The Lovers

So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away, Turn thou ghost that way, and let me turn this… -JOHN DONNE (1572-1631), “THE EXPIRATION”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I SPENT EACH FRIDAY at the Bear dealing with our biggest distributor, Nappi. The Bear took delivery of beer three times a week, but Nappi accounted for 80 percent of all our taps, so its consignment was a big deal. The Nappi truck always arrived on Fridays, and once the thirty kegs had been checked and stored, and I had paid for the delivery according to the Bear’s COD policy, I would buy the driver lunch on my tab, and we would talk about beer, and his family, and the downturn in the economy.

The Bear had a slightly different yardstick from most bars by which to judge how things were going for its customers. The bar had always been popular with repo men, and we had seen increasing numbers of them parking their trucks in the lot. It wasn’t a job I would have cared to do, but the majority of them were pretty philosophical about it. They could afford to be. They were, with only a couple of exceptions, big, hard men, although the toughest of them, Jake Elms, who was eating a burger and checking his phone at the bar, was only five five and barely tipped the scales at 120 pounds. He was soft-spoken, and I had never heard him swear, but the stories that circulated about him were legendary. He traveled with a mangy terrier in the front of his truck, and kept an aluminum baseball bat in a rack beneath the dashboard. As far as I was aware, he did not own a gun, but that bat had broken some heads in its time, and Jake’s dog was reputed to have the singular talent of being able to grip a man’s testicles in its jaws and then dangle from them, growling, if anyone had the temerity to threaten i Bts curd tog fots beloved owner.

The dog, needless to say, wasn’t allowed in the bar.

“I hate this time of year,” said Nathan, the Nappi driver, as he finished off his wrap and prepared to head out into the cold. “I ought to find me a job down in Florida.”

“You like the heat?”

“No, I don’t much care for it. But this-” He gestured at the world beyond the dark cocoon of the Bear as he shrugged on his coat. “They can call it spring, but it’s not. This is still the dead of winter.”

He was right. There were only three seasons in this place, or so it seemed: winter, summer, and fall. There was no spring. Already, it was the middle of February, yet there were no real signs of returning life, no hints of renewal. The streets of the city were fortified with ramparts of snow and ice, the wider sidewalks etched with the treads of the machines that had cleared them over and over. True, the worst of the snow had departed, but in its place had come freezing rain and the dread siege of lingering cold, augmented at times by high winds, but, even in its stillest form, capable of turning ears and noses and fingertips raw. Sheltered streets were caked with patches of ice, some visible and some not. Those that sloped upward from Commercial into the Old Port were treacherous to tackle without grips on one’s soles, and the cobblestone paving, so beloved of the tourists, did nothing to make the ascent any less hazardous. The task of sweeping the floors of bars and restaurants was rendered more tedious by the accumulation of slush and ice, of grit and rock salt. In places-by the parking lots on Middle Street, or down by the wharfs-the accumulated piles of snow and ice were so high as to give the impression that pedestrians were engaged in a form of trench warfare. Some of the ice chunks were as big as boulders, as though expelled from the depths of some strange, near-frozen volcano.

On the wharfs, the lobster boats were shrouded in snow. Occasionally, a brave soul would make a foray out onto the bay and, when he returned, the blood of the fish would stain the ice pink and red, but mostly the seagulls fluttered disconsolately, waiting for summer and the return of easy pickings. At night, there was the sound of tires seeking purchase on treacherous ice, of feet stamping impatiently as keys were sought, and of laughter that teetered on the brink of tears at the pain that the cold brought.

And March still waited in the wings, a miserable month of dripping ice and melting snow and the last vestiges of winter lurking filthily in shadowy places. Then April, and May. Summer, and warmth, and tourists.

But, for now, there was only winter without the promise of spring. Here there were ice and snow, and the traces of old footprints retained amid the crystals like unwanted memories that refused to die. The people huddled together, and waited for the siege to break. But that day, the day that Nathan spoke of the dead of winter, brought something strange and different to this part of the world.

It brought the mist.

It brought them.

It had been bitterly cold for days, weeks, unusually so even for the time of year. Snow had fallen, day after day, and then, just before Valentine’s Day, it turned to freezing rain that flooded streets and turned the drifts of accumulated snow to rugged slabs of ice. Then the Jrillen rain stopped but the cold stayed, until at last the weather broke, and temperatures climbed.

And the mist rose off the white fields like smoke from a cold burning, carried by air currents unfelt by man so that it seemed almost a living thing, a pale manifestation with a purpose untold and unknown. The shapes of the trees became indistinguishable, the forests lost to the enveloping fog. It did not diminish or falter, but appeared to grow denser and deeper as the day drew on, dampening the towns and cities and falling like soft rain on windows and cars and people. By nightfall visibility was down to a matter of feet, and the highway signs flashed warnings about speed and distance.

And still the mist came. It took over the city, turning the brightest lights to ghosts of themselves, cutting off those who walked the streets from others like them, so that all felt alone in the world. In its way, it brought closer together those with families and other loved ones, for they sought solace with one another, a point of contact in a world that had grown suddenly unfamiliar.

Perhaps that was why they came back, or did I still believe that they had never quite departed to begin with? I had set them free, these ghosts of my wife and child. I had asked their forgiveness for my failings, and I had taken all that I had retained of their lives-clothes and toys, dresses and shoes-and burned them in my yard. I had felt them leave, following the marsh streams into the waiting sea beyond, and when I set foot in the house again, the smell of smoke and lost things thick upon me, it seemed different to me: lighter, somehow, as though a little of the clutter had been cleared from it, or an old, stale odor banished by the breezes through open windows.

They were my ghosts, of course. I had created them, in my way. I had given form to them, making my anger and grief and loss their own, so that they became to me hostile things, with all that I had once loved about them gone, and all that I hated about myself filling the void. And they took that shape and accepted it, because it was their way to return to this world, my world. They were not ready to slip into the shadows of memory, to become like dreams, to relinquish their place in this life.

And I did not understand why.

But that was not them. That was not the wife I had loved, however poorly, and the daughter I had once cherished. I had caught glimpses of them as they truly were, before I allowed them to be transformed. I saw my dead wife leading the ghost of a boy into a deep forest, his small hand in hers, and I knew that he felt no fear of her. She was the Summer Lady, taking him to those whom he had lost, accompanying him on his last journey through the thickets and trees. And so that he would not be frightened, so that he would not be alone, there was another with him, a girl close to his own age who skipped in winter sunlight as she waited for her playmate to arrive.

This was my wife and child. This was their true form. What I released in smoke and flames were my ghosts. What returned with the mist were their own.

I worked that night. I was not scheduled to do so, but Al and Lorraine, two of the regular bartenders who had been living together for almost as long as they had been working at the Bear, were involved in a collision on Route 1 not far from Scarborough Downs, and both were taken to the hospital as a precaution. With nobody to cover for them, it meant that I had to spend another night behind the bar. I was still tired from the night before, but there was nothing to be done except to J ona p keep going. I figured that I could probably get an extra day in comp time from Dave, which would give me a little more time to spend in New York the following week, but for now it was just me and Gary and Dave, serving up beers and burgers and trying to keep our heads above water.

Mickey Wallace had planned to talk to Parker again at the Bear that day, but an incident in the motel parking lot early in the afternoon had caused him to reconsider. A man who had been sitting at the bar earlier in the week, the one who had been flirting with the little redhead, was waiting beside Mickey’s car when he went outside shortly after 3 P.M., both car and man barely visible in the thickening fog. The man, who didn’t introduce himself but who Mickey remembered was called Jackie, hadn’t said much, but he’d made it clear to Mickey that he didn’t approve of him bothering Parker, and if Mickey continued to do so, he threatened to acquaint him with two gentlemen who were both bigger and less reasonable than he, Jackie, was, and who would fold Mickey into a packing crate, breaking limbs if they had to in order to make him fit, and then mail him to the darkest hole in Africa by the slowest and most circuitous route possible. When Mickey asked Jackie if Parker had put him up to this, Jackie had replied in the negative, but Mickey wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. It didn’t matter, in the end. Mickey wasn’t above playing dirty himself. He called the Bear to make sure that Parker was still working, and when he was asked if he wanted to talk to him, Mickey said that it was okay, he’d drop by and see him in person.

As darkness settled on the city, and while the mist was still heavy on the land, Mickey drove out to Scarborough.

