The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

FROM Xavier Review

1

THE GUY LOOKED like an off-duty cop. Even Marsh could see that. For a terrible moment, when the door swung open as if torn from its hinges, when the lumbering shape waddled in, blotting out the sunlight from Irving, Marsh thought he’d been set up. He pictured himself hauled off in cuffs, his name splashed across the Examiner’s afternoon edition; he pictured Gina’s tears and the confused faces of their children, and something reared up inside him, an impulse toward self-destruction he didn’t know he possessed.

“You were supposed to be here by eleven o’clock,” he squawked, in the same petulant tone he reserved for his children, for the parolees they hired to scour pots at the hotel.

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting-someone more like Pacino in Scarface, with a little 007 thrown in for good measure; someone with at least a good head of hair. Mickey’s distended gut spilled out from under a dirty sweatshirt that said Property of the San Jose Sharks, and he was wearing shorts.

“All right, take it easy, will you?” the guy said finally, and Marsh knew what he was going to say before he said it-the parking, the traffic, stuck on the Bay Bridge for an hour and a half. “I’ve been driving circles around the block for half an hour looking for a place to park.”

His voice was soft, and it rose to a lilting crescendo that might have been funny, under different circumstances. He stood six feet, and Marsh would have said six across, too. He moved slowly, as if conserving his strength or impaired by his hulking physique, or as if he were in a great deal of pain. With the few pale wisps of blond hair standing up on the pink dome of his head, he looked like a toddler with a thyroid problem, but the threat of physical harm seemed to lurk just behind his every gesture, and Marsh recoiled in spite of himself, bumping into the empty barstool behind him.

“Come on,” Mickey said in a stage whisper, glancing around the bar. “I don’t think we should talk about this here.”

Outside, the sun was like a spear driven through an iron patchwork of cloud, refracted into needles of light in the low-lying haze. The two and a half drinks Marsh had managed to choke down while he was waiting worked in his system, a fire that seemed to sap his extremities of warmth, numbing the tips of his fingers even as it raged in his belly, as if the heat were being drawn inward, sucked violently to his middle, by a bellows. When the wind gusted, it brought tears to his eyes, and at his side the briefcase hung a dead, leaden weight, as if he’d managed to stuff their history, the long and tortured declining curve of their failed marriage, twenty-two years, the bitterness, the venom, rows cataclysmic and inconsequential, in there, along with the banded piles of unmarked, nonconsecutive $20 bills.

He thought the guy was limping, and he was-drawing up short every time he stepped on his left foot. But he was moving quickly, and Marsh had to hurry to keep up.

He trailed at a few dozen paces as the guy walked down Lincoln, waited for a break in traffic, and lumbered across, and they dodged joggers on JFK, now crossing the rolling, windswept green of the park. Down on the grass, a gaggle of children ran screaming after a tennis ball, and a few sunbathers were sprawled on blankets at the edges of the fields, stretched out as if on display. They turned finally onto one of the innumerable hiking trails that webbed the park like capillaries, Marsh straggling now, his face flushed, his sides slick with cold sweat. An enclave of kids were lounging in the bushes alongside the crooked path, passing a bottle, and Marsh caught a whiff of what might have been marijuana smoke, but the wind took it away. Cresting a hill, they clambered through a copse of jack pines, the tops of the trees roiling above them, tossing crazily in the wind. Marsh caught his foot on one of the roots that elbowed up through the topsoil and nearly went sprawling, saving himself at the last minute by catching one of the low branches.

When they finally emerged onto another bright swath of grass, the sounds of the city had receded, a distant hum punctuated now and again by the faraway bleat of a car horn. Variegated bunches of green showed all around, clusters and copses of trees, heather gray and a deep, piney green. All angled spastically in the wind, curling like strange, drunken dancers.

Several trails converged on a duck pond bordered by an asphalt lane. The ducks bobbed uncertainly on the surface of the gray water, as if anticipating some massive upswell. They pitched from side to side as the wind razed through the trees and muted the sound of their chatter. They beat their wings on the water, striking up silvery flares.

A lone bench stood by the water’s edge. The light was an opaque gray wash, as if the whole thing were being shot from some remote vantage and the atmosphere were disturbed between the camera and the action taking place.

Marsh licked his lips. With a trembling hand, he extracted the creased snapshot from his coat pocket and held it, fluttering on the wind. He knew he should be drunk, but he couldn’t feel it anymore at all. Adrenaline, he supposed; he was buzzing with it.

“Your wife,” the guy said, in a way that irritated Marsh, as if he’d seen it a million times, as if the whole thing were something squalid, some oft-repeated tragedy. Mickey sighed. “All right,” he said, looking off at the slight milky haze lowering across the western sky. He looked at Marsh. “What did she do? Is she cheating on you? She’s running around on you and you just can’t take it anymore? What is it?”

