled at it. “It’s okay,” he repeated, over and over.

He named it Cassius because he’d mistaken it for a boxer and he liked the sound of the word. It made him think of Roman legions, proud jaws, honor.

Nadia called him Cash. She came around after work sometimes and she and Bob took it on walks. He knew something was a little off about Nadia-the dog being found so close to her house and her lack of surprise or interest in that fact was not lost on Bob-but was there anyone, anywhere on this planet, who wasn’t a little off? More than a little most times. Nadia came by to help with the dog and Bob, who hadn’t known much friendship in his life, took what he could get.

They taught Cassius to sit and lie down and paw and roll over. Bob read the entire monk book and followed its instructions. The puppy had his rabies shot and was cleared of any cartilage damage to his ear. Just a bruise, the vet said, just a deep bruise. He grew fast.

Weeks passed without Cassius having an accident, but Bob still couldn’t be sure whether that was luck or not, and then on Super Bowl Sunday, Cassius used one paw on the back door. Bob let him out and then tore through the house to call Nadia. He was so proud he felt like yodeling, and he almost mistook the doorbell for something else. A kettle, he thought, still reaching for the phone.

The guy on the doorstep was thin. Not weak-thin. Hard-thin. As if whatever burned inside of him burned too hot for fat to survive. He had blue eyes so pale they were almost gray. His silver hair was cropped tight to his skull, as was the goatee that clung to his lips and chin. It took Bob a second to recognize him-the kid who’d stuck his head in the bar five-six weeks back, asked if they served Zima.

The kid smiled and extended his hand. “Mr. Saginowski?”

Bob shook the hand. “Yes?”

“Bob Saginowski?” The man shook Bob’s large hand with his small one, and there was a lot of power in the grip.

“Yeah?”

“Eric Deeds, Bob.” The kid let go of his hand. “I believe you have my dog.”

In the kitchen, Eric Deeds said, “Hey, there he is.” He said, “That’s my guy.” He said, “He got big.” He said, “The size of him.”

Cassius slinked over to him, even climbed up on his lap when Eric, unbidden, took a seat at Bob’s kitchen table and patted his inner thigh twice. Bob couldn’t even say how it was Eric Deeds talked his way into the house; he was just one of those people had a way about him, like cops and Teamsters-he wanted in, he was coming in.

“Bob,” Eric Deeds said, “I’m going to need him back.” He had Cassius in his lap and was rubbing his belly. Bob felt a prick of envy as Cassius kicked his left leg, even though a constant shiver-almost a palsy-ran through his fur. Eric Deeds scratched under Cassius’s chin. The dog kept his ears and tail pressed flat to his body. He looked ashamed, his eyes staring down into their sockets.

“Um…” Bob reached out and lifted Cassius off Eric’s lap, plopped him down on his own, scratched behind his ears. “Cash is mine.”

The act was between them now-Bob lifting the puppy off Eric’s lap without any warning, Eric looking at him for just a second, like, The fuck was that all about? His forehead narrowed and it gave his eyes a surprised cast, as if they’d never expected to find themselves on his face. In that moment, he looked cruel, the kind of guy, if he was feeling sorry for himself, took a shit on the whole world.

“Cash?” he said.

Bob nodded as Cassius’s ears unfurled from his head and he licked Bob’s wrist. “Short for Cassius. That’s his name. What did you call him?”

“Called him Dog mostly. Sometimes Hound.”

Eric Deeds glanced around the kitchen, up at the old circular fluorescent in the ceiling, something going back to Bob’s mother, hell, Bob’s father just before the first stroke, around the time the old man had become obsessed with paneling-paneled the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, would’ve paneled the toilet if he could’ve figured out how.

Bob said, “You beat him.”

Eric reached into his shirt pocket. He pulled out a cigarette and popped it in his mouth. He lit it, shook out the match, tossed it on Bob’s kitchen table.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

Eric considered Bob with a level gaze and kept smoking. “I beat him?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, so what?” Eric flicked some ash on the floor. “I’m taking the dog, Bob.”

Bob stood to his full height. He held tight to Cassius, who squirmed a bit in his arms and nipped at the flat of his hand. If it came to it, Bob decided, he’d drop all six feet three inches and two hundred ninety pounds of himself on Eric Deeds, who couldn’t weigh more than a buck-seventy. Not now, not just standing there, but if Eric reached for Cassius, well then…

Eric Deeds blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I saw you that night. I was feeling bad, you know, about my temper? So I went back to see if the hound was really dead or not and I watched you pluck him out of the trash.”

“I really think you should go.” Bob pulled his cell from his pocket and flipped it open. “I’m calling 911.”

Eric nodded. “I’ve been in prison, Bob, mental hospitals. I’ve been a lotta places. I’ll go again, don’t mean a thing to me, though I doubt they’d prosecute even me for fucking up a dog. I mean, sooner or later, you gotta go to work or get some sleep.”

“What is wrong with you?”

Eric held out of his hands. “Pretty much everything. And you took my dog.”

“You tried to kill it.”

Eric said, “Nah.” Shook his head like he believed it.

“You can’t have the dog.”

“I need the dog.”

“No.”

“I love that dog.”

“No.”

“Ten thousand.”

“What?”

Eric nodded. “I need ten grand. By tonight. That’s the price.”

Bob gave it a nervous chuckle. “Who has ten thousand dollars?”

“You could find it.”

“How could I poss-”

“Say, that safe in Cousin Marv’s office. You’re a drop bar, Bob. You don’t think half the neighborhood knows? So that might be a place to start.”

Bob shook his head. “Can’t be done. Any money we get during the day? Goes through a slot at the bar. Ends up in the office safe, yeah, but that’s on a time-”

“-lock, I know.” Eric turned on the couch, one arm stretched along the back of it. “Goes off at 2 a.m. in case they decide they need a last-minute payout for something who the fuck knows, but big. And you have ninety seconds to open and close it or it triggers two silent alarms, neither of which goes off in a police station or a security company. Fancy that.” Eric took a hit off his cigarette. “I’m not greedy, Bob. I just need stake money for something. I don’t want everything in the safe, just ten grand. You give me ten grand, I’ll disappear.”

“This is ludicrous.”

“So, it’s ludicrous.”

“You don’t just walk into someone’s life and-”

“That is life: someone like me coming along when you’re not looking.”

Bob put Cassius on the floor but made sure he didn’t wander over to the other side of the table. He needn’t have worried-Cassius didn’t move an inch, sat there like a cement post, eyes on Bob.

Eric Deeds said, “You’re racing through all your options, but they’re options for normal people in normal circumstances. I need my ten grand tonight. If you don’t get it for me, I’ll take your dog. I licensed him. You didn’t, because you couldn’t. Then I’ll forget to feed him for a while. One day, when he gets all yappy about it, I’ll beat his head in with a rock or something. Look in my eyes and tell me which part I’m lying about, Bob.”

After he left, Bob went to his basement. He avoided it whenever he could, though the floor was white, as white as he’d been able to make it, whiter than it had ever been through most of its existence. He unlocked a cupboard over the old wash sink his father had often used after one of his adventures in paneling, and removed a yellow and brown Chock full o’Nuts can from the shelf. He pulled fifteen thousand from it. He put ten in his pocket and five back in the can. He looked around again at the white floor, at the black oil tank against the wall, at the bare bulbs.