It was past 8 P.M. as Mickey moved through the fog toward the house on the hill. He knew that Parker would not return until one or two in the morning, and the house next door was dark. An old couple, the Johnsons, lived there, but they seemed to be away. What was it that they called people who left for Florida when the cold began to bite? Birds? No, “snowbirds,” that was it.

Even if they were home, it wouldn’t have deterred him from what he was planning to do. It would just have meant a longer walk. With them gone, he could park his car close to the house and not have to get his feet cold and wet, or risk being asked by a curious cop what he happened to be doing walking down a marsh road in the winter darkness.

He had already driven by the subject’s house a couple of times in daylight, but he couldn’t take the chance of looking at it up close without the risk of being seen. Now that he wasn’t working as a PI any longer, Parker spent more of his time at home, but Mickey hadn’t been allowed the luxury of watching the house for long enough to establish his routines. That would come, in time.

Mickey still entertained the possibility that he could wear down Parker’s defenses and receive at least a modicum of cooperation from him. Mickey was tenacious, in a quiet way. He knew that most people wanted to talk about their lives, even if they didn’t always realize it themselves. They wanted a sympathetic ear, someone who would listen, who would understand. Sometimes all it took was a cup of coffee, but he’d seen it take a bottle of Chivas too. They were the two extremes, and the rest of humanity, in Mickey’s experience, slotted into various points between.

Mickey Wallace had been a good reporter. He was genuinely interested in those whose stories he wrote. He didn’t have to fake it. Human beings were just endlessly fascinating to him, and even the dullest had a story worth telling, however short, buried somewhere deep inside. But, in time, journalism began to weary and frustrate him. He didn’t have the energy for it that he had once enjoyed, or the hunger to go chasing people day after day just for the stories that he uncovered to be forgotten before the weekend. He wanted to write something that would last. He thought about writing novels, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t read them, so why would he want to write them? Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.

No, what interested Mickey was good and evil. It always had, ever since he was a kid watching The Lone Ranger and The Virginian on TV. Even as a reporter, it was the crime stories to which he was most drawn. True, they were more likely to appear above the fold, and Mickey liked seeing his name as close to the masthead as possible, but he was also fascinated by the relationship between killers and their victims. There was an intimacy, a bond between a murderer and a victim. It seemed to Mickey that a little of the victim’s identity was transferred to the killer, passed on at the moment of death, retained deep within his soul. He also believed, somewhat more controversially, that, in a sense, the victims’ deaths were ultimately what gave meaning to their lives, what defined them, what raised them from the anonymity of day-to-day ordinariness and bequeathed a kind of immortality on them, or as close to immortality as the temporary nature of public attention could allow. Mickey supposed that it wasn’t quite immortality after all, especially since the victims in question were dead, but it would do until he could think of a better word.

It was as a reporter that he had first come into indirect contact with the subject, Parker. He had been among the throng outside the little house in Brooklyn on the night that Parker’s wife and child were killed. He had reported on the case, the stories getting smaller and smaller, and falling deeper and deeper into the main body of the paper, as lead after lead dried up. Eventually, even Mickey gave up on the Parker killings, and put them on the back burner for a time. He had heard rumors that the feds were looking at a possible serial-killer connection, but the price of that information was a promise that he would sit on it until the time was right.

While Mickey was genuinely interested in human beings and their stories, he also acknowledged to himself a kind of numbness of the heart that afflicted many in his trade. He was curious about people, but he did not care about them, or not enough to feel their pain as his own. He sympathized with them, a temporary, shallow emotion, but he did not empathize. Perhaps it was a consequence of his work, of being forced to deal with story after story in close succession, the depth and duration of his involvement dependent entirely on the public’s appetite and, by extension, his newspaper’s. That was, in part, why he had decided to leave the world of journalism behind, and devote himself to books. By immersing himself in only a handful of cases, he hoped to sensitize himself anew. That, and make a little money along the way. He just needed to find the right story to tell, and he was convinced that, in Charlie Parker, he had found that story.

Mickey could recall the moment when he had become convinced that there was something different about the man. He hadn’t faded away after the deaths of his family. Neither had he gone on daytime shows to talk about his pain, in an effort to keep t Jplethehe killings in the public eye and ensure that the pressure on the law enforcement community to track down their killer remained constant. No, he had picked up a PI’s license, and then he had gone hunting, both for the killer, the one who would come to be called the Traveling Man, and for others. The first one he found was the Modine woman, and that was when the bells started ringing for Mickey. That was a story in itself right there, worthy of a Sunday supplement: father loses his wife and child to a killer, then hunts down a pair of child killers in turn. It had everything that a jaded public could desire.

Except Parker wouldn’t tell it. Requests for interviews were politely, and sometimes impolitely, declined. Then-bang!-there he was again, and this time it was the big one he was trying to hook, the Traveling Man. Over the years that followed, it became clear to Mickey, and to others like him, that there was something strange going on here, something quite exceptional. This man had a gift of sorts, although it wasn’t a gift that anybody in his right mind would wish to have: it seemed that he was drawn to evil, and evil, in turn, was drawn to him. And when he found it, he destroyed it. It was as simple, or as complex, as that, depending upon how you chose to view it, because Mickey Wallace was not dumb, and he knew that a man couldn’t do what Parker had done and not suffer serious damage along the way. Now here he was, working in a bar in a northeastern city, separated from his girlfriend, seeing the child he’d had with her maybe once or twice each month, and living alone in the big house upon which Mickey was now carefully shining his flashlight.

Mickey wanted to go inside. He wanted to poke around in desk drawers, to open files in cabinets and on computers, to see where the subject ate, sat, slept. He wanted to walk in his footsteps, because what Mickey proposed to do was to give Parker a voice, to take his words, his experiences, and improve upon them, creating a new version of him that was somehow greater than the sum of his parts. To do that, Mickey needed to become him for a time, to understand the reality of his existence.

And if Parker ultimately decided not to cooperate? Mickey was trying not to think about that. He had spoken to his publisher that morning, and the publisher had made clear his preference for Parker being involved with the project. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but it would affect the number of copies that would be printed, and the nature of the publicity for the book. His view was understandable, but it would make Mickey’s task more difficult. Anyone could put together a cut-and-paste job, although not as good a cut-and-paste job as Mickey could, but that wasn’t what the big bucks would be paid for. It wasn’t just about the money, either: there was a real story to be told here, something deep and peculiar and unsettling, and the words had to come from the subject’s own mouth. Mickey would wear him down, of that he was certain, or reasonably certain. In the meantime, he had begun making contact with other prospective interviewees in the hope of establishing a more detailed background dossier about the subject, because Mickey wanted to know more about Parker than Parker did about himself.

Except, the people who were close to him were also loyal to him, and so far all Mickey had to show for his efforts was, for the most part, a series of rebuffs. True, he had sessions lined up, both on and off the record, with a couple of ex-cops who remembered Parker from New York, and a former captain from Internal Affairs who, Mickey was reliably informed, believed that the subject should be behind bars; the subject and his buddies. They interested Mickey too. All he knew about them were their names: Angel and Louis. J ju wa The captain said that he could help him with them too, just not as much. He was only willing to talk off the record, but he had promised Mickey copies of investigation reports, and some juice that a good reporter like he was would easily be able to corroborate. It was a start, but Mickey wanted more.

His clothes felt damp. The mist was a blessing in that it concealed him from any casual observer passing on the road below, and even someone coming up the drive would struggle to see his car, or him, until they reached the house itself. In fact, Mickey had parked the car beneath a copse of trees, and unless somebody was actively looking for it, he was pretty certain that it would pass unnoticed. Even if Parker returned unexpectedly, Mickey was convinced that he would drive right by it. But the mist was also cold and wet, and so thick that Mickey felt he might almost clasp a clump of it in his hand if he tried, like cotton candy.

In the pocket of his coat he had a set of lock picks.

He climbed up to the porch of the house and, more out of hope than expectation, tried the door. It was locked. He thought for a moment, then gave the door a hard push with his shoulder, rattling it in its frame. No alarm went off. Good, thought Mickey. Another lucky break to add to the absent neighbors and the fact that Parker no longer seemed to have a dog. He’d heard him talking about it with one of the bartenders, shortly before Parker gave him the bum’s rush.

