Live Bait

24

Marty walked into his house and felt like a trespasser. He’d only been gone for two days, but already the kitchen looked strange and unfamiliar, like a place somebody else lived.

You should sell the house, Marty. Get a condo, maybe. Or come to live with Lily and me. We could use the help at the nursery, anyway.

I can’t, Morey. I belong here.

No. You and Hannah belonged here. The two of you. Now you have to find where you belong without her.

It isn’t over.

Of course it’s over. The case is closed. The animal who murdered my daughter is dead. This is as it should be. I thank God for this. I dance around his grave in my heart. And now we can live again.

That had been months and months ago. He’d never seen Morey alive again.

The.357 was still in the hamper, buried beneath the mildewed, shower-drenched clothes he’d thrown in there when Jeff Montgomery had come to tell him Morey was dead.

He went down to the basement and spent thirty minutes cleaning and oiling and checking out the gun before it was fit to carry and shoot. It wasn’t department issue. It didn’t fit in the smaller belt holster he’d worn on his hip for over half of his fifteen years on the force, so he stuffed it in his suit jacket pocket.

He’d never planned on carrying this gun around. He’d bought it for one reason, and one reason only, and holstering the thing after it had served that purpose wasn’t part of the package. Dead men didn’t need holsters.

But he couldn’t tag around after Lily all day with a.357 flopping in a jacket pocket. Not that he really believed he needed the gun, or that she needed his protection. He was half convinced that Jack had already taken a giant leap over that line between sanity and madness, and was seeing imaginary demons everywhere, but it wouldn’t hurt to humor him for a while, until he could figure out what was really going on.

He frowned as he put his cleaning tools and oil back into the kit, trying to figure out the logistics of making a trip to the gun store for a holster without leaving Lily alone, and without frightening her by lending credence to Jack’s paranoia. It seemed an insoluble dilemma, and he decided to deal with it in the morning.

He carried the hamper out to the curb for the garbage-men, ruined clothes and shoes inside, and then went to the big back bedroom to pack. He’d already worn almost everything he’d hastily tossed in a duffel on the morning of his aborted suicide. If he really intended to stay close to Lily for a while, he might as well take the job seriously, and that meant he wouldn’t want to leave her every day to run home for fresh clothes.

The closet smelled like Hannah. It was a light citrusy scent, and yet it nearly knocked him over when he opened the folding doors. He stood there with his big hands hanging helplessly at his sides, massive shoulders hunched forward as if he’d just taken a hard punch to the stomach, staring at whispery silks and soft cottons that moved in the breeze the opening door had created. Sad, empty shells of gentle colors that had once held his wife’s body. The man who had killed her, dead for seven months now, was still killing him. Over and over again.

She was wearing the long white gauzy dress that made it look like she was floating when she walked. He’d seen it in a store window that very day, hanging lifelessly on a mannequin, longing for Hannah’s slender curves to give it form. She was halfway into her old black suit when he carried it into the bedroom, draped over his muscular arms like some gossamer altar cloth. She cried when she put it on, which only made Marty smile. Hannah always cried when she was happy.

They were celebrating life that night. After seven years of trying, Hannah was pregnant.

‘Don’t call it that,’ she told him.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t like the word. It has a hard g. Why would you use such an ugly-sounding word to describe such a wondrous thing? I’m not going to be pregnant, I’ve decided. I’m going to be with child.’

‘Very biblical.’

Her laugh was music in the nearly empty parking ramp. They’d lingered too long at the restaurant after dinner, and now shadows were everywhere. One of them jumped from behind a pillar and grabbed Hannah from behind, laying the evil gleam of a serrated knife against her white throat.

He’d been so smart, that desperate, lanky, wild-eyed kid with the greasy blond hair and the needle-marked arms. He’d taken Hannah first, knowing it would stop Marty cold.

But Marty was a cop. A narcotics detective, for God’s sake. He dealt with people like this every day of his life. He knew what they wanted. He knew how to handle them.

‘Take it easy, son. I’ve got almost fifty bucks in my wallet. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got, and it’s all yours. Just let her go.’

‘Money first. Toss it over here.’

‘No problem. I’m going into my inside pocket, okay? See? I’ll go really slow, I’ll throw down the money, then we’ll turn around and just walk away. Is that all right with you?’

The kid had blue eyes brightened by a hunger few would ever understand, and for an instant, just an instant, Marty thought he might be making a mistake. The kid’s eyes were too blue; too intense; too narrowly focused. Heroin didn’t do that; neither did crack. He began to think it might be something much worse, like one of the new lethal mixes that made nuclear explosions in burned-out brains.

He opened the lapel of his good jacket slowly, to show the pocket inside, the rectangular shape of a wallet against the silk. But he’d forgotten. Jesus Christ, he’d seen the knife against Hannah’s throat and he’d forgotten everything he knew. He’d forgotten to tell the kid about the gun he had to wear, on duty or off, and then he saw the shock and fear in the kid’s too-bright eyes, and then the flash and bite of the knife, and then the gush of Hannah’s life in a flood he wouldn’t have believed possible.

He held Hannah in his arms as her white dress turned red, frantically punching numbers into his cell phone, calling it in, then tossing the phone aside and rocking her gently. The gash across her throat was so deep it took her voice, but she managed to move her hand to her stomach and ask him with her eyes.