Upstairs he gave Cassius a bunch of treats. He rubbed his ears and his belly. He assured the animal that he was worth ten thousand dollars.

Bob, three deep at the bar for a solid hour between 11 and midnight, looked through a sudden gap in the crowd and saw Eric sitting at the wobbly table under the Narragansett mirror. The Super Bowl was an hour over, but the crowd, drunk as shit, hung around. Eric had one arm stretched across the table and Bob followed it, saw that it connected to something. An arm. Nadia’s arm. Nadia’s face stared back at Eric, unreadable. Was she terrified? Or something else?

Bob, filling a glass with ice, felt like he was shoveling the cubes into his own chest, pouring them into his stomach and against the base of his spine. What did he know about Nadia, after all? He knew that he’d found a near-dead dog in the trash outside her house. He knew that Eric Deeds only came into his life after Bob had met her. He knew that her middle name, thus far, could be Lies of Omission.

When he was twenty-eight, Bob had come into his mother’s bedroom to wake her for Sunday Mass. He’d given her a shake and she hadn’t batted at his hand as she normally did. So he rolled her toward him and her face was scrunched tight, her eyes too, and her skin was curbstone-gray. Sometime in the night, after Matlock and the 10 o’clock news, she’d gone to bed and woke to God’s fist clenched around her heart. Probably hadn’t been enough air left in her lungs to cry out. Alone in the dark, clutching the sheets, that fist clenching, her face clenching, her eyes scrunching, the terrible knowledge dawning that, even for you, it all ends. And right now.

Standing over her that morning, imagining the last tick of her heart, the last lonely wish her brain had been able to form, Bob felt a loss unlike any he’d ever known or expected to know again.

Until tonight. Until now. Until he learned what that look on Nadia’s face meant.

By 1:50, the crowd was gone, just Eric and Nadia and an old, stringent, functioning alcoholic named Millie who’d amble off to the assisted living place up on Pearl Street at 1:55 on the dot.

Eric, who had been coming to the bar for shots of Powers for the last hour, pushed back from the table and pulled Nadia across the floor with him. He sat her on a stool and Bob got a good look in her face finally, saw something he still couldn’t fully identify-but it definitely wasn’t excitement or smugness or the bitter smile of a victor. Maybe something worse than all of that-despair.

Eric gave him an all-teeth smile and spoke through it, softly. “When’s the old biddie pack it in?”

“A couple minutes.”

“Where’s Marv?”

“I didn’t call him in.”

“Why not?”

“Someone’s gonna take the blame for this, I figured it might as well be me.”

“How noble of-”

“How do you know her?”

Eric looked over at Nadia hunched on the stool beside him. He leaned into the bar. “We grew up on the same block.”

“He give you that scar?”

Nadia stared at him.

“Did he?”

“She gave herself the scar,” Eric Deeds said.

“You did?” Bob asked her.

Nadia looked at the bar top. “I was pretty high.”

“Bob,” Eric said, “if you fuck with me-even in the slightest-it doesn’t matter how long it takes me, I’ll come back for her. And if you got any plans, like Eric-doesn’t-walk-back-out-of-here plans? Not that you’re that type of guy, but Marv might be? You got any ideas in that vein, Bob, my partner on the Richie Whalen hit, he’ll take care of you both.”

Eric sat back as mean old Millie left the same tip she’d been leaving since Sputnik-a quarter-and slid off her stool. She gave Bob a rasp that was ten percent vocal chords and ninety percent Virginia Slims Ultra Light 100s. “Yeah, I’m off.”

“You take care, Millie.”

She waved it away with a, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and pushed open the door.

Bob locked it behind her and came back behind the bar. He wiped down the bar top. When he reached Eric’s elbows, he said, “Excuse me.”

“Go around.”

Bob wiped the rag in a half-circle around Eric’s elbows.

“Who’s your partner?” Bob said.

“Wouldn’t be much of a threat if you knew who he was, would he, Bob?”

“But he helped you kill Richie Whalen?”

Eric said, “That’s the rumor, Bob.”

“More than a rumor.” Bob wiped in front of Nadia, saw red marks on her wrists where Eric had yanked them. He wondered if there were other marks he couldn’t see.

“Well then it’s more than a rumor, Bob. So there you go.”

“There you go what?”

“There you go,” Eric scowled. “What time is it, Bob?”

Bob placed ten thousand dollars on the bar. “You don’t have to call me by my name all the time.”

“I will see what I can do about that, Bob.” Eric thumbed the bills. “What’s this?”

“It’s the ten grand you wanted for Cash.”

Eric pursed his lips. “All the same, let’s look in the safe.”

“You sure?” Bob said. “I’m happy to buy him from you for ten grand.”

“How much for Nadia, though?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

Bob thought about that new wrinkle for a bit and poured himself a closing-time shot of vodka. He raised it to Eric Deeds and then drank it down. “You know, Marv used to have a problem with blow about ten years ago?”

“I did not know that, Bob.”

Bob shrugged, poured them all a shot of vodka. “Yeah, Marv liked the coke too much but it didn’t like him back.”

Eric drank Nadia’s shot. “Getting close to 2 here, Bob.”

“He was more of a loan shark then. I mean, he did some fence, but mostly he was a shark. There was this kid? Into Marv for a shitload of money. Real hopeless case when it came to the dogs and basketball. Kinda kid could never pay back all he owed.”

Eric drank his own shot. “One fifty-seven, Bob.”

“The thing, though? This kid, he actually hit on a slot at Mohegan. Hit for twenty-two grand. Which is just a little more than he owed Marv.”

“And he didn’t pay Marv back, so you and Marv got all hard on him and I’m supposed to learn-”

“No, no. He paid Marv. Paid him every cent. What the kid didn’t know, though, was that Marv had been skimming. Because of the coke habit? And this kid’s money was like manna from heaven as long as no one knew it was from this kid. See what I’m saying?”

“Bob, it’s fucking one minute to 2.” Sweat on Eric’s lip.

“Do you see what I’m saying?” Bob asked. “Do you understand the story?”

Eric looked to the door to make sure it was locked. “Fine, yeah. This kid, he had to be ripped off.”

“He had to be killed.”

Out of the side of his eye, a quick glance. “Okay, killed.”

Bob could feel Nadia’s eyes lock on him suddenly, her head cock a bit. “That way, he couldn’t ever say he paid off Marv and no one else could either. Marv uses the money to cover all the holes, he cleans up his act, it’s like it never happened. So that’s what we did.”

“You did…” Eric barely in the conversation, but some warning in his head starting to sound, his head turning from the clock toward Bob.

“Killed him in my basement,” Bob said. “Know what his name was?”

“I wouldn’t know, Bob.”

“Sure you would. Richie Whelan.”

Bob reached under the bar and pulled out the 9mm. He didn’t notice the safety was on, so when he pulled the trigger nothing happened. Eric jerked his head and pushed back from the bar rail, but Bob thumbed off the safety and shot Eric just below the throat. The gunshot sounded like aluminum siding being torn off a house. Nadia screamed. Not a long scream, but sharp with shock. Eric made a racket falling back off his stool, and by the time Bob came around the bar, Eric was already going, if not quite gone. The overhead fan cast thin slices of shadow over his face. His cheeks puffed in and out like he was trying to catch his breath and kiss somebody at the same time.

