The Last Kind Words

15

Out of sheer exhaustion I was able to catch a couple hours of sleep, but the pain in my kidneys woke me in the deep darkness. I was slathered in sweat and spurred on to the bathroom. I gritted my teeth, pissed blood, and popped five aspirin.

I took a shower and let the cold water wash over me.

I’d dreamed of Kimmy. I was surprised and bothered by the clarity of the memory. We were in the Commack Motor Inn, one of several pay-by-the-hour motels we used to duck into so we could be together. Intimacy and privacy weren’t among the benefits of living in a large house with an extended family. The backseat of a car got old quick. We were catching our breaths, lying back in each other’s arms. Her hair was wet and scoured my cheek. She pressed her lips to my ear.

“Terry, I’m pregnant.”

It was dark. I couldn’t make out her face. Her voice was steady and I couldn’t tell if she was glad or terrified or excited or indifferent. I knew that was why she’d chosen this precise moment to tell me. She wanted my own honest reaction not influenced by her own.

I said, “We’re not naming her after a fucking dog.”

It made her giggle, a sound that transformed me and lightened me and always seemed to make me float to somewhere safe. “Her? You want a girl?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Why?”

“I like the idea of saying, ‘I’m going home to my girls.’ ”

She let go with a relieved quiet laughter that soon turned into tears as we muttered our sweet somethings and made love again. I thought of the child growing inside her, and we were gentler and somehow more generous than we had been in a while. Afterward I looped my arms around her and kissed her belly. Our breathing was in sync, which meant our breathing was in sync with the baby’s. I’d never felt quite so significant or so vulnerable.

“We’ll get married tomorrow.”

“No,” Kimmy said. “I don’t want to rush i maere c @wert. We can take our time.”

“This summer? On the beach? We can rent the Montauk Lighthouse, have the ceremony at the top.”

“You’ve been thinking about this?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Since when?”

“Since I met you,” I said. It was the truth. “We can buy a house out east. Something nice and affordable, but private, maybe near the Hamptons.”

“You don’t have that kind of money.”

“Not too near. But, you know, nearby.”

“Don’t I get any say in the matter?” she asked.

“No. I’m going to take care of my girls. You just sit back and let me run the show and love you both. This summer, at the top of the lighthouse. I’ll carry you up the steps.”

“There’s got to be two hundred of them, Terry. I’ll be fat by then. You’ll get herniated.”

“I’ll carry you very slowly,” I whispered. “My girls.”

I climbed out of the shower and held a towel to my face and stifled a moan, a groan, I don’t know what, but it wanted out, and I wouldn’t let it. After a minute the force of it began to lessen and finally subsided. I got dressed.

The sun wouldn’t be up for another two hours. I got in the car, drove over to Chub’s garage, and crept the place.

It had the innocuous name of Wright’s Automotive Repair, with a logo that was a touch overdesigned. He’d apparently established a nice, legal business. Three rebuilt classic muscle cars were parked out front with FOR SALE signs in the windows. Four bays in the garage, two of them filled with soccer mom mini-SUVs, another with a Honda Accord in need of a new transmission. The last bay had a complete smashup laid out in it. I could barely make it out as a Dodge. It must’ve been towed there by some insurance company. That meant Chub didn’t mind cops and insurance investigators sniffing around. Another sign that he’d gone completely straight.

I checked through his office cabinets and desk drawers and came up empty. Nothing that proved he was still souping cars for heisters and helping to plan their getaway routes.

I booted up his computer. It wasn’t password-protected. The wallpaper was a photo of Chub, Kimmy, and Scooter all wearing Santa hats and smiling in front of a Christmas tree. Chub was on the verge of cracking up, his head tilted back, face slightly out of focus because he was already beginning to quiver. Kimmy stood there beaming, eyes crimped into an elated squint. Scooter had her mouth wide open in a guffaw, two tiny teeth poking up from her bottom gums. I could almost hear her wild baby giggling.

I was a head case. Jealousy ripped through me. That angry child’s cry of I want, I want. Mine. Mine. Mine. Thieves were a covetous lot by definition, but I wondered if anyone in my family had ever been as green-eyed and greedy as I was now.

Did I want Chub on the narrow or was I hoping to find he was still in the bent life? Either way, what did it really mean to me?

I clicked through a few files. Spreadsheets of accounts and orders and inventories. If there was anything sneaky, I couldn’t see it.

I searched for a safe. It took me two minutes t emdsho find it in the corner, tucked away under a set of shelves partially obscured by racks of motor oil and transmission fluid. It was a small, old, simple model that I probably could’ve cracked in a half hour. But I didn’t even have to bother. Chub was a bit sloppy. He’d left the dial just a couple of numbers off, and the tumblers fell immediately into place.

There was nothing much inside. A few pink slips to junkers out back, some sales receipts, invoices, other old paperwork from before he’d bought the place. Copies of tax returns.

No, I thought, he wasn’t sloppy. This was meant to be found by the cops or by thieves.

Chub had overplayed his hand. I knew now that there was another safe hidden somewhere on the premises. A sigh escaped me, maybe consolation or perhaps discouragement.

I walked the bays. There were a million nooks and crannies. The workbenches were covered with tools. In my own house there were hidden stairwells, crawl spaces, drop shafts. I knew I could hunt for his hiding spot all night long and never trip over it.

My thoughts cleared.

He wouldn’t keep his real cache in the bays. He had legit employees working for him. He’d need a place all his own.

That meant the office. I scanned the area. Checked the ceiling, the vents, the air-conditioning ducts.

That wasn’t how Chub would do it.

I bent to the safe again. It was heavy but shifted relatively easily. I shoved it aside and touched the boards of the floor. It took only a few seconds for me to figure out the proper way to lift them. When I did, they came loose without any effort.

The second safe was a lot newer and more compact. I could probably jug it with the right tools, but there was no need. This time Chub really had gotten sloppy. He’d played the same game as with the decoy safe. He’d left the combination only a couple numbers off.

I yanked the handle and the door popped open. Inside were maps of towns all over the island. Port Jefferson, Bayport, Bay Shore, Bridgehampton, St. James, Glen Cove, Bethpage. Different sets of charts and diagrams covered Brooklyn and Queens. There were notes about roadwork, detours, traffic buildup, and rush-hour congestion, likely spots where state troopers might be hiding on the parkways. Chub was expanding his operation, at least so far as the planning went.

There was ninety grand in thick slabs of cash. I knew this would be only one of his caches, escape-route money in case he ever needed to make a run for it.

“Goddamn it, Chub.”

My voice was loud in the empty room.

I wondered if Kimmy would stand beside him the day he got pinched. Take the baby with her to visit him in Sing Sing, the little girl putting her hand up to the glass partition, Chub holding his up on the other side.

His girls.

I had made another ghost. I thought I might be one myself, revisiting a life that no longer wanted me.

16

I drove home, went to my room, and listened to JFK’s powerful rhythmic breathing as he slept at the foot of my bed. I managed to shove him aside enough to crawl in under the blankets, and when I finally fell asleep I dreamed of Rebecca Clarke. When I awoke, my hands flashed out like I was trying to keep from falling. Iting00A0; D spooked JFK and he barked once in my face.

I sat up and ran my hands through my hair. I needed to start taking sleeping pills, something that would put me out so I could wake up refreshed. Becky seemed so prevalent in my mind that I thought I should visit her, talk to her. Collie had been right. I’d always had extremely vivid dreams. I wondered if I’d sleep better or worse after my brother was dead.

The sun warmed my face. It was a little after dawn. I expected my mother to be up but she wasn’t. I slipped through the house, going room to room and checking on everyone. I stood before the bed of my parents and watched them sprawled but still hugging each other. Mal was out. I hoped he wasn’t scoring them at the Fifth Amendment. Grey slept like he always did, curled up in apparent great comfort as if he were spending the night at the Waldorf. His handsome face took on an even greater beauty in sleep-slack and innocent and genuine. Dale’s teen anger and exasperation were gone from her face, and there was almost a small smile on her lips.

I stopped in Gramp’s room and found him snoozing. It was a relief to see him that way. He looked like he’d just lain down after pulling a particularly exhausting grift. I had the intense urge to wake him up and talk with him. I had the irrational feeling that if I caught him at the right moment I might be able to sneak past his disease. Distract, divert, and charm it. He’d yawn and look at me the way he used to and say, Terry, we’ve got a good day ahead of us. A damn good day. Tight cooze and big coin. He’d chuck me under the chin and give a wink. His hair would be mussed from a night of tossing and the hole in his skull would be on display, black and beckoning. You with me?

I stepped into Collie’s room. It hadn’t been changed either. I wondered how difficult it was for my mother to come in here and dust and revisit his belongings. I looked around and tried to spot any sign of madness. I slid a finger across the spines of the books on his shelves. At least half of them were mine. I could almost feel Becky Clarke’s breath on my neck. I checked his caches. They were all empty.

I drove over to the address listed on the police report as the Clarke house. It had rained during the night and a mist rose off the streets in the growing morning heat. The family hadn’t moved from Brightwaters village. That surprised me. After a tragedy like the one they’d suffered through, I’d assumed they would have wanted to get as far off Long Island as possible. But they’d stuck it out. I wondered if they’d left Rebecca’s bedroom untouched the way I’d heard some families did when they lost their children too soon. The way my own parents hadn’t changed a thing in my room.

I parked up the road and watched the house. It was two-storied and gabled, painted a charming yellow.

The dream had begun to wear away. It felt distant and unknowable. I didn’t know why I was here. I was trying to reconnect to something I didn’t want to be connected to in the first place. But the only way to learn what might have been going through Collie’s mind, if he had smoked Becky, was to start with her. I wanted to look at home photos. I wanted to get a sense of her. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

“Jesus, what the fuck?”

I started my car. I felt like an idiot. I was about to pull away, when the mother came out of the house, followed by the father. Their names were in the file but I didn’t feel the need to check. They were both professionals, dressed in proper business suits, holding briefcases. He had oned рowe a power tie and she wore a skirt that emphasized her lovely legs. He was eating a cruller and trying not to get any sugar on his lapel. She sipped coffee. He finished in three bites and popped the code into the garage keypad. The door slid up. Inside was a two-year-old Lexus. The Clarkes said a few words to each other and climbed into the car together. She was behind the wheel. The train station was ten minutes away. They probably both worked on Wall Street within a block of each other. They’d take the LIRR into the city and sit side by side doing the Times crossword puzzle or double-checking yesterday’s stock figures.

The front door slammed again. A nine- or ten-year-old girl carrying a backpack hopped off the tile stoop, followed by her teenage sister. Sixteen or seventeen and tall, nearly six foot. They walked over to the car and spoke to their parents but didn’t get in. Mom and Dad waved and pulled out. The garage door closed. The sisters started walking together toward the corner bus stop. The teenager had no book bag, which made me wonder if she was a troublemaker at school, sitting in the last row, popping gum and sneering. Her little sister ran ahead, and she put an extra step in her stride. They both had black hair, shoulder length when it wasn’t splayed and hooked by the breeze.

The Clarkes had a first-rate security system. I had the right tools for the job but it would take me a while to trip the system. It looked like I wouldn’t need them. The back door was ajar.

Even after losing one daughter, they left the door open. She might’ve been killed in a park but they should’ve learned something about safety precautions. I shook my head.

I moved fast through the house. For the first time in my life I felt like an intruder. Scoring a place was one thing, but nosing around, being a snoop, hunting through the belongings of the dead, it somehow felt more corrupt.

I hit the master bedroom. Clarke had a.45 in his nightstand drawer. It was loaded. I thought that was a good thing. He might not have time to unlock the piece from a safety box and snap in the clip if someone tried to take his other daughters from him. My respect for Mr. Clarke went up a hair, even if he was a stupid bastard for leaving the door open.

There were three other bedrooms in the home. One was clearly the little girl’s. It looked like a holdover nursery. There were block letters around the mirror, spelling out SHARON. Pink walls and white bookcases full of dolls. But she was getting old enough to assert herself. There were posters of the latest movie stars and a couple of boy bands. Beside her bed was a shelf full of paperbacks. She liked those ’tween vampire romances that I used to read to Dale. I recognized several of the titles.

Branching off from the end of the hall were the other two bedrooms. They were damn near identical. I couldn’t tell which was Rebecca’s and which was the other sister’s. The parents not only kept Becky’s room the same, they still dusted and sprayed air freshener.

Lots of prints of famous artwork on the walls. Looked like one or both of the sisters were interested in the likes of Manet, Jackson Pollock, Dali. I could check the dressers and become a fucking panty sniffer, see which one’s underwear smelled fresher, but I already felt too ashamed. When even a thief feels embarrassed, you know something is way out of line.

I started with the room on the left. There were no photos. I didn’t know what else I was looking for. Some connection between Rebecca and Collie? Between her and some boyfriend? Gilmore figured it was always the boyfriend.

The cops would’ve been through the place five years ago. They would’ve searched the drawers and found a diary or anything else that might’ve given them a lead. I stuck to the most likely places for a hidden cache. Most teens had one. A secret stash of cigarettes, joints, porn, boosted cash, self-taken nudie shots, or anything else they wanted to hide from their parents.

I checked the floor and ceiling of the closet. The air vent. The molding in the corners of the room. I pulled out drawers in case any of them had false bottoms or had been shortened to leave room behind them. I scored when I spotted a loose faceplate on one of the wall sockets.

The wiring had been disconnected. There was a cubbyhole about five inches deep. Inside was a dime bag of marijuana, half a bottle of what looked like Oxycontin, and several other bottles of Valium, Xanax, and Zoloft. The shit was serious. There were also stolen sheets of empty scrips. I pocketed a couple of them. You never knew.

The pot was skunkweed but it was fresh. This was the seventeen-year-old’s room. She liked to mellow out and did what she had to do to follow her buzz and blunt her anxieties. After what she’d been through, I didn’t blame her. But she was overdoing the self-medication. Too many antidepressants could have opposite the intended effect.

I crossed the hall to Becky’s room, hating myself. I felt like a total fraud. Collie’s name was stuck in my teeth. I’d been in the house almost ten minutes. That was a lot of time to be inside. I scouted the likely hot spots, tried the outlets first just to see if the seventeen-year-old had picked up the trick from Becky. There was nothing anywhere.

“Who the fuck are you?”

I spun and the teenage girl was there in the doorway.

If someone comes in the door, you dive out the window. That was one of the basic tenets of being a thief.

Except that she had her father’s.45 trained on me.

They hadn’t been as careless as I’d thought. She was just walking her sister to the corner stop, waiting with her until the bus arrived. That’s why the door had been left open.

“Oh, hey there,” I said, propping a high-wattage smile in place. “I rang the bell. And knocked, but no one answered. The door was open. I’m Freddy of Freddy’s Fix-It. Seems like you’ve got some faulty wiring that your father wants me to check out.”

“The front door was locked. The back door was open.”

“Right,” I said. “See, I was calling out and I decided to come around the side of the house over there and-”

“Where’s your toolbox?”

“Oh, that’s in the truck.”

“So where’s your truck?”

“We didn’t have a flangella voltometer with us. Very important during electrical work, otherwise you can fry the frammistat. My partner left to go get-”

“Shove it. Who are you?”

“Everybody knows Freddy.”

She was pretty, or had been once. Now her face was thin and drawn, with dark steaming eyes and heavy frown lines across her brow and around her mouth. In ten or twenty years they’d be deep as knife tracks. At the top of her arm, the hint of a tattoo edged out from beneath her black T-shirt.eddрu can fry She was underage too. I wondered who this prick was that kept inking all these little girls.

She reminded me more than a little of Dale. The gun never wavered. It was a heavy piece of hardware. She held it with a two-handed grip, and the muscles in her forearms were tense and sharply defined.

I winced and waited for the screaming. I thought, Now Gilmore is really going to tune up my ass in a holding cell.

“I know you,” she said.

“Everyone knows Freddy of Freddy’s Fix-”

“No, I know you, fucker!”

I didn’t like the way she said it. There was rage there as well as anguish and an undercurrent of vengeance. I never wanted to be around someone who sounded like that, much less someone pointing a large-caliber weapon at my heart. My back began to crawl with cold sweat. My breathing hitched.

“You’re one of them,” she continued. “One of those people. That family. Named after dogs.”

Christ. I wasn’t going to be able to cover the ground between us before she pulled the trigger. The window was closed and locked and there was a screen. I wasn’t going to be able to duck through it and run away. I could only hold my ground and pray I didn’t piss myself. I hoped she called the cops instead of taking her hate out on the wrong Rand.

“Which one are you?” she asked. “Tell me.”

“Terrier,” I admitted.

“You look like your brother.”

“Right, but I’m not him.”

“But you’re in my house.”

She had me there. “I found the piece in your father’s nightstand drawer. I removed the clip.”

“No, you didn’t. I checked. I always check. My dad’s taught me all about guns since I was twelve. I’m a good shot. Not that I’d have to be at this range.”

“Shit. Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“You’re not going to get the chance.”

“Just let me explain.”

“You people are thieves and liars and murderers. What makes you think I’m going to listen to you even one more second?”

It was a good question. If I came home and found the brother of the man who’d murdered my sister standing in the middle of her bedroom, I would’ve made my play by now, whatever it was.

But along with the low-slung burning fury and the distress and the dull edginess that comes when someone hooked on pills needs to pop another one, she was intrigued and wanted to know what the hell I was doing here.

I had to engage her. I said, “Your rooms are the same. Yours and Becky’s. Why?”

“So you’ve already been in mine.”

“Yes.”

“Did you steal anything?”

“No.”

“Not enough time?”

“There was plenty of time. But I’m not a thief anymore.”

“Now you just break in to houses but don’tlaiр/p›

“Technically I didn’t break in. I just-”

“Shut up!”

“Your rooms are the same, except you’ve got a hiding place for your goodies. You’re hooked on antianxiety meds.”

Her eyes widened and her mouth opened as if I’d just slapped her. It was an ugly expression on a cute face. Then she grinned without humor. That was worse. She studied me and was offended by what she saw. “Care to guess why, you prick?”

I nodded. “I already know why. You should just call the cops. Ask for Detective Gilmore. Don’t worry, he’ll definitely give me a good beating. He already has this week. He’ll probably let you watch. Or help.”

She was still calm, assured, centered, but the hate inside her was looking to get out, and it flickered in her eyes. They were at least a little crazy. I’d done that to her. My family had done that to her.

“Last chance to tell me why you’re here. After this, I think I’m going to shoot you. I’m not sure where. Maybe in the knee. Maybe the balls. Maybe the head. I haven’t decided. Did you think about dying when you were going through our things?”

“No.”

“You should’ve. You must know something about last chances. Your brother’s used all of his up.”

I kept hoping she’d step farther into the room, or that her arms would tire, or that she’d drop her gaze and give me half a second to make some kind of a break. But it wasn’t going to happen. I could usually make a lie sound like the truth, but I was floundering with her. I felt sheepish just being here. I wondered if I could make the truth sound like the truth.

I said, “I’m in your house because I was hoping your parents hadn’t changed Rebecca’s room.”

“Why would you care about that?”

“I wanted to look at photos. I wanted to know a little more about her. My brother says he didn’t kill her. He admits he murdered the other seven people but says he didn’t touch her. He begged me to look into it.”

She started to laugh very quietly. It was grotesque. I’d made a similar noise when I’d run from my brother, pale and shaking. Her pupils were very large.

The girl said, “First you called her Becky, then Rebecca.”

I’d noted that too. “It was wrong of me to act so familiar.”

“Your game doesn’t even have any rules, does it?” she said. “You think it’s wrong to call her Becky but you don’t mind going through the drawers of a home you’ve invaded? Standing in a room of a girl murdered by your brother?”

“Actually, I do mind. I’m pretty ashamed. Listen, why don’t you call the cops?”

“What makes you think I won’t shoot you?”

“I was raised as a burglar. My whole life I’ve done nothing but take stupid chances. This is just one more.”

She lowered the gun a fraction, then raised it again. I was hoping if she pulled the trigger she would only shoot me in the leg. I very carefully reached for my pack of cigarettes and shook one out.

She said, “There’s no smoking in the house.”

I put the butt back in the pack. “Where do you smoke your pot?”

“In the yard, when no one else is home.”

“Fire your dealer. It’s cheap weed.”

“Your brother,” she said. The word itself seemed to dry her mouth. She licked her lips and swallowed. “Do you believe him?”

“No,” I told her. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Then why come around?”

“He’s my brother. I’ve hated him most of my life. But he’s my brother.”

“Why do you hate him so much?”

The question flustered me. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever thought about it before. I struggled for an answer. Long before the competition over women, even before the bad blood over incidents I remembered clearly-the times he ran out on me during a job, the taunts, the drunken posturing, the fights he started with fences that came back to cause me troubles-I had loved him. We had been friends. He’d protected me. I could remember riding on the handlebars of his bicycle while he kept one arm around my waist to keep me from falling. I thought he would never hurt me. But it had shifted somewhere, in a way I still didn’t understand. He grew angry with me, seemed to always be on the attack. I thought of him stabbing me with the Revolutionary War figure that led to the awful scarring on my chest.

But I supposed that he had his reasons too, if someone had bothered to ask him. Maybe he was only reacting to something I put out into the world. He probably thought that I was distant, cold, a tightass. Maybe I didn’t watch his back enough. Maybe he expected me to love him more, or better. Perhaps the truth was no deeper than the fact that Collie and I were simply wired to be enemies.

She squinted at me as if my hesitation was enough of a response. “You said a detective beat you up. That the truth?”

“Last night.”

“I don’t see any marks.”

I lifted my shirt. The bruises on my kidneys were a mottled blue and yellow. She appeared to be impressed with either my asskicking or my dog tat. She seemed to come to a decision. She lowered the gun. I had no doubt that if I moved toward her or tried to run or said anything out of line she’d shoot me out of my shoes. I stood still in the center of the room.

“Why did he hit you?” she asked.

“Because I stole some files from him. I wanted to read the original reports.”

“I thought you weren’t a thief anymore.”

“I’ve backslid a little,” I admitted.

“And?”

“And Collie confessed to all the other murders but not your sister’s.”

“I know that. Of course I know that. That’s why you’re here?”

“Yes.”

“So why didn’t you look into this five years ago?”

“He only just asked me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

She kskiрaskept the.45 low against the side of her leg, the way the pros did when they walked into a place to knock it over. “He’s crazy.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“And you’re crazy for helping him.”

“Probably,” I said. “Tell me about Rebecca.”

“Tell you what? I don’t know what to say.”

“She was seventeen.”

“That’s right.”

“The report I read said she was being tutored in an advanced physics class that evening. That she and several other students were at a teacher’s home. Mrs. Dan-” I couldn’t remember the name. It was Greek.

“Mrs. Denopolis.”

“Who lived near Autauk Park. Your sister didn’t drive?”

“She jogged. She was on the school track team. She ran everywhere.”

“You must live at least eight or nine miles from the park.”

“For Becky that was nothing. She was a long-distance runner. She’d run down Old Autauk Highway.”

I thought I had a good poker face in place but she must’ve read something in my expression.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I just jogged that way yesterday morning.”

“A lot of people do.”

“Right. Did she ever mention Collie? That she knew him? That he was bothering her? Anything like that?”

“No.”

“Did she mention having any trouble with anyone? An ex-boyfriend?”

“No. I was only twelve but we talked a lot and shared secrets. The same way Sharon and I do now.”

It reminded me that I didn’t know her name. I asked and she said, “Cara.”

“Why aren’t you at school?”

It made her scoff. “What are you, a parole officer? I quit and got my GED. I work part-time at Kohl’s. I’m taking night classes at Suffolk Community.”

“Cara, would it be all right if I called you in case I have any other questions about your sister?”

“I’ve told you everything I can. But if you want to come back you can talk to my parents. I think they might listen. But I’m not sure they could help at all.”

“I doubt anyone can. I’m just spinning my wheels.”

“So am I. That’s how it feels. Like I’m wasting time. That’s why I-” She didn’t have to finish. I knew she meant the pills. She was beginning to tap the gun against the side of her leg. Her agitation was growing worse. I could see the fear in her eyes. It had nothing to do with me. The meds were wearing off. She had to be popping ten or twelve a day. The charge of her emotions was overcoming her, and she needed to deaden it.

“Where’d you get the scrips?”

“Like that’s your business? I stole them from my mother’s ob-gyn.”

“You’ve been on the meds for too long. You’re taking sseрem"too many.”

“I need them.”

“But they’re making you sicker now. You know it’s the truth. You’re taking more and more pills and they’re not working as well.”

“Who are you to say that? You don’t know me.”

“I know when someone is an addict. You need to ease off. Slowly.”

“Maybe I will.”

“You can’t do it on your own. Talk to someone.”

“I think I might. Soon. One of these days.”

“Listen, Cara, one final thing. Even if you’re out of the house for a few minutes, even if you’re only walking to the corner. Lock your door.”

She hadn’t softened while we’d talked. A ribbon of hair had fallen across her face and she brushed it away and it fell back again. She raised the gun. I took a step back and a mean titter spilled from her mouth. “You think I was kidding about using this thing? I hope someone does try something. I hope you come back and try something. Next time I won’t chat. And I was lying about shooting you in the leg or the nuts. If I ever pull the trigger, it’ll be a head shot.”

17

Jack “Fingers” Brown worked out of a bowling alley in Huntington Station. He held court on the last lane and never kept any hardware on the premises. If you wanted a clean, untraceable piece, you came to Fingers. Sometimes the serial numbers were filed off and sometimes they weren’t. It didn’t matter. They either were ripped off from a gun shop, had fallen off an army truck, or were police-academy-cadet fresh.

Collie had used a clean S &W.38 on his mad-dog outing. There were a couple of other guys on the island who might’ve been able to supply a piece like that, but I figured Collie would’ve gone to Fingers first. I wanted to know when Collie had decided to pick up a pistol. Had it been right after he’d left the Elbow Room or right before? Or had he nabbed it weeks in advance, preparing for his decline into the underneath?

Fingers was about fifty, with a smarmy leer, a snow tire around his middle, and a mountain of oiled hair that he kept swept to one side so it looked like he might topple over at any second. He’d been a gunrunner for twenty years or more and got picked up at least once a month by the cops, but they could never hold him for more than a day. He was smart and well connected, and word was he’d ace anyone who even looked like they might rat on him. His public persona of a bowling geek wasn’t a persona. Fingers really did spend several hours a day knocking pins down. I looked around at the signs on the front door as I walked in. They’d been there forever. Senior citizens bowled free on Tuesday nights. Fridays the high school kids got in for half price. Special prices for parties of more than twenty. Ask about discounts.