He moved to the left and peered in the window. There was a night-light burning in the kitchen at the back of the house that shed a little illumination into the living room. The rooms looked comfortably furnished, with a lot of books. To the right of the front door was a small office, a computer on a desk, papers piled neatly around it and on the floor. Mickey knew that Parker had been down in New York recently. He wondered why. He desperately wanted to look through those papers.

He walked to the back of the house and stood in the segmented square of illumination cast by the night-light. The mist seemed thicker here, and when he looked behind him, it formed a near-impenetrable wall of white, obscuring the trees and the marshes beyond. Mickey shivered. He tried the back door, with no result. Once again, he pressed his face to the glass.

And something moved inside the house.

For a moment, he thought that it was reflected light, or a car passing on the road creating shadows in the room beyond the kitchen, but he had heard no car. He blinked, and tried to recall what he had seen. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it might have been a woman, a woman in a dress that hung just below her knees. It wasn’t the kind of dress anyone would usually wear at this time of year. It was a summer dress.

He considered leaving, but then he realized that an opportunity to enter the house might just have presented itself without necessitating a breach of the law. If there was someone inside, maybe he could introduce himself as a friend of the detective. There might be a cup of coffee in it for him, or a drink, and once Mickey got himself seated he would be difficult to roust. Cockroaches were harder to get rid of than Mickey Wallace in interrogation mode.

“Hello?” he called. “Anybody home?” He knocked on the door. “Hello? I’m a friend of Mr. Parker’s. Can you-”

The light went out in the kitchen. The shock of it was so sudden that Mickey stumbled backward in fright, spots before his eyes as they adjusted to the dar Jtha/dikness. He recovered himself, and took a breath. Maybe it was time to leave. He didn’t want the woman inside to take fright and call the cops. That would jeopardize everything. Still, he carefully approached the door one more time. His flashlight was in his right hand, and he used it to rap on the door as he leaned against the glass, shielding his eyes with his left.

The woman was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She was looking right at him, her hands by her sides. He could see the shape of her legs through the thin material, but her face was cast in shadow.

“I’m sorry,” he called to her. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. My name is Michael Wallace. I’m a writer. Here’s my card.” He found a card in his pocket. “I’m going to slide it under the door so you’ll know I’m legit.”

He knelt down and slipped the card through. When he stood up, the woman was gone.

“Ma’am?”

Something white appeared at his feet. His card had been pushed back at him.

Jesus, thought Mickey. She’s at the door. She’s hiding at the door.

“I just want to talk to you,” he said.

go away

For a moment, Mickey wasn’t sure that he’d heard right. The words had been clear enough, but they seemed to come from behind him. He turned around, but there was nothing there, only mist. He put his face to the glass again, trying to catch a glimpse of the woman hiding inside. He could almost see her: a patch of darkness on the floor, a palpable presence. Who is she? he wondered. Parker’s girlfriend was supposed to be in Vermont, not here. Mickey planned to try to talk to her sometime over the next couple of weeks. Anyway, they were estranged. There was no reason for her being here, and even less reason for her to try to hide herself if she was.

Something began nagging at Mickey, something that made him uneasy, but he tried to force it from his mind. He only partially succeeded. He felt it lurking at the edge of his consciousness, just like the woman who was squatting in the shadows by the door, an unwelcome presence to which he was frightened of giving his complete attention.

“Please. I just wanted to speak to you for a moment about Mr. Parker.”

Michael

The voice came again, only this time it was closer. He thought that he could feel breath on his neck, or maybe it was just the wind coming in from the sea, except there was no wind. He spun around, breathing heavily. He felt the mist enter his lungs. It made him cough, and he tasted snow and saltwater in his mouth. He hadn’t liked the way the voice had spoken his name. He hadn’t liked it one little bit. There was a hint of mockery to it, and an implicit threat. He felt like a recalcitrant child being spoken to by a nanny, except-

Except it was a child’s voice that had spoken.

“Who’s out there?” he said. “Show yourself.”

But there was no movement, and no response, not from before him. Instead, he became aware of movement at his back. Slowly, he craned his neck, not wishing to turn away from whatever had spoken to him fr J

The woman was now standing in the kitchen once again, midway between the back door and the entrance to the living room, but there was a lack of substance to her. She cast no shadow, distorting instead of blocking what little light was filtering through the glass, like a piece of gauze in the shape of a human being.

go away

please

It was the use of the word “please” that finally got to him. He had heard the word used in that way before, usually before a cop wrestled someone to the ground, or a doorman at a nightclub applied brute force to a drunk. It was a final warning, couched in a version of politeness. He shifted position so that he could see both the door and the mist, then began to retreat, moving toward the corner of the house.

Because the shadow that was troubling him had just assumed a recognizable form, even as he tried to deny the reality of it.

A woman and a child. A little girl’s voice. A woman in a summer dress. Mickey had seen that dress before, or one very like it. It was the dress that Parker’s wife had been wearing in the pictures that were circulated to the press after her death.

As soon as he was out of sight of the door, Mickey began to run. He slipped once and landed heavily, soaking his trousers and plunging his arms into the icy snow up to his elbows. He whimpered as he got to his feet and brushed himself off. As he did so, he heard a sound from behind him. It was muffled slightly by the mist, but it was still clearly identifiable.

It was the back door opening.

He ran again. His car came in sight. He found the keys in his pocket and pushed the Unlock button once to turn on the lights. As he did so, he stopped short and felt his stomach lurch.

There was a child, a little girl, on the far side of the car, staring at him through the passenger window. Her left hand was splayed against the glass, while the index finger of her right traced patterns in the moisture. He couldn’t see her face clearly, but he knew instinctively that it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had been inches away from her instead of feet. She was as insubstantial as the mist that surrounded her.

“No,” said Mickey. “No, no.” He shook his head. From behind him came the sound of hard snow crunching underfoot, of an unseen figure drawing nearer. Even as he heard it, he sensed that if he were to retrace his steps to the back door he would find the imprint of his own footsteps, and nobody else’s. “Oh Jesus,” whispered Mickey. “Jesus, Jesus…”

But already the little girl was moving away, receding into the mist and the trees, her right hand raised in a mocking gesture of farewell. Mickey took his chance and made a final dash for the car. He wrenched the door open, slammed it behind him, and hit the internal locking button hard. His fingers didn’t fumble, despite his fear, as he started the car and pulled onto the driveway, looking neither right nor left but staring only ahead. He hit the road at speed and hung a sharp right, back over the bridge toward Scarborough, the headlight beams assuming a definition of their own as they tried to slice through the mist. Houses appeared, and then, in time, the reassuring lights of the businesses on Route 1. Only when he reached the gas station on his right did he slow down. He pulled into t J seoughe lot, and hit the brakes, then leaned back against his seat and tried to get his breathing under control.

The traffic signal at the intersection began to change color. The action drew his attention to the passenger window, and what had seemed at first to be random patterns in the moisture now assumed a definite shape.

They were words. On his window, someone had written:

STAY AWAY FROM MY DADDY

Mickey stared at the words for a few moments longer, then hit the button to wind down the window, destroying the message. When he was sure that it was gone, he drove back to his motel and went straight to the bar. It was only after a double vodka that he found it within himself to begin updating his notes, and it took another double to stop his hand from shaking.

That night, Mickey Wallace did not sleep well.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I DIDN’T FIND WALLACE’S card until I opened the back door on the afternoon of the next day to put out the trash. It lay on the step, frozen to the cement. I looked at it, then went back inside and dialed his cell phone number from my office.

He answered on the second ring. “Mickey Wallace.”

“This is Charlie Parker.”

He didn’t reply for a moment or two, and when he did he sounded initially uneasy, although, like a true professional, he quickly rallied. “Mr. Parker, I was just about to call you. I was wondering if you’d considered my offer.”

“I’ve given it some thought,” I said. “I’d like to meet.”

“Great.” His voice rose an octave in surprise, then resumed its usual timbre. “Where and when?”

“Why don’t you come out to my place in, say, an hour. Do you know where it is?”

There was a pause. “No, I don’t. Can you give me directions?”

My directions were intricate and detailed. I wondered if he was even bothering to take them down.

“Got that?” I said when I was done.

“Yeah, I think so.” I heard him take a sip of liquid.

“You want to read them back to me?”