“I’m sorry, but you kids,” Bob said. “You know? You go out of the house dressed like you’re still in your living room. You say terrible things about women. You hurt harmless dogs. I’m tired of you, man.”

Eric stared up at him. Winced like he had heartburn. He looked pissed off. Frustrated. The expression froze on his face like it was sewn there, and then he wasn’t in his body anymore. Just gone. Just, shit, dead.

Bob dragged him into the cooler.

When he came back, pushing the mop and bucket ahead of him, Nadia still sat on her stool. Her mouth was a bit wider than usual and she couldn’t take her eyes off the floor where the blood was, but otherwise she seemed perfectly normal.

“He would have just kept coming,” Bob said. “Once someone takes something from you and you let them? They don’t feel gratitude, they just feel like you owe them more.” He soaked the mop in the bucket, wrung it out a bit, and slopped it over the main blood spot. “Makes no sense, right? But that’s how they feel. Entitled. And you can never change their minds after that.”

She said, “He…You just fucking shot him. You just…I mean, you know?”

Bob swirled the mop over the spot. “He beat my dog.”

The Chechens took care of the body after a discussion with the Italians and the Micks. Bob was told his money was no good at several restaurants for the next couple of months, and they gave him four tickets to a Celtics game. Not floor seats, but pretty good ones.

Bob never mentioned Nadia. Just said Eric showed up at the end of the evening, waved a gun around, said to take him to the office safe. Bob let him do his ranting, do his waving, found an opportunity, and shot him. And that was it. End of Eric, end of story.

Nadia came to him a few days later. Bob opened the door and she stood there on his stoop with a bright winter day turning everything sharp and clear behind her. She held up a bag of dog treats.

“Peanut butter,” she said, her smile bright, her eyes just a little wet. “With a hint of molasses.”

Bob opened the door wide and stepped back to let her in.

“I’ve gotta believe,” Nadia said, “there’s a purpose. And even if it’s that you kill me as soon as I close my eyes-”

“Me? What? No,” Bob said. “Oh, no.”

“-then that’s okay. Because I just can’t go through any more of this alone. Not another day.”

“Me too.” He closed his eyes. “Me too.”

They didn’t speak for a long time. He opened his eyes, peered at the ceiling of his bedroom. “Why?”

“Hmm?”

“This. You. Why are you with me?”

She ran a hand over his chest and it gave him a shiver. In his whole life, he never would have expected to feel a touch like that on his bare skin.

“Because I like you. Because you’re nice to Cassius.”

“And because you’re scared of me?”

“I dunno. Maybe. But more the other reason.”

He couldn’t tell if she was lying. Who could tell when anyone was? Really. Every day, you ran into people and half of them, if not more, could be lying to you. Why?

Why not?

You couldn’t tell who was true and who was not. If you could, lie detectors would never have been invented. Someone stared in your face and said, I’m telling the truth. They said, I promise. They said, I love you.

And you were going to say what to that? Prove it?

“He needs a walk.”

“Huh?”

“Cassius. He hasn’t been out all day.”

“I’ll get the leash.”

In the park, the February sky hung above them like a canvas tarp. The weather had been almost mild for a few days. The ice had broken on the river but small chunks of it clung to the dark banks.

He didn’t know what he believed. Cassius walked ahead of them, pulling on the leash a bit, so proud, so pleased, unrecognizable from the quivering hunk of fur Bob had pulled from a barrel just two and a half months ago.

Two and a half months! Wow. Things sure could change in a hurry. You rolled over one morning, and it was a whole new world. It turned itself toward the sun, stretched and yawned. It turned itself toward the night. A few more hours, turned itself toward the sun again. A new world, every day.

When they reached the center of the park, he unhooked the leash from Cassius’s collar and reached into his coat for a tennis ball. Cassius reared his head. He snorted loud. He pawed the earth. Bob threw the ball and the dog took off after it. Bob envisioned the ball taking a bad bounce into the road. The screech of tires, the thump of metal against dog. Or what would happen if Cassius, suddenly free, just kept running.

But what could you do?

You couldn’t control things.

THE PLACE WHERE HE BELONGS
BY JIM FUSILLI

Beacon Hill

After nearly twenty years at the United Nations, his wife was offered a position with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and she was thrilled. He was not. “Jeff, are you sure you’ll be all right leaving here?” she asked. What could he say? A fair-minded man would acknowledge she’d sacrificed for his career.

During the first week in town, they were invited to a cocktail party in Cambridge. “How long had you lived in New York?” inquired one of her new colleagues.

“Forty-nine years,” he replied.

“And you are…?”

“Forty-nine,” he said, scratching his two-day growth.

“Oh my goodness,” said the man’s wife, “I wonder what you’ll make of us.”

When they were leaving, the host called him Joe.

They settled over by the Museum of Science, and he explored the music clubs-the Dise and T.T. the Bear’s, mostly. He went to shows at the Orpheum, where he had opened for Jesse Colin Young long ago, and concerts at the colleges and at Berklee, roaming by himself while Maya prepared for her lectures. A few musicians he worked with in the ’80s played the Garden, and he walked over, hunched and shivering in a biting wind as he crossed the Charles. Backstage, hugs all around and “What are you up to?” “You know,” he shrugged.

He called Club Passim and asked if he could do a set or two. Thank you, no.

Soon Maya said they were better suited to Beacon Hill, near where several of her colleagues lived, and she found a condo on Beacon Street, two floors in a brownstone built in 1848, the former French consulate, reasonably priced by Manhattan standards, an investment in a down market, and with space for his music room. “Your call,” he said, since he’d made only $6,200 in royalties in the previous year.

She said that she felt revitalized by the new city, that Harvard was a miracle of intelligence and discourse. She was learning, and having fun. He noticed that she no longer asked if he wanted to go back to New York. Boston was becoming her home, while he felt he’d been exiled.

With little else to do, he soundproofed an upstairs bedroom and brought in his equipment-his upright piano, his guitars, a classic Fender bass, his old reel-to-reel tape recorder, mikes and stands, cables, and silver tape. He put baffle over the windows, his old Persian rug on the floor. His platinum album went downstairs in the living room. The label had sent one to every songwriter who contributed to the Grammy-winning soundtrack album. His tender love song was performed at weddings, and even people with little interest in pop music knew the words he’d written. This went on for years, the money rolling in. Then a comedian did a version on Letterman, mugging it up as he serenaded a pig in a straw bonnet. No one took the song seriously from then on. You couldn’t listen to the original version without thinking of the comedian, his rubbery face, squealing voice, and the damned pig. In time, his publisher dropped him. Who’d sing any tune written by a man whose music was so easily ridiculed? Fortunately, they’d set aside enough money for their son to finish at Stanford. His wife had preached frugality even in his best years: before the chaos of his sudden acclaim, they’d planned on having more children. They tried even when it seemed too late.