Marsh began sputtering, unable to answer.

“No,” he said finally. “Nothing like that.” What was the man doing, trying to talk him out of it? “The car,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Do you think you could spare the car?”

“What?” Mickey loomed over him.

“She drives a Mercury Sable. Last year’s model. I was hoping you could avoid-you know. Damaging the car.”

What happened next happened quickly, and while it was happening the one thing that occurred to Marsh, crowding out all other thoughts or considerations, was that he was being mugged. Mickey told him to drop the briefcase, and when he failed to do this, struck him a resounding blow with a large, pinkish fist that seemed to materialize out of thin air, the row of swollen and meaty knuckles making contact with the bridge of his nose. He heard a sharp crack, a ringing in his ears, and when he came to, he was flat on his back in the mud at the foot of the park bench, and several ducks were honking in his ear and padding about on their webbed feet in the mud not far from his head.

The briefcase, the snapshot, the money-all gone. Even his wallet, and yes, his Rolex. He’d been cleaned out, and his suit, $450 before alterations, was ruined. He felt frantically in his pockets for his keys and found them, thinking at least something had gone right. But forty-five minutes later, when he finally found his way out of the park, he could see the bright orange ticket fluttering under his windshield wiper as he approached the Jag. He screamed, not caring who gawked or shook his head. On 19th Avenue, passersby turned their faces away, as if his particular insanity could be transmitted by no more than eye contact, and he stumbled along in the thickening, dusky light.

2

They had a place in South San Francisco, a two-story walkup that sat in a row of identical walkups in what passed for a quiet neighborhood among the sprawl and the clutter of city life. They were still paying for the house, but they’d bought before the latest boom, and when she heard what the other houses on the block were going for these days, she gasped. Sometimes she thought they should sell, treble their money and get out, but she didn’t want to uproot the kids halfway through their schooling. Her father-the Colonel-had dragged her from Illinois to Taiwan to Corpus Christi, Texas, before she was twelve, and she had sworn above all else that she would not do the same thing to Todd and Jaime.

They had a lawn, a twelve-foot-by-four-foot patch of grass she watered and fertilized and guarded jealously against the neighborhood dogs, who were always doing their business there.

They had a two-and-a-half-car garage, a thing that struck her as funny in a vague way, in the sense that two point five children might have been funny.

She watched him come tramping across the lawn, the shit, in what must have been a state of extreme drunkenness if he thought he was going to get away with it-trampling the hyacinths, tripping over the rhododendron along the brick walk, all but tearing the philodendron bush out by the roots as he stumbled coming up the steps. She’d had the feeling this was coming, though she couldn’t have said just what this was yet. She’d sensed impending calamity, sniffing it on the breeze the way you would a coming storm, bracing herself for impact even as she dug in her heels and refused to let the smallest thing go. A tiny exhilaration blossomed inside her at the foretaste. She would have felt entirely justified stabbing him with the garden shears.

Drunk as a sailor. She pitied the creature she’d married.

“If you think,” she said, bits of hamburger clinging to her fingers, on him before he’d set foot in the door, her voice carrying shrilly across the hall, “if you think you can come in here any goddamn way you please, mister, you’d better think again, because you’ve got another thing coming. I spent three and a half hours out there today, and look, would you just look at what you’ve done to my garden? Henry, goddammit, what the hell do you have to say for yourself?”

Then she saw his face.

His nose seemed to be screwed on sideways, as if it had tried to escape but had become confused and tried to go in two different directions at once. Purple bruises bloomed under his eyes, and wads of spittle clung to the corners of his mouth. He stunk like a barroom, the cheap, lowlife smell of booze and cigarette smoke clinging to his suit and wafting into their home. A sense of shock mitigated her horror, and then the whole thing suddenly became funny, and she collapsed against the wall, covering her mouth with the back of her wrist and giggling, aware even as she did of the cruel edge to her laughter, of the pleasure she took in seeing him disgraced.

Jaime had come halfway down the steps and stood there arrested, like a piece of garden statuary. Todd came running from the den, as if he sensed whatever drama was unfolding in the foyer of their home beat out Judge Judy or The People’s Court. He stood in the doorway, elfin, his hair sticking out at the sides. His mouth hung agape, his tongue playing in the space where one of his front teeth had been. He took one look at his father, then he turned and fled.

“Jesus, Dad,” the girl said. She was wearing some witchy, clinging thing that made of her budding curves a shapeless swell and made her entire shape that of a bell. She grinned uncertainly, showing the metal bands around her teeth, taking such obvious delight in her father’s suffering that for the moment she was entirely unselfconscious. “You look like the Elephant Man,” she said.