My family had bowled here when I was a kid. Grey was a natural who regularly broke 250. My mother was damn good too. She had a deceptively soft way of throwing the ball. It would drop from her hand and seem to barely have enough power to make it all the way down the lane, but once it got to the pins they practically exploded. Mal couldn’t break 100 to save his life, and I wasn’t much better. Collie had always been competitive but never with himself. Only with me. So lonstice be T g as he beat me by even a pin, he was happy. My old man would just sit and watch the rest of us and laugh while Gramp hung around in the bar and snatched enough pocket change to pay for his beer.

It was twelve-thirty. Fingers never came in before noon. He was working a four-six split in the fifth frame when I stepped up and sat behind his entourage. His right-hand man was an ex-con leg breaker named Higgins who stood six-three, weighed 230 of mostly muscle, and wore sunglasses day and night so you could never tell when he had a bead on you. It wasn’t a bad guess to figure he was always watching. Word was he used a beaver-tail sap. I kept my hands on my knees.

Two young women were chattering, clapping, and urging Fingers on. They might have been twins or were just affecting the look. Short blond hair feathered across their eyes, lots of neck jewelry, both in muted summer dresses. The bowling shoes actually looked good on them. They each turned and gave me a beaming smile. I grinned back. Higgins kept his body angled toward me. If I made a fast move he’d find the sweet spot of my skull with that blackjack in no time flat.

Fingers had good form, a nice extension as he threw the ball, a solid curve that hooked the edge of the gutter and held on, breaking only at the last moment. He picked up the spare handily and the women clapped and woo-hooed.

He noticed me immediately but chose to ignore me until he and his lady friends had finished their game. Afterward, he gave each of them a juicy kiss that made me think this crew was a little kinkier than at first appeared to be the case. Maybe the bowling shoes should have been a giveaway. The women retired to the bar. Higgins kept focused on me the entire time.

Fingers finally turned his chin and waved me over. I got up and so did Higgins, who shadowed my every move. I stood before Fingers while he cleaned his ball with an oil-stained chamois rag.

“I know you?” he asked.

“We’ve never met,” I said. “My name’s Terry Rand.”

He nodded. “Family’s got a good rep, except for that one black mark on it.”

“Right. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“I’m entertaining some friends right now.”

“This will only take a minute.”

“Not here.” He stuck his ball in a bag. Higgins kept eyeing me. Whatever intimidation the sunglasses got him would eventually cost him. He’d be rough to take under these bright lights, but in a parking lot at night he’d go pretty easy. “Make an appointment with my partner here. Maybe we can set something up in a few days. Maybe next week.”

“It can’t wait.”

“I told you. I don’t do business here.”

“From what I hear, Fingers, this is the only place you do business. No chance of the feds bugging you with all these pins flying.”

“Like I said, I’m entertaining some close friends right now-”

“Yeah, I saw. They really twins or do they just like to play dress-up and pretend?”

It made him reassess me. He held his bowling bag on his lap and wet his lips.

“What do you need?”

“I don’t need anything. I want to ask you a few questions.”

“I don’t answer questions.”

“How do you get through life without answering questions?”

“I just do.”

I put a little ice in my voice. “See that, Fingers. You just fucking answered one.”

He checked over his shoulder at Higgins, to make sure he was still close by. “You don’t want to be troublesome now, kid.”

“You’re right, I don’t. But like I said, this can’t wait. I think you know why.”

“We’re through here,” Fingers said.

Higgins drifted nearer and began to brace me. He stuck his chest in my face and backed me up a step. Like most big bruisers, he underestimated anyone who wasn’t as tall and thick as himself. He got in closer and angled a hip at me so he could yank his sap quickly. His right hand dipped into his pocket. He said nothing. What little of his face I could see held no expression. He started to draw the beaver-tail blackjack.

I grabbed the bowling bag out of Fingers’s lap and hurled it down as hard as I could on Higgins’s left foot. There was a crunch like a box of matchsticks snapping. He let out the first note of a yowl and bent over to grab at his mashed toes. I snapped a knee up into his chin. I couldn’t see his eyes but they had to be rolling. He took one step backward and fought for balance. I knocked his other leg out from under him and he fell flat on his back.

While he was down, I kicked him twice in the face. His glasses cracked and sailed off.

The bowlers in the other lanes kept right on playing. I had to hand it to these folks. They certainly had dedication and passion. Jesus, were they focused.

Fingers didn’t even try to take a swing at me. He just sat with a resigned air, sucking his teeth and shaking his head, probably already plotting how he’d snuff me.

“Did you sell a piece to my brother?” I asked.

“You’re finished, you know. I can’t let this go. Even if I wanted to, I can’t.”

“We’ll cover that later. But for right now, focus. Tell me about my brother.”

“I don’t talk about my customers.”

“Then you’re admitting he was a customer. I’m not the cops, Fingers. It’s not like I’m holding you responsible. But I need to know where he got his pistol.”

He shrugged, his bony shoulders nearly spiking through his bowling shirt. “Why do you care?”

“How about if we don’t chase each other around the track all night long? Did you sell him a clean piece?”

“Yes, I did.”

“How about a knife?”

“That too.”

My heart pounded and I crossed my arms over my chest as if to hold it in. “Right. When?”

“You want the date?”

“I do.”

“How am I supposed to remember that?”

“You remember selling it. I bet you never forget a customer, a price, a date, or a caliber, especially if it’s used in a spree like the one he went on. So tell me. When?”

Higgins let out a moan and started coughing blood. He blinked and tried turning over. I put a foot on his chest and said, “Shh.”

Fingers kept wagging his head. It made that mound of hair waver and flap.

“Even if I wanted to let this go, you think he’s going to?”

“What’d I say? Stay focused, right? Tell me when my brother came to you.”

Fingers told me. It turned out to be the day before Collie went on his rampage. He said, “You’re dead, you know.”

“Bring along someone better than this goon.”

“I will. See you soon.”

I hit the door with my heart tripping. Collie hadn’t gone off on a mad tear. It hadn’t been anything that had happened at the Elbow Room to push him over the edge. He’d either been planning to drop into the underneath or he’d picked up gun fever once he’d held the piece in his hands. A fever that had risen by degrees through the night. My brother, a living storm of urgency and indulgence, sweeping across town.

I wondered if I’d been home, would he have saved the last shot for me?

18

I drew back my arm and tossed the stick. JFK brought it back and I tossed it onto the lawn again. He hung his head, looked at me like I was an asshole, and laid down at my feet.

I wanted to see Kimmy. I wanted to do more than that. I longed to fold up in her arms and beg forgiveness, but only if she would give it to me. I knew she wouldn’t. I would stand there exposed and empty and begging and she would stare at me with no idea of what to say or do. Her eyes would be steamed with years of tamped-down puzzlement and hate. Scooter would jet around and I would want to call her my girl.

I had apologized to my old man for leaving, and now the urge to run was starting to overwhelm me again. In thirty or forty years my brain would turn to tapioca and I’d die in front of a television, watching cartoons and muttering about a dream I’d once had of carrying a woman to the top of the lighthouse.

I sniffed and smelled Mal behind me, standing in the screen door. I hadn’t thought anyone was home. He was a damn good creeper even though his talents lay on the grift. If he quit the stogies, he could still be a solid second-story man.

I turned and said, “Heya, what’s this?”

He pushed through and came out onto the porch. He had an unlit cigar butt tucked into the corner of his mouth. He pulled it free, peered at it for a moment, then replaced it. “I thought we should talk. You’ve been home for days and haven’t even said hello to me yet.”

His coarse, crude face was split by a smile. It looked like a deep fracture working through the side of a cliff. We hugged.

I said, “Nothing personal.”

“I realize that. It wasn’t an easy call for you to respond to. You’ve got a lot on your shoulders now that you didn’t ask for. But it’s still damn good to see you.” He led me over to one of the thin trails cutting through the brush around our property. “Let’s walk.”

“Like when we used to feed the ducks at the lake.”

H dM"1em" align="justify"›“And bum-rush the neighborhood kids’ birthday parties. Every one of those little fuckers used to have a clown or a magician, some asshole choking the shit out of long balloons and turning them into animals. And petting zoos. Monkeys and llamas and baby brown bears. Every other kid with some poor monkey in a cage staring through the bars, the kid trying to feed him ice cream and pizza. Talk about a crime.”

JFK followed along as we moved through the woods. Mal picked up a stick and tossed it. JFK flicked his tail once but didn’t move for it. I scratched at his ear. He let out a long, contented sigh.

Mal looked a little chagrined, which was hard to do considering the cruelty in his features. My shoulders tensed. So did his.

“When you cut and run you leave unfinished business. Don’t think we all can’t see it in you.”

“I thought I looked trim and fit and tan.”

“You do. You also look like twenty pounds of hammered shit.”

I couldn’t help grinning. “Look who the hell’s talking.”

Mal pulled the stogie butt from the corner of his mouth and let out a booming laugh that echoed through the undergrowth. “My beauty is for more refined tastes, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’re still a pretty emotional lot, you know,” he said. “The Rands. All of us. I know this thing is bending you all out of shape. Visiting Collie. Listening to whatever crap he’s pouring in your ear.” He stuck the stogie back in. “You ever need any help, Terrier, I hope you know you can always ask me.”

“Sure.”

“You say that like you don’t believe it.”

“I believe it.”

“Let’s sit.”

We sat on the trunk of a maple tree that had toppled over but wasn’t quite dead. The leaves fluttered when we climbed on it. Squirrels clambered in and out of a knothole, and JFK dropped his chin and watched excitedly, then bolted after them. He could still really truck when he wanted to. He vanished into the brush.

Mal got up the nerve to ask me what Collie had wanted. I turned my chin to look at him and he was staring at the black soil under his feet. Maybe he wanted to know and maybe he didn’t. I didn’t bother to burden him with it.

I wanted to ask why he never married. It wasn’t because he was so ugly. There had been women he’d cared about in his life, women who’d loved him. A couple that I remembered from the time I was very young. Their names and faces remained clear to me. At Christmas dinner twenty or so years ago I remembered calling one of them “Aunt Sally.” She’d put down her silverware and laughed quietly and given Mal a sweet and open look of affection. Everyone else had chuckled pleasantly, but I could tell I’d done something wrong. I’d cried myself to sleep, thinking Mal would hate me forever. In the morning Grey had said, “Some of us aren’t meant for wives and kids, Terrier. The only women we love are the black queens in a marked deck.”

I tried to picture my life if Collie and I had been friends the way my father and uncles were. I saw Collie with a wife and three kids in that house and wondered if I would be able to live the way my uncles did. If a black queen would be enough for me.

I asked, “Did you juke Danny Thompson forty large?”

Mal shrugged his massive shoulders. “More like thirty-seven.”

“Did you know that he’s had men on the street-our street, out in front of the house-waiting for you?”

He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and lit the butt of his cigar. He blew smoke away from me. “Yeah, I spotted them.”

“He’s not Big Dan. He’s insecure and edgy and fairly stupid.”

“I know. He always was, even as a kid. I was surprised you took a shine to him when you were little.”

“The kids of criminals tend to stick to their own kind.”

“He liked to poke the monkeys with a yardstick, remember?”

I was getting annoyed. I got to my feet and turned to him. “Forget about the monkeys. Listen, do I really need to tell you this? You boost from the fish and from the pros, not from the twitchy fuckers.”

“He made it too easy, I couldn’t resist.”

“You should have tried harder. He knows you worked him.”

“He suspects. He doesn’t know.”

“A suspicion is all Danny needs,” I said. “He’s still trying to prove himself to his father’s old associates. Taking you out would give him a little of the juice he wants.”

Mal’s jagged features flattened a little and re-formed into a grin. “He doesn’t have the heart to move against us.”

“He doesn’t need heart. He just needs to put one of his hitters on it.”

“None of them are pros either. Most of Big Dan’s guys retired. Besides, we’ve got news vans covering the house all day long. You think they’re going to want that kind of coverage? In a few days Danny will forget about it.”

“Don’t sell him too short.”

Mal chuckled. Puffs of smoke drifted from his mouth. “Just short enough? His dealer had a three-card bottom drag and he kept folding the aces back into the deck to feed to himself. Big Dan was a psycho, but at least he always ran an honest game and I played him fair. His son’s a mook who’s already gaining a bad rep. Watch. Some of the other syndicates will come in and pull the Thompson crew apart piece by piece and Danny will wind up getting a cushy captain job in one of the other outfits. Either that or someone will plant one in his ear. He’ll wind up in Shalebrook Lake, floating with the ducks.”

He was probably right but I didn’t like how easily he brushed the potential trouble aside. He was usually more practical than that, more cagey. He seemed to only be half paying attention, and I wondered if my father was right and early Alzheimer’s was already beginning to grind away at Mal’s memories. Being aware that you were losing your past, your own mind, must be the worst thing in the world.

JFK broke through the weeds and stood in front of us, panting. I massaged his jowls.

“You ever see Dale’s boyfriend over at the Fifth?” I asked.

“That punk? What’s he call himself? Butch Cassidy? Like he never saw the movie? He’s got no idea what happened to Butch and the Kid in Paraguay?”

“Bolivia.”

“Yeah, whatever the fuck. He comes and goes, runs errands for the guys. Picking up dry cleaning. Running people in and out to the airport. Nothing major. He doesn’t have the heart for it.”

“I think he might be stepping up.”

Mal frowned, tugged his cigar loose. There wasn’t much left of it. I thought I might finally see him light a fresh stogie. “To what?”

“I’m not sure yet. I met him last night. He offered me a job.”

“What, a bank? He couldn’t even open a checking account, that one, much less take down a bank.”

“A jewelry store,” I said.

“He was just talking out his ass, trying to show off to you.”

“Maybe. Tell me about Dale.”

“What kind of question is that?” He stood and the entire log shook. “What do you want to know?”

“Is she a thief?”

He held his hands up before him like I’d just pressed a.32 into his ribs. “Hey, hey, come on now, right?”

“Come on what? Is it a stupid question because I should know the answer is yes or because it’s no?”

“You know your sister’s not a thief!”

“How the hell do I know that?”

“Because your father would never let her go down that road.”

Clouds began to cover the sun. The wind continued to rise. It whistled through the trees so loudly that JFK perked up and looked to see if someone was calling him. “How about if you save that kind of talk for John Citizen, Mal? What else would she know? What else has she been taught?”

“She’s a smart girl,” Mal said. “Straight A’s. She’s going to go to college.”

“How smart? Smart enough to keep out of a big score or smart and capable enough to want in?”

“Jesus Christ, she’s fifteen!”

“I know that,” I said. “I want to make sure she’s nowhere near the punk when he goes down.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it as a sign of reassurance, but it just hurt like hell. “I think you and her need to have a real conversation,” he said. “As soon as possible. Today. But don’t brace her.”

“I won’t.”

Mal nodded but his mouth tightened. We were uncomfortably close to talking about things that the Rands did not talk about. It was almost enough for me to ask him what he was doing, what his own plans were. Did he ever intend on retiring from the bent life, getting off the grift, or were we all doomed to play the game until we wound up on death row or sitting around watching TV with holes in our heads? Did my father find a way out or was he just dying a different slow death, sitting on the porch drinking his beer, taking care of his family, and bored out of his fucking mind?

An almost undetectable expression of worry crossed Mal’s craggy face.

“Have you seen Grey yet?” he asked.

“No.” I waited, but that seemed to be the end; I put a h of it. Another storm was building. Living in the desert, I’d forgotten what it had been like to get rained on all the time. JFK crawled under the downed tree limb and poked his nose out from beneath Mal’s ankles and stared at me.

“Something the matter?” I asked.

Mal looked foggy, reached into his shirt pocket, and retrieved another stogie butt. He lit it, tucked it into the same corner of his mouth. “I don’t know.”

A vein on his forehead began to thicken and throb.

“What is it, Mal?”

My father had said he’d found his brothers on the back lawn, looking a little lost, almost like they were sleepwalking. Was this the beginning of an episode?

“Mal?”

I stepped to him and gripped his elbow, and he snapped away with a tiny fraction of the force he was capable of but I was still pushed aside. He shifted the stogie to the other side of his mouth. “Don’t grab me.”

“I’m sorry. You just looked a little out of it.”

“I’m worried.”

“About what?”

“I’m getting forgetful. I sleep like shit. I wake up with the sweats and I go sit outside and then I’m suddenly freezing. I lose my way around town. Places I’ve been to ten thousand times and now I’m getting lost. I read road signs out loud to help me remember. I think I might really be losing it like Old Shep.”

“Mal, people who are going nuts don’t think they’re going nuts.”

“That’s what they say, but who knows if it’s true?”

Good point, actually.

“It’s hard to explain the way I feel sometimes.”

“Try.”

He held his enormous hands out before him and plied the air, trying to grab hold of something that had no form. He tried again, clutching at nothing, knuckles cracking. He let out a laugh that made my heart sink, fearing for my own future.

“Intense dreams. Nightmares.”

A fierce shiver ran through me. Christ, don’t tell me I was already showing signs of premature senility. Is that what had happened to Collie? Did he feel himself going crazy and just decided to go with it?

“I’m still sharp with the cards,” Mal said, drawing a deck from his pocket. He did a one-handed quadruple cut and then walked the queen of spades across his knuckles. “I carry a deck with me just so I can see them, shuffle through them, and know that I’ve still got a tour-card draw. That I’m still good at something.”

“You been to the doctor?” I asked.

The cards disappeared. “Yeah.”

“What’s he say?”

“He’s got me on medication and a whole health program. Valerian and kava. I drink chamomile tea and have a lot of herbal shit to take. Ginkgo biloba and fish oil. I’m supposed to eat a lot of green leafy vegetables. Me, your father, Grey. All of us. A fucking ton of salad. And your poor mother is always coming up with different healthy dressings for us. Cooking boiled cabbage. Stinks up the whole house. But we eat it. Watching Old Shep, it’s a constant reminder, Chut we eat what we might be like one day.”

He was telling the truth but not all of it. I could sense his desperation. It was way back there in the hard timbre of his voice and in the way he held his shoulders. The rain came down and we let it fall on us as we stood face-to-face. My white streak of hair hung in my eyes so that I didn’t have to show him my own dread. JFK picked up on my mood and whined. He started back up the trail and we followed along almost reluctantly.

Now I understood what was really pulling Mal apart. Not simply the fear of what might be happening to him, but the idea that it might soon be time to take measures into his own hands. That’s what he’d been groping for. He was struggling against the consuming terror that if he didn’t time it just right he might actually become too senile to remember to do the job when the time came. We’d never let ourselves turn into Gramp. We’d fight rats for poisoned bait before we let that happen. I knew I would.

19

JFK hung his head out the passenger window and barked into the rain as I drove over to the high school. Mal was right-it was time Dale and I had a real conversation.

There was much more security now than when I’d attended class here. They’d gated the area up and there was a little booth with a semaphore arm blocking the road. I had to give my name and show ID and tell my reason for being there. I said my sister was feeling ill and I was picking her up to take her to the doctor. The security guard didn’t give a shit so long as he got to mark it all down on his clipboard.

I drove through and parked outside the main set of doors. I didn’t think I’d see Butch’s Chevy around. I hadn’t expected to. He was twenty-one and wouldn’t want to get nabbed on school property with a fifteen-year-old. I was still surprised he’d been introduced to my parents. It seemed like the kind of relationship Dale would want to keep on the sly, but I suspected that Butch had pushed the matter, wanting to show off to my father, the infamous Pinsch Rand.

Within a few minutes the storm ended and the sun broke through again. A caravan of buses pulled up to the curb in front of the school. They blocked my line of sight. JFK was curled up and napping. I got out of the car, lit a cigarette, and took up position near the flagpole. Taped to it was a flyer stating that following the last period, open auditions were being held for A Streetcar Named Desire. It was a good guess that Dale would be there, so I steeled myself and decided to check out the auditorium.

The bell went off and the corridors crowded with students and teachers. A din of chatter, lockers banging shut, and running feet filled the place. I was heading upstream and kept getting pressed back by the current, but eventually I got to the auditorium.

There was a bigger turnout than I’d expected. A lot of jocks milled about in torn T-shirts, trying to ramp themselves up into Stanley-screaming-“Stella” mode. Several girls going out for the Blanche DuBois role had overdone their makeup and set their hair in wild curls. You couldn’t get away from the movie.

I saw Dale off stage right, practicing lines with some other girl. I couldn’t tell if she was doing Stella or Blanche. A flood of warm pride filled my chest. She looked lovely, assertive, and in command.

I went to take a seat and noticed someone in back waving at me. I squinted and saw it was mywasl out tk mother.

“Ma?”

“Terrier, come sit.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What do you think? I’m waiting to watch my baby perform onstage.”

I sat beside her. “It’s an audition.”

“That’s still a performance.”

“Does Dale know you’re here?”

“No, of course not, she’d throw a fit.”

My mother had come prepared. She had a little pillow for her back and a thermos of hot tea with her. She poured a cup and offered it to me. I shook my head.

“Prepare yourself,” she said. “It could be a while before she gets called on. It takes forever in the beginning, but then the group thins out pretty quickly after that. The real nervous nellies will turn green and bow out in the first ten minutes. Once they’re gone, the talented kids really let fly.”

“I can see you’ve attended these before.”

She beamed. My mother’s smile was infectious. I returned it. “Third one this year.”

“So how does she do?”

“She’s amazing. Really quite accomplished. I don’t know where she gets it from.”

“Grifting is just putting on a show,” I said.

“She doesn’t grift.”

“It’s in the blood.”

My mother made an exasperated noise. “Stop it, you. I just wish she wouldn’t always play the smaller secondary roles. I wish she’d go out for the bigger parts.”

It had been years since I’d read or watched Streetcar. “Are there any smaller women’s roles in this one?”

“No, which is why I’m so excited. I think she’s finally going for the lead.” She sipped and stared at me through wisps of steam rising from her tea. “So what brings you here?”

“I wanted to talk to her about Butch again.”

We watched the first Stanley take the stage. He muffed his first line and asked if he could start again.

“So is he real trouble?” my mother asked. “Butch?”

“Semi-real trouble. You were right.”

“So I should be worried.”

“You should relax. She’s smart. She’ll kick him loose soon enough.”

“And until then?”

“Until then I’ll make sure nothing happens.”

She had the presence of mind not to bother smiling. “You’re a good boy.”

“No, I’m not. That’s why you asked me to check up on him. But if I wasn’t here, the way I hadn’t been for all these years, what would you have done?”

“Your father would have paid him a visit,” my mother said. “If it was necessary.”

“Sometimes you scare me, Ma.”

We watched more kids foul their lines and nail thalieir lines. A couple of them had real potential. Most of them didn’t. A few of them knew it and were just there to have a little fun. The drama-coach-turned-director tried to move them along as quickly as possible. My mother had been right about that too. The group had thinned considerably already.

Finally it was Dale’s turn. Unlike others, who’d read from their script pages, she’d memorized her lines. She was going out for Blanche. She and one of the Stanleys were doing the impending rape scene. One part of me was glad she wasn’t doing the “I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers” bit, which several other girls had already covered. She also wasn’t playing Blanche with much of a southern accent. Another smart move, I thought.

My mother gripped my hand tightly, showing fierce pride. Instead of playing Blanche as a weak-willed naïve woman accidentally pushing the brutish Stanley over the edge, Dale characterized Blanche as a kind of seductress purposefully pushing the guy’s buttons. Even when she defended herself and struggled against him, it seemed only another level of foreplay. When Stanley shouted, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” and leaped at her, I almost shot to my feet.

“She’s so good,” Ma said.

“Yes.”

“What’s the matter then? Your face is drawn.”

“Isn’t Streetcar a little… adult for fifteen-year-olds?”

“Maybe for my generation. But hers?” She packed up her items and stowed them away in her handbag. “I need to run.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want her to see me. You should go too. She’ll get embarrassed and then overreact, trust me. Just go.”

“I think I should talk to her.”

“Okay, but be prepared.” She kissed me on the cheek and went out through the side doors.

I followed a couple of minutes later. JFK was sitting beneath the flagpole. I’d only closed the window halfway and he’d shrugged himself through. I stood next to him and we waited. Dale and a couple of her friends came out about ten minutes later. I tossed the butt aside and stepped up to my sister.

She had the same reaction now that she’d had last night. Before she could snap at me, I said, “Relax. No lectures. I just thought I’d pick you up, maybe we could go out for a bite to eat or something. We could talk some more.” Her friends shored up behind her, took her body language as a cue. “Bring your posse along with you if you like. My treat.”

I watched the irritation drain from her face, replaced by that quaint smile she’d given everyone else. “I don’t think I can today, Terry. We’re all going over to Mary’s to work on a science project together.”

To their credit, no one broke into a grin, despite the obvious lie. A distant thrum of thunder broke across the sky and gurgled toward us.

“Hey, Dale, save that shit for Mom and Dad, right?”

She took a careful breath. “I’m busy, Terry. I’ll see you at home.”

“I want to talk to you.”

She wagged her chin toward the auditorium door. “Did you see me in there?”

“Yes, you were good. Wonderful, really. Did you get the part?”

“We won’t know until next week.”

“We can talk about that too.”

I met Dale’s eyes. I tried to let her see that I wasn’t being pushy for no reason. I wasn’t trying to come down on her. I didn’t mean to be a pain in the ass in front of her clique. JFK barked once. It broke the spell. Dale turned to her friends and told them that she’d meet up with them later on. They gave me disapproving glances and drifted off.

It started to sprinkle again. I went back and forth from loving the rain to hating it. I lit another cigarette, and before I could put the pack back in my pocket Dale reached in and grabbed one and waited for me to light her up. I did.

I searched my sister’s face for the little girl I’d recognized last night at the lake. I didn’t see her anymore. She appeared harder to me today, more adult. Maybe she always would, now that I’d seen her turn Blanche DuBois into a wild temptress.

She opened the car door, and JFK jumped into the passenger seat and refused to move. She shoved him into the back, where he stretched out on his side and yawned.

I started the engine but didn’t pull out. We sat there smoking while the rain throbbed across the windshield.

“Was Mother watching too?” Dale asked.

“Yes.”

“She always comes and sits in back. She doesn’t realize how much we can see from the stage.”

“She thinks she’ll embarrass you.”

“She does.”

“Really?” I said. “You don’t look embarrassed.”