Wallace almost choked. When he had finished coughing, he said: “That won’t be necessary.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

“Thank you, Mr. Parker. I’ll be with you shortly.”

I hung up. I put on a jacket, then went down the drive and found the tire tracks beneath the trees. If it was Wallace who had parked there, Kpar¤[1]ithhe’d left in a real hurry. He’d managed to churn up ice and snow to reveal the dirt beneath. I walked back to the house, sat in a chair, and read the Press-Herald and The New York Times until I heard the sound of a car pulling into the drive, and Wallace’s blue Taurus came into view. He didn’t park in the same spot as the night before, but drove right up to the house. I watched him get out, take his satchel from the passenger seat, and check his pockets for a spare pen. When he was satisfied that all was in order, he locked the car.

In my drive. In Maine. In winter.

I didn’t wait for him to knock. Instead, I opened the door, and hit him once in the stomach. He buckled and dropped to his knees, then doubled over and retched.

“Get up,” I said.

He stayed down. He was struggling for breath, and I thought that he might vomit on my porch.

“Don’t hit me again,” he said. It was a plea, not a warning, and I felt like a piece of grit in a dog’s eye.

“I won’t.”

I helped him to his feet. He sat against the porch rail, his hands on his knees, and recovered himself. I stood opposite him, regretting what I had done. I had allowed my anger to simmer, and then I had taken it out on a man who was no match for me.

“You okay?”

He nodded, but he looked gray. “What was that for?”

“I think you know. For sneaking around my property. For being dumb enough to drop your card while you were here.”

He leaned against the rail to support himself. “I didn’t drop it,” he said.

“You’re telling me you left it for me in the dirt on my back porch? That doesn’t sound likely.”

“I’m telling you that I didn’t drop it. I slipped it under the door for the woman who was in your house last night, but she just pushed it back.”

I looked away. I saw skeletal trees amid the evergreens, and the channels in the salt marshes shining coldly amid the frozen snow. I saw a single black crow lost against the gray sky.

“What woman?”

“A woman in a summer dress. I tried to speak to her, but she wouldn’t say anything.”

I glanced at him. His eyes couldn’t meet mine. He was telling a version of the truth, but he had hidden away some crucial element. He was trying to protect himself, but not from me. Mickey Wallace was scared to death. I could see it in the way his eyes kept returning to something behind the window of my living room. I don’t know what he expected to see but, whatever it was, he was glad that it hadn’t appeared.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I came out to the house. I thought you might be more amenable to a discussion away from the bar.”

I knew that he was lying, but I wasn’t about to call him on it. I wanted to hear what he had to say about the events of the previous night.

“ JI slyiI saw a light, and I went around to the back door. There was a woman inside. I slipped my card under the door, and she slid it back. Then-”

He stopped.

“Go on,” I said.

“I heard a girl’s voice,” he continued, “but she was outside. I think the woman joined her at some point, but I didn’t look, so I can’t be sure.”

“Why didn’t you look?”

“I decided to leave.” His face, and those four words, spoke volumes.

“A wise choice. It’s just a shame that you were here in the first place.”

“I just wanted to see where you lived. I didn’t mean any harm by it.”

“No.”

He breathed in deeply, and once he was certain that he wasn’t going to throw up, he rallied and pulled himself up to his full height.

“Who were they?” he asked, and now it was my turn to lie.

“A friend. A friend and her daughter.”

“Your friend’s daughter always goes walking in the snow in dense fog, writing things on other people’s windows?”

“Writing? What are you talking about?”

Mickey swallowed hard. His right hand was trembling. His left was jammed in his coat pocket.

“There was something written on the window of my car when I got back to it,” he said. “It said ‘Stay away from my Daddy.’”

It took all of my self-control not to reveal myself to him. I wanted so badly to look up at the attic window, for I remembered a message written on the glass there, a warning left by an entity that was not quite my daughter. Yet the house did not feel the same way that it had felt then. It was no longer haunted by rage and grief and pain. Before, I had sensed their presence in the shifting of shadows and the creaking of boards, in the slow closing of doors where there was no breeze, and in the tapping on windows where there were no branches to touch them. Now the house was at peace, but if Wallace was speaking the truth, then something had returned.

I recalled my mother once telling me, some years after my father died, that on the night his body was taken to the church, she dreamed that she woke to a presence in the bedroom, and thought she could feel her husband close to her. In the far corner of the room there was a chair upon which he used to seat himself every night to finish undressing. He would ease himself into it in order to take off his shoes and socks, and sometimes he would remain there quietly for a while, his bare feet planted firmly on the carpet, his chin resting on the palms of his hands, and reflect upon the day that was coming to a close. My mother said that, in her dream, my father was back in his chair, except she couldn’t quite see him. When she tried to focus on the shape in the corner of the room, there was only a chair, but when she looked away a figure shifted position in the corner of her eye. She should have been frightened, but she was not. In her dream, her eyes became heavy. But how can my eyes be heavy, she thought, when I am still asleep? She fought against it, but the urge to sleep was too strong.

J thr d

And just as she lost consciousness, she felt a hand on her brow, and lips softly brushed her cheek, and she sensed his sorrow and guilt, and in that moment I think that perhaps she started to forgive him at last for what he had done. For the rest of the night, she slept soundly and deeply, and despite all that had occurred, she did not weep as the final prayers were said for him in the church, and when his body was at last lowered into the ground, and the flag was folded and laid in her hands, she smiled sadly for her lost man and a single tear fell to the earth and exploded in the dirt like a fallen star.

“My friend’s daughter,” I said, “playing tricks on you.”

“Really?” said Wallace, and he did not even try to keep the skepticism from his voice. “They still here?”

“No. They’re gone.”

He let it go. “That was a low thing you did. You always hit people without warning?”

“It comes from the line of work. If I had told some of them that I was going to hit them, they would have shot me first. A warning kind of dulls the impact.”

“You know, right now, I kind of wish someone had shot you.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“Is that why you called me out here, to warn me off again?”

“I’m sorry that I hit you, but you need to hear this face-to-face, and not in a bar either. I’m not going to help you with your book. In fact, I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that it never gets beyond some scratches in one of your notebooks.”

“You’re threatening me?”

“Mr. Wallace, do you recall the gentleman at the Bear who was discussing the possible motives of alien abductors?”

“I do. In fact, I met him again yesterday. He was waiting for me in the parking lot of my motel. I assumed that you’d sent him.”

Jackie. I should have known that he’d take matters into his own hands in some misguided effort to help me. Part of me even felt a kind of admiration for him. I wondered how long he’d spent trawling the parking lots of the city’s motels, looking for Wallace’s car.

“I didn’t, but he’s the kind of man who can’t easily be controlled, and he has two buddies who make him look like a gentle soul. They’re brothers, and there are prisons that don’t want them back because they frighten the other inmates.”

“So? You’re going to set your buddies on me. Tough guy.”

“If I wanted to hurt you that badly, I’d do it myself. There are other ways to deal with the kind of problem that you represent.”

“I’m not a problem. I just want to tell your story. I’m interested in the truth.”

“I don’t know what the truth is. If I don’t know after all this time, then you’re not going to have any more success than I’ve had.”

His eyes narrowed shrewdly, and some of the color returned to his face. J thot I had made a mistake even discussing the matter with him. He was like an evangelical Christian who finds someone on a doorstep willing to debate theology with him.

“But I can help you,” he said. “I’m a neutral party. I can find out things that might be useful to you. It doesn’t all have to go in the book. You’ll have control over how your image is presented.”

“My image?”

He realized that he had taken a wrong turn, and backpedaled furiously.

“It’s just a phrase. It means nothing. What I meant to say was, this is your story. If it’s to be told properly, it has to be told in your voice.”

“No,” I said. “That’s where you’re wrong. It doesn’t have to be told at all. Don’t come to my home, or to my place of work, again. I’m sure you know that I have a child. Her mother won’t talk to you. That I can tell you for sure. If you approach them, if you even pass them on the street and catch their eye, I’ll kill you and bury you in a shallow hole. You need to let this slide.”

Wallace’s face hardened, and I saw the man’s own inner strength reveal itself. Instantly, I felt tired. Wallace wasn’t going to fade into the night.

“Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Parker.” He mentioned the name of a famous actor, a man around whom rumors of a sexual nature had long circled without finding purchase. “Two years ago, I agreed to write an unauthorized biography of him. It’s not my area, all that Hollywood bullshit, but the publisher had heard of my talents, and the money was good, given the subject. He’s one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. His people threatened me with financial ruin, the loss of my reputation, even the loss of limbs, but that book is due to be published in six months’ time, and I can stand behind every word of it. He wouldn’t cooperate, but it didn’t matter. The book is still going to appear, and I’ve found people who’ve sworn that his whole life is a lie. You made a mistake punching me in the gut. It was the action of a frightened man. For that alone, I’m going to claw and dig in every dirty corner of your life. I’m going to find out things about you that you didn’t even know existed. And then I’m going to put them in my book, and you can buy a copy and read about them, and maybe then you’ll learn something about yourself, but I can tell you for sure that you’ll learn something about Mickey Wallace.

“And if you ever lay a hand on me again, I’ll see you in court, you fuck.”

With that, Wallace turned around and trudged back to his car.

And I thought: Aw, hell.

Aimee Price dropped by later that evening, after I had left another message for her at her office detailing most of what had happened since Wallace had appeared at the Bear. She declined coffee and asked if I had any wine uncorked. I didn’t, but I was happy to open a bottle for her. It was the least that I could do.

“Okay,” she said, once she had sipped the wine carefully and decided that it wasn’t about to send her into convulsions, “this isn’t my area, so I’ve had to ask around, but here is where we stand, in legal terms, on the book. Potentially, as the Jin &rs subject of an unauthorized biography of your life, you could bring a lawsuit for a number of legal reasons-libel, misappropriation of the right of publicity, breach of confidence-but the most likely avenue in your case would be invasion of privacy. You’re not a public figure in the way an actor or a politician might be, so you have a certain right to privacy. We’re talking about the right not to have private facts publicized that might prove embarrassing if they’re not related to matters of public concern; the right not to have false or misleading statements or suggestions made about you; and protection against intrusion, which means literal physical intrusion on your privacy by entering onto your property.”

“Which Wallace did,” I said.

“Yes, but he could argue that the first time he came by was to remonstrate with you, and to leave his card, and the second time, according to what you’ve told me, was at your invitation.”

I shrugged. She was right.

“So how did that second visit go?” she asked.

“Could have gone better,” I said.

“In what way?”

“Not punching him in the stomach would have been a start.”

“Oh, Charlie.” She seemed genuinely disappointed, and I felt even more ashamed of my actions earlier that day. In an effort to make up for my failings, I recounted my conversation with Wallace in as much detail as I could remember, leaving out any mention of the woman and child that he claimed to have glimpsed.

“You’re telling me that your friend Jackie threatened Wallace too?” she said.

“I didn’t ask him to. He probably thought that he was doing me a favor.”

“At least he exhibited more restraint than you did. Wallace could have you charged with assault, but my guess is that he probably won’t. Clearly he wants to write this book, and that may over-ride any other concerns as long as you didn’t do him any lasting damage.”

“He walked away under his own steam,” I said.

“Well, if he knows anything about you at all, he can probably consider himself lucky.”

I took the hit. I wasn’t in any position to argue.

“So where does that leave us?”

“You can’t stop him writing the book,” she said simply. “As he said himself, a lot of the relevant material is a matter of public record. What we can do is request, or otherwise obtain, a copy of the manuscript, and go through it with a fine-tooth comb looking for instances of libel, or egregious invasion of privacy. We could then apply to the courts for an injunction preventing publication, but I have to warn you that the courts are generally reluctant to permit injunctions of this kind in deference to the First Amendment. The best we could hope for would be monetary damages. The publisher has probably had a warranty and indemnity clause inserted into Wallace’s contract, assuming the contract has been formally agreed upon. Also, if the whole thing has been handled right, there will be a media-perils insurance policy in place to cover the work. In other words, not only will we not be able to stop this horse from bo Jd tf tlting, but we probably won’t even be able to do more than close the door halfway once it’s gone.”

I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes.

“You sure you don’t want some of this wine?” said Aimee.

“I’m sure. If I start, I may not stop.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll talk to some more people and see if there are any other avenues open to us, but I don’t hold out much hope. And, Charlie?”

I opened my eyes.

“Don’t threaten him again. Just keep your distance. If he approaches you, walk away. Don’t get drawn into confrontations. That goes for your friends too, regardless of their good intentions.”

Which brought us to another problem.

“Yeah, well, that could be an issue,” I said.

“How?”

“Angel and Louis.”

I had told Aimee enough about them for her to be under no illusions.

“If Wallace starts digging, then their names may come up,” I said. “I don’t think they have any good intentions.”

“They don’t sound like the kind of men who leave too many traces.”

“It doesn’t matter. They won’t like it, Louis especially.”

“Then warn them.”

I thought about it. “No,” I said. “Let’s see what happens.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Not really, but Louis believes in preventive measures. If I tell him that Wallace may start asking questions about him, he could decide that it might be better if Wallace didn’t ask any questions at all.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Aimee. She finished her wine in a single gulp, and appeared to be debating whether or not to have more in the hope that it might destroy any memory of what I’d just said. “Jesus, how did you end up with friends like that?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied, “but I don’t think that Jesus had anything to do with it.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MICKEY WALLACE LEFT PORTLAND early the next day. He was simmering with resentment and a barely containable anger that was unfamiliar to him, for Mickey rarely got truly angry, but his encounter with Parker, combined with the efforts of Parker’s Neanderthal friend to scare him off, had transformed him utterly. He was used to lawyers trying to intimidate him, and had been pushed up against walls and parked cars, and threatened with more serious damage at least twice, but nobody had punched him the way Parker had in K Pa´[1] ut many years. In fact, the last time Mickey had been in anything approaching a serious fight was when he was still in high school, and on that occasion he had landed a lucky punch that had knocked one of his opponent’s teeth out. He wished now that he had managed to strike a similar blow at Parker, and as he boarded the shuttle at Logan he played out alternative scenarios in his mind, ones in which it was he who had brought Parker to his knees, he who had humiliated the detective and not vice versa. He entertained them for a couple of minutes, and then dispensed with them. There would be other ways to make Parker regret what he had done, principal among them the completion of the book project on which Mickey had set his heart and, he felt, his reputation.

But he was still troubled by his experience at the Parker house on that mist-shrouded night. He had expected the intensity of his responses to it, his fear and confusion, to diminish, but they had not. Instead, he continued to sleep uneasily, and had woken on the first night after the encounter at precisely 4:03 A.M., convinced that he was not alone in his motel room. On that occasion, he had turned on the lamp by his bed, and the eco-friendly bulb had glowed slowly into life, gradually spreading illumination through most of the room but leaving the corners in shadow, which gave Mickey the uncomfortable sensation that the darkness around him had receded reluctantly from the light, taking whatever presence he had sensed with it and hiding it in the places where the lamp could not reach. He remembered the woman crouched behind the kitchen door, and the child moving her small finger across the window of his car. He should have been able to glimpse their faces, but he had not, and something told him that he should be grateful for that small mercy at least. Their faces had been concealed from him for a reason.

Because the Traveling Man had torn them apart, that’s why, because he left nothing there but blood and bone and empty sockets. And you didn’t want to see that, no sir, because that sight would stay with you until your eyes closed for the last time and they pulled the sheet over your own face. Nobody could look upon that degree of hurt, of savagery, and not be damaged by it forever.

And if those were people whom you loved, your wife and your child, well…

A friend and her daughter; two visitors: that was how Parker had described them to Mickey, but Mickey didn’t accept that explanation for one moment. Oh, they were visitors all right, but not the kind who slept in the spare room and played board games on winter evenings. Mickey didn’t understand their nature, not yet, and he hadn’t decided whether or not to include his encounter in the book that he would present to his publishers. He suspected that he would not. After all, who would believe him? By including a ghost story in his narrative, he risked undermining the factual basis of his work. And yet this woman and child, and what they had endured, represented the heart of the book. Mickey had always thought of Parker as a man haunted by what had happened to his wife and child, but not literally so. Was that the answer? Was what Mickey had witnessed evidence of an actual haunting?

And all of these thoughts and reflections he added to his notes.