“Jaime,” Gina remonstrated. She had a feeling her daughter’s guidance counselor was going to hear about this, and she wanted to mitigate whatever damage had already been done, to keep the situation from escalating any further than it already had. She stanched wounds, bandaged knees, commiserated with Jaime over boys; she was all the children had in this world, the sane center of their lives. And someone had to protect them from their father.

“Go to your room,” he said, his voice cracking. “You go to your fucking room right now. You little slut, you’re lucky we even let you out of the house.”

“Mom,” the girl said, her face a shattered window, like someone had pitched a rock through it. “Something’s wrong with Dad,” and she retreated, backing up the stairs.

“You come back down here and there’ll be something wrong with you,” Henry said. “Things are changing around this house, and they’re changing right now. First thing is, you’re going to listen to your father, and if you don’t, by God, you’ll look like this by the time he’s through with you. I will not be treated like an asshole in my own home.”

He balled his fists. His face flamed, a sea of broken capillaries. “And you,” he said, turning on his wife.

It took one well-placed blow with the blunt edge of the paperweight they kept on the end table by the front door to quiet him. She dragged him by the wrists into the tiny bathroom under the stairs and left him there, sprawled out next to the toilet. She could already see the child custody people sweeping down, a SWAT team surrounding the house, helicopters buzzing outside their bedroom window. Principal Dryer would call again on Monday, vague threats lurking as always behind his measured, even tone. Maybe this time he really would report them to CPS. This was bad.

But by the time she called the kids down for pancakes and Hamburger Helper, her thoughts had already turned to the sale starting Saturday at Saks.

“Where’s Dad?” Jaime asked, picking at her food.

“Don’t you worry about your father,” she said. “He’s sick, Jaime. I put him to bed, and all we can do is hope he’ll feel better when he wakes up.”

“I want a hot dog,” Todd said, thrusting his plate away from him. He got up without asking to be excused and left, and a moment later she heard his bedroom door slam at the top of the stairs.

Two days later she noticed the car.

At first she thought she’d imagined it. But twice on Sunday morning and once in the afternoon she saw the beige Pontiac lumbering along like a dinosaur behind her. It kept two or three car lengths back, weaving through traffic, running a red light to follow her when she made an abrupt left without signaling, one headlight winking in the rearview mirror as the sun crept down in the sky and the day stretched on into evening.

It occurred to her, of course, that she should have been scared. She should have been, but strangely, she wasn’t. She’d always known it would happen like this. The sudden appearance of the Pontiac confirmed something. It augured cataclysm, the great upheaval she’d been anticipating all her life. It made real the fear and suspicion she’d been living with since she could remember, drawing the blackout curtains her father insisted on hanging everywhere they lived at night, hiding under the bed in the dark and reading comics guiltily by flashlight, hoping she wouldn’t be the one who got them all killed. The feeling something exceptional was happening to her now braced her immeasurably. She was jealous of the people who went on the talk shows claiming to have been abducted by aliens in New Mexico. She only wished something like that would happen to her, something to blast away every trace of her ordinary experience and make her life a dream. If the bluish shape massed behind the Pontiac’s windscreen was the shape of her destiny, she welcomed it.

It occurred to her, of course, that they might be from CPS, whoever was in the Pontiac, tailing her, waiting for an opportunity to swoop into her life and take her children. But she felt such kinship with that eddying shape, almost a sisterhood, that she dismissed the idea summarily.

The next day, kids in maroon private school uniforms were playing by the bus stop on the corner. One of them was bouncing up and down on a pogo stick, and it made a sawing noise that cut through the afternoon air. You never saw kids playing in the street anymore, and it comforted her, in a vague way.

She watered the rhododendrons under the gunmetal sky, letting the machine take the calls and listening to the messages at her leisure.

“And I think that if this is happening repeatedly, as it seems to be, there may be some cause for alarm,” Principal Dryer said, his altogether too friendly voice carrying through the empty house on Monday afternoon. He cleared his throat. “Habitual truancy often indicates trouble in the home, something the parents may not even be aware of. If you or Mister Marsh could give me a call in my office anytime during the week, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m sure we all want whatever is best for Jaime.”

He hung up.

Deceitful turd, she thought. Cruddy administrators. The lines were being drawn in the sand.

Someone named Reardon called for Hank a few minutes later, and she listened to him speak into the machine, wrote his name down, and erased the message. Hank had disappeared sometime during the night on Friday. Lying awake in their bed, she’d heard the front door ease shut, wondered where he was going, and she had decided that she didn’t care. She found herself hoping she’d killed him when she’d brained him with the paperweight. She thought there must have been something good in him once, but she didn’t know anymore when he had ceased to be her husband, or even a man.

Her life no longer seemed to be happening to her but to someone else.