Dale finished her cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray. She turned slightly in her seat so she could give me the full effect of her glare.

“What is this?” she asked.

“I’m showing concern.”

“For what?”

“For you.”

“I got that much. I mean, concern over what?”

I hadn’t expected her to be so resistant. I should have. She was a teenager, and for the second time in two days I’d come from out of the shadows to pull her from her own crowd. It was stupid but I still wasn’t sure how else I could’ve done it.

It was a rough hand and I didn’t know how to play it. Should I soft-soap my worries over Butch or ask her flat out if she knew he was a punk working for Danny Thompson who might be a little too eager to step up?

I put the wipers on intermittent and watched the front doors of the school where I’d pretended to be a part of a society when I was actually an outlaw. I’d never believed I would need to get a joe job. I’d always expected to be able to boost and score and burgle my way through life. I’d fail a test and some teacher would threaten me with calling my parents, and I’d always think, Look at the scars on my chest, my old man made me this way. I’d feel a great love and a bewildering resentment for my father. I wondered if Dale felt the same way about him. And me.

She sat with her backpack on her lap. I had the sudden urge to yank it away from her and go through it. I had t? &my nose in everybody’s business. I didn’t want to steal anything, I just wanted to pry and sate my curiosity.

She said, “I told you last night, Terry, I don’t like you following me.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m not following you, Dale. But I didn’t think I’d need to make an appointment with your social secretary either.”

“I have a life, you know.”

“I know. I have no idea what it includes, but I know you have one.”

“If you’re interested, I’ll tell you all about it.”

I cracked my window and tapped cigarette ash outside. The smoke made JFK sneeze so hard he nearly rolled off the backseat. “I am interested. Of course I am.”

“Stop playing coy, Terry. You’re not here to take me out to the malt shop for a sundae. And you didn’t come just to chat or to ask me how much homework I have.”

She was laying it on the line. I had to do the same.

“Tell me more about Butch.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I didn’t say that.”

An angry grin crimped her mouth. It was so abhorrent that I wanted to slap it off her face. “You didn’t have to. You don’t like him and Mom and Dad don’t like him and the three of you are just buzzing around like wasps, aren’t you?”

“No, I don’t think that’s what we’re doing.”

“He’s my boyfriend. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“No,” I said. I tried to remember the days when I’d drive her to the ice cream parlor and everything made her eyes brighten. “Where’d you two meet?”

“At the lake.”

I waited for more. There wasn’t any.

“You know he’s too old for you.”

“Your opinion, Terry.”

“And the law’s. He could go up for seven on statutory-rape charges.”

She tossed the backpack on the floor, put her feet on the dashboard, and crossed her ankles. “You worried about the law all of a sudden?”

“Not really. Are you being contrary for a reason?”

She turned her face away, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. We Rands, we could work one another’s nerves without even making an effort. “What did you do for those five years you were gone?”

“Worked on ranches, mostly.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Yes, why? Did you like it? Is it something you always wanted to do?”

We were getting to places I didn’t want to be. “I didn’t mind it. And yeah, I thought about doing it before I wound up broke with a busted-down car on a road where the exits were thirty miles apart. But I didn’t know what it would really be like.”

She sounded genuinely interested. I wondered if she was just trying to find a way to hurt me. “So why didn’t you get another job?”

“Because I was only killing time. I knew the call would come one day, I guess. I didn’t know you’d be making it, but I knew it would come. And I knew I’d have to sit across from Collie and finally ask him the questions I wanted to know the answers to.”

“Did you get them?”

“No. He’s contrary too.”

“I’m not being contrary. I just don’t know what to tell you.” She swung her legs down and planted her feet on the car mat again. “Start the car, let’s go already.”

I checked the rearview and spotted the security guy coming over to brace me and get me off school property. I threw the car in gear and headed back toward Old Autauk Road.

Dale was smart and mature and was running at least a small game on me, but I just couldn’t manage to come out and ask her if she knew Butch was planning a heist. Or if she was involved in any way. I felt sick with myself for even thinking such a thing, but that didn’t mean I was wrong.

“Why didn’t you give Blanche a southern accent?”

“And be like everyone else? I was trying something new.”

“It worked. You nailed it.”

“Thank you. So you’ve complimented me, now comes the changeup when you ask me something you really want to know. So go on.”

I wanted to know it all but I would never be able to convince her of that. Again that cruel smile played on her lips.

“Have you ever tried to visit Collie?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why would I want to? You didn’t see him until I called you.”

I didn’t want to dig too deeply, but I thought the only way I’d ever learn anything about her, really understand her once again, was to discuss Collie. It tied us together and touched us in a way that it wouldn’t touch anyone else. Collie was our older brother, and there was something exclusive in that.

“I don’t feel the same way you do,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She used an index finger to draw a smiley face in the condensation of the passenger window. When she was done she wiped it away with her palm. “I didn’t know him as well as you did. He wasn’t… He didn’t treat me like you did. He didn’t read to me. He wasn’t interested in me. He was out doing whatever he was doing. We had no real relationship.”

“Dale, I know he was a prick, but still, he-”

“If you say that he loved me, I’m going to yank the wheel and crash us.”

Maybe that was what I was going to say. Maybe Collie had loved her and simply hadn’t known how to show it. Maybe he hadn’t given a damn. He could’ve started slipping into the underneath years before he went mad dog. I seemed to remember him being around, taking her out for ice cream, buying her presents, hugging her and teasing her the way older brothers do. Maybe she just didn’t remember, or maybe I was making too much of it.

“I wasn’t going to say that,” I said.

“Ask me what you really want to know.”

“I’m not sure what I want to know.”

“Yes, you are. You want to know if he replaced you at all. If in the last five years I visited him, wrote to him, phoned him. If I cared about him more than I cared about you.” From second to second, emotions played havoc inside her, maybe the way they did inside all of us Rands. She moved from anger and insecurity to a need for proving herself self-reliant. “The answer is no, Terry. You were both gone. I felt the same way about you both. I didn’t think about either of you much. I couldn’t. You each deserted the family. I cared more about Gramp, right? At least he was there.”

It hurt hearing the truth. This was why Rands didn’t talk. Despite our stoniness, we were a sensitive, fickle bunch. I kept glancing at her. I kept wondering if there was any way to fix our relationship and if I even had the mettle to make the effort.

I said, “Dale, if you’re ever in trouble, you don’t have to face it alone.”

She frowned at me, cocked her head like she hadn’t heard right. “What?”

“You can talk to me. Really. I want you to.”

It was the same offer that Mal had made to me.

“Terry, since you’ve been back we’ve hardly had what you might call a deep conversation.”

“I’m trying to fix that right now. You can still talk to me. You’re not alone. I’ll help you. Whatever it is, I’ll help you, if you’re ever in trouble.”

Her expression shifted a few more times, from perplexity to annoyance to something else I couldn’t place. “Are you talking about… pregnancy?”

“Ah, no, not specifically, I mean-”

“Oh, God.” She threw up her hands. Her nails snapped against the dome light, and JFK perked up like he’d heard a gunshot. “Is this your way of saying that you’ll, what, help me get an abortion?”

“No, no, not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

I couldn’t find the right words. I couldn’t hold on to any particular thread of discussion. A pulse beat painfully in my belly. “I just mean… well, anything. Any problems. Anything you need help with. Ever. Whether it’s with Butch or anyone else.”

“You’re fixated on Butch.”

“I’m not fixated on Butch.”

The rain came down harder now and splashed inside, but I liked the air and she must’ve too, because we left our windows open a crack.

“Do you want me to take you home or drop you off at your friend’s? Or somewhere else?”

My sister gave me a long hard look. I let her do it. It went on for a while. I knew she didn’t trust me. There was no way that she could after what I’d done. But she was trying to find common ground. She was at least willing to make an effort to forgive me.

She abruptly relaxed and asked, “Are you going back out west?”

I hadn’t thought about it much. Now I did. “No.”

“You’re not leaving again?”

“No.”

A scoffing sound eased up her throat. “Why?”

I thought of something we’d discussed at the lake. “This time I’m staying the course.”

She laughed as if I’d just done something cute, reached out, and pressed her hand to my cheek. “My big brother, trying to make up for lost time. Okay. Okay, thanks. It’s nice to know you’ll be around in case I ever need you.”

“I have a question,” I said.

“Of course you do.”

“Why was it you who phoned me at the ranch?”

“No one else wanted to do it. They were all afraid you’d be mad at them, or worse, that you wouldn’t come home.”

“Why didn’t you tell me it was you?”

“I wanted to see if you’d know.”

I tried to read her eyes. I sensed that she was a lot more worldly than she was letting on, but that didn’t have to mean a damn thing.

She said, “You weren’t just killing time. It wasn’t just Collie. It had something to do with Kimmy too, didn’t it? It had to. Why you left?”

“Yeah. She had a miscarriage.”

Dale turned on me, waited a three count, then got up close. She jabbed me in the chest with a finger. It hurt.

“You… you… are a serious asshole! That just means she needed you even more!”

“I know.”

“You abandoned her. You… you-”

“I know.”

“But why?”

Her voice hit that same plaintive whine that mine had reached when I’d asked my brother the same question. I thought I might have an answer, but it wasn’t a good one. And it might not even be the whole truth, but there didn’t seem to be any great truth to it anyway. I missed a child that had never taken a breath. I saw her as clearly now as I had then, laid out and bleeding as if she’d been struck by a car because we hadn’t been watching closely enough. I blamed myself, and I suppose I somehow blamed Kimmy as well. The tragedy had seemed greater in her presence. Her sobs had served to remind me that I couldn’t protect my girls. My failures were forever on display. I was proven a liar. My love for her overwhelmed me until I thought I’d choke. I’d always believed I wanted to die in her arms, and holding her to me I was certain I would. But it wasn’t possible to explain that to anyone.

Dale said, “And now you’re telling me I can trust you?”

“You probably won’t, not for a while. But yes, Dale, you can trust me.”

She grunted like she didn’t believe a word I might ever say. I wouldn’t believe me either. I thought the ride might help to calm things down. I was wrong again. I took us out to Ocean Parkway. She didn’t argue and say she was busy. She put her feet up on the dash the way that Kimmy used to do, and she let me open up the throttle and kick it up to triple digits in the rain. I knew she was a speed demon like Butch was. I could imagine her urging him on faster as he tore past the sand-strewn beach roads. It was a rite of passage. JFK hung his head out the win19;dow, and the rain spattered his thick old face and he panted into the wind. Occasionally he let out a bark. I wanted to do the same. We crossed the causeway and watched the bay thrash below us. It was primal and calming. It spoke to something inside both of us. I could see her readying herself to say something more. I wondered if she was going to admit to working with Butch or being closer with Danny Thompson’s crew than I ever hoped she’d be. I spun through the traffic circle at the far end and drove back across the bridge much slower and more composed. Dale bummed another cigarette off me. She used a chamois cloth on the floor in back to wipe JFK’s fur down. I waited for her to spill. I headed toward home and she turned her head twice in quick succession like she wanted to get a good look at me, maybe check my eyes, before saying the next thing she had to say.

“Okay, so tell me,” I said.

She twisted a lock of her hair and drew it over her ear. “There is something, I think. I’m not sure.”

I asked, “What?”

“I think someone’s been following me, but I could be wrong. It’s just a feeling.”

“Cops?”

“They’re easy to spot. No. Someone else. Maybe because of Collie.”

“Reporters?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did this start?”

“I’m not certain. Nothing I can put a finger on. It feels like it’s been there for a while but I can’t pinpoint an exact time, you know? It’s just been at the back of my mind and now it’s sort of moved to the front.”

“Someone angry at Collie who wants to take it out on his family? That kind of feeling?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You ever see anyone?”

“No.”

“When’s it happen? At home?”

“Yes, when I’m coming home or leaving for school. And at other times. When I’m shopping at the mall with friends. I get a sense that someone is watching.”

“Could it be someone from Danny Thompson’s crew?”

She froze up for a moment, then seemed to slowly regain the power of movement as she nodded. “So you know about that. About Butch working for Danny.”

“Yes,” I said.

She nearly spit her words. “Of course you do. It’s just small-time stuff.”

“I heard. Has he had a falling-out with Danny?”

“No. Maybe. I’m not sure. He’s… he’s involved with something new. A job. I think Danny might be pressuring him for details. Or for money up front.”

Dale spoke like she couldn’t believe the truth of what she was saying, as if she was having déjà vu and hoping for some different outcome this time.

“And you’re worried that he might be using you as leverage against Butch?” I asked.

“You tell me. You know that prick better than I do.”

“I don’t know him that well anymore.”

She didn’t say she thought it might be nothing. She didn’t say it might just be all in her head and she might just be acting paranoid. She knew enough to trust herself, to be wary and on her toes. It was a part of being born into this bent life of ours.

“You ever spot a black Mercedes tagging around you?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Keep an eye out for it. Do you carry any kind of weapon, Dale?”

“What, like a gun or a knife?”

“Like pepper spray?”

“No.”

We drove through neighborhood streets that had flooded. Trash spiraled in the gutters, the sewer grates boiling up like there were sharks under the water.

“I’ll get you something,” I said. “Maybe Mace.”

“They don’t sell Mace anymore.”

“I might be able to get it. You carry it with you everywhere you go from now on.”

“I want a knife,” she said.

She laid it out flat and I wondered if she’d been lying to me. She might just want a knife because she was hooked up with Butch and his crew and she knew that if anything ever went down wrong she’d be able to play sweet and get up close and stick the blade in. At least she thought she could.

I felt my neck flush and straightened my collar to hide it. My Christ, what the hell was going on with this family?

“Maybe I’ll get you a knife too,” I said. “Something small. But you aim for the eyes and throat and it’ll be effective. You feel like someone is following you again, you call me, wherever you are, day or night, you let me know. If anyone tries to grab you, you douse his eyes or you stab him in the face. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

We pulled up in front of the house. She didn’t say, I know you won’t let me down. She didn’t say, I believe in you.

“Aren’t you coming in?” she asked.

“I have to be somewhere. Take the dog, all right, Blanche?”

“Fucker.”

She almost gave me that gentle empty touch on the arm that she’d trained herself to give the rubes. Instead, she leaned over and kissed my cheek.

Dale called the dog. JFK climbed out the passenger side and let my sister lead him up the walk. He turned back once and gave me a sad stare, like he had plenty of his own secrets to spill that would haunt us all forever.

20

Wes used to have a small apartment on the north side of Main Street, above a delicatessen that was one of Big Dan Thompson’s fronts. Now he owned a nice house on the south side, right off the bay. A canal ran behind his patio deck. A twenty-eight-foot sailboat sat at a private dock. The sails hadn’t been tied down properly and they’d become worn and frayed, flapping loose in the wind. The rails hadn’t been polished in years and the deck had banged around so much in storms that I could see cracks worrying up from the keel.

The four-bedroom house was full of expensivighwaid seeof Maine, practical furniture. Chandeliers, marble tiling, a fireplace without an ounce of ash in it. A dining room that sat twelve. A living room with lush leather L-shaped couches, thick white carpeting, a huge plasma television and entertainment system. Coaster trays on every end table. The kind of room where you hosted large parties, serving martinis and canapés.

There were two fresh gallons of milk in the fridge but no beer. It told me that Wes either ate a lot of cereal or had ulcers.

No photos on the shelves, no pictures on the walls. No CDs or DVDs. Nothing that said he spent any time here relaxing. No sign of friends or family anywhere. No women’s deodorant or Tampax in the bathroom. No drawer set aside for a girlfriend. No condoms in his nightstand. No spank mags in either of the bathrooms. No recreational drugs. I found the ulcer meds in his medicine cabinet.

Wes had moved up in the world but wasn’t enjoying himself much.

He was out cold in the master bedroom. Like every syndicate guy who did business out of a bar or a titty joint, he didn’t crap out until eight or nine in the morning and didn’t get his day started until maybe five P.M.

He slept with a.32 snub under his pillow. I’d never known anyone paranoid or dopey enough to really keep a pistol under their pillow. He could sneeze or have a nightmare and put one in his own ear. Danny really had him knotted up inside. I unloaded the snub and left it on his dresser. In his closet I found a false back with an assortment of guns stashed behind it, including two.357 Magnums, a couple of Desert Eagle 9mms, and one semiauto rifle. They all appeared to be unfired.

There were banded blocks of hundred-dollar bills amounting to around fifty g’s. If I was still a thief I’d be having a very good week. Between Chub’s cache and Wes’s hoard I could’ve set myself up in Miami and lived the righteous life for a year.

He also had five untraceable burner cell phones. I tried one and it worked. I pocketed it. In a small box were a couple of switchblades and a butterfly knife. I snatched the butterfly.

I watched him sleep for a few minutes. His hundred-and-fifty-dollar haircut still looked good after eight hours of tossing and turning. But his face remained scrunched into a harassed expression. I wondered why he put himself through all of this. He wasn’t a born mob mook and he didn’t have the disposition for the serious roughnecking. I couldn’t see him ever killing anyone, but who the hell really knew.

I cleared my throat and said, “Evening, Wes.”

He was a light sleeper. He snapped up out of bed and looked side to side. It took him a second to go for the gun under his pillow. He scrabbled at the mattress and then checked the sheets.

I said, “Relax.”

His eyes cleared and he focused on me. Then he laid back down and rubbed his face. “Terry. Jesus God. You trying to juke me?”

“If I was I would’ve been long gone by now. Besides, Wes, you don’t own a hell of a lot to fence.”

His face fell and flushed so pink that it looked like a kid had dabbed him with a paintbrush. He wouldn’t have minded me robbing him nearly as much as my finding out he was boring as hell. “I’ve been meaning to buy some new stuff.”

“Right.”

“Give me a minute. And get out of my bedroom.”

He bounced away to hit the head and I went and sat on his nice couch in his nice empty living room. He joined me in ten minutes, freshly showered, wearing a clean suit, his eyes as red as if he hadn’t slept at all.

“You’ve got a sweet touch,” he said. “You must if I didn’t wake up.”

“Some skills you never lose.”

He frowned at me. His knitted eyebrows made him look like he was about ten years old. “I don’t appreciate you coming here like this. You could have just called or rung the goddamn doorbell.”

“Don’t get your feelings too bent out of shape or I might remind you that you’ve been parked at my curb, watching my house.”

“I was only doing what the boss told me.”

“I’m only doing what I have to, Wes. Next time I’ll knock, right?”

He sat opposite me. “What do you want, Terry?”

I knew he wanted to get himself some milk. I wanted to tell him that it was okay, but I’d already embarrassed him enough. He wasn’t my friend, but I didn’t have to put him on the defensive like this. I’d been creeping around so much lately after so much time being out of the bent life that I wondered if I could go through a front door anymore.

“It hasn’t been easy for you since Big Dan blew out his heart,” I said.

“I get by.”

“What is Danny into that’s so off course from the way his father played the game?”

“You don’t need to know that, Terry.”

“You really ought to retire.”

It made him laugh and glance around the room like I’d told a complicated joke to a large group of guests and he wanted to see if everyone else was laughing. “And do what? Garden? It’s in my blood. Same as being a second-story man is in yours.”

“I don’t take ulcer medication or have two gallons of milk in my house.”

He leaned in. “You don’t have a house.”

“Good point.”

“So what did you do? Climb on the roof?”

“No,” I said. “Popped out a basement window. It’s easy to creep another criminal’s house. They never have alarm systems hooked up to the police.”

“I’ll remember that.” He held his arms up in a gesture of resignation. “So, you going to tell me what you want, Terry? We haven’t been back to your dad’s place.”

“Let’s table it. Tell me about Butch.”

“Butch?”

“Started hanging around Danny’s not too long ago. Thinks he’s an outlaw. Twenty-one, skinny, busted nose, shaggy hair, pencil beard, smells like acne cream. Sounds like maybe he’s taken down a few small scores.”

“Oh, that kid. Yeah.”

I could tell by the way he said it that he knew my sister was seeing Butch. That it was something they talked about around the Fifth Amendment. Maybe as a joke, maybe as something more. Look at who the Rands are going to welcome into the fold-this dumh="bshit poser. What’s that make him? How do we turn that to our advantage?

“What’s Danny got him doing?”

“Why are you asking?”

“You know why I’m asking, Wes.”

He put his hand to his belly as if the acid were about to eat through his shirt. “If you’ve got questions for the kid, you should break in to his place. Not mine.”

I waited. I wanted a cigarette but Wes didn’t even have any ashtrays.

“He doesn’t do much. He’s an errand boy. Chauffeurs some of the guys around. Picks up food. We send him to the bakery. Gets the dry cleaning and like that.”

“What crew does he run with?”

“No real crew so far as I know. But I don’t know much about the kid. He comes in with losers, strings with a lot of third-raters.”

“You know if they’re moving up?”

He answered carefully. “If they are, Mr. Thompson will get a piece of it.”

I nodded. It sounded about right. Danny wasn’t pushing Butch and his crew into anything, but he wanted them to kick up in case they got away with a score.

“And my sister, Dale?” I asked.

“What about her?” Wes said.

I didn’t want to form the words. “Has she been working for Danny?”

“Ask her.”

“Hey, let’s pretend I’m asking you, right?”

It got tense for a moment. We glared at each other. We were both good at holding a malevolent stare. The pause lengthened. It could go on all night. I let my eyes soften. It was a calculated move for an honest purpose.

“It’s my sister, Wes,” I said. “I need to know if she’s in trouble.”

“She’s what, sixteen? Fifteen? Running around with a scumbag amateur punk who thinks he’s up to raiding big scores. Is she in trouble? Is that really even a question, Terry?”

“I suppose not.”

He smiled without any warmth. “Well, there it is then. But for the record, I don’t know if she’s involved with the crew.”

“You don’t know? You’re Danny’s right-hand man. You fucking run the crew.”

He rubbed at his stomach again and grimaced. “Not so much lately. I handle his business and the main crew, but Mr. Thompson’s… been dealing with out-of-towners.”

“You mean he’s having other syndicate guys whacked.”

“There’s some of that. But other things too. He’s a little paranoid. It’s not his fault. It’s just the life. He has a lot of new help. Some of these guys, I barely know their names. He keeps them close. He includes me on most of it, but not all. I don’t think he trusts me with some of the rougher stuff.”

“Don’t drink milk in front of him. You got any Mace?”

“What? Mace? No. Why would I have Mace? What the hell do you want Mace for?”

I got up and headed for the door. *li01C;Forget it.”

21

Coming out of Wes’s neighborhood, I took a corner too fast and Collie’s folder came sliding out from under the passenger seat. The papers scattered across the floor mat. I tried to ignore them but they kept drifting, whispering, and drawing my attention.

I pulled over into a strip mall and watched folks going in and out of the stores. Kids still playing on those nickel rides that had been set in cement twenty-five or thirty years ago. A mini-helicopter that went up six or eight inches, then down, a couple of lights flashing. And the children excited as hell and clambering all over it while their mothers did their business in the stationery, the bakery, the laundromat.

I drew the butterfly knife and whipped the blade out, twirled it shut, then snapped the point out again. Dale would get the feel of it in five minutes. If she was going to hang around Butch and his crew and felt better with a little protection, then I wasn’t going to deny her. I’d have to get her clear of them some other way. I didn’t know how. She was on the edge, trying to decide which way she wanted to go. My stomach twisted at the idea of her getting in deeper with the crew, even if she wasn’t running heists yet. Maybe the blade would wake her up to the fact that she wasn’t playing a game. I thought how easy it would be for women to defend themselves if only men taught them a little about how it was done.

I put the paperwork back in order and paged through it. I wondered how much of it Collie’s wife had access to. I remembered her in the prison, the way she used her hands to form compact, brusque gestures. The way her glossy black hair lashed the air. The way he had shrunk from her like a child being punished. She wasn’t afraid of him. She had control over him. Maybe because he loved her. Maybe because he was locked up and needed someone on the outside to help.

How much help was she giving him? And what kind?

All I knew was that her first name was Lin. I dug through the file, hoping there’d be additional details. I didn’t find any. I had to get to a library or hop on the Internet. I had to do a little research. Dale would have a laptop. I wondered if Collie’s wife knew how to use a pistol or a blade. She seemed like the type who would.

Then I realized, Jesus Christ-Lin. Her last name would probably be Rand. Why not? Anyone who felt the need to go through a formal marriage even within the walls of a prison might be traditional enough to take her husband’s last name.

I drew out my new cell phone and called information. They gave me her number and I punched it in.

There wasn’t any ringing, just music. I waited for voice mail or an answering machine but nothing came up. Finally a woman answered with a crisp, “Yes?”

“Lin… Rand?”

Hearing her own name made her even more irritated. “Yes. Who is this? What do you want?”

I said, “This is Terry Rand.”

“Oh.” She brightened instantly. “Oh, Terry, yes, pardon me. My God. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever hear from you. I’m so glad you called.”

“I’d like to meet with you if I can.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Are you free for dinner? We coe ax201D yould-”

I didn’t feel like spending an evening talking with a woman who had married a child-killer behind bars. “I’d like to meet now, if that’s okay.”

“Certainly. You could come by my apartment. I live in West Islip, off Sunrise Highway.” She gave me directions. I knew the apartment complex. I’d boosted a few TVs out of there years ago. Who knows? Maybe I’d juked her place before.

“I’ll see you in twenty minutes,” I said, and hung up.

It took me fifteen. She had a ground-floor corner unit in the rear. Outside her door was a small but impressive garden and a couple of wrought-iron chairs that looked charming but impractical. I knocked and got an eight-count wait.

She opened the door, smiled at me, and said, “Terry, it’s such a pleasure.” First she held out her hand, and as I went to take it she drew me into an embrace. I didn’t return the hug.

I’d noticed her killer heels in the prison, and now I saw how petite she was. She couldn’t be taller than four-eleven and she wouldn’t hit a hundred pounds if she had rocks in her pockets. I imagined Collie opening her letters, finding snapshots of her that would make him flinch after so much time in the can. She had a resolute poise but also seemed little more than an attractive wisp, her shining black hair gliding about her as if in slow motion, so that you felt if you looked away even for a moment you’d turn back and find that she’d evaporated.

Her place was clean and stylishly furnished. There were touches of formal Chinese setting. Mats, silks, bamboo, and a large framed painting of what appeared to be Hong Kong, taken from a junk in the harbor at sunset.

“What can I offer you?” she asked. She reached out and put three fingers lightly on my wrist. I could barely feel them. “A beer? A glass of wine?”

“You sounded terse on the phone,” I said.

