Later

20

I didn’t see Liz Dutton for a long time after that, a year or maybe a little more. I missed her at first, but that didn’t last long. When the feeling came, I just reminded myself she screwed my mom over, and bigtime. I kept waiting for Mom to have another sleepover friend, but she didn’t. Like ever. I asked her once, and she said, “Once burned, twice shy. We’re okay, that’s the important thing.”

And we were. Thanks to Regis Thomas—27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list—and a couple new clients (one of them discovered by Barbara Means, who was by then full-time and actually ended up getting her name on the door in 2017), the agency was back on a firm footing. Uncle Harry returned to the care home in Bayonne (same facility, new management), which wasn’t great but better than it had been. Mom was no longer cross in the morning and she got some new clothes. “Have to,” she told me once that year. “I’ve lost fifteen pounds of wine-weight.”

I was in middle school by then, which sucked in some respects, was okay in others, and came with one excellent perk: student athletes with no class during the last period of the day could go to the gym, the art room, the music room, or sign out. I only played JV basketball, and the season was over, but I still qualified. Some days I checked out the art room, because this foxy chick named Marie O’Malley occasionally hung out there. If she wasn’t working on one of her watercolors, I just went home. Walked if it was nice (on my own, it should go without saying), took the bus if it was nasty.

On the day Liz Dutton came back into my life, I didn’t even bother looking for Marie, because I’d gotten a new Xbox for my birthday and I wanted to hit it. I was all the way down the walk and shouldering my backpack (no more one-armed tote for me; sixth grade was in the prehistoric past) when she called to me.

“Hey, Champ, what the haps, bambino?”

She was leaning against her personal, legs crossed at the ankles, wearing jeans and a low-cut blouse. It was a blazer over the blouse instead of a parka, but it still had NYPD on the breast and she flapped it open in the old way to show me her shoulder holster. Only this time it wasn’t empty.

“Hi, Liz,” I mumbled. I looked down at my shoes and made a right turn onto the street.

“Hold on, I need to talk to you.”

I stopped, but I didn’t turn back to her. Like she was Medusa and one look at her snaky head would turn me to stone. “I don’t think I should. Mom would be mad.”

“She doesn’t need to know. Turn around, Jamie. Please. Looking at nothing but your back is just about killing me.”

She sounded like she really felt bad, and that made me feel bad. I turned around. The blazer was closed again, but I could see the bulge of her gun just the same.

“I want you to take a ride with me.”

“Not a good idea,” I said. I was thinking of this girl named Ramona Sheinberg. She was in a couple of my classes at the beginning of the year, but then she was gone and my friend Scott Abramowitz told me her father snatched her during a custody suit and took her to someplace where there was no extradition. Scott said he hoped it was at least a place with palm trees.

“I need what you can do, Champ,” she said. “I really do.”

I didn’t reply to that, but she must have seen I was wavering, because she gave me a smile. It was a nice one that lit up those gray eyes of hers. They weren’t a bit sleety that day. “Maybe it will come to nothing, but I want to try. I want you to try.”

“Try what?”

She didn’t answer, not then, just held out a hand to me. “I helped your mother when Regis Thomas died. Won’t you help me now?”

Technically, I was the one who helped my mother that day, Liz just gave us a quick ride up the Sprain Brook Parkway, but she had stopped to buy me a Whopper when Mom just wanted to push on. And she gave me the rest of her Coke when my mouth was so dry from talking. So I got in the car. I didn’t feel good about it, but I did it. Adults have power, especially when they beg, and that’s what Liz was doing.

I asked Liz where we were going, and she said Central Park to start with. Maybe a couple of other places after that. I said if I didn’t get home by five, Mom would be worried. Liz told me she’d try to get me back before then, but this was very important.

That’s when she told me what it was about.