She ran a bubble bath before the kids got home, luxuriating in the folds of steam, scraping the dead skin from the balls of her feet. The flakes drifted away on the water, softened to opacity. She wondered what her life would seem like if it were on television, what some anonymous viewer in a faraway living room or den would think. She felt alienated from her own experience, atomized, like the molecules of steam rising from the water in the tub.

3

“Sushi?” Karyn said. “I’m impressed, Dad. This isn’t your style at all.”

She was majoring in graphic design at City College, she didn’t wear makeup, and she never seemed to have a boyfriend. But there were men in her life, he was sure there were, and he admired whatever it was that kept her from getting stuck.

She had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s hair. Only the dimple on her chin was his, and it was his favorite feature, incongruous, stamped there like an afterthought. She had her mother’s way about her, the sardonic smile and the jaw that tapered to a point, always disapproving, like someone had pinched it while she was still being formed in the womb. She might have been pretty if she wasn’t so serious. But the steely thing in her, the thing that had enabled her to survive her childhood, it had marked her somehow, and Mickey didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or happy that she was that much stronger than he’d ever been.

She winked back at him, and she seemed content to let him be her dad for the evening. They assumed their roles, and as long as she assumed hers and let him play his, they’d have a good time. She even laughed at his jokes, and her mother had stopped doing that before the honeymoon was over.

“We were just kids, you know. We had no business having kids of our own.”

“Stop it, Dad.”

She ordered a California roll. She ordered the salmon and the tuna, and the eel for herself. He watched her trying to pronounce the Japanese from the menu, and he could picture her doing her math homework at the table in the kitchen in their apartment on Post Street all those years ago, her legs still too short to touch the floor while she sat in the chair, her hair already that fine shade of black. She’d been too serious even then, committing her multiplication tables to memory while he’d argued with Sue, nearly coming to blows over the balance in the checkbook.

Japanese music lilted from the speakers in the corners of the room, and an aquarium bubbled by the door. He sipped his tea, scalding his upper lip, and cursed, setting the cup down angrily. He thought for the hundredth time that day that all he wanted was a beer, but as he’d discovered the other night, the Kolonopin the court-appointed psychiatrist had given him didn’t mix well with beer. A woman in a kimono brought miso soup, seaweed and tofu afloat in the cloudy broth. She bowed politely at them, demure, self-effacing, made up like a porcelain doll. When she moved away, Mickey realized she’d forgotten to bring spoons.

“Your nose looks better,” Karyn said, and she sipped her soup, which answered that question. She prized out a piece of tofu with her chopsticks. “How’s your side?”

“Better. Those fucking kids. I’m still a little sore. I can’t take it like I used to. I swear to God, honey. I feel like I got old overnight.”

“Hey, Dad? Do you think they have places like this in Japan? I mean with the costumes and the music and everything?”

“I think they all eat McDonald’s over there,” he said.

She got a kick out of that, and he felt better about everything for the moment. When the woman brought the sushi, he watched Karyn stir the wasabi into a tiny dish of soy sauce with her chopsticks, and he thought she looked like some kind of lesser samurai, diligently observing a time-honored ritual. She ate carefully, using her chopsticks. He used his hands. He scarfed tempura, crunching steamed asparagus, feeling the wasabi clear his sinuses.

“So you’re in trouble again, huh, Dad?”

“Nothing I can’t handle, sweetie. I’m just taking a little vacation. I’m gonna get out of the city for a while.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding, and that was all they said about it.

He walked her back to the car and kissed her on the cheek. He could feel the hardness through her jacket, and she pulled away from him even as she nestled in his arms. Sunlight slanted across the tops of the houses on Twin Peaks, bathing them in pastel light, etching doors and windows in sharp bas-relief. Through layers of cloud, the radio tower pricked glumly at the sky.

“’Bye, sweetie.”

“Yeah. Hey, see you, Dad. You take care of yourself, okay? And thanks for dinner.”

As the sun slanted down and the sky turned from pink to cobalt blue, he sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac and dug the crumpled snapshot from his shorts pocket. He pressed it flat against the steering wheel. He didn’t even know the woman’s name. She stared up at him with panicked eyes, crow’s feet etched into their corners, her smile bright and hysterical, as if the expression of connubial bliss pained her somehow. She was wearing a mohair sweater, and her skin had an eerie luminescence, a metallic sheen acquired from too many deep pore cleansers, facial rinses, and mud masks. Her hair was pulled back in a way that made her forehead seem too wide, and her eyebrows arched sharply, identical and neatly plucked works of art. She wasn’t exactly catwalk material, Mickey thought. But she was still a hell of a good-looking woman.