She nodded. Her glossy hair took a second to follow the motion of her head. “I’ve recently started getting a lot of crank calls.”

“Because of Collie.”

“Yes. Please sit.” She directed me to a settee that was uncomfortably hard. She poured two glasses of wine and sat one in front of me. I didn’t touch it. “He’s in the news again all the time now. There’s been a resurgence in interest. I did a few interviews with reporters, but they trim the coverage and edit out anything I have to say about the new details in Collie’s plight. They make me appear to be an unbalanced… groupie.”

I thought, Plight.

She went on. “People phone and tell me how next week they’re going to be sitting in the dark, saving electricity to make sure there’s plenty of voltage for his electric chair. They don’t realize he’s going to-”

“Get the needle.”

“Yes.”

She sipped from her glass, and her hair folded over her face like curtains at the end of Act I and she started to cry. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t trust her. I didn’t believe you could fall in love with a mass murderer through prison letters scanned by guards. I didn’t believe you could have a legitimate relationship with a killer of nine-year-olds. But I’d abandoned the woman I’d loved andlas spent an entire afternoon watching her and her child from another man, jealous and sick and wishing I could steal her away, so what the fuck did I know?

“He told me to talk to you. He said you had information.”

“Excuse me, Terry. I don’t often get a chance to speak with someone who… understands. It’s a relief.” She wiped her eyes with her index fingers and took a slow deep breath. “And you look so much like him. It’s a bit startling. Yes, information. About the other girls. Yes. Even so, it’s nice to finally meet his family.”

I smiled vapidly. Family. This was Lin Rand. She got up and walked out of the room. I wondered how she’d do feeding Gramp. I imagined her and my mother cooking together in the kitchen, boiling cabbage, providing plenty of leafy greens to my uncles. Her on the porch sharing beers with my old man. Giving JFK a flea bath. Paging through the photo albums, laughing at Collie when he was a kid. Look at him here without his front teeth. Here with a foot up on the bumper of his first muscle car, wearing a T-shirt, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Me in the background glaring, brooding, always angry with him. Her sitting with us on Christmas Day, opening presents, handing me a box. Here, Terry, he wanted you to have this; he made it himself. Me opening it and finding a license plate. TERRIER 1. I looked down and saw that the wine in my glass was full of tiny thrashing waves. I realized I was nearly panting, practically snorting.

Lin returned with an accordion folder like the one I’d grabbed at the precinct. She sat it in front of me and said, “This is some of what we’ve discovered.” I flipped it open. Instead of official reports inside, there were dozens of pages of handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, obituaries. I took my time. I read through a lot of the data. I recognized the women that Gilmore had talked about. There were another three women listed, two who’d died before Collie’s spree. I didn’t know what to make of it. I had a hard time seeing one guy snuffing all these women without anyone catching on, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. On the surface of it I saw a lot of disparate deaths, some clearly murders, others possible accidents. There were a lot of angry men in the world. So much of the focus of that rage would be women. I pictured insecure boyfriends diving onto these girls in a fury. I saw bitter, defeated men prowling, hunting, snickering, sneaking up. I saw my brother beating an old woman to death with his fists. I saw him strangling Rebecca Clarke and leaving her body in the grass.

“Terry,” Lin said. “Your face.”

“My face?”

“You’re very flushed.”

“Right.” I shut the folder. “Why these women?”

“Pardon?”

“Why only these particular women? What’s the connection between them?”

“They fit the profile. Young. Late teens to early twenties. Pretty. Brunettes.”

I snorted. “Is that all?”

“We haven’t discovered anything else to connect them.”

I nodded and couldn’t seem to stop. It was like the tendons in my neck had been cut. My chin hit my chest and it rattled my teeth. I couldn’t catch enough air. “What about all the others?”

“What others?Ȋw 1D;

“The blondes. The ugly ones. The fat ones. The forty-year-olds. What about all of those women who’ve been choked or beaten in the last seven or eight years?”

“That’s not-”

Gilmore had been right. It all looked like bullshit. The young women all bore a vague resemblance but other than that, there was nothing that tied them together. Maybe they were strangled, maybe not. I could almost hear Gilmore’s finger coming down on the tabletop, click click click.

“This isn’t evidence.”

“It’s part of the profile.”

“You watch too much fucking television.” I slid the folder aside. “You can force the facts to fit any profile, that doesn’t mean it’s real.”

“But this-”

“What do you do?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your profession. What do you do?”

“Oh. I’m currently unemployed.”

“You have a nice place. What were you before you were unemployed?”

There was the dull light of discomfort in her eyes, quickly replaced by defiance. “I worked for Child Protective Services as an investigator.”

It struck me hard. I shuddered with the urge to laugh. I tried choking it back but a weird little giggle escaped my lips. I stood and thought, What the hell am I doing here? I took a step toward the door and the laughter came bubbling up, hot and wet, and I couldn’t stop. She didn’t know what to do. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. I leaned over and propped my hands on my knees, gasped until tears filled my eyes. I wiped them away and they kept coming. Then I wasn’t sure if I was laughing anymore. Abruptly, I knew I wasn’t. I faced her calmly and said, “You’re goddamn kidding me.”

“No, I-”

“They fired you when they found out you had married a mass murderer convicted of killing children.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Let me guess. You’re suing them for losing your job. You consider it prejudice.”

“No. I knew what I was doing. I realized I would be discharged.”

I stepped away from her. “There’s nothing here. My brother iced Becky Clarke. He’s still running a game on me. And you too.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. I didn’t expect you to be so… combative.”

“It’s the nature of my family. We’re all contrary.”

“Collie isn’t.”

That nearly got me laughing again, but I managed to curb it. She pulled the accordion folder closer, then sipped her wine. She didn’t appear to be upset, merely disappointed.

I got to the door but couldn’t make myself leave yet. I turned and asked, “Why did you write him in the first place?”

She looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t think you would believe me.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She considered it.ing I drifted back toward the settee but didn’t sit. I was drawn to the picture of Hong Kong. I’m not sure what there was about it. Maybe simply the openness of it. Talk about a city of thieves and murderers, corruption and money and beauty. Lin looked at me like she was looking at Collie. There was the light of love in her eyes, or maybe it was only self-deception.

“I wrote him,” she said, “to tell him that I would be sitting in the dark, saving electricity to make sure there was plenty of voltage for his electric chair. I was one of those people. He killed a child. A little girl. A harmless old woman. All those poor people. I found him irredeemable.”

“And now?”

She lifted her chin as if exposing her throat for the kill. “He’s still irredeemable. But I love him.”

I thought about it. “That’s not why you wrote him. There had to be a reason. Something that set you off.”

She held her glass of wine but didn’t sip it. She looked like a mannequin posed in a beautifully mannered way. “Oh, that’s right, you’re someone who needs reasons. So I’ll tell you honestly. I think it was his face. In the paper. His expression. He was handsome but unrepentant. He wasn’t smirking like some of them do. He wasn’t embracing the spotlight. And yet he also wasn’t ashamed. He wasn’t weeping. He didn’t look suicidal. He didn’t look like someone who would enjoy prison. He didn’t look like a killer, but he was one. He wasn’t terrifying. He also wasn’t pathetic.”

“What was he?”

“Himself. That’s all he was. He was merely himself.”

How profound. How authentic. Heartfelt, penetrating. The laugh was there in my belly, wanting out. I thought, And if he was terrifying or pathetic or suicidal he wouldn’t have been himself? No wonder they’d found each other. They were both seriously nuts.

“He responded to my letters. They were… genuine. He takes the world on its own terms. His letters are direct but conscientious. You can read them if you like.”

“Christ, no.”

“I began to visit him. Due only to curiosity, of course, at first. I thought I might submit an article for a magazine. I dabble with journalistic writing. I was full of hate. I wanted to vent it. I wanted to put it down on paper, but more than that I wanted to show him for what he was, whatever that might be. I decided I should face him. I craved a chance to dig into him and make him feel something. I didn’t realize that he felt everything, just like the rest of us. I’ve never met a man more emotionally honest and accepting.”

“You don’t get out much, lady.”

She looked at me evenly. “It took months before the hate dropped away. I eventually began to look forward to seeing him. I fell in love with him. We can’t ever truly know when it happens or why. We don’t choose who we love, Terry.”

“You’re too easy on yourself.”

She lowered her eyes. “Trust me, I’m not.”

Trust was too hard to come by. I went to the painting again. I thought, Maybe that’s where I need to go. That’s where a man could get lost. They had world-class pickpockets there. I’d promised everyone in my family that I’d never run again, but maybe it waht s the only answer.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“What?”

“You whispered something.”

I cleared my throat and coughed up the question. It was the same question. It was the only question.

“Why did he do it?” I asked.

There was a lengthy pause. “He doesn’t know why. He just did. That’s all there is.”

“You sound exactly like him. He bought his gun the day before, did you know that? You don’t plan something spontaneous and irrational. He must’ve said something about what happened that night.”

“No,” Lin said, and she watched me like she was watching a little brother who’d skinned a knee, as if she wanted to put a bandage on a little scrape, give it a kiss. “He never has. He simply says he did what he did and that’s all.”

“That’s not good enough. Not nearly.”

“It doesn’t have to be good enough for you, Terry. You can keep asking, keep looking for answers, but you’re only going to be hurting yourself. Don’t you see that?”

“He’s lying.”

“Collie doesn’t lie.”

I rushed forward, grabbed her by the shoulders, and pulled her out of her seat. The glass went flying and hit the floor but didn’t break. The spilled wine almost looked like it could be blood in this light. “You don’t know shit about my brother. You’re just one of those nutso fans who dig on serial killers because you think they’re romantic outlaws. Marriage behind bars to a convicted murderer-do you know how pathetic you are? I know your kind. Every asshole on death row has fifty of you writing him every day, espousing love.”

An expression of pity crossed her face. “You don’t understand, Terry.”

She wasn’t bothered at all by my outburst. “Well, no shit, lady! I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you.”

She took my hand and rubbed my wrist softly, the way you might touch a traumatized child. In a strange way it helped.

I managed to force the words out. “He kissed them. His victims. That day. On the forehead. He put his lips to their foreheads.”

Nodding, she said, “I know.”

“You knew?”

“Yes.”

“But Becky wasn’t kissed. There’s evidence of that. That works in his favor, I think. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“It’s in the files. I thought you understood.”

“I thought you talked to Gilmore.”

“I did. I begged him to check the evidence. He said he had but that he still wasn’t convinced. He’s… personally invested. He feels very betrayed by Collie. And by you, for that matter. I think… he almost wishes he was a part of your family. That he was your brother as well.”

“He acts like it. Collie always stabbed me in the back. Gilmore goes for my kidneys.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You don’t need to. So Collie told you? About him… putting his lips on his victims?”

“Kissing them. Yes.”

“When did he do it? When did he kiss them? Before or after he murdered them?”

She took a deep breath. “After.”

“That rotten prick. That insane scumbag prick.”

She kept rubbing my wrist. “This isn’t good for you, Terry. You’re going to make yourself sick.”

I snapped my arm away. “Oh, shut up! You’re calling me sick? You?” I dodged toward the door like I was going to run, then I turned and got up in her face again. “You? Your bridal suite was an eight-by-ten cell. Your husband ices little girls.”

Again, that look of sympathy swam in her eyes. “You try to hide your pain by being as abrasive as you can.”

I lifted my hands as if to put them on her shoulders. Or around her neck. She didn’t flinch. My hands got closer. The pulse in her throat was in sync with my own heartbeat. I hissed, “You could have done it yourself. You could have snuffed those girls.”

Her jaw muscles tightened. Her eyes lost that profoundly sad sheen. “That’s ridiculous!”

“You could’ve done it just to help him out. Just to make the cops think there was another murderer out there. Drug users, meth-heads, prostitutes. Those sound like the kind of people you’d run into while working Child Services. How many crack babies were you visiting on a daily basis? How many skells did you run into out in Riverhead?”

Nothing I said rattled her. Maybe she really was an icy-blooded psycho like Collie. She said, “These other murders aren’t helping him. Nothing can help him. He’s doomed. He’s going to die for what he did. He’s all right with that.”

“And are you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you care about Becky Clarke? And these others, assuming they are connected?”

“Because there’s someone else out there killing women. It has to be stopped. You looked at the data I’ve collated-”

She grabbed for the folder again. She smacked it against my chest. She reached for my hand and forced me to take it.

“There’s nothing here.”

“They’re going to murder him,” she said.

I’d used the same word while I’d stood in line to get into the prison to see him the first time. “It’s not murder. Murder is an unlawful killing. He’s the murderer. This is an execution. He deserves to die.”

“He’s your brother.”

“He’s an asshole. And you worked Child Protective Services? You should be mortified. Hang your head, lady. Put your nose to the ground.”

“He wants you there, Terry. At the execution. He wants you to be a witness. Maybe he’ll give you the reason you need then. Maybe they’ll be his last words.”

“Fuck the both of you.”

I threw down the paperwork and beelined out the door. I swept past her garden, got in my car, and tore ass o9;vut of the lot with the tires smoking and squealing. I went over the curb and the shocks took such a hit that my head bounced hard off the roof. I saw white stars that turned red and ran into the gutters.

22

I went home and Gilmore was sitting out on the porch with my father. I was surprised to hear my old man laughing, but there it was. It sounded real.

I knew that Gilmore’s romanticized concept of family, twisted by his youth, had somehow led him to us. I wondered what would have happened if he’d been lucky enough to live in middle America with a boring-as-fuck-all family perched on a plastic-covered couch, watching Lawrence Welk repeats. Would he have been better off or worse? Would we?

“Hello, Terrier.”

“Gilmore.”

My father took a deep pull on his beer, then said, “We were just talking about that time Gramp got caught on the bay with a stolen kayak and some silverware. His car died over on Oak Beach. Thought he could land the kayak at Fire Island and instead got caught in the ferry channel-”

Gilmore showed a lot of teeth in his smile. It wasn’t nearly as bad as his grin. “-and almost wound up pulled into the props of a boatload of gay activists planning a parade at Cherry Grove.”

“He spent the day with them, said they had good barbecue and knew how to laugh.”

“I arrested him after he stole a clam boat and tried to make a getaway.” Gilmore swung himself aside in his seat to face me. He leaned in and motioned for me to do the same. “He didn’t realize it had no motor and he had to pole himself back to the mainland. He got tired halfway across and sent out an SOS. He didn’t know the water was only three feet deep and he could’ve walked back. Not one of your better-planned jukes.”

“Old Shep was never much for ocean activities,” my old man said.

I didn’t remember the story. It sounded made up. It sounded like my father was being ingratiating, using Gramp as a punch line just to keep Gilmore smiling. I wondered why he would bother.

I wondered if Gilmore was here to square off with me again, in some way using my father as leverage against me. I sat, took a proffered beer, and waited for the questions. I was surprised when the men continued passing anecdotes. Stories of stupid burglars and cops on the take who got nailed with their hands in the evidence locker. They didn’t try to engage me in any way. I even found myself joining in a bit. Finally I wished them good night.

I stepped inside and went up to my room and then padded downstairs and took up a perch by the front window, where I could listen to my old man and Gilmore talking. The night-light over the kitchen sink didn’t reach my dark corner. I sat on the floor and dropped my head back against the cold wall.

“He looks well,” Gilmore said. “He say anything about his time away?”

“Not much. Just that he was enjoying himself.”

“That’s good. Anything about where he settled?”

“A farm,” my father said. “Milking cows, feeding chickens, all that. Raised corn.” My father cracked open another bottle, took a sip. “Can’t picture him doing iidtcdotestit, but he’s healthy, and that’s what matters.”

“You don’t think he’s back simply to get into trouble, do you?”

“No, I don’t, Gilmore.”

“Good, that’s good to know. But there’s something about home that brings it out in him again, huh?”

“I don’t think so.”

“All right, then. But I wish you hadn’t called him.” Gilmore sounded wistful. “I wish you would’ve let him go.”

“I did,” my father said, “but his brother needed him.”

“Collie’s going to get him involved in something bad.”

“Collie’s gotten us all involved in something bad already. Terry’s just doing right by his family.”

I got the sense that they both knew I was listening. I kept waiting for Gilmore to mention my taking the files and the incident at the Elbow Room.

My mother came out onto the porch to ask them if they wanted anything to eat. She didn’t notice me there in the dark corner of the kitchen. I felt like a kid again, playing a child’s game, hiding from the grown-ups and having difficulty understanding their intentions. Mal came in and got himself some leftover fried chicken, nodded to me, then went off to eat in front of the television.

Gilmore and my father continued talking about small somethings and next-to-nothings. Finally I heard Gilmore stand and move to the porch steps.

“You have a good evening, Pinsch.”

“You too.”

“Thanks again for the photos.”

My father kept up the geniality, but his voice sharpened the smallest degree. “Don’t mention it. Drive safe now.”

I got up and glanced out the window. Gilmore got into his car and waved. I was surprised to see my father lift his hand in response. After Gilmore drove off down the street, my old man stepped into the house. He immediately turned his head to where I sat. I asked, “What photos?”

“You shouldn’t have been listening, Terry.”

“You knew I was here. You wanted me to listen, Dad.” We stood in the shadows and faced each other. “What photos did you steal for him?”

“I didn’t steal any.” My old man sounded a little strained, maybe a little embarrassed. That worried me worse than almost anything that had happened so far. “I took some of his kids.”

“You staked out his ex-wife’s house?”

“It’s his house.”

He opened the fridge, drew out another beer but didn’t open it. The refrigerator light showed me a hint of his hidden pain. “Why would you do that? What’s he got on us?”

“Nothing. I did it because I know what it’s like for a man to lose his family. You think I wouldn’t have asked someone to take pictures of you on your ranch if I could’ve? Or Collie, even now?”

Mal walked in and deposited the chicken bones in the garbage. My father followed him into the living room. I moved to the kitchen table and continued to sit in the dark, wondering something I had never wondered="1 before. I wondered if my father was lying to me.

The house stank of boiled cabbage and chicken grease. I headed for my room and made it halfway up the stairs before I heard the phone ring. My mother answered and my belly tightened. She moved to the bottom of the steps and saw me there, held the phone out toward me with a slightly apprehensive expression, the same kind she wore when I was in junior high and some girl called the house. “For you.”

I was tired. I felt feverish. The stink was killing me. “Who?”

“Take it.”

It was my uncle Grey. He asked, “So, you busy?”

I hadn’t spoken to him in half a decade but he sounded like we’d shared an espresso twenty minutes ago.

I didn’t know how to answer. “Not really.”

“You hungry? Meet me at Cirque d’Outre. Nine o’clock.”

“Cirque d’Outre? The hell is that?”

“Torchy’s.”

Torchy’s was our in-joke for a restaurant down on the water in Glen Cove. Since the fifties it had been owned by various arms of the syndicate, changing hands every few years. The wiseguys insured it up the wazoo, opened it as a high-class establishment, brought in the yacht and sailboat crowd, and slowly skimmed off the top until they were so far in the red that they had to torch the place. It had been built up and burned down again under four names that I was aware of.

“How soon until the next fire?” I asked.

“A few months at least. You don’t have to worry about getting your toes roasted, you know those boys have never picked up a murder rap off a firebug scheme.”

I wanted to talk to Grey. I missed his action, his energy. He was already lightening the load I felt. “I’m not dressed for it.”

“So put on some nice clothes.”

“I don’t have any nice clothes that fit anymore.”

“You can raid my closet.”

“I don’t think I’m in the mood for a big night.”

“What big night? A chance to sit and relax. Break bread. Have a nice meal. Talk with a beautiful woman.”

“What woman?”

“You’ve been home for days and I haven’t seen you yet. Enough with the dodging out the back door. Nine o’clock sharp, right?”

“Sure.” I hung up.

My mother wafted in close, sponging down an already clean table. She kept her back to me. That meant she had something to say that she didn’t want to say but would eventually get around to if I stood where I was long enough. I hung back and waited.

She said, “Watch out for him.”

She spoke with almost no inflection. I couldn’t tell if she meant I should watch out for him or watch out for him. She didn’t look at me. I slid aside and she raised her chin. I tried to read her face and saw almost nothing there now. “What do you mean?”

“He’s been going out nights. More and more. And not just with the ladies. I think he’s working on some kind of scam.”

“nig;This is news?”

“It worries me.”

My mother had become a nervous woman, with good cause. Collie’s arrest, my abandonment, having to care for Gramp, Dale blossoming into a young woman and all the problems that presented. Now the chance that Mal and Grey were both getting ill. She was the strongest of us.

“What kind of scam?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But he gets that look in his eye like whenever one of you Rands is working a racket.”

“You’re a Rand too.”

“You male Rands,” she said. “You born Rands.”

“I’ll see if I can find anything out. It seems like he’s set up a double date for us tonight.”

She went to the sink. It was empty. There were some dishes on the drainboard drying. She looked like she wanted to keep busy. Her hand went to a clean glass and she put it in the cupboard. Then she moved it to the left. Then to the right. Then she closed the door and looked at another glass in the drainboard.

“Ma, it’ll be okay,” I said.

“He’ll be with that pretty reporter.”

“He’s probably just diverting her attention.”

“No, he’s trying to hold on to his youth with that one. He likes how interested she is in him.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“Yes, because she’s more interested in the story. That’s why he’s bringing you there, really. You’re part of it. She’ll have questions.”

“I know how to handle myself.”

“I know you do.”

She turned and looked at me, and a charge passed through the air between us. She was trying to shield and guard me through her own force of will. Her hands wandered to my collar, then my throat, and then she placed both palms firmly on my cheeks and kind of smooshed me. My lips pursed like a fish and she gave me a quick kiss. Then she ruffled my hair like I was six years old and left me alone with my own trepidation.

I took a shower and then checked Grey’s room. He was a clothes horse. He had at least twenty tailored suits in his closet. I found a classic white shirt and black suit combo that fit almost perfectly. When I shot my cuffs I looked like any other Rat Pack wannabe circa 1962.

He had a separate cabinet for ties. There were hundreds. I didn’t see the point. After you got through about twenty, they all started to look alike. He had a real fetish. Or maybe his various women all gave him the same Christmas gift each year. I found a thin black silk one and grabbed a pair of shoes that pinched my heels only a little.

I checked myself. Flo had been right. I did look a little like Grey.

He’d stand in the mirror when I was a kid and I’d watch the slow and significant ritual of his grooming. The way he’d use two wooden brushes, one in each hand, to style his hair. Slapped aftershave to his cheeks and massaged his skin, always giving himself a few chucks under the chin right before he finished. Then he’d dab himself with cologne at the hollow of his throat. He’d have a suit already laid out on the bed but would often try on five or six shirts, sometimes all the same color, before he made his choice. Her a019;d hold up ties against his chest and check his reflection from different angles, in different lighting. When he was done I’d be fascinated with the intricacies of tying a double Windsor knot. It was like a stage performance. He’d catch my eye in the mirror and say, “The clothes don’t make the man, the man makes the clothes. But they have to be the right clothes and the right man.”

Headlights washed against the window. I pulled back the curtain and spotted Dale and Butch sitting in his Chevy, parked at the curb. They were arguing, their faces animated in the harsh dashboard light. I went to my room, pulled out the butterfly knife, and left it on her nightstand.

I walked downstairs and stood at the front door. I looked down at myself dressed in my uncle’s clothes, on my way to a date I didn’t want to go on, and abruptly felt like a moron. I should be helping Dale. I should be preparing myself to tell Collie to go fuck himself. The list went on. I should be making sure that Danny Thompson wasn’t still plotting to pull forty grand out of Mal’s ass. I should either be figuring out what to say to Kimmy and Chub or I should let it go. I had to watch out for Fingers and Higgins. Sweat broke out on my upper lip. Maybe Gilmore was right. Maybe my coming home had only stirred up all this trouble. And instead of fixing it, here I was playing dress-up.

My father came up behind me, gestured with his chin at the muscle car, and said, “Your mother right about him?”

“Yes. He’s a bank-heister wannabe.”

Two, three beats went by, then he let out a disgusted grunt. “So that’s why he gravitated toward her.”

I didn’t have to say it. He said it for me.

“Or her to him.”

“Yeah.”

“Won’t be able to stop her from seeing the little shithead.”

“No, probably not.”

The rest of the equation passed between us silently. Someone might have to convince him to stop seeing her.

I started to undo my tie. My old man put a hand on my arm and said, “Hey, no. Go have a night out.”

“Dad, I should be-”

“You should be out having a good time with Grey. He invited you. You said yes, right? So go. The reporter is cute. You can field her questions. And she’ll have a cute friend. What’s so wrong with that?”

Maybe nothing. I took the parkway up to 25A and drove down to the sound. The party boats coasted in on moonlit water as calm as a sheet of glass. They docked behind Torchy’s, and wealthy couples strolled across the massive deck, arm in arm, all pearls and five-thousand-dollar Italian fashion. A ten-piece band led by a young Dino look-alike played fifties crooner tunes. I was twenty minutes early. Grey would already be inside with his date and her friend. They’d be at the bar and he’d be regaling them with stories and letting them drink in his beauty. I let him do his thing and parked on the street for a while, listening to “Till There Was You” and “More” and “A Blossom Fell.” Then I drove in and let the valet take my car.

Inside, the place wasn’t quite as different as I’d been expecting. But a lot of ritzy restaurants right on the water had the same feel. Large windows so you could watch the party boats coming, an emphasis on seafaring decor that you really couldn x2019;t get away from. Ocean-blue walls, portraits and ancient photos of whalers, framed centuries-old maps of Long Island, seascape oil paintings. This one had a three-tiered setup with a lot of mirrored and well-lit staircases, like they expected Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to put on a show.

The host wore a black suit that was only a touch more retro than mine. He asked for the name of my party and I told him.

We got two steps toward the table when Grey appeared at the foot of the bottom staircase, slick and handsome with all the cool and style in the world, owning everyone and everything around him, including me.

23

“There’s the boy,” my uncle said.

He was sixty-two and looked ten years younger. He wore dashing and debonair the way other men wore desperation. I could smell his moisturizer, exfoliants, veggie conditioners, and skin toners. His eyebrows had been trimmed. He was holding a glass of Glenlivet, his favorite liquor. With his free arm he pulled me into a tight clinch and kissed my forehead.

“It’s good to see you, Terrier. You know I should break your ass for dodging us the past few days.”

I hadn’t seen him in five years and couldn’t think of a thing I wanted to say to him. I clenched him back and my head felt emptier than it had been since the ranch. I felt protected and fortified. Hugging him was like hugging my father, who never hugged anyone. Grey clapped me on the back and I did the same to him. He shot me a smile and I returned it.

