The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Flying Solo by Ed Gorman

FROM Noir 13

"YOU SMOKING AGAIN?"

"Yeah." Ralph's sly smile. "You afraid these'll give me cancer?"

"You mind rolling down the window then?"

"I bought a pack today. It felt good. I've been wanting a cigarette for twenty-six years. That's how long ago I gave them up. I was still walking a beat back then. I figure what the hell, you know. I mean, the way things are. I been debating this a long time. I don't know why I picked today to start again. I just did." He rolled the window down. The soft summer night came in like a sweet angel of mercy. "I've smoked four of them but this is the only one I've really enjoyed."

"Why this one?"

"Because I got to see your face."

"The Catholic thing?"

"That's right, kid. The Catholic thing. They've got you so tight inside you need an enema. No cheating on the wife, no cheating on the taxes, no cheating on the church. And somebody bends the rules a little, your panties get all bunched up."

"You're pretty eloquent for an ex-cop. That enema remark. And also, by the way, whenever you call me 'kid' people look at you funny. I mean, I'm sixty-six and you're sixty-eight."

Ralph always portrayed himself as a swashbuckler; the day he left the force he did so with seventeen citizen complaints on his record. He took a long, deep drag on his Winston. "We're upping the ante tonight, Tom. That's why I'm a little prickish. I know you hate being called 'kid.' It's just nerves."

I was surprised he admitted something like that. He enjoyed playing fearless.

"That waitress didn't have it coming, Ralph."

"How many times you gonna bring that up? And for the record, I did ask for a cheeseburger if you'll remember, and I did leave her a frigging ten-dollar tip after I apologized to her twice. See how uptight you are?"

"She probably makes six bucks an hour and has a kid at home."

"You're just a little bit nervous the way I am. That's why you're runnin' your mouth so hard."

He was probably right. "So we're really going to do it, huh?"

"Yeah, Tom, we're really going to do it."

"What time is it?"

I checked my Timex, the one I got when I retired from teaching high school for thirty years. English and creative writing. The other gift I got was not being assaulted by any of my students. A couple of my friends on the staff had been beaten, one of them still limping years after. "Nine minutes later than when you asked me last time."

"By rights I should go back of that tree over there and take a piss. In fact I think I will."

"That's just when he'll pull in."

"The hell with it. I wouldn't be any good with a full bladder."

"You won't be any good if he sees us."

"He'll be so drunk he won't notice." The grin made him thirty. "You worry too much."

The moon told its usual lies. Made this ugly two-story flat-roofed cube of a house if not beautiful at least tolerable to the quick and forgiving eye. The steep sagging stairs running at a forty-five-degree angle up the side of the place were all that interested me. That and the isolation here on the edge of town. A farmhouse at one time, a tumbledown barn behind it, the farmland back to seed, no one here except our couple living in the upstairs. Ken and Callie Neely. Ken being the one we were after.

We were parked behind a stretch of oaks. Easy to watch him pull in and start up those stairs. I kept the radio low. Springsteen.

When Ralph got back in I handed him my pocket-sized hand sanitizer.

"You should a been a den mother."

"You take a piss, you wash your hands."

"Yes, Mom."

And then we heard him. He drove his sleek red Chevy pickup truck so fast he sounded as if he was going to shoot right on by. I wondered what the night birds silver-limned in the broken moonlight of the trees made of the country-western song bellowing from the truck. A breeze swooped in the open windows of my Volvo and brought the scents of long-dead summers. An image of a seventeen-year-old girl pulling her T-shirt over her head and the immortal perfection of her pink-tipped breasts.

"You know what this is going to make us, don't you? I mean, after we've done it."

"Yeah, I do, Tom. It's gonna make us happy. That's what it's gonna make us. Now let's go get him."

I met Ralph Francis McKenna in the chemo room of Oncology Partners. His was prostate, mine was colon. They gave him a year, me eighteen months, no guarantees either of us would make it. We had one other thing in common. We were both widowers. Our kids lived way across the country and could visit only occasionally. Natural enough we'd become friends. Of a kind, anyway.

We always arranged to have our chemo on the same day, same time. After the chemo was over we both had to take monthly IVs of other, less powerful drugs.