Beacon Hill was unbearable. He couldn’t find its rhythm, couldn’t recognize the cues. He was out of place, and nothing he did made him feel any better. Daily life was a relentless series of insults and indignities. People were smug and complacent. Common courtesy didn’t exist. No one said hello or thank you or held open a door. His wife, a temperate soul, couldn’t disagree completely when he said there was something odd and off-putting about the place. A cleaner on Charles Street misplaced two of her suits for nine days and never apologized. She’d ordered a case of wine for a party at their apartment and it never arrived. “Service isn’t a priority,” she concluded. He couldn’t find plantains at the grocer’s, and the bagels sucked. No one knew what he’d done.

She loved her job, and called the neighborhood a walker’s delight-the town houses, antique shops, Acorn Street, the esplanade on the Charles, the way the sun shone when spring finally arrived. She took his arm as they crossed the Salt-and-Pepper Bridge, sailboats gliding below.

After Maya went to bed, he’d walk across to the Public Garden, his guitar and case in hand, hoping something would come to him. In Washington Square Park, he’d have drawn a crowd. Here, nobody cared. During the day, he’d slip into a T-shirt, tug on jeans, and bring a sandwich to a bench where he’d watch swans drift on the lake; nearby were flowers and nannies with cheery babies running on chubby legs. He’d smile, nod, but no one responded. In New York, he’d meet friends for lunch. He’d see people on the street. Everybody was open and welcoming. Hey, Jeff! they’d shout. Here, there was no refuge, no place to hide. He was a balloon drifting toward the high, boundless sky.

Staring at his platinum album, he saw his gaunt, ghostly reflection and was surprised to find he was still there.

“Did you hear about the baby?” Maya said, as she hung up her skirt.

He shook his head. “I didn’t go out.”

She was going to ask if he heard it on the radio, but he’d become completely disengaged. He’d even stopped streaming WNYC. “A baby is missing. Stolen.”

She came to him with a flier she’d been given at the Charles Street T station. It said the baby was taken in the Public Garden yesterday. She had been sitting in a stroller over by the Make Way for Ducklings statue. So many children were laughing and playing. One fell and cut a knee on the cobblestone. When a nanny rushed over to help, leaving the infant’s stroller for a moment…

“You could jump into a car and be on 90 to New York in five minutes,” he said.

“They’re looking for people who were in the park to help.”

“Good luck.” He had it in his mind Beacon Hill wouldn’t piss on somebody if he was on fire. He didn’t believe her when she said it wasn’t Beacon Hill’s fault, reminding him that he’d struggled for the past few years in New York.

He went to his studio while she made dinner-salmon and a cold rice dish she’d picked up on Charles Street. When he came down, she was pouring Pinot Grigio as she read a working paper on the Fair Trade movement.

After they ate, he brought the dishes to the sink. Soon soap bubbles rose and popped.

“Jeff. Are you coming?”

He grabbed a towel. “Where?”

“To the vigil, remember? Everybody’s helping with the baby.”

“These people?”

“Stop it,” she said. “I’m going. I wish you would.”

“I’ve got work,” he told her. “I’ll be upstairs.”

After he brought the trash to the basement, he walked outside and stood on the steps. Over in the Public Garden, hundreds of people were fanned out, studying the grass and grounds, looking into the tulip beds, hoping for a clue, any tidbit of information, a revelation. Klieg lights police had stationed on the pathways shed an eerie glow throughout the park, and there were long, quivering shadows. Kids in shorts and hoodies served cold drinks. An uncomfortable silence and an unsettling sense of dread filled the early summer air.

Maya was over by the Angel of the Waters, the statue that reminded him of one with the same name in Central Park, and she was chatting with a thick, busty blonde. As the other woman lectured, Maya folded her arms, solemnity on her face. When she spotted him, she beckoned him with a wave, but he pointed upstairs and made a little gesture like he was strumming a guitar. Then he went back inside.

“I’m onto something,” he said when she returned. “Don’t be surprised if I don’t come to bed.” He held up a cloth sack she’d gotten at the Museum of Fine Arts that he’d filled with snacks and something to drink.

“Jeff,” she said, as she kicked off her flats, “look at this.”

Another flier. A sketch by a police artist.

“It looks like you, Jeff.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he said, as he nudged it back toward her.

“Gail McDermott thought so.”

“Gail McDermott…?”

“The blonde on the first floor…Runs a PR agency…”

He didn’t know anyone in the building. “No,” he said, tapping the flier, “that guy is old. He’s half bald. Scruffy. It’s not me.”

“I didn’t say it was you…”

“I’m going upstairs.”

“They’re going to drag the lake tomorrow,” she told him.

Walking away, he said, “She’s not dead.”

He couldn’t keep the baby in his music room. It was as dark as a cave, and the soundproofing left the air stagnant and stale. He’d changed her and fed her and burped her and held her, tickled her chin, combed her downy hair with his fingers, bathed her with warm water with a face cloth, cooed at her, sang to her, played little figures on the piano. But the carton he converted to a bassinet was stupid, and she needed sunlight, so he brought her downstairs into the kitchen and sat with her on his lap by Maya’s basil plants and thyme leaves.

“Hey baby,” he said as he cuddled her in his arms.

Out on Beacon Hill, people had pulled their chins out of the air and were treating each other with decency and humility. They had a cause bigger than themselves now, something beyond parading their imaginary status. Or so he assumed. He hadn’t left the apartment grounds since he took Baby Alice. Remembering that a few residents in the building didn’t retrieve their Globe until the day’s end, he brought her to the center of the king-sized bed, nestled her on goose down, and took the creaking spiral staircase to the lobby. As he started back up, the Globe under his hand, he heard the baby cry and hurried back to scoop her in his arms. He said, “It’s all right, baby. Everything’s all right.” He bounced her and rubbed her back until she sighed and stopped fussing. He kissed her moist cheek.

Down in her office in apartment 3, statue-still and silent, sat Gail McDermott, who, though she tried, couldn’t convince herself she hadn’t heard a baby’s cry. Fresh cup of coffee in hand, she lifted the flier with the police sketch from her in-box, and yeah, it did look like Maya’s husband, that New Yorker who was some sort of musician, the odd, scowling guy who dressed like a teenager and looked like he needed something no one could provide.

“Jim,” she called as she knocked again. “Jim.”

He opened the door a crack. “It’s Jeff,” he said.

“Jeff.” Gail McDermott introduced herself by handing him a business card. “I heard a baby.”

“Not here.” He scanned the card. McDermott Communications, it read. Specialists in Crisis Management. The building’s address was printed below.

“Do you have the baby?”

“Do I have-”

McDermott pushed in, and he watched as she surveyed the living room. Plain, plump, and round-faced, she wore business slacks and a snug white silk blouse. No makeup, her hair tucked behind her ears. Flip-flops and a PDA on her belt.

“No baby here,” Jeff said, standing by the door.

“I could’ve sworn-What’s this?” She stared at the platinum album, framed on the wall. “I love this movie. Wait-You wrote this song? That song?”

The one with the pig, he thought, yeah.

“That was my sister’s wedding song.” She turned. “That’s a beautiful song. Wicked beautiful.”

“Thank-”

Upstairs, Baby Alice let out a cry. He sank as he realized he’d left the door open to his soundproof studio.