“Whatever’s been on your mind, let it go for the night,” he said. “All the same shit will be waiting for you when you come back to it. But for now let’s get soused in style.”

I stalled and held back a step as he turned for the dazzling staircase. Maybe I did have questions after all. They started buzzing me all at once. I wanted to know what kind of game Grey was running on the pretty newscaster and why he hadn’t kept her out of the family’s hair. I needed some perspective on what my parents had endured. I wanted to ask if he’d been to the doctor like Mal and how far the disease had progressed. He shouldn’t be drinking, that much was obvious. But I knew he wouldn’t stop, it was too much a part of who he was. Grey might not answer. He might freeze me out for ruining his night. But of all the Rands he was the one who’d learned to chatter the best. Usually just to play the ladies, but I thought if anyone might shoot the heavy breeze with me, it was Grey.

As we walked up the steps he said, “You like older women, right?”

“What?”

His chuckle broke deep in his chest. “Sure you do.”

“Look, I just wanted to-”

“They’re worldly. They’re self-affirming. They know their own needs, their likes and dislikes, and they aren’t afraid to share them with you. Don’t be put off.”

“Is this about infiltration?” I asked.

“If you’re lucky.” He sipped his drink. “The twentysomethings, even the thirtysomethings, are usually still trying to figure themselves out, and they think daytime television and therapy and Redbook quizzes are the way to do it. The forty-year-olds, they’re not called cougarsmucnd we and hin for nothing.”

“Grey, the hell are you talking about?”

He looked me up and down. “You chose a nice suit. Wrong tie for it, but you did pretty good.”

We walked to the top tier and he led me to a table at the far corner. I supposed they were the best seats in the place, looking down on everyone else, with the best view of the sound. You could see clear to Westchester, the lights of the party boats bright and inviting.

The pretty blond newscaster was sitting there with another woman, those azure eyes full of eager delight. A soft scent of citrus danced along with her, tangling with Grey’s cucumber-and-aloe deep pore cleanser.

I glanced at Grey but he was giving her the sloe eye. I wondered if she had her tape recorder running in her purse.

Like I’d done yesterday morning when she and her news crew accosted me, I held my chin up.

Grey either didn’t notice my discomfort or didn’t care. “Terry, this is Victoria Jensen. Vicky. I believe you’ve already met.”

She held her hand out and smiled brilliantly at me. “If it’s not the Freddy’s Fix-It guy.”

I did my best to smile back but I knew I wasn’t making it. She let out a warm laugh that had probably driven a dozen men over the edge. “That’s me.”

“Terrier, I’m glad we can finally say hello.”

I took her hand. She was looking right through me. “My brother is scheduled for execution in ten days. Do you still want to know what I think of that? And if I have a message for the families of his victims?”

“I was doing my job.”

Grey cleared his throat. “Let’s keep it light for the night, shall we?”

Maybe it was he who’d been played. I thought perhaps she’d maneuvered him into asking me along tonight, but then I realized-she was looking through me, all right, but it was only because she was eyeing him with that perfectly loving gaze. I decided no, not her, the other one.

The friend. I gave her my full attention.

Grey said, “And this lovely lady is Eve Drayton.”

I nodded. “Another reporter.”

“We prefer the term journalist,” Eve said.

She didn’t stand. She offered me her hand and I took it. She was on the north side of forty and still quite captivating. Twenty-five years ago she’d been a beautiful teen but had settled into a well-aged attractiveness. Deeply black hair framed her face, with a few strands of silver here and there. There was a bold assurance and natural radiance in her eyes. She was dressed in a classy black dress that hugged her curves but didn’t stifle.

She openly studied my face and body. Her lips tilted into the barest self-satisfied grin. I sensed a sharp intellect at work, biding its time, already covering the angles. Despite myself I stood a little straighter.

“How do you do, Terrier,” she said.

“Hello, Miss Drayton,” I said.

“Please, no formalities on such a lovely night. Call me Eve.”

There was something about her I liked, and that spooked me. Maybe it was the attention. Or just standing here in clothep› s that weren’t my own. I looked over at my uncle. He was canoodling with Vicky. Perhaps Grey did have real feelings for her. You could never figure out someone like him. He always switched up the game.

The waiter came around to take our drink orders. He was a small, limber guy with a lot of pep in his stride. I thought he had to be in shape in order to run up and down all those stairs so many times in a night. Grey ordered me a Glenlivet. I hated the taste of it, but for some reason we were clearly trying to make an impression. He jumped the gun and ordered fresh lobster all around.

The waiter asked, “Would you like to come downstairs and choose your own from our tank?”

Grey said, “Only if you install an elevator.”

Vicky kept a hand on Grey at all times. He didn’t seem to mind. Before my arrival she’d been in the middle of a story, and now she continued. It was about a celebrity actor she’d interviewed out in the Hamptons only minutes before the guy’s wife backed over the mayor’s dog. It wasn’t much of a story. The mayor had screamed, the dog had been crippled, and the actor and his wife had taken off and caused a six-car pileup in Bridgehampton.

Grey gave her a loving stare. He gave every woman a loving stare. He packed his gaze with a sweet longing and a casual indulgence. It was natural to him. The world came easily to Grey. He knew how to have fun.

I wanted to know what information was being passed on in the sugary words he whispered into swooning women’s ears. Was he giving away family secrets? Was he doing it and forgetting that it had been done?

The drinks arrived. I sipped while Vicky laughed. It was a lush and bratty giggle that made my teeth ache.

“She left out the most significant part,” Eve said, like a mother trying to correct a child’s mistold joke. “The mayor’s dog, faithful Banjo, wound up being featured in a children’s movie the next summer. Banjo has a little wagon now for his hind legs. The movie grossed three times what the actor’s next film made, and he’s still doing community service for his role in the traffic accident. He puts in ten hours a week at a no-kill shelter.”

Maybe it was a true story. We all laughed like it was. I hadn’t laughed in a long time and it felt good. Eve smiled pleasantly at me. Vicky and Grey went into a huddle. She pointed across his lap at the water and Grey said, “It’s Westchester, sweetie, not Jersey.”

They were being capricious, acting giddy, the kind of playfulness that would’ve drawn attention if we hadn’t been at the top of the restaurant. They whispered together.

I finished my drink. I wondered if it would be easier to phone the host and tell him to send up another.

“Grey’s told us that you’ve been away from home for a while,” Eve said to me.

She’d checked into the family. She knew I’d been gone. But she tried to personalize the fact. I wondered if it was a reporter move or if she was just being polite. “I have.”

“We’ve kept up with the Rands in a professional capacity. But I must confess I don’t know much about you.”

“But I bet you’ve checked my police jacket,” I said.

“Yes, I admit I have,” she said, grinning, which brought the dimples out. “You’re not so bad.”

“So far as you know.”

“Can I get a few words from you on record about your brother?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry.”

It was a knee-jerk rebuke. I knew she’d work on me for the story. It was her job. I tried not to hold it against her. I still felt tight and guarded, but I liked her lips and I kept staring. I felt strong but foolish.

“I understand,” she said.

I wondered if she really did. I wondered if anyone could understand the conflict I felt over Collie, and how much a part of me wanted to rant about it, and how the rest of me would be mute forever. “Do you?”

She sipped her drink. “I think so. Most people enjoy talking about themselves and telling us their stories. Whether they’re just cultural filler or something deeper, more relevant on a personal or even social level, they want to share their tales.” She leaned back in her seat, but she held me with her acute focus. “It’s only the tragic cases where people prefer to say nothing. They’re too overwhelmed.”

“And always will be.”

She gave the slightest, most feminine of shrugs. “Perhaps.”

She had watchful, intense eyes. I liked the way she looked at me. “You’ve visited your brother in prison,” she said.

At least we weren’t going to have the usual so-tell-me-about-yourself kind of conversation. In one way I was glad for that. In another I thought, When he’s dead, will they stop wanting to know about him?

“Yes,” I told her.

“Twice. I’m curious as to what he had to say to you.”

“The same thing he’s been saying for five years. Mostly. He now states he didn’t murder Becky Clarke.”

I didn’t know why I told her. I turned and looked out the window. I thought that maybe I should run again. I’d promised not to, but since when did I keep promises? North this time, somewhere it was cold and white. Maybe I’d just picked the wrong direction the first time.

She touched my wrist and I turned back. She smiled, dropped her gaze. That bothered me. She said, “He never admitted to it.”

“But now he flat out denies it.”

When she glanced back up at me, she tried to give off an air that she knew all my secrets. “And you don’t believe him.”

“I don’t believe much of what I hear.”

She interviewed me without making it seem like I was being questioned. She made flat statements that filled in for interrogatives. She had a well-practiced rhythm to her cross-examination. It was subtle and she tried to up the ante by being even more indirectly flirtatious. It wasn’t an act. It was just the way she came at life, unable to separate herself from the job. Few people could. She put three fingers on my wrist, the same way Collie’s wife, Lin, had. Where Lin was almost a will-o’-the-wisp, Eve put weight and energy into the touch.

“Have you met his wife?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Grey perked up and snapped out of his lovers’ huddle. His cheeks were pink from all his kissy business with Vicky. “What’s this now?”

“He married a pen pal in prison a year ago,” I said.

“Your father never said anything.”

“My parents didn’t know. I met her this afternoon.”

“And what’s she like?” Grey asked. He appeared genuinely interested. “Or do I really need to ask?”

“Not what I expected,” I told him. She hadn’t been, but I only realized it now. All of the anger I’d felt had faded, and I replayed my conversation with Lin.

“What did you make of her?” Eve asked.

“I’m still not certain.”

Three waiters brought the dinners up, along with another round of drinks. They set a lobster in front of me still in its shell and provided a nutcracker and bib. Vicky put hers on and tore in. Eve crossed her legs and bumped my leg with her heel. It gave me more of a thrill than I would’ve thought.

Grey sipped and sat back, clinking ice cubes. “All the worst killers have their fan clubs. The ones who want to know what it’s like. Who get excited from the prospect of writing to or meeting with or, Christ, actually marrying someone who’s crossed that line.”

“I don’t believe she’s like that,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me because just a couple of hours ago I had been convinced that she was.

“Either that or they want the gratification of bringing another one into Jesus’s fold. They want to prove that nobody is beyond redemption. They weep and praise God and think they’re saints for putting time in on lost causes.”

“She’s not like that either. She said Collie was irredeemable.”

“I really hope she doesn’t start showing up for the holidays.”

“I met her once,” Eve said. “She came down to the television station, trying to prove he was innocent of the Rebecca Clarke murder.”

Vicky touched the back of Grey’s hand, as if she had to soothe him due to the nature of the conversation. Her fingers were dappled with a sheen of butter sauce. “That’s right. We let her talk on camera for a while but she made some wild accusations. She believes another killer is loose and the police aren’t investigating properly.”

Grey caught my eye and said, “Sounds like a ruse to throw off the scent at this stage of the game.” His face clouded. He slowly dug into the lobster, chewed it as if he refused to let anything ruin his night. He had a staunch capacity for pleasure.

“He admits the others, just not that one,” I said.

“It’s a new game he’s running. You don’t wait years to tell someone you’re innocent of murder.”

“He doesn’t claim to be innocent of murder. Just that one.”

His voice was beginning to thicken with alcohol. “It doesn’t matter. They’d have to retry his entire case. Who knows, maybe it’s what he was after all this time. I didn’t think he had it in him, the patience to do it this way, but it’s a nice maneuver, if that’s what he’s after. A hell of a gambit. I give him a lot of credit for holding off until the last week. Eat, Terry. You’re too thin.”

“He me looks good,” Vicky said.

“Yes, he does,” Eve agreed, and the dimples flashed again.

I ate without enjoyment and without putting the stupid bib on. Grey kept things lively and the women responded. The conversation shifted to other news topics that I hadn’t been following. Eve asked about my tan and I told her about working on a ranch. I didn’t know why. Maybe she was right and everyone wanted to tell their own story, so long as it wasn’t laced with tragedy. My life out west had been boring but not tragic. I mentioned the one time I tried to break a bronc and wound up with a concussion. They all laughed and eventually so did I. Once the table was cleared, Grey and Vicky decided to go for a stroll on the deck and listen to the band. I could hear them playing “Carolina Moon.”

“Back in a few minutes,” Grey said. He didn’t wink but it felt like he had. He thought he was doing me a favor. I turned to Eve. The window behind me vibrated. The breeze was picking up. It was about to rain again.

Her purse was carefully propped against her hip, slightly open. I suspected a digital recorder. Reporters wanted a statement one way or another, but it didn’t faze me. I was glad that she put her job first and foremost. It clarified things. I wasn’t ready for a real double date. I couldn’t imagine trying to begin a relationship and making the small talk that led to enduring times.

“I’ve been flirting with you all night,” Eve said. “You don’t seem to enjoy talking much. Or is it that you just don’t enjoy talking to me?”

“To any reporter or recording device.”

She lifted her purse, opened it, and withdrew a miniature recorder. “It’s not on. I’m eager for a story, but not to the point of deception.”

“Some journalists play a low game.”

“Yes, they do. But put it in perspective. Are they lower than the games a family of professional thieves plays?”

I went to finish off my drink and it was already empty. “Are you asking my opinion?”

Her grin eased into an expressive smile. I wondered how many stories she’d gotten out of men who never wanted to say a damn thing. “I bet if this wasn’t already turned off, you would’ve cased my house and stolen it while I was in the shower.”

“I would’ve waited until you were asleep.”

“I see. Well, if that’s the case, let me save us both some embarrassment and I’ll tell you now that I sleep in the raw.”

It made me laugh. She wasn’t flirting so much as she was trying to break through my hard shell, and I knew it. “I certainly appreciate your concern for my emotional well-being.”

There was a real affection in her expression, the frown lines smoothing, her face opening. But her fertile eyes were still trying to pin me down. “You were going to be the centerpiece of my report.”

“We’ll both survive the letdown. So will your viewers. You were bound to bore the hell out of them anyway.”

The tension between us thrashed and built and lessened like the sound waters. “People can’t understand your brother. What he’s done is too hideous. But you, they’ll sympathize with you. They’ll identify with you.”

“Why would they want to? Because I’m not so bad? Or because I’m not as bad as him? He’s going to be dead in a little more than a week. He’ll be forgotten two days after he’s in the ground. There are better stories for you to chase.”

“That’s a wonderfully honest response.”

“They’ve all been honest,” I said. “They just haven’t been what you wanted, sadly.”

She ran a hand through her hair, and the silver strands caught the light a little more brightly. She turned her face away for a moment and something in her strong profile seemed to call to me. The set of her lips or the distinct arc of her jaw.

Grey and Vicky returned. They were both flushed, their faces streaked with sweat. Grey was an amazing dancer. He’d tried to teach me over the years, but I had no rhythm. He used to say, “No woman will ever take you seriously if you can’t lead or keep up with her on the dance floor.”

The waiter appeared and presented Grey with the dessert menu. He ordered seven or eight items, more than we could eat, and said that we would share. We moved over to white wine. The chatter became even more casual. It wafted past me and I responded adequately and had no idea what I was saying. Eve spoke of her daughter, who was training to be a vet technician. She took out her phone and showed us photos that her daughter had sent her of a litter of newborn Rottweilers. Grey and I chuckled and talked about how my father had boosted JFK from a puppy mill he’d accidentally broken into. It was, to my knowledge, the one and only time my old man had ever called the cops.

The chocolate layer cakes and cheesecakes and pie à la mode arrived. We ate from one another’s dishes. Eve fed me forkfuls of icing. She leaned in a little farther. She continued her sweet yet powerful assault on my will.

I waited for Grey to use the men’s room. When he excused himself I gave it a ten count and then pushed away from the table.

“Excuse me, ladies, I need to use the house phone.”

“You can borrow my cell,” Vicky said.

I stood. “Okay, I lied. I want to talk to my uncle about you two.”

“Stay here and ask us instead,” Eve said.

“Sure,” Vicky concurred. “We’ll tell you anything you like.”

I grinned and turned away and headed for the men’s room.

Grey was in a stall. There was a towel guy who looked like he’d been put together from pieces of driftwood washed up in the Bay Shore marina. He could’ve been anywhere from forty to eighty, his rough-hewn skin colorless, his face pudgy and soggy from years of alcohol abuse. He glanced up at me as I entered, and his whole life story was in his glazed eyes. Condemned for his sins to sit in the corner of a shitter and hand out towels to rich men.

He nodded to me. “Sir.”

“Can you do us a favor and give us a little privacy?” I asked.

“I’m not supposed to leave, sir.”

“How about when you need fresh hand towels or more soap or something?”

He cocked a thumb at the stacks of towels, toilet paper, hand creams, soap, and cleaning products behind him. “We have plenty, sir.”

He made sir sound lidthke fuck you, shitheel.

I pulled out my wallet and dished him a fifty. “You just ran out, right? Take ten minutes.”

“Certainly. Thank you, sir.”

He tipped off his stool and clawed for the door handle, his vision burned out by hours of blinding porcelain-tile reflection.

I stood outside Grey’s stall and said, “So what’s this all about?”

“I’m busy at the moment, right?”

“I knew you had a thing going with Vicky, but why did you invite me along? Why expose us this way?”

“You like Eve, don’t you?” he asked.

“She’s sharp. She’s insistent. Forceful.”

“So why’s that bending you out of shape?”

“It’s not,” I admitted. “But we don’t need another pair of eyes on us.”

“Ah, she does have beautiful, enchanting eyes.” He sounded like he was half in love with her himself. “And since when do you speak for the whole family? You’ve been back a few days and you’re taking over the entire house? You running the show?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Eve is a lovely woman. I thought you’d like her.”

“I do.”

“See how easy that was?”

“But-she wants a story.”

“So feed her one.”

“That’s not what I do.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry, Terrier, I’m not sure what it is you do anymore. I thought you might like to come out and enjoy yourself for a night.”

Thunder broke over the sound, and the echo picked up such strength on its way to shore that it was like a colossal hammer coming down on the restaurant. The acoustics in the bathroom made it even worse.

“Jesus Christ, what are you doing in there?” I asked. “Giving birth?”

“It would go faster if you’d quit diverting my attention.”

“Sorry,” I said.

He finished up and unlocked the stall door and spent a long time washing his hands and staring at himself in the mirror. He combed his hair, smoothed down one eyebrow. “You’re going to have a good time with her. She’s very witty. She’s also very creative in bed.”

I shook my head. “Oh, Christ, did you really have to tell me that?”

“Go frolic. Have some thrills. Infiltrate. It’ll be an agreeable experience. Trust me.”

“Stop saying shit like that, Grey.”

He laughed and finished duding himself, checked the knot on his tie, and walked out. I followed.

Grey didn’t sit again. The bill was on the table. He said, “Are we ready?” He didn’t look at the check, just counted off six C-notes and laid them down. I wondered what he thought he was getting for his payout. He didn’t need to impress the women. Was he trying to impress me?

He held his hand out to Vicky and helo fped her put her wrap on. Eve began to put her own jacket on, and I realized there was no reason to be rude and I held it for her while she shrugged her arms in. Then she lightly touched my elbow, squeezed it twice, and then released me. I wondered what my play should be. I wanted to talk with Grey longer. I was worried about his health. I wanted to know if he’d seen a doctor as well. He hadn’t had any leafy greens with his dinner. He should be taking fish-oil capsules. Lobster wasn’t fish, it was crustacean. I thought maybe it wouldn’t count.

“I think Vicky and I are going to walk down to the beach and sit in the moonlight for a while,” he told me. “Eve came with me. Do you think that-”

Eve interrupted and said, “It’s all right, I can have the host get me a cab.”

“Nonsense,” Grey said.

“I’d be happy to drive you home,” I told her.

“Thank you, Terry, that’s very sweet of you.”

The valet brought my car up. We got in and I pulled off and drove a little stiffly. I was surprised and a bit uncomfortable that I felt some attraction for her. She didn’t put her hand on my thigh. I thought she might. I sort of expected it.

She said, “I live in Head of the Harbor. Just take 25A east.”

It was a ritzy area on the North Shore. “I know where it is. Northern State is quicker.”

“And more dull. Besides, it’ll give us time to talk.”

“Sure.”

I drove east on 25A. We were going to hit a lot of lights. The traffic was fairly heavy and it grew worse around Huntington when the rain started to come down again. I remembered driving Kimmy down the shore on dark storm-filled nights like this. Eve asked about my youth and I answered honestly, what I could remember. So much of it was always right there on the tip of my tongue, in the front of my mind, and yet so much of it seemed gone forever. I talked about my dad, about climbing drainpipes and jugging safes. There was no inflection in my voice no matter how much I tried to sound lively. Maybe once we got Collie out of the way it would be different. Or we’d be done. I turned on the radio and Eve shut it off. I glanced at her and she smiled. I thought she would smile no matter what I might say or do.

“You want to discuss him,” she said.

I turned and looked at her face in silhouette. “Christ, no.”

“I think you do. It seems to be what matters most to you right now. That much is obvious, Terry.” Her voice rose a bit with a tinge of anger. I wasn’t sure if it was for me or Collie. “You’re thinking about it right now. Anybody can see the pressure you’re under.”

“He’s not what matters most.”

“Then what does? I’d like to hear.”

I thought I might talk about Kimmy and Scooter. I thought about telling her to interview Cara Clarke again, because there was a girl who had a lot of pain to purge.

Eve said, “Why did you feel the need to visit him a second time?”

It had to come back to my brother. “He asked me to.”

“And that was all you needed to prompt you.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Will you see Collie again?”

I turned and snapped, “Who the hell are you to use his name?”

She relaxed and fell back in her seat, opened her purse, drew out a cigarette, and lit up off my car lighter, the way Kimmy used to do. I almost wanted to put my arm around her. “You’re protective of him.”

“I just don’t like to hear his name.”

She was in shadows, the smoke catching the light and drifting across my face. “Did he tell you why he killed those eight people?”

I thought, Seven. He says it was only seven. But I don’t know. How the hell am I supposed to know?

Already there were several accidents on the road. Late dark night, wet country roads, you had vehicles wiping out into one another like they were playing bumper cars. Cops in their rain gear directed traffic. The flares left flaming streaks across my vision as we passed by.

“That’s not how this is going to work,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not going to get anything out of me because I have nothing to give, Eve.”

By the burning red glare I watched as she nibbled at her bottom lip with her front teeth, held on for an instant, then slowly let out a small sound that wasn’t quite a sigh. “I want your perspective.”

“I can’t give that either,” I said. “I’m too close. What do you really expect me to say? I have no more insight into Collie than anybody else does. I’m at even more of a loss, right? Because I never expected this to have ever happened. So I’m worthless to you. But you’re not to me.”

She kicked off her shoes, shifted in her seat, got more relaxed. I turned the heater up and opened the vent onto the floor so she wouldn’t get cold.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll listen. What can I help you with?”

“Did you interview the families?” I asked.

“The victims’ families? Yes, of course.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Anything to connect them?”

“The police say no.”

“I know what the police say, Eve. What do you say?”

“I say no.”

The same images scuttled through my head. The little girl, twisting away from the barrel of his gun. The old woman, meeting my brother on the sidewalk, passing him without a word, fearful of such a large man, and Collie spinning the full force of his strength on her with his fists. Her breathless grunts beneath the awful sounds of her bones snapping, screams choked in the center of her flailed chest. I held on to the steering wheel at ten and two, a conscientious driver. I was worried that the images were already losing some of their power over me. Another accident was coming up. I rolled down my window partway and the rain sluiced in and wet the side of my face.

“Give me something I can use,” I said.

“To what end?”

“To the only end, the very end. I need to know if he did them all or not.”

She drew her knîs up and angled closer to me. Her breath warmed my neck. “I think you should just accept that he’s guilty of killing them all. It would be easier for you.”

“Maybe, but I’m not sure.”

“Your father is still robbing houses,” she said.

It took me so off guard that I nearly missed a bend in the road. Shining reflectors appeared across the dark expanse of a guardrail. I eased my foot off the gas and maneuvered into a tight turn. “How do you know?”

“He was detained three months ago for breaking in to a home.”

“Whose home?” I asked, and my voice was sharper than I intended.

She looked aside at the wet empty woods flashing past as if she had to think hard to come up with the name. She was deciding whether to tell me or squeeze me for another angle at the story. Our attraction for each other was secondary to a night of murder and the continuing fallout. She glanced at the side of my face. I turned and she read something in my eyes, despite having nothing more than the dashboard light to read them by.

“The Wright family. Do you know them?”

I didn’t let my expression change. My scalp prickled with sweat, and a sliver of ice worked itself into the small of my back. My father had crept Chub and Kimmy’s house. I imagined him parking in the same spot where I had parked in front of their place. Watching them as I had watched. Seeing Scooter race by on the front lawn. My old man that close to her. I watched him popping out a screen window and sliding through, wandering the house in the darkness while Kimmy and Chub slept. Or made love. My old man listening. The fuck was going on?

“You said detained. He wasn’t arrested?”

“No, Terry. But it’s on record.”

Had Gilmore shown up to talk Kimmy or Chub out of pressing charges? Had she or Chub simply shown mercy? I wondered at the fear in her face, awakening in the night to see her ex-boyfriend’s father at the foot of her bed. My hands tightened on the steering wheel, and a muscle spasm made me tug right, then left, the tires chirping on the wet road.

“Who was the cop on scene?” I asked.

Eve reached for my knee in a show of concern. The rain sprayed my temple. I was driving sharp but fast. I wanted to go faster. I wanted to take the next right and head back home and confront my father. I thought, This means something, this will paint your old man in a way you have never seen before. My stomach twisted. I’d never been angry at my father, not even when he’d torn my rib through my flesh. But now I was chewing my tongue and tasting blood.

“I don’t remember,” Eve said. “Is it important? Who are the Wrights?”

“What did he take?”

“Nothing.”

“Then he wasn’t robbing the house.”

“So what else could he have been doing there?”

The stink of burning flares continued to fill my nostrils. I glanced at Eve. She was watching me intensely. She said, “Terry… please, slow down.” This whole scene might turn up on page three. The way I folded under questioning, how I sweated and barked. My mother would want to break Grey’s ass for putting me in this position. My sister would think I was a dunce. Lin would pass word back coto Collie that I had been wooed. I didn’t know what my father would think. It seemed a little pathetic that I wouldn’t know what my father would think.