Ralph said he'd had the same reaction when he'd first walked into the huge room where thirty-eight patients sat in comfortable recliners getting various kinds of IV drips. So many people smiling and laughing. Another thing being how friendly everybody was to everybody else. People in thousand-dollar coats and jackets talking to threadbare folks in cheap discount clothes. Black people yukking it up with white people. And swift efficient nurses Ralph Francis McKenna, a skilled flirt, knew how to draw in.

Once in a while somebody would have a reaction to the chemo. One woman must have set some kind of record for puking. She was so sick the three nurses hovering over her didn't even have time to get her to one of the johns. All they could do was keep shoving clean pans under her chin.

During our third session Ralph said, "So how do you like flying solo?"

"What's 'flying solo'?"

"You know. Being alone. Without a wife."

"I hate it. My wife knew how to enjoy life. She really loved it. I get depressed a lot. I should've gone first. She appreciated being alive."

"I still talk to my wife, you know that? I walk around the house and talk to her like we're just having a conversation."

"I do pretty much the same thing. One night I dreamed I was talking to her on the phone and when I woke up I was sitting on the side of the bed with the receiver in my hand."

Flying solo. I liked that phrase.

You could read, use one of their DVD players, or listen to music on headsets. Or visit with friends and relatives who came to pass the time. Or in Ralph's case, flirt.

The nurses liked him. His good looks and cop self-confidence put them at ease. I'm sure a couple of the single ones in their forties would probably have considered going to bed with him if he'd been capable of it. He joked to me once, shame shining in his eyes, "They took my pecker, Tom, and they won't give it back." Not that a few of the older nurses didn't like me. There was Nora, who reminded me of my wife in her younger years. A few times I started to ask her out but then got too scared. The last woman I'd asked out on a first date had been my wife, forty-three years ago.

The DVD players were small and you could set them up on a wheeled table right in front of your recliner while you were getting the juice. One day I brought season two of The Rockford Files, with James Garner. When I got about two minutes into the episode I heard Ralph sort of snicker.

"What's so funny?"

"You. I should've figured you for a Garner type of guy."

"What's wrong with Garner?"

"He's a wuss. Sort of femmy."

"James Garner is sort of femmy?"

"Yeah. He's always whining and bitching. You know, like a woman. I'm more of a Clint Eastwood fan myself."

"I should've figured on that."

"You don't like Eastwood?"

"Maybe I would if he knew how to act."

"He's all man."

"He's all something all right."

"You never hear him whine."

"That's because he doesn't know how. It's too complicated for him."

"'Make my day.'"

"Kiss my ass."

Ralph laughed so hard several of the nurses down the line looked at us and smiled. Then they tried to explain us to their patients.

A nurse named Heather Moore was the first one. She always called us her "Trouble Boys" because we kidded her so much about her somewhat earnest, naive worldview. Over a couple of months, we learned that her ex-husband had wiped out their tiny bank account and run off with the secretary at the muffler shop where he'd been manager. She always said, "All my girlfriends say I should be a whole lot madder at him, but you know, when I'm honest with myself I probably wasn't that good of a wife. You know? His mom always fixed these big suppers for the family. And she's a very pretty woman. But by the time I put in eight hours here and pick up Bobby at daycare, I just don't have much energy. We ate a lot of frozen stuff. And I put on about ten pounds extra. I guess you can't blame him for looking around."

Couple times after she started sharing her stories with us, Ralph made some phone calls. He talked to three people who'd known her husband. A chaser who'd started running around on Heather soon after their wedding day. A slacker at work and a husband who betrayed his wife in maybe the worst way of all-making constant jokes about her to his coworkers. And she blamed herself for not being good enough for him.

Then came the day when she told us about the duplex where she lived. The toilets wouldn't flush properly, the garbage disposal didn't work, both front and back concrete steps were dangerously shattered, and the back door wouldn't lock. Some of her neighbors had been robbed recently.