He’d lost control in the park. He knew that. It seemed to happen more often these days. What did it mean when you quit drinking and you were even meaner than before? Like when those kids had jumped him the other night. He didn’t remember half of that. They’d circled him up, and the next thing he knew, he was on the verge of beating one of them to death with his bare hands. In the park it was the same. He hadn’t wanted to kill anybody, but he’d seen the guy standing there in his expensive suit with his gold-plated Rolex, and it was like the ghost of every CO, every commissioner or DA who’d reprimanded him for the last twenty years had reared up on him suddenly, and before he’d even known what he was doing, the guy was flat on his back, out cold with one punch.

He figured Reardon was probably going to be pissed. Whatever angle he was playing, Mickey had blown it for him. And if he had enough money in the briefcase he’d taken from Marsh to pay off his debts and put himself in the clear, his instincts still told him to take the money and run, hotfoot it for the airport before everything started to catch up with him.

But another voice whispered at him through those luminous brown eyes in the photograph. They were crazy eyes, he realized; something was missing in them, something was fractured. It wasn’t lust they stirred in him. More like some deep and inexpressible desire to make good on his life after throwing forty-three years away. What was the point in running away from San Francisco? Here the battle lines had been drawn, and here he would make his stand. Only he didn’t know yet what he was fighting-or what he was fighting for. He’d lost Sue years ago, and he didn’t know if it was too late even to win Karyn back.

He let it all tick over in his mind as he started the car, meandering out toward the Great Highway as the last of the day’s light burned out over Ocean Beach.

She was much smaller in person than he’d expected. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. And Christ, the woman could shop. He tailed her to the malls, the department stores, the high-end places downtown. She took it seriously. Like some people take food or professional sports seriously. She stalked the aisles like a big-game hunter, shrewd eyes goggling out of her childish face. He watched her trying on a diamond tiara at Saks on Saturday, twisting from side to side in front of the mirror in her designer jeans, and he thought of Wonder Woman.

He staked out the house. He kept vigil. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed being a cop. However cynical you became, however arbitrary the designations seemed, by virtue of the uniform, you became one of the good guys. And you believed in it because it was all you had, because if you weren’t one of the good guys, the only thing left for you was to be one of the bad.

Those days seemed simple to him now. It seemed to him they’d all been playing dress-up, like playing cops and robbers when they were kids. How many of his friends from the neighborhood had he put away over the years? And why them, when he was no different?

He had the feeling he was broaching new territory, entering uncharted waters. If he no longer wore the uniform, if he no longer had the force of the law at his back, how could he know what was right any longer?

He wasn’t going to kill her. He knew that now. He’d known it from the first, from the moment he’d set foot in the bar and seen Marsh slouched there in his custom-tailored suit. And before, when Reardon had called. He’d known he wasn’t going to be able to go through with it, even then.

The house might have gone for a hundred grand five or six years ago, but if he had to hazard a guess, Mickey would have said half a million by now. It looked just like every other house on the block, and they were all butted right up against one another, one house stacked on top of the other like Dixie cups in a line all the way to the top of the street and the dun-colored hills beyond.

If you wanted to know what kind of parents they were, all you had to do was look at the kids. The girl was your typical tortured adolescent-combat boots that reached her knees, hair dyed black with a flaming red stripe down one side. She carried a lunchbox to school, and Mickey wondered if he hadn’t done all right by Karyn after all. As for the boy, Mickey just felt sorry for him. He was a chip off the old block, that was for sure. He already looked like his father-of whom, Mickey remarked, there had been no sign.

He ate fast food and slept in the car. After three days he could smell himself. He’d blown his tail on Sunday, he was sure of that, running a red light on Geary, and good sense told him to clear out before he got himself arrested. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. For the clouds to part and reveal the firmament-he didn’t know. He thought he’d figure it out when the time was right.

4

Henry Marsh checked into the Airport Hilton with a change of socks, a toothbrush, and a pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He needed some time to think.

First thing Saturday, he called in sick for the week. He had AIDS, the Ebola virus. He’d come down with the bubonic plague. There was a family emergency, his grandmother was flooded out of her house in Mississippi, there was a war starting up in Bosnia again-whatever. He wasn’t going back to work, not for as long as he lived. His last official act as assistant general manager of the Radisson Hotel in downtown San Francisco was canning Tommy Reardon.

“He’s been late every day for a month. I think something’s going on. I caught him drinking during his shift twice last week, and I think he’s sniffing cocaine at work, too. He looks all bug-eyed and paranoid.”

The open line hummed. He could hear Robert “Call-Me-Bob” Zimmer, the bar manager, making little clicking noises with his tongue.

“I tried to give him a chance,” Marsh said. “I’ve been telling him to clean up his act. But I think it’s time something was done about it.”

“Where are you, Henry?” Zimm said finally. He was a big, poker-faced man with a dry sense of humor and an easy way with people. Everybody he worked with liked him. Marsh had been trying to get him fired for years. “People have been talking,” he said. “They’re worried about you. There’s been some concern. They say you’re showing all the signs of a real crack-up.”