We got to Head of the Harbor and she directed me along a series of back roads to her isolated neighborhood. She looked at me like she knew I had boosted a lot of TV sets out of houses like these, but it wasn’t true. There were too many private security forces and it wasn’t worth the risk.

She lived in a beautiful home that wasn’t more than five years old but had been built in the Victorian style. Three floors with arched windows set in squared-off bays. The front door was centered in an elaborate porch, and the roof featured gabled ends edged in a decorative carved timber.

“Come inside for a drink,” she said.

“I’m not going to tell you anything you can use, Eve. I’m sorry I wasted your evening.”

She kissed the edge of my mouth. “You haven’t. Not at all.” It was prim by any standard of kissing, but there was a controlled heat to it. I turned to her and she thumbed her lipstick off my cheek. She placed a hand on my forehead like she was checking for fever and then leaned in and kissed me again, much more passionately. I didn’t entirely return it but I could feel something loosening within me. Our tongues rested against each other for a time. I liked not having to talk. She drew away.

Not everything had to lead back to Collie and death. I could have something of mine. I wanted her. I could have her. There was nothing wrong with it, and I tried to believe it.

“Is there a Mr. Drayton?” I asked.

“Mr. Drayton is shacked up with a twenty-year-old theater-arts major in Miami. He won’t be bothering us. Come inside for a nightcap.”

I shut off the engine. The pulse in my throat snapped. Kimmy had been on my mind so much that the very idea of sleeping with another woman somehow felt like a betrayal. Eve noted my resistance. She also saw my desire. She brought my lips to hers again. I fell into it and started reaching for her hungrily.

My conflict heated her even more. She liked a little obstinacy. She lifted a knee and swung closer to the driver’s seat and ground herself against me. I started to groan. The pictures in my head continued shuffling. I hugged Eve tightly and licked beneath her ear. It made her laugh. I liked the sound of it. Her laughter got louder and poured itself down my throat.

24

In the dark, when we were about three quarters of the way through the funky stuff, I heard the front door open. I thought maybe Mr. Drayton had returned from Miami a sadder and wiser man. My thief’s instincts took over. I extracted myself from Eve and hopped off the bed. I looked at the door. I looked at the window. We were on the first floor and I wondered if I should climb out. I looked for my pants. She caught her breath and turned on the nightstand light.

I thought of Mr. Drayton wearing a bright-yellow shirt and holding a 10-gauge. I pictured Collie slipping through the tight rooms. Someone moved up the hall toward us. I scanned for my pants but couldn’t find them.

“Relax, Terry,” Eve said. “It’s my daughter, Roxie. She works late for an emergency animal clinic.”

“Oh yeah.” I remembered the photos of th coenter" Dre newborn Rottweilers.

“I think I mentioned that she’s training as a vet technician.”

“That’s very… professional,” I said.

“Yes, she is. Come back to bed.”

Roxie’s footsteps continued to the door. She knocked quietly and asked, “Mom, you still up?”

“Not now, Rox,” Eve said. “We’ll talk in the morning, all right?”

“Sure thing. Good night.”

“Good night, honey.”

Roxie headed up the stairs, and a door on the second floor opened and shut. A stereo turned on in a distant corner of the house, and quiet music made the ceiling thrum.

“Come back to bed,” Eve said.

I slid in under the covers and she rolled into my arms. She inspected the black and yellow bruises over my kidneys. “My God, I didn’t notice these before. Who’ve you been tussling with?”

“The cops,” I said.

I shouldn’t have, but I was still a little miffed at Gilmore and the truth slipped out. She was right. I guess I did want to talk.

“I can do an exposé,” she told me, her voice tight and serious. “I started my career investigating a sergeant in Bedford-Stuyvesant who had raided his own evidence locker. Give me the officer’s name. I’ll visit him with a news crew every day. I can have him walking a beat in Cudahy, Wisconsin, this winter.”

“No,” I said. “He’s a good cop. He’s not hurting anyone else.”

“How do you know?”

“He and I just had some personal issues. And I might still need him.”

“What for?” she asked. “A burglar needing a cop is an odd state of affairs.”

“I need him to keep looking into the Rebecca Clarke murder.”

“Then you do believe your brother is innocent.”

Her body was taut and well muscled, but soft in the appropriate places. She put in a lot of time at the gym. I spotted some oddly pigmented areas at her neck, breasts, and hips that might have been very faint surgery scars. Her breasts were large and didn’t sag much. Her belly was trim and tight and slightly freckled. She wore a thin golden chain across her midriff that chimed so faintly while we’d been making love that I thought there might be a cat walking around the place with his tags tinkling. Legs lean, calves well defined as she arched her toes out and her whole body tightened with a yawn.

“Whatever I believe, I don’t want to talk about it now,” I said.

She ran her hands over my stomach, my chest. “How could you stand it?”

“It was only two sucker-punches.”

“No, not that.” She kissed my chest. “This.”

I thought she meant my scars, but then I realized she was talking about my tattoo. “Yeah, it hurt like a bitch.”

“It’s so intricate.”

There had been a lot to cover. I nodded. She ran a hand through my chest hair like she was petting the head ofa lр the hound. She pressed her lips to the dog’s eyes, his nose, then licked across the teeth of its open, barking mouth. She laid me back against the set of thick pillows and ran her tongue down from my navel. I started to pant. I took hold of her head and gently guided her lower. She went with it for a moment, then resisted.

“Why are you all named after breeds of dogs?” she asked.

“Why in the hell are you asking that now?”

“I’m curious.”

Upstairs, Roxie closed a bathroom door. A fan went on, water ran, and the pipes groaned in the walls. Her phone rang and she answered and immediately began arguing with someone. The rain kept spraying against the windows, like it was being cast off by a woman whirling her wet hair against the glass.

“No one seems to know,” I said. “It’s just been the way of our family for at least the last four generations.”

I brushed her hair back with my fingers. She kissed my inner thigh. She flicked her tongue against my flesh and murmured and giggled. She nipped at me. She turned her face upward at me. I thought, Jesus, she’s going to keep me vibrating like a cello string all night long.

“Isn’t it degrading?” she asked.

“I thought you liked it,” I said.

“Not this. Being named after a dog.”

“No. It’s my name.”

She tried to be ingratiating, whispering cutely the way real lovers do. Upstairs, her daughter was on the verge of yelling and then must’ve hung up. The pipes kept groaning. Eve made me groan too. “Still, if you’re named after an animal, doesn’t it make you feel like you should act like an animal?”

I didn’t know what she was asking, if it was a risque way of saying I should be more aggressive or if she was going deeper than that, asking if I ever felt the temptation to go mad dog. Let the beast loose.

“Playing timid isn’t your strong suit,” I said.

“You might be surprised, Terry.”

She began to stroke my thighs again. She used her skilled hands to make me sip air. She continued trying to distract me in an effort to make me more pliable. Her eyes were amused and bright.

This time we kept the light on. Afterward, she walked naked to the kitchen, got me a beer, poured it for me in a tall glass, and snuggled beside me while she sipped two fingers of Glenlivet. I noticed now that she was shaved, oiled, well powdered despite the sweat streaks, and I wondered if it was really for me. Grey had admitted to sleeping with her. I wondered how often and how recently.

I finished the beer. We fell back into bed and went another round, this time much smoother and suppler and maybe even a touch sweeter. I hated drinking scotch, but for some reason I liked the taste of it on her lips.

After, she said, “You’re a good man, Terry.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I’ve met a lot of bad ones. I’ve interviewed them and covered their court cases and done follow-ups through the years. I once visited Manson for an hour-long prime-time special. Five minutes in his presence and I knew we’d never air it. I knew you could see the fear in my face. You’re a good man at your heart.”

I ln aрet out a chuckle. “Because I’m not as nuts as Manson?”

“You don’t have to worry about being like your brother.”

“Eve-”

“One doesn’t have to be very astute to know what’s so heavy on your mind. It would happen to any of us. It does happen. It’s why people like Dahmer’s father write books. They feel a need to understand where that kind of evil comes from.”

Evil. It was a word I hadn’t used in connection with Collie yet. He was a mass-murdering prick, but I hadn’t thought beyond the act itself to imagine him as truly evil.

“This is some kind of fucked-up pillow talk,” I said.

“I was just trying to put you at ease.”

“I think falling asleep in each other’s arms would be more helpful.”

Eve held me tightly and said, “Say no more.”

She dropped off to sleep first. I thought about Chub unwinding himself from Kimmy and sneaking back to his garage to pore over his getaway maps. Checking up on the roadwork conditions, which lanes would be shut down tomorrow, where the detours were. I had to talk to him. I felt myself drifting, Eve’s breath glancing off my chin. I started to dream before I was fully asleep.

My sister had been right. I had a head as full of snakes as when I’d left. Now I clung to memories that weren’t mine. I couldn’t be sure if I was awake or out cold. My stomach burned. The smell of whiskey seemed overwhelming and made me gag. Eve’s soft snores pounded at me. I saw hands pulling a sash around a young woman’s throat. In her dead eyes I saw my face.

I snapped fully awake with the sense of someone watching me.

I knew the feeling well, probably because my mother liked to watch me sleep. I opened my eyes into slits. It was still dark. I checked Eve and she was sleeping soundly. The door remained shut.

I waited.

Moonlight splayed against the walls, the silver hue blurred by the intermittent rain. I considered that Torchy’s was undoubtedly mobbed up. Danny might’ve gotten word that Grey and I had been out on the town. It could’ve miffed him. He might want to brace Mal again. He might want to push me for showing up with attitude at the Fifth. I couldn’t imagine Danny sending Wes around in the middle of the night, but Wes had admitted there were nastier goings-on that he wasn’t a part of. Danny had a lot of worse boys around still trying to make their bones. I hung my hand over the edge of the mattress and felt for my pants. A shadow broke against the moonlight.

Someone was standing at the window, peering in.

I slipped out of bed on a roll and slid my trousers on in a fluid move. The forward momentum carried me across the bedroom. I rushed to the window. There was a patch of glass that the water diverted around, like someone had wiped it down to see inside better and the oil from his fingertips had caused the rain to deflect.

I turned the latch and hefted the window up. The screen stopped me. If I was outside trying to get in, I could pop it loose in half a second. But right now I was so keyed up that I couldn’t get it to unlock from the track.

Eve woke and said, “What is it? What are you doing?”

The sound of someone running across the wet lawn made my heart hammer, and I finally juse Mрt put my shoulder to the jamb and bulled my way through the screen. The metal track squealed and the molding cracked like a gun going off. I took a header into the bushes and lurched across a lawn gnome that practically impaled me. I tasted dirt. I came up in a crouch and wasn’t sure which way to go. I didn’t have my bearings yet.

Eve hadn’t put on the outside light, and the streetlamp didn’t provide much illumination. I spit out blades of grass.

An engine started up the block. Trying not to slip in the mud, I loped in that direction, but it was already too late. A car pulled away from the curb a couple of houses away. No headlights, no shouting, and no mad screeching as he turned the corner. I couldn’t tell the make or model. Whoever it was accelerated smoothly and popped on the lights just as he faded from my sight.

I ran to my car but it was a lost cause. Eve’s porch light came on.

She stepped out onto the veranda, dressed in a robe, and hugged herself as I walked back to her. She gave me a perplexed grin. “I’ve had guys try to skip out before breakfast, but you even left your shoes-” Then she caught my expression. “What is it? What was it?”

“Someone was staring through the bedroom window at us.”

“Who?”

“I didn’t get a good look.”

She was nervous but tried to play it off. “Well, we were certainly worth watching, especially during the second go-around, but-”

I put my arms around her. “It’s okay, Eve.”

“No, it’s not. I’m actually spooked. Come inside.”

We walked back into the bedroom. I reached over the windowsill and pulled the busted screen back up. I’d wrecked it good. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, who cares about that. Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

She stared over my shoulder at the dark front yard. “What did you see?”

“Just a shadow.”

At the door was a knock. “Mom?”

“It’s all right, Rox.”

“What’s all the noise?”

“Nothing, dear.”

Roxie huffed in agitation. “You’re sure?”

“Go talk to her,” I told Eve.

She left the bedroom and spoke with Roxie for a few minutes, then returned. I asked, “You have any jealous boyfriends that might be hanging about?”

“None.”

“Your daughter have any dirty-minded beaux? I heard her arguing on the phone.”

“She’s twenty and it’s her first serious boyfriend. They’re discovering all the joys and pains. Perhaps it was one of your fellow unsavory types?”

Leg-breaking I could understand. But not window-peeking.

Someone had simply been watching Eve and me sleeping.

“I don’t know,” I said, my pulse driving harder through my throat, my scars burning as I thought about my father creeping houses again, standing at the bottom of Kimmy’s bed, watching her, movi/p›рng silently to Scooter’s room, looking down at the baby sleeping in her crib.

25

I got dressed. Eve offered me an early breakfast but I declined. I held her for a while and we kissed deeply, but I think we both knew this was a one-night venture. We didn’t promise any further rendezvous.

“Take care of yourself,” she told me.

“I’m not the one cracking beers with Manson,” I said. She laughed and I pressed my lips to her forehead and cut out.

I caught a few hours’ sleep at home. I woke up late, almost nine A.M. I showered and came downstairs feeling refreshed but a little out of sorts. A lot had happened yesterday and I hadn’t had any time to sort through it.

My mother was cleaning dishes. All she seemed to do was cook and clean dishes and stuff Old Shep with cereal. She was making a big breakfast for the family but no one was around. She said, “Sit. In ten minutes I’ll have pancakes and scrambled eggs. But no bacon, we’re out of bacon.”

“Don’t bother with it, Ma.”

“It’s no bother.”

“Have you eaten yet?” I asked.

“Of course I have. All I do is eat.”

My mother, beautiful as she was, looked tired and too thin to me. The morning light caught in her auburn hair, the red highlights blazing. She gave a soft smile. She was worried about me. She had always worried about me, but now I was back under her roof, within reach. She would share my burden willingly.

“Ma, coffee is good. Leave the-”

“You talk like I need to get to the office, Terrier. As if I have to check my daily organizer first to see if I can fit in making a meal for my son. Sit, drink some milk, eat.” She enjoyed waiting on her children. I knew that every time she turned around and looked at the kitchen table, she’d see Collie in his usual place opposite me.

She poured me a glass of milk and stirred pancake batter. I thought, There’s plenty of money. They could put Gramp in a home. They could hire a nurse. “Did you have a good time with Grey?”

“Yes,” I said, but I’d hesitated a half second too long.

“What happened? Trouble?”

“No. Is he here?”

“No. He stayed out last night.”

“He set me up on a double date. That reporter and a journalist friend of hers.”

“That Vicky.” She nodded and stirred eggs around in one pan with a spatula, then flipped a huge pancake in another. “You’d think he suddenly wanted to be in the limelight, for them to write about us again, after all this time. Maybe he does. It’s attention, and he loves attention. Did they give you a hard time, asking questions?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“He should know better.”

“He does know better, but I think he genuinely likes her.”

“Grey doesn’t genuinely like anybody. But she is young, and thare & an an T#t’s a powerful bouquet to a man like him.”

“Who’s ‘a man like him’?” I asked.

“An older man who can’t let go of his own youth, who’s preoccupied by the past. He acts like he’s twenty. Too much silk and not enough sand.”

“Do women like sand?”

“Women love sand.”

“Well, he’s got style anyway.”

“He looks foolish running around with dim girls like that Vicky.”

I’d never heard her say anything like that before. I drank my milk. My mother finished cooking and set the food down in front of me. She pressed syrup in my direction. She didn’t sit but started cleaning up immediately. I wondered about the grandparents I never knew. I tried to imagine what would have happened if my mother had listened to them and stopped seeing my father. She’d be married to a stockbroker and be vacationing every year in Saint-Tropez.

When she’d drained the sink and folded her gloves neatly across the drainboard, I asked, “Why don’t you and Dad ever travel?”

“Travel?” The word appeared to be poisonous in her mouth. “What do you mean? Where would we go?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere.”

“Why would I want to go anywhere?” she asked. It was a genuine question.

“People do. They go on vacation. They visit Europe.”

“But what would we do in Europe?”

“I don’t know what you would do in Europe, Ma. You’d be a tourist. You’d eat European foods. You’d see the sights of the world. The Coliseum. The Eiffel Tower. Go look at the Rhine.”

She pulled a face like I’d just suggested the silliest thing she’d ever heard. Maybe I had. Either way the topic was dead.

She said, “I need you to run to the store for me.”

She handed me a list of items she needed. A lot of green leafy vegetables, bottles of vitamins, ginkgo biloba, and fish oil. Plenty of chicken. Turkey burgers. Salmon. A frozen turkey. I knew I should get used to eating this stuff.

She also had listed a lot of munchies. Potato chips, cocktail peanuts, candy, and mint chocolate chip ice cream, which was my favorite. “I don’t eat this crap anymore, Ma.”

“You’re too thin. Here.” She tried to shove money into my hand but I refused to take it.

“I’ve got it, Ma.”

“Don’t steal the groceries.”

“I’m not going to steal groceries.”

She squinted at me. “I still have to shop there.”

“I’m not going to steal the goddamn groceries.”

I drove over to the market. Out in front were those same nickel rides that had been in the strip mall by Wes’s place. These I’d ridden myself twenty years ago. A rocket ship that went up and down, beeping with lights blinking. Kids were tugged past by their parents. I flashed on Scooter giggling excitedly, with me cheering her on. I thought of Kimmy and Chub bringing her to the Mother Cabrini Feast. It was a tradition when wkneဆe were kids, fronted by St. John’s Church. A second-rate carnival that still seemed like something special. Chub and I used to warn the rubes away from the worst of the rigged games.

It took me twenty minutes to get everything on my mother’s list. I hated boiled cabbage, but I would start eating it. I would have to. I picked up bottles of vitamin A and C and E. Flaxseed. They all helped with memory and cognitive function. I’d have to learn to start taking them.

I paid and carried out the bags. I got to the car and was halfway through loading the groceries in the trunk when I saw Higgins coming for me.

Fingers had been too tight to hire another goon. He really should’ve sprung for somebody better, like I’d told him.

Higgins had no cool. He’d taken our fracas too personally and his anger made him stupid. He hadn’t given his foot time to heal. His face was swollen with bruises, and his lip was badly split. He came gimping along on an intercept course with a Glock held down tight against his leg. His new sunglasses burned like twin camera flashes in the sunlight. There were kids around, families walking to their cars.

He started to raise his gun. He wasn’t going to make any kind of a speech or take the time to get off a wiseass tough-guy phrase. He just wanted me iced. I was a little surprised by his single-mindedness.

I did the only thing I could do. I hurled the frozen turkey at him.

It was a huge twenty-five-pounder. It struck him high on the shoulder and I heard his collarbone snap. The pain was so intense he couldn’t quite scream. A choked groan stuck in his throat, his mouth open as he tried to suck air through the agony. His arm went dead and he dropped the pistol. I was shocked it didn’t go off.

I made it to him in three steps and hooked him twice under the heart, then put a forearm into his face. His glasses broke and flew off. I hadn’t noticed before that his eyes were beady and black and too close together. No wonder he kept them covered. I grabbed the gun and dragged him into the space between my car and the one parked next to me. I reached into his back pocket and came up with his blackjack and put him out.

He’d be unconscious for hours. I stuck him in the passenger seat and grabbed up the dropped groceries. At first I was surprised as hell that no one had seen anything, but then I realized the fight had lasted no more than twenty seconds. I pulled out and drove over to the mall, parked close to the main doors, and started roaming various stores and shops. Within twenty minutes I’d clipped three wallets from daddy fat cats who didn’t look the type to ever be intimidated and were bound to make a serious stink.

Higgins was still out cold. I transferred the credit cards, driver’s licenses, and cash to his wallet. I wiped my prints off the gun and stuffed it back in his pocket. Then I drove him over to Gilmore’s precinct, dumped him at the curb, and split.

The cops wouldn’t know what to make of him at first, but they’d hold on to him tight. His record would speak for itself, as would his association with Fingers Brown and the skirted gunrunning allegations. Loaded with fresh charges, they’d sniff around the bowling alley again and Fingers would spook and cut him loose. The only question was whether Fingers was angry enough to take a run at me on his own. I didn’t think he had the heart.

I drove home and carried the groceries in. As my mother started unpacking them she said, “This turkey’s starting to thaw.” She looked up at me in surpriseI rဆ. “Something happened, I can tell by your face. Where’ve you been? What happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Your cheeks are flushed.”

“I’m fine.”

Her face hardened. “I hate when I’m lied to.”

I helped her put the groceries away. Everything went in the same place as when I was a kid. That would never change, not in five years, not in fifty. There was something comforting in the familiarity. Another minor symbol of saccharine sentimental value.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Mal and Grey, who knows. Your father’s in the garage with his collection.”

It stopped me. “What collection?”

She turned and grinned. “Oh, you haven’t been introduced to his hobby yet?”

“Dad’s got a hobby?”

“He has for some time. Go look at it.”

“It?”

“Them. Go ahead. In the garage.”

“Am I going to want to see this?” I asked. I didn’t know what I thought might be out there, but I had trepidations. My father with a hobby? What might that entail? Stamps? Coins? Empty beer cans from around the world?

The other day I’d worried about him being bored after his retirement. Now I knew he was still doing a little second-story prowling, and not just to keep himself busy. But was there more going on?

“You look scared,” my mother said.

“I’m not scared, I just never thought of him as having a hobby.”

“It’s not porn.”

“I didn’t think it was porn. And I don’t think porn can actually be a hobby either. And it wouldn’t scare me.”

“I’m just telling you, that’s not it,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Retirement gives people too much time to think. They have to do something to stay busy and focus their attention.”

“How about you?” I asked. “What focuses your attention?”

“I take care of the family,” she said simply. “I’ve got an old man inside who needs as much care as a newborn. I’ve got a teenage daughter dating a creep. Worrying about her is a full-time job on its own. And I have to clean a house three times bigger than we need, because half the space is for loot. I even clean the loot sometimes. It’s all junk. We should get rid of it, but it would take as long to dig it out of the house as it took to put in. You know some of the shit that’s hidden away? But who knows, there could be a de Kooning or a Pollock stuck in these walls. Those three, they don’t want to get rid of any of it, because they think the police are watching. The cops who were chasing all that crap have been dead thirty years. We should have a garage sale and really put some money in the bank.”

“I agree,” I said.

“Well, when you get out there, try to talk your father into it.”

I went out and around to the garage. The side door was ajar. I stepped into the huge work areionဆa where my grandfather and his brothers had done most of the woodwork for the house’s secret rooms. JFK heard me and clambered to his feet and moseyed over.

I was expecting rebuilt classic cars. My old man hadn’t been much of a car thief, but he had taught me how to boost the muscle speedsters of his teenage years. I thought he might be looking to the past and trying to get back in touch with his youth.

It wasn’t a car.

My father was spraying glass cleaner and wiping down an enormous display case with six lengthy glass shelves and mini-track interior lighting.

He glanced over his shoulder and said, “Hello, Terry. So what do you think?”

“Well… it’s not porn.”

Inside were figurines. I estimated there to be at least a hundred pieces. Most of them were of Asian men and women and children, pulling rickshaws, feeding barnyard animals, playing with dogs. I didn’t find them beautiful. I didn’t think them ugly. I forced myself not to frown. I made myself keep my hands at my sides instead of reaching up to scratch my head. My father opened the case and started spraying the inside of the glass door with no-streak cleaner.

I said, “Can I touch them?”

“Sure.”

I picked one up. It was hollow and very light. It felt cheap to me. There wasn’t a speck of dust on it. I turned it over. I was surprised to see the words “Made in Occupied Japan.”

“Why these?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” my father said. “Gramp had a couple of them around when I was a kid. They caught my attention somehow. I’d snatch one every now and again from some house, kept them in a cache hole in one of the crawl spaces. For the last couple of years I’ve been hunting through antiques shops. Gives me something to do with myself.”

“Why keep them out here? Why not bring them into the house?”

He shrugged. “They’re not really for show. They’re just for me. I like looking at them. They’re something delicate made during a terrible time.”

He sounded a little embarrassed, like he expected me to think less of him.

“Tell me about them,” I said.

“Nothing too interesting to tell. They were produced by U.S. forces from ’45 to around early ’52, at the end of the occupation. It was a short production period so these pieces are fairly scarce. The bisque figures are less common than the porcelain, and usually they’re of higher quality. You saw the import stamp on the bottom. They were all required to have the ‘Made in Occupied Japan’ or just ‘Occupied Japan’ mark.”

“How valuable are they?” I asked.

“Depends on the individual piece,” he said. “Piano babies can range from twenty-five to a hundred dollars. Toby mugs from, say, ten to maybe eighty-five dollars. There’s a couple of shops out in Southampton that really try to gouge you. Salt-and-pepper shakers list for up to maybe forty dollars a pair.”

I didn’t know what a piano baby or a Toby mug might be, but my father was actually excited to be talking about the figurines, so I let him go on. I’d imagined they must be expensive antiques worth in the thousands. To hear him price them at ten or twenty ›

He went on about the salt-and-pepper shakers, poodles, boy with begging dog, boy with fish on line, girl holding flower, and how thousands of pieces had been copied in European styles. I wasn’t really listening. I was watching him. He looked happy and animated. There wasn’t much in the world for him to be buoyant about, so I was glad he had this.

My father was too short to wipe down the top few inches of the case, so I did it for him. When I was finished I stared at my reflection and watched the man behind me. It was the only way I could meet his eyes.

“Dad,” I said.

There was something in my voice that warned him. I turned and watched as his shoulders hitched. He cocked his head slightly. I knew his body language like I knew my own. He was setting his resolve, waiting for the pain. I waited too, for the confidence to ask the question. It took time to find it.

“Why did you boost Kimmy’s place?”

“I didn’t boost it,” he said.

“You went there.”

“Yes.”

“And you were caught.”

He almost smiled. “Yeah.”

My old man rarely did anything that got under my skin, but that smile did it. I threw down the dust rag. I took a step toward him. My blood surged and I got up close, in his face, thinking, Am I about to hit my father? Is it possible I can do that? If I can do that, then he could watch me making love to a woman through her window.

“You had to have wanted to be caught. You’re too good otherwise.”

His lips slid into a self-effacing grin. It only masked the truth. “I’m getting old.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Do you really want one, Terry?” he asked.

“For Christ’s sake, yes.”

The grin dropped. His eyes filled with emotion. It was something I wasn’t quite prepared to see. A quiver of fear went through me and I was suddenly sorry I’d decided to face him at all.