The landlord was a jerk-lawyer, of course-named David Muldoon. Despite the comic-book surname he was anything but comic. Ralph checked him out. A neo-yuppie who owned several income properties in the city, he was apparently working his way up the slumlord ladder. Heather complained to the city and the city did what it did best: nothing. She'd called Muldoon's business office several times and been promised that her complaints would soon be taken care of. They weren't. And even baby lawyers fresh from the diploma mills wanted more than she could afford to take Muldoon on.

We always asked her how it was going with Muldoon. The day she told us that the roof was leaking and nobody from his office had returned her call in four days, Ralph told her, "You don't worry about it anymore, Heather."

"How come?"

"I just have a feeling."

Heather wasn't the only one wondering what the hell he was talking about. So was I. He said, "You got the usual big night planned?"

"If you mean frozen dinner, some TV, maybe calling one of my kids who'll be too busy to talk very long, and then going to bed, yes."

"Maybe watch a little James Garner."

"Yeah, or put on Clint Eastwood and fall asleep early."

"Glad you don't have plans, because we're going on a stakeout."

"I go to bed at nine."

"Not tonight. Unless we get lucky. Maybe he'll get laid and get home before then."

"Who?"

"Muldoon, that's who."

"You know for a fact that he's got something going on the side?"

"No. But I always listen to my gut."

I smiled.

"I say something funny?" Sort of pissed the way he said it.

"Do all you guys watch bad cop shows before you graduate? Your 'gut'?"

"Most of these assholes cheat."

I thought about it. "Maybe you're right."

"Kid, I'm always right." Grin this time.

Turned out it was the secretary in the law firm on the floor below Muldoon's. Not even all that attractive. He was just out for strange in the nighttime.

We waited leaning against his new black Cadillac.

"Who the fuck are you two supposed to be?"

"We're supposed to be the two guys you least want to hear from." I was happy to let Ralph do the talking.

"Yeah?" All swagger.

"Yeah. You're taking advantage of a friend of ours."

"Get the fuck out of my way. I'm going home."

"It's a bitch getting rid of that pussy smell on your clothes, isn't it? Wives like to pretend they can't smell it."

Dug out his cell phone. Waggled it for us. "I don't know who you two assholes are, but I'll bet the police won't have any trouble finding out."

"And your wife won't have any trouble finding out about the snatch in that apartment house behind us either."

I didn't realize what had happened until I saw the counselor bend in half and heard him try to swear while his lungs were collapsing. He fell to his knees. Ralph hit him so hard on the side of the head Muldoon toppled over. "Her name's Heather Moore. She's one of your tenants. She doesn't know anything about this, so don't bother trying to shake her down for any information. You've got two days to fix everything wrong in her apartment. Two days or I call your wife. And if you come after us or send anybody after us, then I not only call your wife, I start looking for any other bimbos you've been with in the past. I'm a retired homicide detective, so I know how to do this shit. You got me?"

Muldoon still couldn't talk. Just kept rolling back and forth on the sandy concrete. He grunted something.

That was how it started. Heather asked us about it once, but we said we didn't know anything about it. Heather obviously didn't believe us, because two weeks later a nurse named Sally Coates, one neither of us knew very well, came and sat down on a chair next to the IV stand and told us about her husband and this used-car salesman who'd sold them a lemon and wouldn't make it right. They were out seven grand they hadn't been able to afford in the first place, but they had to have a car so her husband could get to the VA hospital, where he was learning to walk again after losing his right leg in Afghanistan. The kind of story you watch on TV and want to start killing people.

All innocence, Ralph said, "Gosh, Sally, I wish we could help you, but I don't see what we could do. There isn't any reason he'd listen to us."

"I can't believe it," Sally said the next time we saw her. "Bob got a call the day after I told you about this salesman. The guy said to bring the car in and they'd get it fixed up right so we wouldn't be having any trouble with it. And there wouldn't be any charge."

"I'll bet you did a lot of praying about it, didn't you, Sally?"

"Of course. We have two little ones to feed. Keeping that car running was breaking us."

"Well, it was the prayers that did it, Sally."

"And you didn't have anything to do with it?"

"Ask him."

I shook my head. "What could we have done, Sally? We're just two old guys."

After she left, Ralph leaned over from his leather recliner and said, "The only good thing about dying this way is we don't have to give a shit about anything. What're they gonna do to us?" That grin of his. "We're already dead."