“Oh, Jeff…” McDermott said, puffing up.

Maya and Jeff, the baby in his lap, faced McDermott, who sat behind her desk, the Angel of the Waters in the Public Garden over her shoulder. Like Jeff, she’d converted a bedroom to a workspace.

“Why?” Maya repeated.

He said, “I don’t know why.”

“Was she in danger, Jeff?” McDermott asked.

“No. She was asleep.”

“Tell me what you were thinking…”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking. I just, I don’t know, reacted.”

“To what?” Maya asked.

Is a man who no longer matters supposed to understand why he did something? “I don’t know. Really,” he replied truthfully. He looked down at the baby, who slept peacefully. Here, Maya, he wanted to say. I’m sorry. Take her and let’s go home.

But it was more, and much less, than that.

“Ever do anything like this before?” McDermott asked.

“No. Of course not.”

“We need a lawyer,” Maya said.

“I’ll get you one,” McDermott replied, holding up a blunt index finger. “But let’s think this through…”

She’d wriggled politicians, businessmen, and academics out of worse situations than this. Had the Patriots listened to her, the nation wouldn’t think of them as cheaters. Had Larry Summers, he’d still be president of Harvard.

She rubbed her temples. Stealing a baby from a stroller could seem a low thing. It had to be spun right. The guilty party had to define the crime.

“It was an impulse,” Jeff said.

“So this is what you do in New York? You have an impulse and you steal a baby?”

He hung his head.

“Have you called the police?” Maya asked. She was still stunned, the morning a blur since she was pulled from the lecture hall.

“That’s not at the top of our agenda,” McDermott replied. “We have to inculcate Jeff here.”

“Are you saying we sneak the baby back into the park?” Maya asked.

“We could do that,” McDermott replied. “But how does that help him?”

Maya frowned. “For one, he may stay out of jail…”

“That’s the minimum outcome,” McDermott said as she stood. “We can do better than that.”

Jeff brushed the baby’s hair from her forehead.

“Why does he take her?” McDermott said as she started to pace. “He’s distressed, his career in shambles, no one acknowledges him. He has a sort of psychotic breakdown. Do I have that right, Jeff?”

“Just about,” he admitted.

Maya looked at her husband, surprised he’d said it aloud.

“Or he’s committed an act of civic disobedience against Beacon Hill. He feels a smugness, a starchiness, a lack of soul…He’s worried the child will grow up with a distorted sense of self. She’ll be ill-equipped for life outside a tiny, out-of-touch neighborhood in a dynamic city, a great nation.”

Maya turned as McDermott circled behind her. “You don’t believe that, do you?” she asked.

“There’s less pretension on Rodeo Drive,” answered McDermott, who had grown up in the Ninth Street Projects.

“No, I meant you can’t believe the police will accept that as an explanation.”

“The police will be easy,” McDermott said. “Getting your husband back on top of the music business is the trick.”

“I never was on top, actually.” Jeff stared at Baby Alice. He wondered what their daughter might’ve looked like if ambition hadn’t gotten between his word and Maya and their son.

“Go shower and shave, Jeff,” McDermott said, as she returned to her desk. “Maya, get over to Newbury Street and buy him some grown-up clothes. I’ll watch the baby.” As she sat, she added, “By the way, I get five hundred dollars an hour, and you’re on the clock until this is done.”

Okay then. Two in the morning and Jeff was in his spot, his guitar on his lap, his fingers on the steel strings. The Angel of the Waters hovered over him, wings open, arms outstretched. Cast as far as he could see, the park was splendid under a starry summer sky, the flowers asleep until dawn. In the near distance, a policeman patrolled on horseback.

He strummed a minor chord, another, anoth-

What? Was that…Was that a baby’s cry?

He put the guitar on its case, walked to the dry, shallow fountain at the foot of the statue, and, oh my God, there was a baby. The missing baby. Baby Alice.

He scooped her up, nestled her in his arms, and dashed to Beacon Street. There wasn’t a car in sight. Damn. Plan B. He raced to their building and rang every bell. Someone answered, a man with a high, flowery voice.

“I found the baby,” Jeff said hurriedly into the speaker. “The missing baby. I found it. Call the police.”

McDermott, in plaid pajama bottoms and a Big Papi T-shirt, reached him first, and by the time Maya rushed downstairs in her robe and slippers, most of the building was in the lobby, waving at the baby, patting Jeff on the back.

“Look, Maya,” he said breathlessly. “She was in the park. Under the statue.”

“It’s a miracle,” she muttered.

“She doesn’t look hurt,” McDermott said, peering over Maya’s shoulder.

Jeff nodded. He was crisp in new green khakis, a striped shirt from Brooks Brothers, and boating shoes, his hair combed, the part where it should be. For a moment, he drifted deep into the story McDermott had concocted. He felt like a man who’d done something worthwhile.

Wanting no part of the charade, Maya left to retrieve his guitar.

The police came. Two squad cars, burly guys in uniforms. The Herald beat the Globe there, and its photographer got him cradling the baby, cops surrounding them as they came down the brownstone steps. “Sox Sweep Yanks-Again!” read the Herald headline that ran alongside a vertical photo of Jeff and Baby Alice. “Our Angel Safe and Sound” was the caption. The story on page three identified him as a famous Hollywood songwriter. They got his first name right, all four letters, and found an old photo of him sandwiched between Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt taken at some benefit show long ago.

“That was an awful thing to do, Jeffrey,” Maya said, turning away whenever he approached. “You need help.”

Citizens Bank tried to give him the $5,000 reward they’d put up, but, as McDermott instructed, he insisted it go to Baby Alice. Her parents, cordial young lawyers who were saving to buy their first home, thanked Jeff by inviting him and Maya to brunch on Rowes Wharf. Over the meal, he learned the nanny was back in Nicaragua, courtesy of immigration services.

“Glad you got that poor woman deported?” Maya asked as they walked back to their apartment.

He was glad about a lot of things, if not that. The day after the baby was recovered, Jeff was flown to New York to appear on The Early Show, where he was interviewed about the Miracle of the Angel.

“Yes, I have some new songs,” he said as the interview wound down.

“Will you be writing one about Baby Alice?”

“I like that idea,” he replied, as McDermott had instructed when she media-trained him.

Some big country music star he’d never heard of asked to hear his new material. A publisher with offices in New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and London offered to rep him. And a hip-hop mega-producer secured the rights to his old song from the movie, pledging to turn it into a hit again, “as soon as I find the look for the product.”

When he finally returned to Beacon Hill, he hardly recognized the woman who greeted him. Despite the turmoil, Maya seemed content, energized yet at ease, all the sharp angles gone. The pace of the old town suited her, she said. She’d moved on. “Go back to New York, Jeff,” she said, and he did.

DARK WATERS
BY PATRICIA POWELL

Watertown

Promptly at 7:19, right in the middle of Jeopardy!, the entire house went black; no electricity! and she’d had to rustle through her drawers to find candles to light up the kitchen so she could see to eat a tin of sardines with crackers and slog through half a bottle of Chardonnay. Later she had crept upstairs, weary and slightly depressed, to read peacefully a book on uncertainty she’d been trying to sink her teeth into for some time. She had not long settled into the chapter on “discomfort” when she heard the knocking on the front door downstairs, which was immediately perplexing for she did not really know anyone in the area that intimately, she’d just moved near six months now, had told no one of her whereabouts except her best friend Rhonda, and she was not expecting Rhonda, nor expecting that Rhonda would’ve disclosed her location to Fred. And yet who could it be knocking on her door at this hour-11 according to the clock on the bedside table. Who could it be?