His shoulders slumped again, and he walked to the worktable and sat heavily on the stool there. “I heard Kimmy had a baby. I wanted to see her.”

“Why?”

His face tightened. “I’ve got to explain everything to you?” There was a hint of anger in his voice. When I was a kid, that used to terrify me. Now it was even worse. “You leaving us… and Collie about to die… it’s got me… I’ve been… been-”

He couldn’t put it into words. He hit the wall. It had been so long since he’d opened up about anything that I could see the confusion and fear in his expression as he tried to talk. His eyes shifted back to his figurines as if they helped to ground him.

I wanted to put a hand on his shoulder, perhaps even hug him. But that would be too much. It would overpower him. It would suffocate him. I waited in silence with him, and when the silence got to be too much I said, “Go on, Dad.”

“I always thought I’d have grandkids. I’ve been thinking about that some lately. Kimmy… I thought when she got preg anဆnant that…” He drifted to a close, his thumbs brushing across his fingertips like he was getting ready to jug a safe.

“You knew about that?” I asked.

“How stupid do you think we are? Of course we knew. She was family. The baby-” He regained some composure. “Anyway, I’d been thinking about her and the kid she and Chub had. I just wanted to see her.”

“You could’ve knocked on the door.”

“No, I couldn’t have. Anyway, the little girl kicked off her blanket. I pulled it back over her. Stood there a few seconds too long, Chub caught me in the room. He was understandably… uh, irritated and called the cops. Kimmy tried to talk him out of it but it was too late. So I got hauled in. Chub dropped the charges an hour later. I played like I was getting senile and walked in to the wrong house. It was an easy sell, what with Gramp. So there it is.”

He hadn’t told me because I’d asked, I knew. It had been something inside him that needed out. Now that it was, he didn’t look angry or indignant. He hadn’t been looking for any kind of forgiveness or absolution from me. He’d only explained himself because he’d wanted to.

I did put my hand on his shoulder then, for an instant, and then walked back into the house.

I helped my mother feed my grandfather his lunch. I’d just managed to get the last forkful of chicken salad down his throat when a news flash broke in on his cartoons. Instead of his chin dropping, he lifted his head a little higher, his eyes dark and alert. Vicky was on the scene at the park. She looked gorgeous and smiled endearingly.

Cara Clarke’s body had been discovered hanging from a tree in the same location where her sister Rebecca’s strangled corpse had been found five years earlier.

They put up a photo of Collie. We looked like twins.

26

The crime scene was a quiet bedlam. Hundreds of people had turned out to stand behind the police lines and watch the cops working the scene for evidence and taking photos of Cara Clarke’s body. Some were on their knees weeping. A lot of them were praying. Flowers were already on display. They’d stack them up on the spot for years to come.

Vicky and her film crew were still covering the story. I made sure she didn’t spot me, or she would have beelined for me. Gilmore walked past twice, looking angry and in command. I tried to get his attention. We had to talk.

The heat was going to come down on me now. After five years away, I return home, visit my brother twice in prison, and now the sister of one of the women he’d been convicted of murdering was dead in almost the same way.

I tried to imagine what could have happened. The reports said she’d been hanged. They were playing up the fact that she was on antidepressants, and they hadn’t even found her extra stash or the stolen scrips yet. A lot of trauma victims tended to revisit the scene where they’d lost a loved one to commit suicide. Psychiatrists were on camera, discussing the rise in teen suicide.

I stepped up to one of the uniforms standing guard around the scene. I said, “Tell Gilmore that Terry Rand is here.”

“Detective Gilmore is extremely busy right noweme cam d, sir.”

“I have information he’ll want to hear.”

The guy actually sighed. I didn’t blame him. They were going to be getting hundreds of tips an hour from all over the place. “Of course, sir. We’ll be happy to take your statement. Simply line up to the left, please. Someone will be with you shortly.”

“It’s important and it’s real.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Seriously, don’t brush me off. He needs to hear this, and he needs to hear it now.”

“Line up to the left. Or you’re welcome to come down to the station, sir.”

I slipped under the crime-scene tape. It was a bold move. Five cops descended on me in an instant. They wrestled me back, saying, “Sir, sir, please, you are not allowed on this side of the tape!”

“Let me talk to Gilmore. My name is Terry Rand. He’ll want to hear this.”

The disturbance caught Gilmore’s attention. He came over. The other police officers dispersed. He shook his head at me. “Terrier, today you’re just being a pain in the ass. If this is about that nonsense with your brother, I’m going to give profound consideration to running you in.”

“Is this your case?”

“For the moment it’s everybody’s case.”

“Let me spill what I know. Then you decide.”

“Okay, but make it fast.”

I told him the truth. All of it. Starting with me watching the Clarke house, creeping the place, getting caught by Cara, staring down the.45. If I caught another beating for it, that was fine by me. I was used to pissing blood. I was less accustomed to murder.

He listened intently. His little grin dropped from his face, but his lips were still busy, curling and uncurling. He looked at me and his expression shifted into earnest worry. I knew what he was thinking. That maybe I had snuffed Cara in order to help my brother. That this was my confession. I held his gaze. I thought he might arrest me on the spot. I was ready to lie on my belly again and put my hands behind my head.

“Let’s go talk in my car,” he said. “I want to hear you repeat everything you just told me. Everything.”

“In your car?”

“In my car. Come on, Terry.”

He should’ve dragged me to the precinct and gotten me on video. He was cutting me some slack, but he should’ve known better. We marched over to where his car was parked on the lawn. I didn’t want to see Cara’s corpse, but I couldn’t help staring. Forensics was still working on her, so they couldn’t cover her up yet. Her face had gone an ashen gray, and her protruding tongue looked exceptionally pink against her darkened chin. Her eyes were only half open but had bulged forward from the sockets. I stifled a groan. I was probably acting very suspicious. I was probably sealing my own doom.

He said, “In back.” We both got in the back, and I kept looking at the police crawling all over the area. Forensics was working on the tree limb, taking photos, checking the scuffs on the bark. Cara Clarke had been tall, nearly six foot, the branch was fairly low. It wouldn’t have been difficult for a strong man to heft her up and make it look like she x20had hanged herself. I couldn’t spot anything that Cara might have leaped from, but she could have conceivably climbed onto the branch herself.

“How was she done?” I asked.

“Hanged.”

“They said that on the news. But how?”

“Terry, I can’t talk about that with you.”

“I might be able to help.”

A squall filled Gilmore’s face. “How in the hell are you going to do that?”

I saw several thoughts whip through his eyes. He thought about grilling me. He thought about giving me friendly advice to get out of town. He thought about raiding the Rand house and seeing if there might be something around to implicate me in the girl’s murder. He was an almost-bent cop. That meant he picked and chose when he’d cross the line and when he wouldn’t. You never knew when he might go by the book and when he might not.

Surprisingly, he settled on simply answering my original question. “A nylon cord, the kind used to tie dock cushions and bumpers to the sides of boats.”

“Does her father own a boat?” I asked.

“Yes. A twenty-four-foot Wellcraft cuddy. Keeps it docked at a marina but apparently hasn’t taken it out in years.”

“Cord in the garage?”

“We’re not discussing this further.”

I thought of Sharon, the youngest sister, who would now be coddled obsessively by her parents. They were going to hold her close but not close enough, because the ghosts of her sisters were always going to get more attention.

“Did you find the.45?” I asked. “Or any gun? She was tough. She knew how to fire a gun. Check her hands for gunpowder residue.”

“I don’t need a career thief to teach me how to do the job of a police officer. She didn’t pull the trigger on you. You managed to talk your way out of it.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to talk her into showing up here. Was she done on the spot or strangled elsewhere and left here?”

Gilmore snapped his fingers under my nose. His expression had hardened. His eyes weren’t full of sadness anymore, they were like shale. “Focus now, Terrier. You don’t ask the questions. You answer them. You assure me of your sincerity and maybe I won’t throw you in jail tonight. Or maybe I will. Did you have anything at all to do with this?”

“No. How long’s she been dead?”

“Get out and go home.”

“Tell me, all right?”

He turned away for a moment, and when he turned back he stared deeply into my face, trying to read whether I was someone he could trust. I wasn’t, of course, but he was still giving me leeway. I knew why. On some level he was acting like I was his younger brother, the punk always getting his nose dirty but who was forgiven for it. He looked away again, and when he faced me I could see that he’d come to a decision.

“Early this morning,” he said. “And just so I know, Terrier, where were you this morning?”

I didn’t want to drag Eve Drayton into this but there was no choice. I told him about Eve and even my father’s figurine. Hcollecting, but I left out the bit about Higgins. Gilmore nodded.

“Your old man, he likes his Toby mugs.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“He’s showed them to me before. Now, give me the names of all the antidepressants again and exactly where I can find them in her room.”

I told him about the false outlet and the five-inch-deep cubbyhole.

Gilmore nodded. “She only had legal prescriptions for the Zoloft and Valium. All of those others, in combination-self-medicating on stolen pills, maybe expired-who the hell knows how someone will react with all of that in their system.”

“So you think she really offed herself?” I asked.

“That’s what it looks like so far,” he said.

“I don’t think she would do it.”

He frowned at me, his face mottled with emotion. “How do you know?”

“I just feel it.”

“You met her for what? All of fifteen minutes?”

“It was enough,” I said.

He scoffed. He seemed to take a dim kind of pleasure in schooling me on the realities of the world. “No, it’s not. Twenty years isn’t enough for you to really know someone, or do I need to remind you of that?”

I held my hands up in a gesture that might have been anger or helplessness. “No, you don’t.”

“She was a screwed-up kid taking powerful meds in dangerous amounts. With all the renewed coverage on the case of her sister’s murder, she was probably hurting worse than ever. And you showing up in the middle of her bedroom couldn’t have helped any.”

“Listen to me, she was sharp, she was on the ball, she-”

“You don’t know a thing, Terrier. Now go home. Don’t mention any of this to your journalist girlfriend or I’ll-”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“-pull you in on obstruction. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then go.”

I got out. I walked toward the crime-scene tape. I glanced back at Cara. Figures in blue uniforms and white gloves worked over her excitedly. Who had iced her? Why now? I thought, My Christ, has he been watching me? Is he following me? Is he that close even now? Her dead eyes were aimed in my direction.

27

I headed back to my car. I sat heavily behind the wheel. I scanned the faces in the crowd. The only one I recognized in the area was Gilmore’s.

Is he that close even now?

The dead girl continued to watch me. My body was a little ahead of my mind. I glanced in the rearview and saw that my face was pale.

I imagined Gilmore sitting with my father, playing cards with my uncles, being friendly with my brother. I saw the two of them out at the Elbow Re? &nd eve tQoom together, sharing stories, frustrations, fears. I thought of him opening up to Collie about his marital troubles. Gilmore had told me, Anytime you get too curious about what was going on in his head, remember where that kind of thinking leads. Maybe he’d gotten close enough that the underneath had swallowed him too.

My father had said, He’s got too much time on his hands. I don’t know what he does with it all.

I gripped the steering wheel, my thoughts burning. I tried to turn myself away from what I was thinking, but I couldn’t.

He’d tracked me to the Elbow Room. He hadn’t worked the cases, he’d told me, but he’d looked into them. But what if he was already familiar with them? The whores, the drug addicts, the women presumably murdered by their boyfriends. Gilmore would know exactly what to do to make those cases look like accidents or suicides. He’d know how to plant evidence to point at a husband or a pimp.

I shook my head to shake the questions off or to line the pieces up in place. Was that why his wife had left him? After he’d killed Rebecca Clarke in the park, did she know her husband had gone off the big ledge?

I thought about Gilmore wanting to become a part of my family and what that might actually mean. What if he’d been following Collie? He was always around, always in our business. He’d spent so much time projecting that big-brother vibe that I was starting to pick up on it.

Except my big brother was insane.

Gilmore could’ve been shadowing Collie around that night. He could’ve sensed what was going to happen. He was going to lose his wife and kids. He was already heading out onto the edge.

I said the name once out loud. “Gilmore.”

Christ, it was crazy. I shook my head again. Collie had me so twisted up I didn’t know what to think anymore. Gilmore. Was it possible? Why was I wasting time even considering it?

My cell phone rang. I’d never heard it ring before and it took me a second to figure out which button to push to answer.

“Hello?”

“You heard about Cara Clarke?” Lin asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you really believe that I’m killing those girls in an effort to somehow help your brother?”

“No,” I said.

She let out a deep breath. “Then you accept there’s a murderer out there?”

“No,” I said. “I’m still not sure about that.”

“What? Why not?”

I wondered if I should mention Gilmore. But I wasn’t sure of a damn thing. “It looks like Cara Clarke committed suicide.”

“That’s just the killer covering his tracks and obscuring the facts!”

“Maybe,” I said. And again, “Maybe. But you don’t know for sure.”

I could hear the tremor in her voice. “But it’s-it’s so-”

“Don’t say ‘obvious,’ Lin. Nothing about this is conclusive.”

“Will you go to the police anyway?” she asked.

“I already have,” I said.

“Do you want my files? Something here might help them.”

“They’ve already gone through your files, right? They’ve already written you off as a nut. I might stop by to go through them again. I’ll call you if I learn anything more.”

The anger and disappointment seemed to have tightened her mouth. She could barely get the words out. “Thank you, Terry.”

I snapped my phone shut, sat in my car, and watched the mob thin as the cop cars came and went. I kept thinking I should have done something differently. Cara had been a kid in pain and I could’ve reached out to her more. I could have advised her better. The same was true about my own sister. I needed to watch over her more carefully. I couldn’t make the same mistake again.

Gilmore.

I’d memorized his address from the rent receipt in his desk at the precinct. I thought of Gilmore working my kidneys, full of fury but trying to control it. Hating me, maybe the same way that Collie did. A man on the edge who’d been dipping his toe into bloody puddles.

I drove over to the complex. It was nicer than I remembered, with a large open court full of flowers and trimmed hedges. He had a one-bedroom corner apartment. There were three locks on the door, looked like two of them were fairly fresh. Did that prove he had something to hide? Gilmore should know that putting in your own locks often made it easier for someone to break in. Locksmiths got sloppy, didn’t cut out the perfectly sized holes for the latches and bolts. The work sometimes loosened the door in its frame, giving a little extra play in the setting. There was no one around. I felt strangely calm considering my suspicions. It took me fifty seconds to get through all three locks.

I crept the place. I searched for anything that might tie Gilmore to the Clarkes or the other women. I checked all the obvious and inconspicuous places. I searched for kill trophies. I checked his cereal boxes again. No cash, nothing. He’d wised up. He wouldn’t keep money around the place anymore. So where was the extra cash that he made off Danny Thompson? Was he flying straighter now or did he have a secure lockbox someplace?

He didn’t take his work home with him. There were no files, no paperwork. I went through his computer and discovered nothing encrypted. All I found were photo albums of his kids, hundreds of pictures of better times with them and his wife at the beach, trick-or-treating, opening Christmas presents. I found the photos that my old man had taken of Gilmore’s daughters, the two of them standing near their mother’s car, as if waiting to be driven to school. What did that say about Gilmore? Was he obsessing over his kids? Over girls or women in general? And what the hell did it say about my father? Was it as creepy as it seemed? Or was it just further proof that lonely men with too much time on their hands will do strange things to alleviate their average sorrows?

It wasn’t hard to push a good man off the big ledge. It happened every day. Heartbreak could make you a murderer. So could losing your job, drugs, or having one beer too many. Or maybe nothing at all, like Collie kept saying.

An hour after I’d entered, I relocked his door and got back to my car. I phoned information and got the number for the television station where Eve and Vicky worked. It took me ten minutes to wade through the menu and finally get Eve. She answered on the first ring.

“You’ve heard about Cara Clarke?” I asked.

She wasn’t someone hisnwho needed the quiet hellos and the after-sex small talk. I wondered if I did, if I normally would want it if I hadn’t just seen the body of a murdered teenage girl.

“Vicky’s been on scene,” Eve said. “We’re busy here now, Terry. Your brother’s story was big before, but now-”

“Off the charts.”

“Yes.”

I had difficulty saying it. “I need your help.”

“Anything,” she said.

“In exchange for an in-depth on-camera interview, right?”

“No, Terry. I know you’d probably agree to sit for one, but it would be a lie. I’m a professional but not a shrew. Hopefully we’re at least a few steps along the road to being friends. So what can I do to help?”

“The cop I mentioned. His name is Detective Gilmore.”

I could hear her perk up in her seat. In the background there was a din of voices, the sound of a lot of activity. I wondered what other kind of fallout Cara’s death would bring.

“You said you still needed him. That you didn’t want me to do an exposé.”

“I just want you to dig. Find out what you can about him.”

“Why?”

Because, I nearly said, my brother is manipulating me into being suspicious of everyone, and it’s making me as crazy as he is.

“A screwy hunch. It’s probably nothing, but I’ve got a gut feeling I can’t shake loose.”

“And what am I looking for?”

“I’m not certain. See if his jacket has gotten sketchy in any way over the last five years. If there’ve been any off-duty collars in places where he shouldn’t be. If there’s been any kind of internal investigation into him. If he’s had a psych evaluation.”

I could tell that she held the phone a little tighter to her lips, got herself away from the noise of the newsroom. Now there was something like concern in her voice. “You suspect him of something. What is it?”

“First let me know if anything pans out, then I’ll fill you in if I can.”

“You ask a lot,” she said.

“Everyone does.”

“Give me a couple of hours.”

I disconnected. I had to keep moving. I was close to the address that had been on Butch’s suspended driver’s license. I had to keep an eye on the punk and his crew and see if Dale needed something more than a butterfly knife to protect herself. I had to see who his connections were.

It was a nice house, obviously his parents’ place. His Chevy wasn’t around. I rang the bell, and when his mother answered I told her that I was a high school buddy of Joe’s and wanted to catch up on old times. I figured she wouldn’t call him “Butch.”

Despite the gray streak and a few extra years, I was young enough to look like we’d run together. I turned on my most winning smile. She looked at me like she knew I was lying but that everyone who hung around her son lied to her. Her face went hard and drained of all interest and concern. She told me he hadn’t been livin="jAg at home for some time and shut the door in my face.

Next stop was the Fifth Amendment. Butch wasn’t around. Nobody knew where he might be. Danny was holding court with his crew in their usual spot. A lot of fat cats with lit cigars were rolling their sleeves up. It looked like a big poker game was on the agenda for later tonight. Maybe someone had Butch out picking up some fresh baked goods. I split.

From the road I phoned the house, hoping to talk to my sister. My father answered and put Dale on.

“Where’s Butch?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I wanted to ask him something.”

“What?”

“What to get you for your birthday.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Where is he?”

“I’m not pregnant. You don’t have to beat him up. And he didn’t defile me either. I wasn’t a virgin when I met him, you know.”

Some things men weren’t meant to imagine, and a sister’s first time was one of them. “Shut up! Christ! Tell me where he is.”

“No,” she said. “And thank you for the knife.” Then I heard her turn on her blow dryer and she hung up.

I staked out my own house and parked down the street, mostly hidden by a curtain of brush. Dale fixing her hair meant she’d be heading out soon.

Butch picked her up around seven o’clock and I tagged along. There wasn’t much need. I figured they’d be heading over to the lake. Butch parked pretty much in the same spot as before. They reenacted everything that they’d done the other night, except that Butch seemed to be drinking a lot more. Maybe the pressure of the heist was getting to him.

I didn’t spot anyone. I kept the lights off and the music low and I tried not to let myself drift too much, but I couldn’t help it. I kept thinking that I could’ve saved Cara Clarke somehow. I didn’t know how, but I had botched the job. Maybe I never should have visited her. Maybe I had led the killer to her door. Maybe I had brought the underneath along with me and she’d gotten swept up in it too.

I stared at the headlights of the kids’ cars and watched them dancing and drinking in the firelight until it felt like my eyes were full of splinters. Maybe this was the beginning of Alzheimer’s.

It was a school night and my sister left early enough to make my mother only moderately unhappy. Butch wove around on the road a little and kept crossing the center line. They parked in front of our house and argued for a few minutes, maybe about his drinking, and then made out for a while. Then Butch split.

He was knocking back beers as he drove home. I followed. I wanted to drop a dime on him for drunk driving with my sister in the car, the prick. He pulled into a low-class apartment complex in Wyandanch known for its drug market. I watched him weave up the sidewalk. I sat out in front and waited for ten minutes, then I went to have a look.

I couldn’t even say I crept his place. The lock was broken and his front door was halfway open. The stink of rotting food made me gag.

Butch was passed out on the couch. He had a three-inch doobie still burning in an ashtray. His pad was a catastrophe. Empty beer cans and old bags of Chinese takeout, ribs, burgers, wer

There wasn’t much to the douche. He had a.22 with a warped front sight tucked down between the couch cushions where he slept. He had a new wallet. It had someone else’s ID and about a hundred bucks in it. The idiot had juked somebody but hadn’t tossed the driver’s license. Maybe he thought he could pass himself off as Carlos Ortiz Arroyo.

Right out in the open, scrawled on a grease-soaked pizza box, were the name and number of Stan Herbert. He was a fairly small-time fence who took the dirty items nobody else wanted. If you boosted a church, then you brought the silver chalice to Stan. Butch and his string were relying on the wrong guy to move their jewelry. Either Butch was running the heist into the ground or they were all a bunch of amateurs or morons. Danny would want a fat hunk off the top and there wasn’t going to be much cheese left for the rest of them. Even if they got away with it, they weren’t going to want to give out such a big cut. That would put them on the wrong end with the Thompson crew. They were as good as caught or dead. The cops would sniff out Dale. Whether she was involved or not, it would go bad for her just because of the Rand name.

Butch was a dim bulb. I wasn’t going to be able to scare him into laying off the heist. I wasn’t going to be able to talk any sense into him.

Five men in all. I wondered if he’d picked up his fifth yet or if he was still looking. A family-owned jewelry store. Small shop, a lot of employees. Four minutes inside. I tried narrowing down which shop it might be, but there was no way. I looked over at Butch on the couch and tried to see what my sister saw in him. She could do much better. If she went for bad boys she could still go for smarter. Maybe she just dug the Chevy.

As I was heading home, my phone rang again. The noise of it startled me. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to carrying a cell and I couldn’t wait to get rid of it as soon as I could. When that might be I had no idea. Maybe as soon as Collie was dead. Since I was still doing a lot of creeping, I thought maybe I should set the fucker on vibrate.

“Hello?”

“We’ve got a little trouble, Terry,” Wes said. “And don’t bother asking me how I got this number, it’s my goddamn phone. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist juking me.”

“Taking a burner isn’t juking you, Wes. What’s the trouble? Something with my sister?”

“No,” he said. “Your uncles are here at the Fifth.”

“Ah, shit. The poker game.”

“Right. They just walked in a few minutes ago. You’re the one who put it in Mr. Thompson’s head that when Mal and Grey are together they’re cheating. He said you mentioned cross chatter and keeping the marks distracted.”

“What a fucking idiot I am.”

“If you get here fast, maybe we can calm the situation before anything starts.”

“Danny throwing his weight around?”

“No. It’s all nice and mellow so far. But you know Mr. Thompson holds a grudge.”

“How much have they won so far?”

“Nothing. Nobody’s much ahead yet.”

Thatȁhon9;s how it would start. My uncles were just loosening up a little. They’d run the hands evenly for a while. Take a pot or two and then feed a couple back to the other players. The next step was to start losing slightly, then more heavily. After they’d gotten five or six grand deep, the others would get in a good mood and grow even sloppier, and then my uncles would come in with the serious rips and finish the fat cats off fast.

“I’ll be there in five minutes. But tell me something else first.”

“What is it?”

“How deep is Gilmore into Danny’s pocket?”

I could almost hear Wes’s stomach rumbling, the acid splashing around. “You don’t need to know things like that, Terry.”

“I really do, Wes. Has he ever pulled a trigger for you?”

“What?” Wes’s voice tightened, and he put some frost into it. “Terry, I don’t understand what’s been going on with you, but this isn’t the kind of thing we should be talking about.”

“Is that a yes, then?”

“Doesn’t the guy eat at your house and drink beer with your father? I thought you knew him.”

“I thought I did too, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“There’s a lot of that going around. Hurry the fuck up and get here, would you?”

It took me ten minutes. A sign on the front door said PRIVATE PARTY TONIGHT. That had always been Big Dan’s euphemism for a major game. It just proved that Danny was still walking in his father’s shadow, afraid to strike off on his own.

I walked in anyway. I started over to Danny’s table, and one of his soldiers stepped up and blocked me. Danny watched it happen but kept me waiting. Wes saw it too and knew he had to let the boss throw his weight around a little. A few minutes went by. I tried hard to be patient.

Danny had a new suit on, one that looked a couple of sizes larger and fit him more comfortably. His paunch was well hidden. He’d used some kind of thickening gel to give his hair more texture. He still couldn’t keep from thumbing back his widow’s peak.

Mal had one of his stogies lit. He smoked it without ever pulling it from his mouth. Just sucked air through his teeth and then blew smoke out one side of his mouth. In front of him was either a Bloody Mary or a glass of tomato juice, garnished with a stick of celery.

Grey had stopped off at home at some point and now wore a charcoal suit and a power tie. If possible, he looked even sharper than he had last night. He wore his best jewelry. Rolex watch, diamond pinkie ring, a gold bracelet. He said it all served as distraction and decoy. The more flash you wore, the more chance that someone was looking at the shine and not at your four-card pull. It went counter to everything my father had taught me. You wore nothing on your hands so that no one looked at your hands. Both methods seemed to work pretty well.

The fat cats appeared to be having fun. I recognized two of them as mob guys who used to hang around with Big Dan. Both from Chicago, in town for a few days doing business. I suspected Mal was right again. The Chi syndicate was here pulling the Thompson crew apart and stealing their business.

Danny’s boys hung close but not too close. The mook in front of me had on an enthusiastic expression like he was daem"cring me to try to run around him. I thought about picking up a chair and cracking him across the face, but I thought that probably wasn’t the best way to proceed. I was there to keep things from getting out of hand, not to start a riot on my own. I waited.

Finally Danny glanced up from his cards and waved me over with two fingers. The soldier moved aside and a path was cleared to the table.

“What, no dog this time?” Danny asked. “Figured you had him trained to read cards and bark out the suits. Arf arf! Queen of diamonds! Woof woof woof! Nine of clubs!”