I developed a uniform. A Cubs cap, dark aviator glasses, and a Louisville Slugger. According to Ralph I was "the backup hood. They're scared enough of me. Then they see this guy with the ball bat and the shades-they'll do anything to cooperate." He didn't mention how old we were.

The nurses kept coming. Four in the next three months. A nurse who was trying to get a collection of family photographs back from an ex-boyfriend she'd broken up with after he'd given her the clap, spurned boyfriend stealing the collection and keeping it for her breaking up with him; the nurse whose daughter's boyfriend was afraid to visit because two bully brothers down the block always picked on him when he pulled up; and the nurse who liked to sit in on poker games with five guys who worked at an electronics discount house and thought it was pretty damned funny to cheat her out of forty to sixty dollars every time she sat down. It took her four months of playing twice a month to figure it out.

No heavy lifting, as they say; no, that came with a tiny, delicate young nurse named Callie. We noticed the bruises on her arms first, then the bruises on her throat, despite the scarf she wore with her uniform. Then came the two broken fingers and the way she limped for a couple of weeks and finally the faint but unmistakable black eye. A few of the other nurses whispered about it among themselves. One of them told us that the head nurse had asked Callie about it. Callie had smiled and said that "my whole family is clumsy."

It was during this time that both Ralph and I realized that we probably wouldn't be beating the prognoses we'd been given. With me it was a small but certain track of new cancer suddenly appearing on my right thigh; with Ralph it was the return of heart problems he'd had off and on for two decades.

We didn't talk about it much to each other. There isn't much to say when you get to this point. You just hope for as much decent time as you can get, and if you've been helping people here and there you go right on helping them as long as you can.

We followed Callie home one night, found out that she lived in a tumbledown farmhouse as isolated as a lighthouse. The next night we followed her home, and when she stopped off at a shopping center we waited for her by her car.

She smiled. "My two favorite patients. I guess you don't get to see me enough in chemo, huh?" The cat-green eyes were suspicious despite her greeting. She'd developed another one of those mysterious limps.

"That's right. Tom here wants to ask you to marry him."

"Well," the smile never wavering, "maybe I should talk that over with my husband first. You think?"

"That's what we want to talk to you about, Callie," I said. "Your husband."

The smile went and so did she. Or at least she tried. I stood in front of the car door. Ralph took her arm and walked her about four feet away.

He said something to her I couldn't hear, but her I heard clearly: "My personal life is none of your damn business! And I'm going to tell my husband about this."

"He going to beat us up the way he beats you up?"

"Who said he beats me up?"

"I was a cop, remember? I've seen dozens of cases like yours. They run to a pattern."

"Well, then you weren't a very good cop, because my husband has never laid a hand on me."

"Three restraining orders in five years; six 911 calls; the same ER doctor who said he's dealt with you twice for concussions; and a women's shelter that told me you came there twice for three-night stays."

The city roared with life-traffic, stray rap music, shouts, laughter, squealing tires-but right here a little death was being died as she was forced to confront not just us but herself. The small package she'd been carrying slipped from her hands to the concrete and she slumped against her car. She seemed to rip the sobs from herself in tiny increments, like somebody in the early stages of a seizure.

"I've tried to get away. Five or six times. One night I took the kids and got all the way to St. Joe. Missouri, I mean. We stayed in a motel there for two weeks. Took every dime I had. The kids didn't mind. They're as scared of him as I am. But he found us. He never told me how. And you know what he did? He was waiting for us when we got back from going to a movie the kids wanted to see. He was in our room. I opened the door and there he was. He looked down at Luke-he's eight now; he was only four then-and he said, 'You take care of your little sister, Luke. You two go sit in my truck now.' 'You better not hurt her, Dad.'s Can you imagine that-a four-year-old talking like that? A four-year-old? Anyway, then he looked at me and said, 'Get in here, whore.' He waited until I closed the door behind me and then he hit me so hard in the face he broke my nose. And my glasses. He forced the kids to ride back with him. That way he knew I'd come back too."