Mickey checked into a hotel over by Penn Station, a typical tourist trap with a warren of tiny rooms occupied by noisy but polite Asians, and families of rubes trying to see New York on the cheap. By late that afternoon, he was sitting in what was, by his standards, and the standar J A the stands of most other people who weren’t bums, a dive bar, and considering what he could order without endangering his health. He wanted coffee, but this looked like the kind of place where ordering coffee for any reason unconnected with a hangover would be frowned upon at the very least, if not considered actual evidence of homosexual leanings. In fact, thought Mickey, even washing one’s hands after visiting the restroom might be viewed as suspect in a hole like this.

There was a bar menu beside him, and a list of specials chalked on a board that might as well have been written in Sanskrit, they’d been there so long and unchanged, but nobody was eating. Nobody was doing much of anything, because Mickey was the only person in the place, the bartender excepted, and he looked like he’d consumed nothing but human growth hormone for the past decade or so. He bulged in places where no normal person should have bulged. There were even bulges on his bald head, as though the top of his skull had developed muscles so as not to feel excluded from the rest of his body.

“Get you something?” he asked. His voice was pitched higher than Mickey had anticipated. He wondered if it was something to do with the steroids. There were peculiar swellings on the bartender’s chest, as though his breasts had grown secondary breasts of their own. He was so tan that he seemed at times almost to fade into the wood and grime of the bar. To Mickey, he looked like a pair of women’s stockings that had been stuffed with footballs.

“I’m waiting for someone.”

“Well, order something while you’re waiting. Look on it as rent for the stool.”

“Friendly place,” said Mickey.

“You want friends, call the Samaritans. This is a business.”

Mickey ordered a light beer. He rarely drank before nightfall, and even then he tended to limit his intake to a beer or two, the night of the visit to Parker’s house excepted, and that night had been exceptional in so many ways. He wasn’t thirsting for a beer now, and even the thought of sipping it made him feel queasy, but he wasn’t about to offend someone who looked like he could turn Mickey inside out and back again before he’d even realized what was happening. The beer arrived. Mickey stared at it, and the beer stared back. Its head began to disappear, as though responding in kind to Mickey’s lack of enthusiasm for it.

The door opened, and a man stepped inside. He was tall, with the natural bulk of someone who had never felt the need to use any form of artificial growth enhancers stronger than meat and milk. He wore a long blue overcoat that hung open, revealing a substantial gut. His hair was short and very white. His nose was red, and not just from the cold wind outside. Mickey realized that he’d made the right choice in ordering a beer.

“Hey,” said the bartender. “It’s the Captain. Long time, no see.”

He reached out a hand, and the newcomer took it and shook it warmly, using his free hand to slap the man’s substantial upper arm.

“How you doin’, Hector? See you’re still using that shit.”

“Keeps me big and lean, Captain.”

“You’ve grown tits, and you must be shaving your back twice a day.”

“Maybe I’ll keep it long, give the boys something to hold on to.”

“You’re a deviant, Hector.”

“And proud of it. What can I get you? First one is on the house.”

“That’s decent of you, Hector. A Redbreast, if you don’t mind, to get the cold out of my bones.”

He walked down to the end of the bar where Mickey was sitting.

“You Wallace?” he asked.

Mickey stood up. He was about five ten, and the newcomer towered over him by seven or eight inches.

“Captain Tyrrell.” They shook hands. “I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

“Well, after Hector has obliged me, the drinks are on you.”

“It’ll be my pleasure.”

Hector placed a substantial glass of whiskey, untroubled by ice or water, beside Tyrrell’s right hand. Tyrrell gestured to a booth against the back wall. “Let’s take our drinks down there. You eaten yet?”

“No.”

“They do a good hamburger here. You eat hamburger?”

Mickey doubted that this place did a good anything, but he knew better than to refuse.

“Yes. A hamburger sounds fine.”

Tyrrell raised a hand and shouted the order to Hector: two hamburgers, medium, with all the trimmings. Medium, thought Mickey. Jesus. He’d prefer it charred to within an inch of its life in the hope of killing whatever bacteria might have taken up residence in the meat. Hell, this might be the last burger he ever ate.

Hector duly entered the order on a surprisingly modern-looking register, even if he operated it like a monkey.

“Wallace: that’s a good Irish name,” said Tyrrell.

“Irish-Belgian.”

“That’s some mix.”

“ Europe. The war.”

Tyrrell’s face softened unpleasantly with sentimentality, like a marshmallow melting. “My grandfather served in Europe. Royal Irish Fusiliers. Got shot for his troubles.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Ah, he didn’t die. Lost his left leg below the knee, though. They didn’t have prosthetics then, or not like they do now. He used to pin up his trouser leg every morning. Think he was kind of proud of it.”

He raised his glass to Mickey.

“Sláinte,” he said.

“Cheers,” said Mickey. He took a mouthful of beer. Mercifully, it was so cold that he could barely taste it. He reached into his satchel and produced a notebook and pen.

“Straight down to business,” said Tyrrell.

“If yo J A“Ifu’d prefer to wait…”

“Nah, it’s good.”

Mickey took a little Olympus digital voice recorder from his jacket pocket, and showed it to Tyrrell.

“Would you object if-?”

“Yes, I would. Put it away. Better still, take the batteries out and leave that thing where I can see it.”

Mickey did as he was told. It would make things a little more difficult, but Mickey had reasonable shorthand and a good memory. In any case, he wouldn’t be quoting Tyrrell directly. This was background, and deep background. Tyrrell had been quite clear about that when he had agreed to meet with Mickey. If his name appeared anywhere near the book, he’d stomp Mickey’s fingers until they looked like corkscrews.

“Tell me some more about this book you’re writing.”

So Mickey did. He left out the more artistic and philosophical elements of his proposal, and tried to tread as neutral a path as possible as he described his interest in Parker. Although he hadn’t yet ascertained Tyrrell’s views on the subject, he suspected that they were largely negative, if only because, so far, anyone who liked or respected Parker had refused point-blank to talk to him.

“And have you met Parker?” asked Tyrrell.

“I have. I approached him about an interview.”

“What happened?”

“He sucker-punched me in the gut.”

“That’s him all right. He’s a sonofabitch, a thug. And that’s not the worst of it.”

He took a sip of his whiskey. It was already half gone.

“You want another one?” asked Mickey.

“Sure.”

Mickey turned to the bar. He didn’t even have to order. Hector just nodded and went for the bottle.

“So, what do you want to know about him?” said Tyrrell.

“I want to know what you know.”

And Tyrrell began to talk. He spoke first of Parker’s father, who had killed two young people in a car and then taken his own life. He could offer no insights into the killings beyond suggesting there was something wrong with the father that had passed itself on to the son: a faulty gene, perhaps; a predilection toward violence.

The hamburgers arrived, along with Tyrrell’s second drink. Tyrrell ate, but Mickey did not. He was too busy taking notes, or that would be his excuse if he were asked.

“We think the first man he killed was named Johnny Friday,” said Tyrrell. “He was a pimp, beaten to death in the washroom of a bus station. He was no loss to the world, but that’s not the point.”

“Why do you suspect Parker?”

“Because he was there. Cameras picked him up entering and leaving the station during the killing window.”

“Were there cameras on the bath J A on the broom door?”

“There were cameras everywhere, but he didn’t appear on them. We just got him entering and leaving the station.”

Mickey was puzzled. “How could that be?”

For the first time, Tyrrell looked uncertain. “I don’t know. The cameras weren’t fixed then, except for the ones on the doors. It was a cost-cutting measure. They moved from side to side. I guess he timed them, then moved in conjunction with them.”

“Difficult to do, though.”

“Difficult. Not impossible. Still, it was odd.”

“Was he interviewed?”

“We had a witness who placed him at the scene: washroom attendant. Guy was Korean. Couldn’t speak more than about three words of English, but he picked out Parker’s image from the door cameras. Well, he picked out Parker’s image as one of five possibles from a series of images. Trouble was, we all looked alike to him. Of those five people, four were as different from one another as I am from you. Anyway, Parker was hauled in, and agreed to be questioned. He didn’t even lawyer up. He admitted to being at the bus station, but nothing more than that. Said it was in connection with some runaway he’d been asked to find. It checked out. He was working a teen case at the time.”

“And that’s as far as it went?”

“There wasn’t enough to charge him on, and no appetite for it anyway. Here was an ex-cop who had lost his wife and child only months before. He may not have been loved by his fellow officers, but cops support their own in times of trouble. It would have been a more unpopular case to prosecute than charging Goldilocks with burglary. And like I said, Johnny Friday was no Eagle Scout. A lot of people out there felt that someone had done humanity a service by taking him off the team permanently.”