His boys laughed because they had to. The Chi guys went along with it and smiled even though they had no clue.

My uncles knew exactly why I was there. Mal seemed a little disturbed but Grey was curious, his eyes a bit hot, wondering how this would all play out. He grinned at me and gave me a nearly invisible head wag. He wasn’t telling me not to join in. He was saying, You’ve got balls, kid, getting laid last night must’ve really fired you up to jump back into the game.

There was an empty chair on Danny’s right. I swung it around and squeezed in on his left.

“So deal me in,” I said.

“You need ten g’s to join us.”

Like his father, Danny didn’t bother speaking in code the way some of the other outfit guys did. They would’ve said ten bags of cement or ten slices of bacon or something equally stupid. Big Dan didn’t believe in speaking stupid in his own place, even if the feds were tapping him. Danny was following suit.

“My uncles will spot me,” I said.

“Sure,” Grey said. He gave me the wag again. His eyes were even brighter. He was enjoying himself. He paid ten grand, collected the chips, and set them in front of me. They didn’t amount to nearly as much as I would’ve thought.

Danny’s dealer did have a three-card bottom drag, just like Mal had said. The guy kept folding the aces back into the deck to feed Danny. It didn’t mean anything to Mal or Grey. I saw Mal cut the deck once and knew he’d snapped a face card out and palmed it. I had to fight to stay in the game, though. I sat next to Danny so that I could pull his discards and load myself up. I had wide pockets and kept them stuffed with at least one card each. Danny had a penchant for going for flushes. It was dumb, but it made it easy for me to cheat on his behalf. Once I knew what he was after, I could aim a suit in his direction.

Grey and Mal both had the minutest of tells. No one else would be able to pick up on them, but I could see exactly when my uncles were about to squeeze a pot or feed each other cards. Their cross chatter distracted the others, but I tuned it out. I managed to upset their juke and steal some cards they needed along the way. I fed the pot when they wanted to go light and I threw in my cards when I shouldn’t have.

I was down a couple of grand, which wasn’t so bad considering how little I cared about my own hands. I wasn’t nearly the card manipulator my uncles were. Not even as good a player as a couple of the fat cats. But I was lucky during the game. I managed to swing some tight inside straights and pulled a full house twice on the last card.

Danny had been worried that with three Rands in the game he and his friends would be cut to ribbons. Instead, he was up, with the Chi guys down. I think it made him feel secure, like he was getting back at them a litmysctle, showing them that, like his father before him, he could be in charge and take their money whenever he wanted.

Every now and then the conversation would get risque and someone would tell a dirty joke and Grey and Mal would feed into it like it was the funniest thing ever. Mal’s heavy laughter resounded across the Fifth and made heads turn. The girls kept coming around with drinks and taking food orders. I knew they were shills who would be glancing at our cards and giving Danny the information with coy body language. Wes kept mostly clear of the scene, popping over only every once in a while to make sure nobody was getting too badly bent out of shape. He was a good man to have around. I wondered how many times he’d kept Danny from going to war.

My nerves were tight. I tried not to make eye contact with my uncles. Grey still seemed to be having a good time, talking women, talking about the best places in Chi to eat, to score, to shack up. Mal didn’t talk much when he wasn’t chattering with Grey. He looked too intimidating. No one ever wanted to start a conversation with him.

It was never foremost about the money for them, just the skill of working the cards. They had as good a time fighting me for control of each hand as they would have had scooping in the pot.

About three hours in, the effort started to put a real strain on me. It was exceedingly difficult trying to keep everything as even as possible, to shield Danny from my uncles’ maneuvers. I wasn’t going to be able to hack it for much longer. Grey knew it. He nodded to me, a sign of respect.

I’d done my part. Danny still kept giving Mal the stink eye from time to time. Maybe he was showing off. It made sense. If he wanted to look hard in front of the Chi syndicate, he would’ve picked the biggest, meanest-looking guy in the room. Every so often he’d try to embarrass us the same way the guard at the prison had, by saying our entire names. “Malamute, you want another celery stick or are you going to step up to carrots now? Greyhound, I like your aftershave, reminds me of a good time I spent in a Parisian whorehouse when I was seventeen.” The Chi boys were used to fucked-up names and didn’t cut a grin. Their current boss was Nicky D’Amico, who’d been nicknamed “No Nose” because he suffered from asthma.

I’d been in the game long enough. If anyone’s luck changed too radically at this point, it would look extremely suspicious. Mal and Grey weren’t going to be able to juke Danny or the mob tonight. I wasn’t sure what I’d accomplished really. I’d screwed my uncles’ score. They weren’t going to like it. They were going to come right back here during the next big game and steal another forty grand, minimum. Maybe more to make up for their loss tonight. I’d bought a little time and pissed them off in the process.

It was after midnight. I cashed out. I’d won an extra two hundred bucks and left it as a tip for the waitresses.

Danny said, “Calling it quits?”

“I know better than to push my luck.”

“I’m not sure about that, Terrier. There’s a lot of things I might say about you. But that you know when to fold probably isn’t one of them.”

“I do tonight.”

I stood. I gave a nod around to the other players. Mal and Grey eyed me and I knew how it would go down. They’d play another hour, maybe win a grand or two each, and then fold up. I was going to get an earful.

ȍ lR1C;Maybe that’s good then,” Danny said. He thumbed his widow’s peak, took a swig of his drink, and wiped his face down with a cocktail napkin. I got the feeling he was working his way up to saying something that wasn’t going to be nice. I thought I should scram fast.

“Right. Have a good night, Danny.”

“So tell me, Terry. Did you snuff her?”

I froze. I knew he was talking about Cara Clarke. His timing was bad but he was asserting himself again. Mal and Grey both stared at him like they wanted to give him a smack. Everyone had heard the news. It was on everybody’s mind.

Who’s the guy who’d come home after five years and talked to his mass-murderer brother right before one of the victims’ sisters had been snuffed in the same place and pretty much in the same way, hmm?

I wondered if I should answer. I wondered if I might wind up with a little more cachet with these guys if I kept them guessing.

But I suppose I needed to clear the air. “No.”

“Sure about that?”

“Is that the question, Danny? If I’m sure I didn’t ice the girl?”

“Just thought I’d ask.”

“Looking out for the community now, is that it? You’re a real padrone, huh? Worried about your neighbors’ daughters?”

“You laughing at me?”

Wes had a lot of guts. He tried to edge between Danny and me. He wasn’t afraid to get in the middle of things and he was smart enough to know when he had time to ease some of the pressure.

He said, “He isn’t laughing, Mr. Thompson. He isn’t even smiling.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Wes. He is. You don’t know him like I do. He’s laughing. He’s smiling.”

I said, “This the way you want to play it, huh, Danny?”

“When I make a play you’ll know it. You got anything to say to that?”

“Sure. Fuck you.”

He banged his fist down on the table. Cards jumped and chips rattled onto the floor and drinks spattered. “I told you already, Terry! Don’t talk that way to me!”

Mal and Grey cashed out. They stood and pressed their chairs back and moved to me. Grey on my left, Mal on my right. Mal balled his hands into fists and let them rest against his legs. Grey put his hands in his jacket pockets and made it seem like he might pull a nickel-plated.38, something that matched his nice suit.

The tension grew. Danny’s boys moved in. A couple had opened their jackets to make it easier to draw from their shoulder holsters. They kept looking to him for orders. Danny did nothing. He sipped his drink some more, let the ice click off his teeth. The Chi guys looked worried. They didn’t want to get caught in the middle of a shoot-out.

I started to say something, I’m not even sure what, and Grey put a hand on one of my shoulders and Mal put a ham hock on my other and they easily turned and shoved me along and followed me out the door.

Once we were in the parking lot, Grey let out a humorless laugh. He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag and said, “Been a while since we’ve been backed up to an alley wall like that ch. I used to think I missed it. I don’t.”

Mal braced me at my car. “You feel like telling me if you were just honing your craft or if there was another reason for that?”

“I was worried that if you juked Danny another forty large that-”

“Thirty-seven.”

“-he might not be so forgiving this time.”

“You see what we have here?” Grey asked. “You see how our nephew looks out for us? This is love. Our boy gets laid last night and suddenly he’s all balls.”

He winked at me and I felt my face flush. “Like I said, I was worried.”

“And that makes it all right?” Mal demanded.

“Say what you want, I did it for you. For us.”

“We’ve been doing this a lot longer than you, kid.”

“Yeah, but Danny doesn’t hold to the same code as his old man.”

Mal frowned, his craggy face falling in on itself like cliffs toppling during an earthquake. “Big Dan once gutted a man because his baked ziti didn’t have enough cheese on it. You’re giving him more credit than he’s due. He had no code. There is no such thing as a code with these people, Terry.”

“All the more reason not to score them.”

“It’s what we do.”

When you got down to it, that was the answer to everything. “I wish you people would all get off that. You’ve all got enough cash to live large for the rest of your lives. Why don’t you relax a little? Go on vacation. Visit Europe.”

He glared at me. “What would we do in Europe?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you would do in Europe!” I shouted. “Why do you have to do anything in Europe?”

“Why are we talking about Europe?” Grey asked. “You planning some kind of score going on over there?”

“No, Christ, there’s no goddamn score. Forget it. Forget I said anything.”

“Sure.” Grey checked his left cuff, brushed a bit of lint off. “Right after you apologize.”

“Apologize? For what?”

“Did you see all the mooks getting ready to yank their guns or did you miss that?”

“I saw it.”

Grey regarded me like he had something important to say but this wasn’t the proper time to say it. It’s how he used to look at me when I had a big date in junior high. He was still grinning. His eyes were still hot. I knew what was going to happen about a second before it did.

His hands were fast and powerful. He slapped me so hard that my eyes filled with a white glare as if lightning had struck in front of me. My ears rang and my head shook so badly that my nose started to bleed.

Mal handed me his handkerchief. They were probably the only two guys in the world who still carried handkerchiefs.

Still, he gave Grey a disapproving glance.

Grey said, “No matter what your reason was, you never ruin another man’s juke. Especially when we’re talking about family. It’s rude, Terry. It’s disrespectful.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“See?” Mal said. “He apologized. I knew we taught him better than that.”

“Of course. He’s our boy.”

Mal squared his shoulders. He drew a fresh cigar from his inside jacket pocket, chewed off the end, and spit it out. He focused on me. “You know anything about who might have offed the sister?”

“Now you’re asking me if I did it?”

“Is that what I said?”

My nose kept bleeding. I couldn’t look either of them in the face, because I was so angry I thought I might actually take a swing at them. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply. “No. I don’t know anything. I talked to Gilmore, though.”

“And what’s he say?” Mal asked.

“Nothing. He told me nothing.”

“He never tells anyone anything, that prick.”

“Collie’s girl,” Grey said. He tightened his tie knot. Even after three hours of high-stakes poker and working the cards, he still looked fresh, not a hair out of place. “The wife. The groupie. He could’ve talked her into it.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“It’s what they do. It’s a fact. Half of them are copycats in the making.”

I wagged my chin. “I’m pretty sure not her.”

Mal looked puzzled. “What girl? Collie’s got a girl? A wife?”

“He got married in prison,” I said.

“Did you tell me that?” He got agitated, moved in close on me. His massive hands came up in a shaky gesture of distress. “Did I know that?”

“I don’t think you did, Uncle Mal.”

“If you mentioned it, then tell me you did. I need to know when I’m being forgetful.”

“I didn’t mention it,” I told him. “You didn’t know about it.”

I almost brought up the fact that I’d crept the Clarke house, my suspicions about Gilmore, my worries about my old man. But I kept thinking, What can they do to help? What’s the point of explaining? These two popping their vitamins. What was added stress going to do to them?

I thought, This is who I am. I am going to become one of these old men. I’ll have nothing. No wife, no children, no family. I’d lost Kimmy. Worse, I’d given her up. And Chub was going to lose her as well, the fucking fool.

Mal sighed. He placed an enormous hand on the back of my neck and pulled me to him in a half hug. “It’s late, let’s go home.”

“I can’t,” I told him. “I have something I need to do.”

28

Nothing had been shifted around in either of Chub’s safes. I sat at his office desk and picked up the phone. “Home” was #1 on his speed dial. I punched the button and wonder#x2Once wee desbeied if Kimmy would answer. I wasn’t sure what the hell I would say if she did. I realized as the line connected that I hadn’t put much thought into this plan.

Chub gave a very tentative “Hello.”

He saw that he was being called by his own garage, after hours. I thought perhaps I should say my name at least, tell him to meet me. But I didn’t. I felt safer in my anonymity. I was afraid of my own best friend. I was a cowardly fuck. I hung up.

It took him fifteen minutes to tear ass over from his house. He was driving a ’64 Shelby Cobra 289 Roadster, another classic muscle car he must’ve restored himself. Some he sold, some he kept.

He was a disciplined planner when it came to getaways, but he didn’t know what to do when entering his own garage that had mysteriously called him and hung up in his face. I watched him standing out there in the dark, wondering which way he should play it. Whether he should come in the back or through one of the bays or just unlock the front door. He finally decided to try the front. He didn’t even bother calling out a hello. He checked his desk, picked up the phone, listened to the dial tone, kept looking around.

“Chub.”

He spun, his left hand going for his back pocket. There was no bulge of a pistol, so he must’ve been packing a blade.

It was stupid of him to carry anything except an automatic with a hair trigger. The only bastards who were likely to come after him were the crews he was working with. Some paranoid mook who wanted to take care of all witnesses, anybody in the know. As soon as Chub laid out the plans, the mook would lever up something small, probably a popgun.22, and go for the head shot. Even if Chub saw it coming, what the hell was he going to do to stop it with just a blade in his hand?

I snapped the lights on.

When he saw it was me he cocked his head, drew a deep breath, and took his hand out of his pocket. A sad grin played across his lips but never fully settled there. He wore an expression that said he should’ve known it was me. He’d been waiting for this. I suppose I was predictable. I was the guy who didn’t have whatever it took to face up to people the normal way. I couldn’t knock on a door. I couldn’t stand by my girl. I couldn’t save my brother. He eyed me but didn’t approach.

“Terry.”

All of the jealousy and anger I felt moved through me second by second like a storm on the open water. It bobbed to the surface and then fell away. A thousand good memories all scrambled through my head. I thought we would have to shake hands. We would have to do that much. I put out my hand and he took it. I moved in a little closer and could feel his heart hammer against my own. He took a step away. As I waited for my anger to return, I realized it was already there.

“How long have you been home?” he asked.

“A few days.”

“Heard on the news about the girl. The sister of the one that-”

“I didn’t do it,” I said.

He gave a puzzled expression. “I never thought you did.”

He was too skilled to let his eyes shift toward the safe. He walked to the front of the desk and leaned against it, facing me, blocking me from the safe. I heard his folded knife thunk against the thick wood. He crossed his arms.

I remembered how he’d walked with a ="1xlight step, almost skipping out of the car and rushing after Scooter, who squealed and playfully tried to run from him. How he’d swept her into his arms and set her on his shoulder and twirled and whirled across the lawn while her fingers brushed the buds of tree branches. The way he had kissed Kimmy and pressed his forehead to hers.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“Collie asked me to come back and I did.”

“Was that all it took? Someone asking?”

“It was more than that,” I admitted.

He nodded, but the tension between us grew. He looked into my face until I turned away. “You ready to talk about it?”

I said nothing.

“You don’t think you owe me that much, Terry?”

There was too much clawing around inside me, like a wild animal wanting out. He shifted and the blade clunked again.

I said, “You once told me that Kimmy… she’d send me up or set me straight. Which is she going to do for you?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

His face was blank. He swallowed thickly. His throat was dry. He knew.

“Give it up, Chub. She deserves better than to watch you get taken down by the cops. Your daughter needs her father.”

He stood and took two steps forward and got nose-to-nose. “This is the first thing you say to me in five years? Out of everything, that’s what you choose to say?”

“It’s the most important thing I can think of.”

His mouth folded into a sneer. “That’s sad, then.”

“Maybe it is.”

“You don’t know shit, Terry.”

“I know they’re doing roadwork out on Vets Highway, and if you send a crew down there they’ll get snagged in traffic and get scooped up.”

He gave a disgusted laugh. “You went through my stuff. I should’ve known. If anyone could find a second safe, it would be you. That’s why you’re in the garage. That’s why you decided to play it this way. You thieves, you think you’ve got a God-given right to stick your nose up everyone’s ass.”

“You’re a thief too, Chub.”

“No, I’m not.”

Maybe he was right. You could look at it that he was just a guy who aided others in pulling their scores, without really getting his hands too dirty. The cops would still give him at least a nickel upstate.

“You’ve got no reason to keep playing the game, Chub.”

“Who the hell do you think you are? What I do is my business.”

“You don’t need the extra cash.”

“You don’t know anything, Terrier. I have my reasons.”

“Unless you’re going to tell me that your little girl has a rare blood disease, then you don’t.”

Chub was on me in a second. He shoved me hard against the wall. He pinned me there with one hand locked on my throat and the other on my right wrist. I didn’t struggle. Sweat dappled his balcidd head.

He said, “You know where I work. You must know where I live. You’ve seen my daughter. You’ve been watching us, haven’t you?” I didn’t confirm or deny. He paused, his face mottled with rage. “Did you know your old man cased my house a few months ago? I woke up and found him talking with Kimmy. Said he was checking up on her. At three in the morning. After breaking in to my house. I should’ve pressed charges and sent him to the joint, but I felt sorry for him. He looked lost.” Chub tightened his grip on me. I started to gag but I still didn’t fight him. “So what happens? You do the same thing to me. Just where the fuck do you people get off?”

I choked out, “It’s time to change.”

It sounded stupid and overwrought even to me. It got another ugly laugh out of him. “You’re telling me that? You? First thing you do when you get back home is fall to type. Just like your brother and uncles and father. You couldn’t wait to break in here, could you? I bet this isn’t even the first time. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

“Chub, I-”

He didn’t let it go, his voice tight and hard. “Haven’t you?”

“Listen to me.”

“Haven’t you, Terrier?”

“Yes.”

He backed away from me and wrapped his arms around his chest as if to hold in his frustration and hate. “Jesus fucking Christ!”

“Listen to me,” I said. “Forget about that.”

“Forget about that?”

“You have a kid. I don’t. Think about Scooter.”

“Scooter?” He was practically screaming. “Who the hell is Scooter?”

“Your girls. Think about your girls. Chub, don’t wreck your life. Don’t you know how easy it is to lose everything? Take it from me.”

His eyes were full of rage and disappointment. He was so hurt and appalled that he couldn’t even look at me anymore.

“Take what from you, Terry?” he asked. “Why don’t you explain? What life lessons have you learned since you abandoned Kimmy? Since you left her to go through the most difficult time of her life all alone? Since you vanished without a word. Guide me with your newfound wisdom. What else do you have to tell me?”

There was nothing else to tell him, nothing further that I could elaborate on or account for. There was no way for me to articulate the all-consuming panic of being trapped in the underneath. The pure crystalline clarity of the terror that had made me run.

I said, “Don’t make my mistakes.” I knew exactly what my brother had meant about making ghosts. It hadn’t been that difficult to figure out. I had understood without wanting to face it.

The night of his spree he was compounding all the failures of his life, sustaining the sins, building the deeper, awful memories that he would carry to the grave with him. The underneath had welcomed him and he’d gone to it. That was the result of all that blood. He had taken his own life without putting a bullet in his head. I said, “Don’t get caught, Chub,” and left.

29

Just as I was about to pull into the parking lot of the Elbow Room, my phone rang. It was Eve. I answered and was surprised at how much I looked forward to hearing her voice.

“It’s late,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you tonight.”

“I work late,” she said. “And talking to contacts on the night shift is the best time to get honest answers from them. They’re bored. They’re just hoping to find an ear they can bend. So I did some digging into your friend Gilmore. He’s under IAD investigation.”

That didn’t surprise me. “For anything in particular?”

“They think he’s tipped off some mob boys about police raids.”

“He has. Anything about his wife? They recently separated. Anything like a restraining order? Abuse?”

Eve paused. I knew she was still wondering how this tied in with my brother, with me. “No, nothing like that, Terry. It appears to be amicable. Neither of them has filed for divorce. Maybe they’re working it out.”

“Anything else? Anything worse?”

“What do you mean by worse?”

“You tell me.”

I could hear her lick her lips. The sound heated me up a little. “You’re worrying me now.”

“Don’t be. I’m probably wasting my time. And yours.”

“Well, there was nothing I could find, and I dug around pretty well. I could pull in some favors, if you like, but that might get me onto Gilmore’s radar. Do you care about that?”

“Yeah, I do. You’ve done enough, Eve. Don’t put any more into this.”

“What were you hoping to find?”

“I wouldn’t say I was hoping to find anything. Thanks, Eve.”

Her voice hardened, but not much. No one liked to pull favors for a one-night stand. “Of course. You can pay me back with dinner sometime.”

I said, “I promise,” and I meant it.

I walked into the Elbow Room and found Flo perched at the bar in the same place as the last time I’d been there. She had lipstick on her teeth and still smelled of Four Roses. She was chatting up a john who stared at her like she was every woman in the world he’d ever hated, from his mother to his first girlfriend to his wife. She didn’t seem to notice his brooding, intense glare. I wondered, Is this the place every guy comes to right before he goes out of his skull and butchers a helpless stranger?

I stepped over to her and snapped a fifty in front of her face. I nodded to an empty corner in back. She whispered a few cooing words to the john, but he didn’t seem to notice. She followed me and put her hand on my ass.

“Hey, honey,” she said, “you got a car in the lot? You look so melancholy, just pining for the one who got away, huh? You won’t even remember her name after me. Let’s go to your car and-”

I turned and she breathed whiskey into my face. “You remember me?”

She didn’t ye201›t. She smiled and placed her hands on my chest and tried to take the money from my grip while humming empty promises. I gripped her by the shoulders and gave her a solid shake. Her expression tightened and her eyes focused.

“Know me yet?” I asked.

“Yeah. The white streak. Like your brother. You have a bad temper too. Buy me a drink.”

I held on to her. Her sweaty skin felt like wet clay. “No, you’re already stewed. You can earn half a C-note by not fucking with me and just answering a couple questions. Then you can get back to your other business, right?”

She looked back at the bar. The john was glaring at her empty seat, like he still saw her, or some other despised woman, sitting there.

She said, “All right, all right, let me go.”

I released her. “You know a cop named Gilmore?”

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

She grinned and showed me her red waxy teeth. “The night he beat the piss out of you.”

“Right. Is he a regular around here?”

“No, nothing like that.” She licked her lips in what she thought was a seductive manner. It made my stomach crash. “Him and a few other cops come around every once in a while. The bar’s pretty close to the precinct. When they do I usually head out the back door. But like I said, it’s not often. Not regular.”

“He ever roust any women?” I asked. “You ever hear complaints about him? Following women? Anything like that?”

“No. What are you going on about? What are you getting at?” She moved for the money again, and this time I let her take the bill and crush it down into her cleavage. She put her hands back on my chest and tried to push me off. “I don’t like talking about cops. I don’t want nothing to do with them.”

“You said you were here the night my brother killed those people and was arrested.”

“Yeah.”

“Was Gilmore here that night? Think hard. And don’t try to bullshit me. There’s no more money to be made, so don’t string me along.”

A disgusted giggle floated up from her chest. “You don’t want bullshit then I’ll tell you I don’t remember. I remember your brother only because of what happened. I don’t know who else was here. I don’t know if Gilmore was around. I know he wasn’t one of the cops who arrested your Collie. I would’ve remembered that. But whether Gilmore was here having a beer, I have no idea. Did you really expect I would? That anyone would?”

It had been a stupid long shot, but it was all I had to play. “Okay, thanks.”

I walked her back to her seat. The john continued to drunkenly glower, lost in his bitter stupor. I took two steps toward the door. The fucking bartenders in this place never seemed to cut anybody off. Flo sat beside the guy and let out a laugh that made the flesh between my shoulder blades crawl. I got the hell out of there.

The drive home went by so fast it almost felt like it didn’t happen. My brain was on autopilot. I drove without thinking, without seeing the road. I couldn’t shake the vision of Gilmore strangling Rebecca Clarke, slowly squeezing the life adeout of her as she choked and gasped, and then five years later coming back to do the same thing to her sister.

I sat in the driveway without realizing I’d pulled in and parked. Maybe it was the slap Grey had given me, maybe it had rattled my brain loose. I put my head down on the steering wheel and started to drift again. I figured I’d better get inside to bed before I woke up on the Cross Bronx Expressway doing ninety-five onto the George Washington Bridge.

I barely got my clothes off before I hit the bed.

I dreamed of Kimmy. I would always dream of Kimmy.

She didn’t want to rush it. We weren’t speeding along. I had called the Montauk Lighthouse and asked a few questions about wedding ceremonies. I had the judge’s name. I knew what paperwork we needed to bring.

We were in the mall, moving past the huge plate-glass window of Fireside Jewelers, when she unlaced her fingers from mine and stopped in her tracks.

She glanced at me and gave a grin. I returned to her side and we stood shoulder-to-shoulder and stared through the window together.

She had her eye on a half-carat diamond bordered by twin sapphires. Not too expensive so far as these things went, but more cash than I’d ever dropped on anything in my life. My fingertips itched.

“I can get it cheaper,” I said.

“You can’t steal an engagement ring.”

“Why not?”

“Is that the question you’re asking me? Why you can’t steal my engagement ring?”

“Nope.”

We stood there for what seemed like a long time. I held her to me. Moments like these, I thought I could go straight. I wanted to offer our children a life, a future, something besides a house full of decades-old loot that nobody wanted. I imagined the ring on her finger. It looked like it would hurt if she brushed it against my back while we were making love.

We stepped inside. She tried the ring on and held it up and I kissed her finger and I kissed the piece of ice. I thought I had just enough cash in my wallet to at least make a down payment. I was wrong. They wanted twice as much. Kimmy reluctantly took the ring off but she remained giddy. I put my hand to her belly. My girl inside wasn’t moving yet.

I reached for her.

Sweat slid onto my lips and I heard voices in the backyard. The taste of salt reminded me of kissing down the length of Kimmy’s back that night while she giggled and eyed me over her shoulder and said, “That’s it, that’s it, worship me like a dirty goddess. Kiss me like I’ll die tonight.” I coughed and thought I should go to the window, I should see who’s out there, but I wanted to return to my girl. I rolled over. I pressed my face into the pillow. The voices stopped and the breeze carried only the scent of storm.