This was in the food court of the mall where we'd convinced her to come and have some coffee with us. You could reach up and grab a handful of grease from the air. I'm told in Texas they deep-fry quarter sticks of butter. If it ever comes up here, this mall will sell it for sure.

"But you always come back."

"I love him, Ralph. I can't explain it. It's like a sickness."

"It's not like a sickness, Callie. It is a sickness."

"Maybe if I knew I could get away and he'd never find me. To him those restraining orders are a joke." Then: "I have to admit there're sometimes-more and more these days, I guess-when I think maybe it'd be best if he'd just get killed driving that damned truck of his. You know, an accident where he's the only one killed. I wouldn't want to do that to anybody else." Then: "Isn't that awful?"

"It is if you love him."

"I say that, Tom. I always say that. But the woman at the shelter had me see a counselor and the counselor explained to me what she called the 'dynamics' of how I really feel about him. We had to take two semesters of psych to get our nursing degrees, so I'd always considered myself pretty smart on the subject. But she led me into thinking a lot of things that had never occurred to me before. And so even though I say that, I'm not sure I mean it." Then, shy: "Sorry for all the carrying-on in the parking lot. I attracted quite a crowd."

"I collected admission from every one of them."

She sat back in her curved red plastic chair and smiled. "You guys-you're really my friends. I was so depressed all day. Even with the kids there I just didn't want to drag myself home tonight. I know I was being selfish to even think such a thing. But I just couldn't take being hit or kicked anymore. I knew he'd be mad that I stopped at the mall. Straight home or I'd better have a damned good excuse. Or I'll be sorry. It's no way to live."

"No," I said, "it sure isn't."

"Now let's go get him."

Callie had mentioned she was taking the kids for a long weekend stay at a theme park, which was why we'd decided on tonight.

Neely didn't hear us coming. We walked through patches of shadow then moonlight, shadow then moonlight, while he tried to get out of his truck. I say tried because he was so drunk he almost came out headfirst and would have if he hadn't grabbed the edge of the truck door in time. Then he sat turned around on the edge of the seat and puked straight down. He went three times and he made me almost as sick as he was. Then of course, being as drunk as he was, he stepped down with his cowboy boots into the puddle of puke he'd made. He kept wiping the back of his right hand across his mouth. He started sloshing through the puke, then stopped and went back to the truck. He opened the door and grabbed something. In the moonlight I could see it was a pint of whiskey. He gunned a long drink, then took six steps and puked it all right back up. He stepped into this puke as well and headed more or less in the direction of the stairs that would take him to his apartment. All of this was setting things up perfectly. Nobody was going to question the fact that Neely had been so drunk it was no surprise that he'd fallen off those stairs and died.

We moved fast. I took the position behind him with my ball cap, shades, and ball bat, and Ralph got in front of him with his Glock.

Neely must've been toting a 2.8 level of alcohol because he didn't seem to be aware of Ralph until he ran straight into him. And straight into the Glock. Even then all he could say was, "Huh? I jush wan' sleep."

"Good evening, Mr. Neely. You shouldn't drink so much. You need to be alert when you're beating the shit out of women half your size. You never know when they're going to hit back, do you?"

"Hey, dude, ish tha' a gun?"

"Sure looks like it, doesn't it?"

He reeled back on the heels of his cowboy boots. I poked the bat into his back. I was careful. When he went down the stairs it had to look accidental. We couldn't bruise him or use any more force than it took to give him a slight shove. If he didn't die the first time down he would the second time we shoved him.

"Hey."

"You need some sleep, Neely."

"-need no fuckin' sleep. 'n don't try'n make me. Hey, an' you got a fuckin' gun."

"What if I told you that I've got a pizza in the car?"

"Pizza?"

"Yeah. Pizza."

"How come pizza?"

"So we can sit down in your apartment and talk things over."

"Huh?"

"How-does-pizza-sound?"

Ralph was enunciating because Neely was about two minutes away from unconsciousness. We had to get him up those stairs without leaving any marks on him.

"Pizza, Neely. Sausage and beef and pepperoni."