“Why wasn’t Parker popular?”

“Dunno. He wasn’t meant to be a cop. He never fit in. There was always something odd about him.”

“So why did he join?”

“Some misplaced loyalty to his old man’s memory, I suppose. Maybe he thought he could make up for those kids’ deaths by being a better cop than his father was. You ask me, it’s about the only admirable thing he ever did.”

Mickey let that slide. Already, he was startled by the depths of Tyrrell’s bitterness toward Parker. He couldn’t figure out what Parker might have done to deserve it, short of burning Tyrrell’s house down and then screwing his wife in the ashes.

“You said that Johnny Friday was the first killing in which Parker was suspected of involvement. There were others?”

“I’d guess so.”

“You’d guess?”

Tyrrell signaled for a third whiskey. He was slowing down some, but he was also getting tetchy.

“Look, most are a matter of record: here, in Louisiana, in Maine, in Virginia, in South Carolina. He’s like the Grim Reaper, or cancer. If those are the ones that we know about, J A know abo don’t you think there are others that we don’t know about? You think he called the cops every time he or one of his buddies punched someone’s clock?”

“His buddies? You mean the men known as Angel and Louis?”

“Shadows,” said Tyrrell softly. “Shadows with teeth.”

“What can you tell me about them?”

“Rumors, mostly. Angel, he did time for theft. From what I can tell, Parker might have used him as a source, and in return he offered him protection.”

“So it started out as a professional relationship?”

“You could say that. The other one, Louis, he’s harder to pin down. No arrests, no history: he’s a wraith. There was some stuff last year. An auto shop he was reputed to have a silent interest in got targeted. A guy, one of the shooters, ended up in the hospital, then died a week later of his injuries. After that-”

Hector appeared at his elbow and replaced an empty glass with a full one. Tyrrell paused to take a mouthful.

“Well, this is where it gets strange. One of Louis’s friends, business partners, whatever, he died too. They said that he had a heart attack, but I heard different. One of the mortuary attendants said that they had to fill in a bullet hole in his throat.”

“Who did it? Louis?”

“Nah, he doesn’t hurt those close to him. He’s not that kind of killer. The whispers were that this was a revenge raid gone wrong.”

“That’s what he was doing up in Massena,” said Mickey, more to himself than to Tyrrell, who didn’t seem to notice anyway.

“They’re like him: they’re being looked after,” said Tyrrell.

“Looked after?”

“A man doesn’t get to do what Parker has done, to kill with impunity, unless someone is watching his back.”

“The ones on record were justifiable homicides, I heard.”

“Justifiable! You don’t find it strange that none of them ever even made it to the steps of a court, that every investigation into his actions exonerated him or just petered out?”

“You’re talking about a conspiracy.”

“I’m talking about protection. I’m talking about people with a vested interest in keeping Parker on the streets.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Could be because they approve of what he’s done.”

“But he’s lost his PI’s license. He can’t own a firearm.”

“He can’t legally carry a firearm in the state of Maine. You can be damned sure he has guns squirreled away somewhere.”

“What I’m saying is, if there was a conspiracy to protect him, then something has changed.”

“Not enough to land him behind bars, where he belongs.” Tyrrell rapped an index finger on the table to emphasize his point.

Mickey leaned back. He had filled pages and pages of notes. His hand ached. He watched Tyrrell. The older man was staring into his third glass. They’d been huge measures, as big as any Mickey had ever seen poured in a bar. Had he himself drunk that much alcohol he would be asleep by now. Tyrrell was still upright, but he was on the ropes. Mickey wasn’t going to get anything more of use from him.

“Why do you hate him so much?” he asked.

“Huh?” Tyrrell looked up. Even through a fug of progressive intoxication, he was still surprised by the directness of the question.

“Parker. Why do you hate him?”

“Because he’s a killer.”

“Just that?”

Tyrrell blinked slowly. “No. Because he’s wrong. He’s all wrong. It’s like-It’s like he doesn’t cast a shadow, or there’s no reflection when he looks in a mirror. He seems normal, but then you look closer and he isn’t. He’s an aberration, an abomination.”

Christ, thought Mickey.

“You go to church?” asked Tyrrell.

“No.”

“You should. A man ought to go to church. Helps him to keep himself in perspective.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Tyrrell looked up, his face transformed. Mickey had over-stepped the mark, and badly.

“Don’t get smart with me, boy. Look at you, scrabbling in the dirt, hoping to make a few bucks off another man’s life. You’re a parasite. You don’t believe in anything. I believe. I believe in God, and I believe in the law. I know right from wrong, good from evil. I’ve spent my life living by those beliefs. I cleaned out precinct after precinct in this city, rooting out the ones who thought that being lawmen made them above the law. Well, I showed them the error of their ways. Nobody should be above the law, especially not cops, doesn’t matter if they wear a badge now or wore one ten years ago, twenty years ago. I found the ones who stole, who ripped off dealers and whores, who dispensed their version of street justice in alleyways and empty apartments, and I brought them to book. I called them on it, and I found them wanting.

“Because there is a process in place. There is a system of justice. It’s imperfect, and it doesn’t always work the way it should, but it’s the best we have. And anyone-anyone-who steps outside that system to act as judge, jury, and executioner on others is an enemy of that system. Parker is an enemy of that system. His friends are enemies of that system. By their actions, they render it acceptable for others to act the same way. Their violence begets more violence. You cannot perform acts of evil in the name of a greater good, because the good suffers. It is corrupted and polluted by what has been done in its name. Do you understand, Mr. Wallace? These are gray men. They shift the boundaries of morality to suit themselves, and they use the ends to justify the me J Astify theans. That is unacceptable to me, and if you have a shred of decency, it should be unacceptable to you too.” He pushed the glass away. “We’re finished here.”

“But what if others won’t act, can’t act?” asked Mickey. “Is it better to let evil go unchecked than to sacrifice a little of the good to resist it?”

“And who decides that?” asked Tyrrell. He was swaying slightly as he pulled on his coat, struggling to find the armholes. “You? Parker? Who decides what is an acceptable level of good to sacrifice? How much evil has to be committed in the name of good before it becomes an evil in itself?”

He patted his pockets, and heard the satisfying jangle of his keys. Mickey hoped that they weren’t car keys.

“Go write your book, Mr. Wallace. I won’t be reading it. I don’t think you’ll have anything to tell me that I don’t already know. I’ll give you one piece of advice for free, though. No matter how bad his friends are, Parker is worse. I’d step lightly when I’m asking about them, and maybe I’d be inclined to leave them out of your story altogether, but Parker is lethal because he believes that he’s on a crusade. I hope that you expose him for the wretch he is, but I’d watch my back all the way.”

Tyrrell made a gun with his hand, pointed it at Mickey, and let his thumb fall like a hammer on a chamber. Then he walked, a little unsteadily, from the bar, shaking hands with Hector one more time before he left. Mickey put away his notebook and pen, and went to pay the tab.

“You a friend of the Captain’s?” asked Hector as Mickey calculated the tip and added it to the bill by hand for tax purposes.

“No,” said Mickey. “I don’t think I am.”

“The Captain doesn’t have many friends,” said Hector, and there was something in his tone. It might almost have been pity. Mickey looked at him with interest.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we get cops in here all the time, but he’s the only one who drinks alone.”

“He was IAD,” said Mickey. “Internal Affairs.”

Hector shook his head. “I know that, but that’s not it. He’s just-”

Hector searched for the right word.

“He’s just a prick,” he concluded, then went back to reading his bodybuilding magazine.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MICKEY WROTE UP HIS notes on the Tyrrell interview in his room while the details were still fresh in his mind. The pimp stuff was interesting. He Googled the name Johnny Friday, along with the details that Tyrrell had shared with him, and up came some contemporary news reports, as well as a longer article that had been written for one of the free papers entitled “Pimp: The Brutal Life and Bad End of Johnny Friday.” There were two pictures of Friday accompanying the article. The K arÄ[1] asfirst showed Friday as he was in life, a spare, rangy black man with hollow cheeks and eyes that were too large for his face. He had his arms around a pair of young women in lacy underwear, both of whom had their eyes blacked out to preserve their anonymity. Mickey wondered where they were now. According to the main article, young women who became professionally acquainted with Johnny Friday were not destined to lead happy existences.