She swung out of bed irritated as hell, padded over to the window, and flung back the lace curtains. Outside the night was impenetrable and the trees swayed drunkenly and against the frosted window, the silvery slanted rain. It had been raining all day, and now it was dark, with big winds howling through the walls and the rain battering the roof, and outside, outside was the black and sodden night. She was wearing a long see-through pink gown that in the early years of her marriage used to excite her husband greatly. But that was another story altogether. She hauled on a white duster over her gown, pulled on satin slippers, and looked around quickly for something big, something heavy, something that with just one blow would carry off the culprit. She found a screwdriver, which she slipped into her pocket, and a big heavy-duty metal flashlight she switched on at once, lighting her way downstairs to put an end to the disturbance.

Her name was Perle, she was forty-seven, and just six months ago she got up one morning and decided she was leaving her marriage. She was not leaving her children, mind you, who were away at college, she was leaving Fred, as things between them had been dead for some time, the two of them like ships passing in the night en route to some unknown destination. The truth was, early on she had lost herself, had given it over, thinking that was love, did not know where he ended and she began, and now she wanted to retrieve herself, for she had stopped living, she was just coasting now, on the sea of life. It sounded like a cliché, she knew, but that was how she saw it. She did not say a word to him the morning she left. She waited until he was gone to the hospital to visit the sick and the dying-he was an evangelical minister who believed in the laying on of hands-then she packed one suitcase full of clothes, another of her face products as she had a tendency to break out into boils, and she called the movers to collect the upright her mother had given her. Heading west, she slowly drove away from her life that morning in the white Pontiac, stopping only once to fill it with gas and to buy a cheese sandwich and a bottle of water. She rented a semi-furnished one-bedroom in Watertown, a sleepy little place that had a river running through it. She knew no one, no one knew her, and except for the tortured sonatas she played in the early mornings upon arising, she interacted only with the hairdresser where she went for a weekly rinse and set, the cashier at the bank for she was living off some CDs she’d put away for a rainy day, and the Armenian grocers that lined both sides of the main drag with their dark overstocked little shops full of Mediterranean goods.

Who is it? she cried weakly, and then she muscled up herself, for this was ridiculous. Who is it? she snapped, her voice unrecognizable even to her, and the pounding stopped at once. A face was pressed up against the glass, a dark face wet and wild with a falling-down mustache and a felt hat pulled so low she could barely see the eyes, but she could sense the desperateness in them. And when a sliver of lightning lit up the porch, she saw it was a white man slightly stooped, or maybe he was holding something, his raincoat glowing in the brief light.

It was crazy what she was about to do, she knew all the stories, knew them up and down, knew too there were white men who preyed on black women, and yet she yanked open the door and he stumbled in, wet and heavy and dank with the smell of dread.

What? she cried. What’s the matter! She ushered him into the kitchen, where he leaked water all over her floor, perhaps even blood, she could smell iron. She had the light pointed on his face, which looked gray and swollen, and on his pin-striped suit, on the untied shoes that looked slightly small for his long slim frame. She had the screwdriver poised for his heart at her side.

Help me, he gasped, leaning on the kitchen counter, and holding his arm that looked unhinged. They’ve shot me.

Blood was seeping onto her clean white Formica table and collecting into black pools.

She did not ask who had shot him; she did not want to know. She lit the candles on the counter, grabbed the light, and flew upstairs, pulling out towels and antiseptic fluids and ammonia and bandages and gauze, a pair of scissors, tweezers, pliers, and pain relievers, whatever she could find. She had a well-stocked medicine cabinet.

Downstairs he had removed the jacket, and his shirt was soaked with blood and the blood was still dripping on the floor she had just mopped that morning and he was whimpering like something half dead. Should I call an ambulance? she asked him. Should I call the police? Take you to the hospital. She tried to remember where she’d seen one.

And he turned to look at her, perhaps for the first time, and the hardness on his face disquieted her. I wouldn’t do that if I were you, he said coolly.

A fat piece of rage flew into her chest suddenly. Was he threatening her, was this fucker threatening her in her own house after she had dragged him in, that piece of shit? She let the rage hang there between them for a minute. Finally she said, Well, just so you know, mister, you can’t stay here, okay, you can’t fucking stay here. She was out of breath, winded. She could see the phone and she tried to think who she could call if this joker tried to play the fool. She’d rented the house from an older lesbian couple who were psychiatrists and who lived two houses down with their adopted son Ron, who they said had Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, but that term, she’d come to learn, was just a euphemism for crabby and rude and antisocial behavior. She could call them. Or, if she screamed, there was George the electrician across the street, she’d met him just yesterday, and there was the woman to her right whose dog was always shitting in her yard; there was the old geezer on the other side who leered at all the young women who passed his porch. Chuck. But even if she screamed, who would hear her with all this rain battering down?

Help me, he whimpered like a half-dead dog, help me clean this up, please. He was losing massive amounts of blood, she could see that now, and his face looked scared and at the same time slightly suprised. His full lips were loose and leaking.

She could just let him bleed to death, she was thinking. But she was not that kind of person. She didn’t think she could do that. Here, she said, dropping some pills into his hand that shook mightily and giving him a glass of juice. He swallowed them quickly, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down. Then she set to work, boiling water on the gas stove, helping him out of his shirt that smelled like shit and sulphite, hauling him over to the sink where she proceeded to extract the bullet with her assortment of instruments, and to bathe and dress and bandage the wound. She was good at this; she’d been an emergency room nurse until a few years ago. She was gentle and patient, as she tended to be with all things maimed. The whimpering soon subsided. She could see he was impressed, but more than that, relieved. Perhaps even grateful. He could have bled to death or the wound could’ve turned septic. It took a good thirty minutes, and during that time she felt his eyes moving up and down her chest-she was stacked-and around her neck and arms which were strong and scented with ginger and musk oil.

Have you eaten? she asked him.

He nodded wearily. And she saw that he was not a bad-looking man, his face was bony and square, his eyes big and long-lashed, and he wore his hair cut close and even to his head. The mustache made him look older than he probably was; she put him to be slightly past fifty. He was not a very big man; she could take him down, she decided, if it came to that, she was strong. Still, he was muscle-bound, as if he’d spent a lot of time in jail or at the gym. She did not think it was the latter. He wore a layer of defeat about him that reminded her of Russell.

You have family around here? she asked him. You married? She made her voice hard.

Twice, he said. Two kids. One at community college. The girl. You?

She shook her head and remembered that she was wearing her duster-and underneath that her pink gown-and she pulled the string tighter around her waist and pressed down her hair, which felt big and heavy suddenly. Did she have toothpaste on her face? Sometimes she used toothpaste to stop the swelling boils. Her fingers edged up toward her cheeks to check. She breathed in relief.