I allowed myself the pleasure of taking in the summer night. The first time I'd ever made love to Karen had been on a night like this near a boat dock. Summer of our senior year in college. We went back to that spot many times over the years. Not long before she died we went there too. I almost believed in ghosts; I thought I saw our younger selves out on the night river in one of those old rented aluminum canoes, our lives all ahead of us, so young and exuberant and naive. I wanted to get in one of those old canoes and take my wife downriver so she could die in my arms and maybe I'd be lucky and die in hers as well. But it hadn't worked out that way. All too soon I'd been flying solo.

Neely started puking again. This time it was a lot more dramatic, because after he finished he fell facedown in it.

"This fucking asshole. When he's done you take one arm and I'll take the other one."

"I thought we weren't going to touch him."

"That's why you shoved those latex gloves in your back pocket same as I did. You gotta plan for contingencies. That's why cops carry guns they can plant on perps. Otherwise we'll be here all night. Clint Eastwood would know about that."

"Yes, planting guns on people. Another admirable Eastwood quality."

"Right. I forgot. Tender ears. You don't want to hear about real life. You just want to bitch and moan like Garner. Now let's pick up this vile piece of shit and get it over with."

He'd worked up a pretty good sweat with all his puking. It was a hot and humid night. His body was soggy like something that would soon mildew. Once I pulled him out of his puke I held my breath.

"We don't want to drag him. They'll look at his boots. Stand him upright and we'll sort of escort him to the steps."

"I just hope he doesn't start puking again."

"I saw a black perp puke like this once. I wish I had it on tape."

"Yeah, be fun for the grandkids to watch at Christmastime."

"I like that, Tom. Smart-ass remarks in the course of committing murder one. Shows you're getting a lot tougher."

We took our time. He didn't puke again, but from the tangy odor I think he did piss his pants.

When we were close to the bottom step, he broke. I guess both of us had assumed he was unconscious and therefore wouldn't be any problem. But he broke and he got a three- or four-second lead while we just stood there and watched him scramble up those stairs like a wild animal that had just escaped its cage. He was five steps ahead of us before Ralph started after him. I pounded up the steps right behind him. Ralph was shouting. I'm sure he had to restrain himself from just shooting Neely and getting it over with.

Neely was conscious enough to run but not conscious enough to think clearly, because when he got to the top of the stairs he stopped and dug a set of keys from his pocket. As he leaned in to try and find the lock, his head jerked up suddenly and he stared at us as if he was seeing us for the very first time. Confusion turned to terror in his eyes and he started backing away from us. "Hey, who the hell're you?"

"Who do you think we are, Neely?"

"I don' like thish."

"Yeah, well, we don't like it either."

"He got a ball bat." He nodded in my direction. He weaved wide as he did so, so wide I thought he was going to tip over sideways. Then his hand searched the right pocket of his Levi's. It looked like he'd trapped an angry ferret in there.

Ralph materialized Neely's nine-inch switchblade. "This what you're looking for?"

"Hey," Neely said. And when he went to grab for it he started falling to the floor. Ralph grabbed him in time. Stood him straight up.

But Neely wasn't done yet. And he was able to move faster than I would have given him credit for. Ralph glanced back at me, nodded for me to come forward. And in that second Neely made his sloppy, drunken move. He grabbed the switchblade from Ralph's hand and immediately went into a crouch.

He would have been more impressive if he hadn't swayed side to side so often. And if he hadn't tried to sound tough. "Who'sh gotta knife now, huh?"

"You gonna cut us up, are you, Neely?"

All the time advancing on Neely, backing him up. "C'mon, Neely. Cut me. Right here." Ralph held his arm out. "Right there, Neely. You can't miss it."

Neely swaying, half stumbling backward as Ralph moved closer, closer. "You're pretty pathetic, you know that, Neely? You beat up your wife all the time, and even when you've got the knife you're still scared of me. You're not much of a man, but then you know that, don't you? You look in the mirror every morning and you see yourself for what you really are, don't you?"

I doubt Neely understood what Ralph was saying to him. This was complex stuff to comprehend when you were as wasted as Neely was. All he seemed to understand was that Ralph meant to do him harm. And if Ralph didn't do it, there was always the guy in the ball cap and the shades. You know, with the bat.

