Family Honor

Chapter 23

It helped that I had been a cop. It helped that I was a licensed private investigator. It helped that I had a gun permit. It helped that Millicent confirmed my story, however monosyllabically. It helped that I was a woman defending a young girl against two known thugs. It helped that I was kind of cute. It probably helped a little that Rosie was cuter than is legally permissible in many states. And it helped a lot that I was Phil Randall’s daughter. We didn’t have to go downtown. We agreed that Millicent would be better off if she weren’t mentioned to the press. The lead detective on the case was a sergeant named Brian Kelly who had thick black hair and a cute butt and a wonderful smile.

“We’ll need to talk again, Sunny,” he said about five in the afternoon as they were cleaning up the crime scene. “Is it okay if I call you Sunny?”

“Absolutely, Sergeant,” I said.

“And I’d appreciate you calling me Brian,” he said.

We were sitting at my kitchen table with Rosie plomped on one of Brian’s feet, looking up at him with her tongue lolling out. Millicent was sitting up on my bed with her knees to her chin and her arms wrapped around them, staring at the television.

“I’ll do what I can to shelter the kid. If there’s a trial she may have to testify, but I doubt that there’ll be a trial.”

“You don’t plan to bring old Mike into court?”

“The guy you didn’t shoot?” Brian looked at his notes. “Mike Leary. Don’t know him. But he hangs around with Terry Nee, we’ll find some use for him, and he’ll plea-bargain.”

“Fine,” I said.

“You don’t have any thoughts you’ve not shared with me, do you, about why they were here and what they were doing?”

“You know what I know,” I said.

“Maybe,” Brian said.

“Would I lie to you?”

Brian smiled at me. When he smiled his eyes widened a little and seemed to get brighter.

“Of course you would, Sunny. We both know that.”

“So young and yet so cynical,” I said.

He stood and put his notebook away. I stood with him.

“Lemme get back to the station,” Brian said, “and sort of fold this up and put it away for the night. I’ll call you in a couple days.”

“Fine.”

“You okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You ever kill somebody before?”

“No.”

“It’s sort of a heavy thing,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll leave a cruiser out front for the night, just until we shake this down a little.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay. I’ll call you.”

“Do,” I said.

And he left. I followed him to the door and locked it after he left. Rosie went down the length of the loft and jumped up on the bed beside Millicent and lay down. I sat at my kitchen counter for a while. My ears were still ringing. When the mass of buckshot had hit him, Terry Nee’s shirt had disappeared in a mass of blood. I wondered if he felt it. He might have made a sound when he went backward. I wondered if he had been alive when his leg was twitching, or if it was just some weird reflex and Terry was already somewhere else. I’d have to clean the shotgun. If you fired them and didn’t clean them, the barrel got pitted. Terry was a guy who couldn’t believe a woman would shoot him, or couldn’t allow himself to back down to a woman. Whatever it was, it killed him.

They would have taken the girl. He went for his gun. He’d have shot me. With a 10-gauge shotgun at two feet you can’t aim to wound. I had to kill him. The ringing wouldn’t go away. I shook my head a little and got up and went to the cabinet and got a green bottle of Glenfiddich and a short glass. I poured an inch of scotch and sipped it, and poured some more. I could feel my heart moving in my chest. I was aware of my breathing. It seemed shallow. I took another sip of scotch, and shivered slightly and got up and went to the refrigerator and added some ice. As I was putting the ice in, some of it slipped from my hand and scattered on the floor. When I bent to pick it up I dropped the glass. The glass broke. I couldn’t leave broken glass on the floor with Rosie in the house, so I went to the broom closet and got the dustpan and a broom and cleaned up the glass and ice, and put it in the trash compactor and closed the compactor and turned the switch. I walked over to the broom closet and put the broom away and hung the dustpan on the hook. It slipped off the hook and dropped to the floor. I bent to pick it up and felt all the strength go from me, and sat down on the floor and began to cry. I heard Rosie jump down from the bed and trot down the length of the loft. She came around the kitchen counter and began to lap my face. Maybe to comfort me. Maybe because she liked salt. Then Millicent appeared around the corner of the counter, barefooted, and stared at me. Her face was stark and colorless. Her eyes seemed nearly black in the oval of her face.

“You all right?” she said.

Rosie lapped industriously. I nodded.

“How come you’re crying?” Millicent said.

Her voice had the flat tinny sound fear makes.

I shook my head. She stood. I sat. Then I put my hand up and took hers and squeezed it. Rosie lapped the other cheek. I could feel control starting to come back. I was beginning to breathe more slowly. I let go of Millicent’s hand and put Rosie off my lap and got to my feet. I got another glass and put some ice in it and poured some single malt into it.

“Can I have some?” Millicent said.

I got her a glass and handed it to her. She added ice and poured some scotch over it. We sat together at the counter. We both took a drink. Millicent frowned.

“What is that stuff?”

“Single malt scotch,” I said.

“Its not like any scotch I ever had.”

I nodded. We were quiet. Rosie lay on the rug sideways to us, looking at us obliquely.

“It bother you, shooting that guy?” Millicent said.

“Not at the time,” I said. “Now it does.”

She shrugged and stared at the scotch for a bit and took another small sip.

“What’d they want?” she said.

I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“You,” I said.

Her eyes got bigger.

“My mother sent them,” she said.

“I don’t know who sent them,” I said.

“My mother.”

The way she said “mother” was chilling. If I ever had children, and the clock was starting to tick on me, I prayed that they would never call me mother in that voice.

“How would your mother know men like that?” I said.

Millicent looked at my counter and didn’t answer. I waited. Millicent sipped some more of the scotch. She was five or six years below the minimum age. I was contributing to the delinquency of a minor. So what? Everybody else had.

“How would she?” I said.

“My mom knows a lot of men,” Millicent said, still staring down at the countertop.

“And you think she would send them here with guns to get you?”

“Sure.”

“These same two men beat up Pharaoh Fox, looking for you.”

Millicent shrugged.

“You think your mother sent them to do that, too?”

“Sure.”

“The man I... the dead man was a known criminal. The police knew him. He was a strong-arm man, an enforcer.”

Millicent took another swallow of scotch.

“She knows guys like that,” Millicent said without lifting her stare from the countertop.

I sipped my scotch. Millicent sipped hers. The room was quiet, except for the television murmuring in front of the bed at the other end of the loft.

“Millicent,” I said finally. “There’s more to this than that. Your mother is an affluent suburban housewife married to a very successful man. How in the hell would she come to know people like Terry Nee?”

Millicent stared at my counter some more.

“And why would she send such a person looking for you?”

Stare.

“Does this have something to do with why you ran away?”

Shrug.

I reached over and took hold of her chin with my right hand and turned her face toward me.

“Goddamn it,” I said. “I just shot a man to protect you.”

“And yourself,” she mumbled.

“And Rosie,” I said. “And I’m in this because of you. And I want to know what exactly the fuck is going on.”

Tears welled suddenly. She tried to shake her head. I held on to her chin.

“What?” I said.

The tears were running down her face now.

“What?”

Her breath was coming in little gasps.

“What?”

“I... I saw... I saw something,” she gasped.