“San Diego,” Marsh said. “We’re waiting for a flight. It’s Gina’s mother. She’s in the hospital again. Leukemia or something. Look, our flight’s boarding. I’ve got to go.”

“If anyone asks, Henry, you didn’t hear it from me, all right? But people are talking.”

“Thanks, Zimm. Just take care of Tommy for me, will ya?”

“Call me Bob,” Zimm said, and he hung up.

Time folded in on itself after that. He finished one pint, went across the street for another. When he finished that one, he went back out and bought a fifth. He passed out sometime around noon, and when he woke up, it was dark again.

He watched Saturday Night Live, flipping channels with the bottle balanced precariously on his stomach. He watched Jenny Jones and thought about his wife. The thing was, he hadn’t expected the guy to show. Never in a million years did he think there were people who did this kind of thing for money. He hadn’t been prepared. The Cub Scout motto came back to him, and he remembered his father, a remote, congenitally disturbed man plagued by a host of neuroses who had deferred in all matters to his wife, Henry’s mother, a woman whose overweening influence had driven him, Henry, to the far ends of the earth-to California-to escape, to make a life for himself, to raise his children where the woman could not smother them as she had smothered him. But curse of curses, fate of fates, he had married his mother, or a woman just like her, a woman who seemed in every way different from her but who had, in fact, turned out to be so much the same he could no longer separate the two in his mind, and the bitches at his back had become one.

Had she cheated? She’d lost interest in him sexually years ago, but then she’d never been much interested in sex. Still, he remembered times when it was free and easy between them. Certainly they’d fornicated once-twice, if they’d conceived the two brats, the bloodsuckers, and he wondered if that was when it had ended, when the first or the second of the kids had popped out, if that was the precise moment when the gates had swung closed, when the dream of better things and better times had died, stillborn. They-she and the children-had made his life a prison.

Sunday morning he washed his socks and his underwear in the sink. He found a Chinese takeout menu in the drawer by the bed, tucked into the obligatory Gideon’s, and he ordered spareribs and egg rolls for breakfast. He drew the curtains and paced the room naked. He stood under the shower until it ran cold. He passed out again in the afternoon, and when he woke, it was a quarter of two and he had fifteen minutes to haul himself out of bed and across the street to the store for another bottle.

5

The girl crept downstairs after dark. The television was blaring in her parents’ room, an apocryphal white noise, a bluish blush of light showing under the door. It gave the impression of something trying to get out, something she’d seen in a hundred horror movies, but it was only her mother in there, hiding away.

The lights in the hall burned like sentries and made her think of Bedouin fires in the desert, something she’d seen in National Geographic, though it was the words that came to her and not the image. Like Bedouin fires, she thought. The house was dark, as still as a mausoleum.

She’d just reached the front door when the noise from the television upstairs died and her mother’s voice carried shrilly down the hall.

“Where are you going at this time of night, Jaime?”

The woman had some kind of sixth sense; she had sonar like a bat’s.

“I’m just going for a walk, Mom. I’ll be back in a while.”

Her mother didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

“Well, okay, sweetie. But you be careful, will you? I hate to think about you walking around out there all by yourself after dark. I know it’s a good neighborhood, but don’t be long. I can’t stand to think about it.”

The girl rolled her eyes.

“Then don’t think about it, Mom.”

She didn’t wait for her mother to answer.

Outside was the roiling sky, the moon like a hole punched in the clouds, and the faint taste of the ocean on the air. She took it for granted they were near the water, although she couldn’t see it from the house. When they’d gone to Sacramento to see her grandparents, she’d missed it. She’d felt some nameless dread, an anxiety she couldn’t place until they’d come back across the San Mateo bridge, and she’d realized it was the ocean she missed all along.

She felt reflexively in her pocket for her keys before she pulled the door shut and stood on the front step for a minute, looking up and down the quiet street, the starlit confines of her world. A couple walked slowly past, dappled in shadow. They were climbing the hill, leaning into the grade, and they were maybe a few years older than she was. Moonlight glinted off the boy’s glasses, and the girl’s face shone, her lips parted in an expression that was at once abject and leery and was somehow frightening on both accounts. The boy was neat, clean-cut, and maybe a little embarrassed. He held her hand awkwardly, as if unsure what to do with it.

Boys were puzzling, Jaime thought, only in the depths of their stupidity.

A man went quickly past on the other side of the street, ducking under the trees, his face hung in shadow. His jacket flashed like a warning signal, bumblebee yellow, and the girl hesitated, letting him dart past before she came down the steps and crossed the lawn, turning up the hill toward the bus stop. Her mother’s paranoia was rubbing off on her. But if she’d married her father, Jaime thought, she’d probably be stark raving mad by now, too.