Divorced, she said when she saw that his eyes were still moving on her honey skin, and then she could’ve kicked herself. My boyfriend should be coming home about now, she added, and glanced at the clock on the wall, which had stopped at 7:19.

Got in with the wrong crowd, he said, as if he hadn’t heard that her man was coming home. And now they’re on my ass.

Coke. She said this softly. She didn’t even know why she said it. But he seemed like he’d do it big. He looked the kind who would want to impress.

He sighed without answering. Then: They think I have the money.

She nodded.

I ditched the car and then hoofed it. Fuckers shot me.

She didn’t look at him, she didn’t want to encourage him; she didn’t want details. Here was another boy playing at being a man. She knew that crowd. Did he even ask his wife about the cocaine, did he even say to her, Look, love, things piling up, I have this plan? Did he even allow her to talk him out of it? How about this, she might have said, instead? No, he had a scheme, some get-rich-quick scheme, some half-baked idea with a bunch of criminals. But everyone wants to be the hero. Russell too wanted to be a hero. She thought his mustache was ridiculous. He didn’t earn it.

She was exhausted. It was late. She had wiped up the blood from off the floor and the counter and disposed of the rags and the bullet. She was ready for him to go now so she could get back to her life. Except he didn’t look like someone ready to move. She grabbed two glasses from the cabinet and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. She poured him a finger, which he sucked down at once; she poured him another and one for herself, which she sipped slowly there at the kitchen table, the rain coming down outside, the flickering candles between them, the light low and soft on their drugged and morbid faces, their shadows skittering off the walls.

She missed Fred something furious; she had not missed him all this time-but tonight suddenly she wanted his taste on her tongue, his long dark neck, his beautiful mouth with the lips shaped like a heart, his breath jagged and harsh. She imagined him picking up the phone, his surprise at first, which he would immediately cover up by hardening his voice. Then it would be like pulling teeth trying to get anything out of him, anything warm. It was close to 12:30, by this time he’d be asleep or perhaps reading still and sipping the glass of port he took at night before bed, his feet covered in socks no matter how warm the night; it helped him sleep, he said. And what would she tell him? She’d let a white man into her house. A man who could kill her. A man she did not know from Adam.

She found another candle, lit it, and gave it to him.

The bathroom is upstairs to the left, she said, you’ll find towels too, and soap.

She turned away from his eyes like coals in the night, and busied herself in the kitchen as he trailed away with the light and started heavily up the stairs. She heard the door close, heard him tinkling, heard the toilet flush, and now the tub was filling with water.

She had to call somebody, needed to call somebody. But when she picked up the phone and put it to her ear, she saw that it was dead and that the line was cut.

Motherfucker! she thundered up at him, the panic eating at her now. Where was her cell, where the fuck was her cell? She scrambled around in the dark, knocking over bottles, crashing into bins; a glass fell on the floor and shattered. Jesus Christ! The terror was at her throat. She couldn’t find her purse. She couldn’t find her keys. She couldn’t find anything at all. She turned Jack Daniel’s to her head, gulped down a mouthful, and when that didn’t produce the desired result, she swiftly swallowed several more. Fred’s favorite sermon was about evil. You had to defeat it, he said. You can never let the seeds of it flourish. It is like cancer, he liked to tell the crowd, the worst, most virulent form, it spreads like wild fire. And when she’d tried to follow his reasoning about what this evil was, it was always the unknown, it was the surprise, and it was the challenge, the unpredictability. He was a careful man, that Fred. She’d left because of her faith, or maybe her lack of it. She didn’t have conviction. She didn’t have belief. She didn’t have strong boundaries against evil, and how could she when she was always so curious about the unknown?

Suddenly there were footsteps thudding up the stairs at the front of the house. There were voices out there, men talking, there was banging on the front door again, banging on the glass, and she stood up with a start, her heart pounding again. This time the bell was ringing too, and she sat down and got up again, she heard sirens wailing outside, and whirling lights filled the room. It was the police. She ran to the door with the candle; she flung it open wide with a wild and certain joy.

Officer?

He was young and fat, his cheeks like apples.

Ma’am? He sounded surprised to see her. Maybe it was because she was black, or because she was in her duster, with her hair unsuppressed about her face. Ma’am, he said again, sorry to bother you.

Her face must’ve looked weary at this point. And she was weary.

Ma’am. He thrust a picture in her face. Ma’am, this man is very dangerous. Just escaped from Walpole. Maximum security. We’re going around the neighborhood looking for him. We have the stolen car outside, so we know he isn’t far. Have you seen anyone?

She felt faint suddenly. She remembered when they came for Russell, fifteen of them for one little nineteen-year-old boy. She must’ve rocked unsteadily, for the officer caught her under the arms.

You’re okay, ma’am?

She opened her mouth to speak, to tell them that the piece of shit they were looking for was upstairs now in her tub, naked as the day he was born, that she’d patched him up, patched up the arm nice and good and extracted the bullet, and how did he thank her, he cut the telephone wire, that’s what he did, he cut the wire. And despite herself, despite herself, she yawned loud and staggering. Then she yawned again and again, as if her brain needed an extraordinary amount of oxygen.

Sorry to wake you, ma’am. It’s just that the stolen car is right outside.

She paused to peer into the night but all she saw were the circling lights from the police cars and Russell spread-eagle, fifteen guns pointed at his head. And then, in the distance, George’s house, and faces pressed against the windows watching.

Look, ma’am, if anyone comes by asking for help, do not let him in, do you hear me? We might have shot him, and he might be bleeding. In fact, call us at once, call 911. I’m Officer Derrick. Tom Derrick. He took her hand, which was limp and slightly damp. Sorry to bother you like this. He was about to walk away and then he reconsidered.

Ma’am, we’re just going to take a look around the back; make sure you’re safe. Then we’re going to check next door. Thanks again for your time.

She watched them traipse down the stairs, must be about six of them. She watched them fan out, turning the corner to the side of the house, shining their big lights. She heard them unlock the gate and step across the garden, their shoes sluicing through mud. She could hear them banging on the door of the woman next door whose dog often shat in her yard. She could hear them rooting around for some time before they slammed back into their cars and drove away. She looked out at the everlasting falling rain and at the streak of white light zigzagging the sky from the west. She waited for the thunder-clap to blast through the heavens. And then she cleared her throat to make sure her voice box was still in operation. Hello, she cried into the night so she could hear herself. Hello! The air felt good on her skin; in fact, it was warmer outside than it was inside her house, which was freezing.

She turned back to her house, locked the door behind her, and leaned against it; a sigh sounding like a wail heaved out of her chest.

Fucking pigs!

She reeled at the sound of his voice so near her neck and ran smack into him, his chest like steel against her duster, which had flown open. She screamed then, and immediately caught herself and whacked him hard across the face with the flashlight. He cried out. She whacked again and again until he found her wrists and grabbed them. He thrust her against the wall, his breath acrid against her neck. And for a long time they stayed in that dance. She could tell he was thinking, thinking what exactly to do with her. He could not read her motives.

Cool it! he barked, his nails biting into her flesh. Don’t get crazy now, okay, bitch? Don’t get fucking crazy.

She could not see his eyes, but she imagined they were small and mean, the eyes of a man who could kill and maim people, the eyes of a man who could rape and murder and end up in maximum security.