‘It’s all right, Hannah,’ he told her, one hand pressed as hard as he dared on her throat, trying to hold the life inside. ‘The baby’s all right. The baby’s all right.’

He kept telling her that, over and over, until her eyes went flat and her hand slipped lifelessly to the concrete.

The ambulance arrived within five minutes. It was only three minutes too late.

Marty had never even heard the smack of the kid’s footsteps as he ran away. But he remembered his face.

He stood very still in front of the closet for many moments, just breathing, coming back. The pictures of that night were always with him. To one degree or another, he visualized pieces of it every day. But never had the recollection been that complete, the images that cruel and vivid. He’d always known the complete memory would resurface eventually in all its horror, and he’d lived with the certainty that when it did, he would finally be able to pull the trigger.

It took his breath away when he realized that he’d been wrong. He had a gun in his pocket, and absolutely no inclination to use it. He’d seen the worst his mind had to offer, and now, miraculously, he felt himself letting it go.

Lily was sitting in her chair with a book in her lap when he got back to the house. She was bundled into a purple terry robe, sipping water from a glass with multicolored stripes. She patted the arm of the couch next to her chair. ‘Sit a minute. You were gone a long time. I worried.’

Marty settled onto the couch and sank into cushions that had been softened over the years by all the dead people he’d loved.

‘Minneapolis isn’t so safe anymore, that you can be out at all hours. Of course you probably have nothing to worry about with that gun in your pocket.’

Marty smiled a little. Lily didn’t miss a trick.

‘Then again, guns are dangerous. It could go off, you could shoot yourself accidentally.’

‘I’m not going to shoot myself, Lily.’

Lily cocked her head and stared at him for a moment. ‘That’s good to hear, Martin. Then all these months, I’ve been worrying for nothing.’

Marty looked into bright blue ageless eyes, and wondered what would happen if anyone in this family ever told the truth. ‘I thought about it,’ he said, testing the waters.

‘You must still be thinking about it if you’re carrying a gun.’

The truth thing seemed to be working out. Marty thought he’d try it again. ‘Jack asked me to go home and get it. He’s worried about the murders, and wants me to keep an eye on you.’

Lily sipped from her glass without looking at him. ‘He said that?’

‘He did.’

‘Hmph. So I have a bodyguard, now? You’re going to move in, stay here forever? That’s a very big suitcase you brought in.’

Marty gave her a tired half smile and looked down at the old tweed Samsonite he and Hannah had gotten for their honeymoon. ‘I’m going to stay until the cops find out who’s killing people.’

She set her glass down very carefully on the table, then pushed herself up out of the chair. ‘Then you might as well unpack that thing.’

Marty was hanging up his last pair of khakis in the bedroom closet when he heard a soft rap on the door. Without waiting for an answer, Lily entered with a stack of neatly folded clothes and set them down on the bed.

He looked uncertainly at the blazing white boxer shorts on the top of the pile. ‘Are those mine?’

‘All day I had to soak these in bleach. Have you heard of bleach?’

He walked over and held them up. There were razor-sharp creases in the front. ‘You ironed my underwear?’

She shrugged. ‘Are we animals? Of course I ironed them.’ She toddled over to the closet and examined the row of khakis he’d just hung up. ‘You can’t fold slacks like that,’ she said, pulling each pair off the hanger and refolding them along the crease.

When she’d finished, she turned to find Marty sitting on the bed, watching her with a sad smile.

‘What?’

‘Hannah used to do that.’

Lily folded her lips together, looked away, and nodded. ‘We all walk around with holes in our hearts.’ She looked back and met his eyes. ‘But we still walk around.’

‘Sometimes I’m not sure why we do that. Why we hang on when things get so bad.’ He glanced at the fading, bluish tattoo on her arm. ‘There had to have been times when you wondered if it was worth it.’

She squared her shoulders beneath the puffy purple robe and eyed him steadily. ‘Not once. Not for one single minute. Life is always worth it.’

Marty remained sitting on the bed for a long time after the door clicked shut behind her, a little shamed by this tiny old woman who was so much stronger than he was.

Finally he went to the old rolltop desk in the corner, pulled out the chair, and sat down. The top drawer was mostly empty, except for a legal tablet and a package of ballpoint pens. With great care, he centered the tablet on the desk, selected a pen, and then just sat there, waiting. Eventually his hand moved almost of its own accord, picking up the pen, drawing a circle with lines radiating from it, like a sun. In the middle of the sun, he wrote ‘JACK.’

An hour later, he leaned back and rubbed his burning eyes, and for the first time in a long time, he was craving coffee instead of scotch. He’d filled three pages with notes and questions, and still, jumbled thoughts ricocheted through his head, demanding transfer to paper.

This is what he used to do when he was working a particularly troublesome case, and the familiarity of it reminded him of many a late night when Hannah would creep into his office quietly, drape her arms over his shoulders, and chide him gently for leaving her alone in that big, cold bed. He could almost feel the weight of her soft arms, smell the lemony soap she used to wash her face, feel the tickle of her silky hair on the back of his neck.

An amazed smile formed slowly on his lips. For an entire year, his only memories of Hannah had been of her death. Now, for the first time, he was recalling a piece of her life.

I’m getting better, he thought, flipping over a new page.