She waited until the end of the block to light a cigarette, although she couldn’t figure out how her parents hadn’t caught on by now, seeing as she’d come in reeking like a cigarette every day for almost a year. If they knew, they weren’t saying anything-maybe hoping she’d give it up if they just acted like they didn’t notice-and she didn’t see any reason to rub their noses in it.

The first few drags made her woozy, an ephemeral wooziness she wanted to hold on to for as long as it lasted and that was gone too quickly. The bus stop sat crookedly like a chess piece at the top of the hill, webbed in a skein of gauzy light from the street lamp, the opaque siding pitted and scarred. A dark-skinned woman in a rain jacket who was as wide as she was tall was waiting under the shelter, and she turned her eyes on Jaime as if some vague animal instinct had registered an incursion.

But there was no threat, no reason whatsoever to be alarmed, and she seemed smug then, sitting primly on the tiny seat, glancing quickly at Jaime out of the corner of her eye and looking away as she folded her arms across her chest.

She didn’t wear black for the sins of the teeming world, and not because she was obsessed with sex or with death or because she wanted to die, although she thought about it-with sex, it was the other great mystery-and not even because she came from what she considered the archetype of the dysfunctional family. Even Reynaldo, the Spanish exchange student who’d been trying to get in her pants for the last six months, seemed to think it meant there was something wrong with her. “It says to me you have great sadness,” he said, in that ridiculous accent that made everything he spoke seem a come-on. But then Reynaldo thought Americans were all head cases anyway, and there were things she couldn’t explain to him. There were things she couldn’t explain to anyone, not to her friends or her boyfriends, not to her parents or the endless procession of guidance counselors and psychologists they were always sending her to at school. Not to Principal Dryer, who’d taken an almost fawning interest in her, whose wife was cheating on him with Jaime’s math teacher. But she’d never questioned her own capacity to survive, and she knew something inside her would persevere. She’d made that decision a long time ago, without ever knowing she was making it, and she would not become crazy like her mother, she would not die inside like her father, who she half expected to find waiting at the breakfast table with a loaded gun one of these mornings. She didn’t know if Todd was going to make it, but she’d take him with her if she could, and she knew that one way or another, come what might, she’d survive them all with her soul intact.

One cigarette led to another. She had a relationship with the things that had power over her; there was a give and a take. Things like Reynaldo, who was always pushing the envelope, always asking-begging-for a little bit more. She said, “Don’t, goddammit,” and he only laughed. But if she ever let him have what he wanted, he’d disappear. She intuited this the same way she intuited he was lying when he said he wasn’t a virgin. He talked about the girls he’d had in Spain, and she wondered if they were real or not, or if he was only making them up. He was terrified of the world waiting between her legs, and the power that gave her over him gave her an almost sexual thrill that was far more exciting than his anxious, inept fumbling. And that thrill in turn, that feeling that he didn’t even know he was giving her and wouldn’t understand if he did, it held sway over her.

She took all responsibility. She had to handle him with kid gloves. And if she ever let him have his way, she’d ruin it. He’d never look at her again.

The world was a matrix of power relationships. Love and pity, tolerance and kindness-sometimes she wondered if those entered into the equation at all. In her estimation, God was a bleak thing, a cold, clear eye watching with dispassion.

The bus rolled to a stop with a hissing of air brakes, the door opened, and the woman got on, giving Jaime a look over her shoulder. She sat a while longer before she started back down the hill, and it occurred to her as she passed the Parsons’ place that she’d seen the beige Pontiac across the street the night before. She thought it had been sitting there the night before that, too. And that might not have struck her as out of the ordinary, if not for the fact someone was sitting in the car, a shape massed behind the wheel, under the galaxy of reflected light. She walked quickly, not wanting to sprint for the front door but having to fight to keep from doing just that, all her cool thrown off for the moment, fumbling with her keys for what seemed an eternity, hands trembling, the hackles rising on the back of her neck. She could feel him watching her.

“Jaime? Is that you?”

“Yes, Mom.” She slammed the door and fell against it. She twisted the deadbolt and peered around the curtain. There was no movement outside.

“Don’t slam the door, Jaime.”

“Mom, I think there’s something going on. There’s a guy sitting in a car across the street. It’s kind of creepy.”

The pause before her mother answered alerted the girl to her mother’s complicity, to a web of knowledge and causality that stretched far past where she was standing now.

“Stop it. Jaime, you stop it right this minute. You’re scaring me half to death. You know how I am.”

“Yeah, Mom. I do.” It occurred to her then that she ought to leave well enough alone, that she was going to become as crazy as her mother if she wasn’t careful.