She pulled away and moved back into the kitchen, and when she couldn’t figure out what she wanted there, she went back to the living room, back to the door where she lingered for some time watching the night, and then she headed upstairs which was damp with the steam and sweat and oils from his bath, and inside her room she bolted the door and shoved the antique dresser against it and sat down at the edge of the bed. Her face, she realized now, was wet and her hands were trembling. She sat on them and tried to calm her breathing. Her book on uncertainty stared up at her from the floor.

Fred, she moaned quietly into the night. Fred. She was afraid. Deathly afraid. But what could she do? She had to do something. She had to come up with a plan. She had to get out of there. Or get him the hell out. She saw that she was still shivering, that her hands were trembling, even her teeth were chattering. Her entire face was on fire. She grabbed a bottle from the bedside table and sprinkled some pills into her mouth. Then she stood up, blew out the candle, and crawled under the blanket, pulling and tucking it under her chin, and with her breath, she waited.

It rained steadily through the night and though it was at first impossible to sleep, she eventually drifted off, waking from time to time grateful for the snores wheezing through the house, which meant he had not killed her, he had not robbed her and left. At one point she got up to close a window downstairs that had swung open in the wind, and when she saw him on the couch curled up like that, curled into a ball and shivering and wheezing into the dark, she put another blanket on him. But as soon as she went to the door and paused in front of it, trying to decide how fast she could move, how far she could get, the wheezing stopped.

She woke to the smell of coffee and frying bacon. She woke to the warm sun pushing its way through the maple leaves outside and through her window and into her bed, falling in a square on her face. She woke to the life that she had imprisoned herself in. It wasn’t Fred this time or her marriage. It was of her own doing.

She lit a cigarette. This was one of the things he hated, that she smoked; she drank to the point of drunkenness, she cursed, she loved sex, she read pulp, she liked violent movies, and she didn’t always give a damn about his sermon when he was a preacher at a big evangelical church and had an image to uphold.

It was Thursday. On Thursdays she visited her mother who had Alzheimer’s and lived in a nursing home three hours away. Usually she got there by noon, so they could have lunch. Her mother used to love oxtails and she had found a little Cuban place that braised them tenderly in tomato sauce and served them with small yellow-eyed pigeon peas mixed with saffron rice. Sometimes she’d read to her mother, recently they’d been working on a book about Sidney Poitier’s life, and she’d sing show tunes and spirituals with her. Whatever she remembered. Her mother had taught piano and singing lessons for years. After that they would go for a walk in the botanical gardens nearby, then she would return her mother to her room and make the three-hour drive home. She looked forward to these outings with her mother dearly.

Downstairs on the counter he had scrambled eggs and the coffee was dripping steadily into the pot. She looked out the window at the wind-strewn grass that needed weeding; all the plants she had bought at Home Depot last week, intending to repot, were now blown to shreds or drowned. There was still no electricity and the room was quiet, no humming coming from the refrigerator or newscaster’s voice buzzing from the television in the living room. Birds were busy at the feeder, noisy old jays and a few starlings. Is he even hygienic? she wondered, glancing at the plate of yellow eggs and then at his long and shapely fingers, the nails neatly cut and clean.

You might want to add salt, he said. I don’t touch the stuff, high blood pressure.

He closed his eyes over his food, and then started to eat. The flashlight had left big angry welts on his face. This did not make her feel bad. He ate slowly, meditatively; he cut his bread into neat little squares with his knife, he chewed a long time as his dark bristled jaw, strong and square, moved up and down. He was wearing the pin-striped suit and the wrinkled shirt underneath was white and clean. He must’ve washed it last night. And the burgundy wingtips with his toes bunched up at the front were definitely not his size. He must’ve bludgeoned someone and taken his clothes and car. The felt hat sat proudly on the counter.

These are good eggs, he said to no one, must be organic. He looked at her and showed his teeth, which were big and bright and yellow. They don’t have these where I’m coming from.

After they took Russell, her father had a break down, then a heart attack. After they took Russell, her father was no damn good.

She had no appetite whatsoever, and her food lay untouched, though after a while she played with the mushy eggs on her plate, using the fork to push them aside and then draw them toward her again. She had a CD she could cash and give to him. It had several more months still before maturity; they would charge her a penalty. Didn’t matter, she would give it to him and then maybe he would go, he would drop off the face of the earth. That was her predicament: now that she had let him in, how to get him the hell out of her life.

Thank you for last night, he said softly, and she looked at him quickly, his eyes big and blue and full of light. She turned away. She wanted to tell him he must leave at once, but something was stopping her.

A minute later she went back upstairs and got dressed. Inside the bathroom mirror, her face was a mess, it had broken out, and a thousand boils had taken up residence. She got out her lotions, her rinses, and her special dermatology soaps, and after about half an hour she emerged with a new face and quarter-pound of foundation.

I’m going to the bank, she said to his back, the muscles moving slowly up and down under his jacket as he washed and dried the few plates. Her mug of coffee was sitting there untouched, her eggs too. He covered them up with a napkin.

I’m getting you some money so you can go, she said, so you can start again.

He turned then to look at her, his eyes hard and still. There was a warning in them and his whole face had turned to stone. She saw how he could kill. Easily.

I’m not going to the police, she said, I’m going to the bank. Suddenly she felt testy. If this were about the police, I would’ve handed you over last night. Don’t you want to have a life? Don’t you want freedom? She saw something shift in his face and it emboldened her. You have to trust me too. This works both ways. I had to trust you last night and that wasn’t easy.

Outside, the air was incredibly humid and the men working for the cable and electric companies were already attached to posts repairing wires; police cars rolled slowly up and down the street as if looking for somebody, and the dog walkers were out too, with their baggies of brown stool. Young mothers pushed their expensive strollers and joggers, delighted to see the sun again, daintily sidestepped puddles of water. Hard to believe that not too long ago this was considered an old working-class neighborhood full of mainly Irish and Italians who worked in the arsenal. Now the town was full of yuppies driving up property taxes and opening restaurants that served arugula salads and Kobe organic burgers. And the arsenal now housed the gourmet ghetto, expensive artist studios, condominiums, and a high-priced mall.

She walked by the tiny cemetery where many a dog went to defecate against the mildewed tombstones, and by the old church they were developing into more condominiums. She waited at the light, and when it changed she walked past the hairdressing salon, the Syrian shoe repair shop, the Greek diner, and the Miles Pratt house, taken over by dentists now. She nodded hello to a man and his little girl standing outside the Armenian Library and Museum. Down the tiny side street near the CVS was the Iranian restaurant where she’d had lunch a few times by herself; she liked the rice sprinkled with fleshy pomegranate, the ice cream flavored with cardamom and rose water, and had planned to take her daughters there when they visited. To the left of the restaurant was the post office, and beyond that the Charles River, with its cool, dark, slow-moving waters. Often she went there to read or to feed the ducks even though there was a big sign prohibiting this. Sometimes just to empty her head and to be in the company of nature.

Outside the bank, she sat on the bench near a Japanese maple and smoked three cigarettes in succession, waiting for the line to thin. Up the street near the CVS, a police car circled the square slowly.