Neely stumbled backward, his arms circling in a desperate attempt to keep himself upright. He hit the two-by-four that was the upper part of the porch enclosure just at the lower part of his back and he went right over, the two-by-four splintering as he did so. He didn't scream. My guess is he was still confused about what was happening. By the time he hit the ground I was standing next to Ralph, looking down into the shadows beneath us.

There was silence. Ralph got his flashlight going and we got our first look at him. If he wasn't dead, he was pretty good at faking it. He didn't land in any of those positions we associate with people who die crashing from great heights. He was flat on his back with his arms flung wide. His right leg was twisted inward a few inches, but nothing dramatic. The eyes were open and looked straight up. No expression of horror, something else we've picked up from books and movies. And as we watched the blood started pooling from the back of his head.

"Let's go make sure," Ralph said.

It was like somebody had turned on the soundtrack. In the moments it had taken Neely to fall all other sound had disappeared. But now the night was back and turned up high. Night birds, dogs, horses and cows bedded down for the evening, distant trucks and trains, all turned so high I wanted to clap my hands to my ears.

"You all right, Tom?"

"Why wouldn't I be all right?"

"See. I knew you weren't all right."

"But you're all right, I suppose. I mean, we just killed a guy."

"You want me to get all touchy-feely and say I regret it?"

"Fuck yourself."

"He was a piece of shit and one of these nights he was gonna kill a friend of ours. Maybe he wouldn't even have done it on purpose. He'd just be beating on her some night and he'd do it by accident. But one way or another he'd kill her. And we'd have to admit to ourselves that we could've stopped it."

I walked away from the edge of the porch and started down the stairs.

"You doin' better now?" Ralph called.

"Yeah-yeah, I guess I am."

"Clint Eastwood, I tell ya. Clint Eastwood every time."

Turned out Neely wasn't dead after all. We had to stand there for quite a while watching him bleed to death.

I was visiting my oldest son in Phoenix (way too hot for me) when I learned Ralph had died. I'd logged on to the hometown paper website and there was his name at the top of the obituaries. The photo must have been taken when he was in his early twenties. I barely recognized him. Heart attack. He'd been dead for a day before a neighbor of his got suspicious and asked the apartment house manager to open Ralph's door. I thought of what he'd said about flying solo that time.

Ralph had experienced the ultimate in flying solo: death. I hoped that whatever he thought was on the other side came true for him. I still hadn't figured out what I hoped would be there. If anything would be there at all.

The doc told me they'd be putting me back on chemo again. The lab reports were getting bad fast. The nurses in chemo commiserated with me as if Ralph had been a family member. There'd been a number of things I hadn't liked about him and he hadn't liked about me. Those things never got resolved and maybe they didn't need to. Maybe flying solo was all we needed for a bond. One thing for sure. The chemo room hours seemed a lot longer with him gone. I even got sentimental once and put a Clint Eastwood DVD in the machine, film called Tightrope. Surprised myself by liking it more than not liking it.

I was sitting in my recliner one day when one of the newer nurses sat down and started talking in a very low voice. "There's this guy we each gave five hundred dollars to. You know, a down payment. He said he was setting up this group trip to the Grand Canyon. You know, through this group therapy thing I go to. Then we found out that he scams a lot of people this way. Groups, I mean. We called the Better Business Bureau and the police. But I guess he covers his tracks pretty well. Actually takes some of the groups on the trips. Five hundred is a lot of money if you're a single mother."

The chemo was taking its toll. But I figured I owed it to Ralph to help her out. And besides, I wanted to see how I did on my own.

So here I am tonight. I've followed him from his small house to his round of singles bars and finally to the apartment complex where the woman lives. The one he picked up in the last bar. He's got to come out sometime.

I've got the Louisville Slugger laid across my lap and the Cubs cap cinched in place. I won't put the shades on till I see him. No sense straining my eyes. Not at my age.

I miss Ralph. About now he'd be working himself up doing his best Clint Eastwood and trying to dazzle me with all his bad cop stories.

I'm pretty sure I can handle this, but even if it works out all right, it's still flying solo. And let me tell you, flying solo can get to be pretty damned lonely.