The kitchen was a wreck. Pots and pans were climbing out of the sink, and the gray, stagnant water smelled like roadkill. A week’s worth of plates and dishes were stacked on the counter. And her father hadn’t been home in three days. He’d called her a slut, which was so far from the truth, she wanted to laugh. If her father only knew how hard she’d worked to curb her desire, to preserve the upper hand.

She managed to clear off a corner of the counter, enough room to make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and she poured herself a glass of the chocolate soymilk they bought just for her before she carried her sandwich upstairs on a paper towel.

6

He’d finally decided he was going to have to take matters into his own hands. That had been his only mistake. Trusting anyone else to do his dirty work, to take care of his business.

After three days, he’d sobered a little. Enough. The idea came with sudden, vicious clarity. He hadn’t wanted to get blood on his hands, but life was like that. Sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do. He thought of Clint Eastwood; he thought of Sean Connery; he thought again of Pacino in Scarface. They were cowards, weak men. Then he thought about Smilin’ Jack in The Shining. Now there was a man who could take care of business.

He left his dirty socks in the sink. He didn’t bother to check out. He wasn’t coming back, but he guessed they’d figure that out soon enough. Walking through the lobby, he saw the implements arrayed beside the fireplace, which was nonfunctional, strictly ornamental. There was the shovel; there, the broom. There were the giant tongs, and yes, the poker. The kid behind the desk was staring at his computer like he’d been shot up with Thorazine-eyes glassy, jaw slack. Probably stoned, Marsh thought. It was impossible to find reliable help anymore.

He swooped through the lobby like a bird of prey, catching hold of the poker as he passed the hearth and whisking it from the rack, carrying it out the door like a cane. The kid didn’t look up. Marsh started laughing. His breath came in whinnies and grunts, hurting his side. He swung the poker once, twice, listening to the whistling sound it made on the chilly air. The elderly couple coming in the door steered clear, giving him wide berth. He made a beeline for the car, stopping only once, to vomit.

7

He scarfed a cold cheeseburger from the glove box. He had three more; he could make it another night. They weren’t so bad once you got used to them. He washed it down with some flat Pepsi and belched, tasting pickle.

The girl started up toward the corner at a quarter of ten. She did it every night. Up to the bus stop before ten, and she’d sit there and have two, maybe three cigarettes, then she’d walk back.

The car stunk. It smelled like French fries and animal fat, like dirty sweat socks and musty sneakers, like unwashed, unshaven Irish ex-cop. After three days of sleeping behind the wheel and waking in his clothes, three days of waiting for the answer, he was through. Nothing had come to him, and nothing, so far as he could tell, had happened. And nothing, he’d decided, was going to happen, either. He considered ringing the doorbell, but dismissed the idea as soon as it occurred to him. He didn’t know which was worse-stalking the woman, staking out her house and scaring her children half to death, or ringing her doorbell and announcing himself: I know you don’t know me, Mrs. Marsh, but my name is Mickey Walsh, and your husband hired me to kill you.

If he thought his life was in the shitter a week ago, he could just imagine. He’d go from metro section to the front page.

He realized he’d been expecting something to happen, that he’d been keeping his vigil half hoping and half fearing Marsh would turn up and try to do the deed himself. If it came down to his word against Marsh’s, he knew where he stood. Even with twenty years on the force, he’d be on the losing end, and that seemed to him the story of his whole sad and shoddy existence on the earth, all forty-three years of it. What would he do if Marsh came home? Was he protecting the woman? Did he need to? He didn’t know. Should he have gone to the departmental psychiatrist years ago like everyone had told him to? Probably.

He’d gone through his life doing whatever the crowd did. When they rode around in squad cars looking for drunks to roll, he’d done it. When they’d gone whoring, when they’d beaten up the homeless or the Mexicans or rousted the blacks for conglomerating on street corners, he’d done that, too. On his own, he didn’t know the first thing. He didn’t even know how to behave around his wife or his daughter.

He started the car. The old Pontiac still turned over on the first try. He had $125,000 in a briefcase in the trunk, and he was going to South America. He’d read it in a book. That was what people did when they wanted out-out of the country, out of the life. He was taking early retirement, a permanent vacation.

He’d just put the Pontiac in gear when the green Jaguar came screaming around the corner at the top of the hill, hopping the curb and narrowly missing the bus shelter on the corner. Marsh swerved across his lawn and plowed into the side of his wife’s Mercury. He lurched out of the car, waving something in his hands. Mickey reached over, fumbling in the glove box, digging under the cold cheeseburgers for the.38 he’d been carrying for twenty years, since he was a rookie on the force, the spare piece he’d carried for two decades without firing it. Once he’d thought about using it to plant on a suspect. Now, watching Marsh stumbling across the moonlit yard, hacking at the philodendron bushes as he tottered up the steps to his front door, Mickey only hoped it still worked.