The second picture had been taken on the mortuary slab, and showed the extent of the injuries that Friday had received in the course of the beating that took his life. Mickey figured that Friday’s family must have asked for the photograph to be released; that, or the cops had wanted it done in order to send out a message. Friday wasn’t even recognizable as the same man. His face was swollen and bloodied; his jaw, nose, and one of his cheekbones broken; and some of his teeth were sheared off at the gums. He had suffered extensive internal injuries too; one of his lungs had been punctured by a broken rib, and his spleen had ruptured.

Parker’s name wasn’t mentioned, which was no surprise, but a “police source” had indicated to the writer that there was a suspect in the killings, although there was not enough evidence as yet to press charges. Mickey calculated the odds in favor of Tyrrell being that source, and decided they were about even. If he was, then it meant that, even a decade ago, he’d had doubts about Parker, and he might have had some justification for them. Mickey hadn’t cared much for Tyrrell, but there was no denying that the man who had killed Johnny Friday was dangerous, someone capable of inflicting grave violence on another human being, an individual filled with anger and hatred. Mickey tried to balance that with the man he had encountered in Maine, and what he had heard about him from others. He rubbed his still tender belly at the memory of the punch that he had received on Parker’s front porch, and the light that had flared briefly in the man’s eyes as he had struck the blow. Yet no other blows had followed, and the anger in his eyes was gone almost as quickly as it had first appeared, to be replaced by what Mickey thought was shame and regret. It hadn’t mattered to Mickey then-he had been too busy trying not to cough his guts up-but it was clear upon reflection that, if Parker’s anger was still not yet fully under his control, then he had learned to rein it in to some degree, although not quickly enough to save Mickey from a bruised belly. But if Tyrrell was right, this man had Johnny Friday’s blood on his hands. He was not just a killer, but a murderer, and Mickey wondered how much he had truly changed in the years since Johnny Friday’s death.

When he was finished with the Tyrrell material, he opened a paper file on his desk. Inside were more notes: twenty-five or thirty sheets of paper, each covered from top to bottom in Mickey’s tiny handwriting, illegible to anyone else thanks to a combination of his personal shorthand and the size of the script. One sheet was headed with the words “Father/Mother.” He intended to head out to Pearl River at some point to talk to neighbors, store owners, anyone who might have had contact with Parker’s family before the killings, but he had some more homework to do on that first.

He checked his watch. It was after eight. He knew that Jimmy Gallagher, who had partnered Parker’s father down in the Ninth Precinct, lived out in Brooklyn. Tyrrell had given him that, along with the name of the investigator from the Rockland County District Attorney’s Office who had been present at the interviews with Parker’s father following the killings. Tyrrell thought that the latter, ex-NYPD, name of Kozelek, mig J QKozelek, ht talk to Wallace, and had initially offered to smooth the way, but that was before their conversation had come to a bad-tempered end. Wallace figured that call wasn’t going to be made now, although he wasn’t afraid to tap Tyrrell again, once he’d sobered up, if the investigator proved reluctant to speak.

The partner, Gallagher, was another matter. Wallace could tell that Tyrrell hadn’t liked Gallagher any more than he’d liked Charlie Parker. He went back to his notes from that afternoon and found the exchange in question.

W: Who were his friends?

T: Parker’s?

W: No, his father’s.

T: He was a popular guy, well liked down in the Ninth. He probably had a lot of friends.

W: Any in particular?

T: He was partnered with-uh, what was his name now?-Gallagher, that’s it. Jimmy Gallagher was his partner down there for years. (Laughs) I always-ah, it doesn’t matter.

W: Maybe it does. T: I always thought he was queer myself. W: There were rumors?

T: Just that: rumors.

W: Was he interviewed in the course of the investigation into the Pearl River killings?

T: Oh yeah, he was interviewed all right. I saw the transcripts. It was like talking to one of those monkeys. You know the ones: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil? Said he knew nothing. Hadn’t even seen his old buddy that day.

W: Except?

T: Except that it was Gallagher’s birthday when the killings occurred, and he was down in the Ninth, even though he’d requested, and been given, a day off. Hard to believe that he would have gone to the Ninth on his day off, and his birthday, what’s more, and not hooked up with his partner and best friend.

W: So you think that Gallagher went down to meet some people for a birthday drink, and if that was the case, Parker would have been among them?

T: Makes sense, doesn’t it? Here’s another thing: Parker was on an eight-to-four tour that day. A cop named Eddie Grace covered for Parker so that he could finish his tour early. Why would Parker have been calling in favors unless it was to meet up with Jimmy Gallagher?

W: Did Grace say that was why he covered for Parker?

T: Like everyone else involved, Grace knew nothing and said nothing. The precinct clerk, DeMartini, saw Parker skip out, but didn’t say anything about it. He knew when to turn a blind eye. A waitress in Cal ’s said Gallagher was with someone on the night of the killings, but she didn’t get a good look at the guy, and he didn’t stay long. She said it might have been Will Parker, but then the bartender contradicted her, said it was someone else in the bar with Gallagher, a stranger, and the waitress subsequently decided that she’d been mi J Quo;d beenstaken.

W: You think someone put pressure on her to change her story?

T: They closed ranks. It’s what cops do. They protect their own, even if it’s the wrong thing to do.

Mickey paused at that point in his notes. Tyrrell’s face had changed when he spoke about ranks closing, of men being protected. Perhaps it was the IAD investigator in him, a deep-seated hatred of corrupt men and the code of omerta that protected them, but Mickey didn’t think that was all. He suspected that Tyrrell had always been outside the loop even before he joined IAD. He wasn’t a likable man, as Hector had pointed out, and it might have been the case that the “Rat Squad” had given him the opportunity to punish those whom he despised in the guise of a crusade against corruption. Mickey filed that observation away, and returned to his reading.

T: What I couldn’t figure out was, what did it matter if Gallagher was with Parker that night, unless Gallagher knew something about what was going to happen?

W: You’re talking about a premeditated killing.

Mickey recalled that Tyrrell had reconsidered at that point.

T: Maybe, or Gallagher knew the reason Parker ended up killing those two kids and wanted to keep that knowledge to himself. Whatever the reason, I know Jimmy Gallagher lied about what happened that night. I’ve read the IAD reports. As far as we were concerned, after that, Jimmy Gallagher was a marked man for the rest of his career.

Mickey found Gallagher’s name in the phone book. He considered making a call to him before heading out to Bensonhurst, then decided that he might be better off surprising him. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to gain from speaking to Gallagher, but if Tyrrell was right, then there was at least one crack in the story constructed around the events of the day on which the Pearl River killings had taken place. As a reporter, Mickey had learned to become the water in the crack, widening it, weakening the structure itself, until it finally collapsed to reveal the truth. The killings and their aftermath would play an important part in Mickey’s book. They’d offer him scope to consult a couple of rent-a-psychologists who’d give him chapter and verse on the impact on a son of his father’s involvement in a murder-suicide. Readers ate that stuff up.

He took the subway out to Bensonhurst to save a few bucks and found Gallagher’s street. He knocked on the door of the neat little house. After a couple of minutes, a tall man answered the door.

“Mr. Gallagher?”

“That’s right.”

Gallagher’s lips and teeth were stained red. He’d been drinking wine when Mickey called. That was good, unless he had company. It could mean that his defenses might be down some. Mickey had his wallet in his hand. He removed a card from it and handed it over.

“ J Q"5%"> &ldqMy name’s Michael Wallace. I’m a reporter. I was hoping to talk to you for a few minutes.”

“About what?”

And now it was time for Mickey to massage the truth a little: a lie in the service of a greater good. He doubted if Tyrrell would have approved.

“I’m putting together a piece about changes in the Ninth Precinct over the years. I know you served down there. I’d like to speak to you about your memories of that time.”

“A lot of cops passed through the Ninth. Why me?”

“Well, when I was looking for people to talk to, I saw that you’d been involved in a lot of community activities over here in Bensonhurst. I thought that social conscience might give you a better insight into the nature of the Ninth.”

Gallagher looked at the card. “Wallace, huh?”

“That’s right.”

He leaned forward and tucked the card carefully into the pocket of Mickey’s shirt. It was a curiously intimate gesture.

“You’re full of shit,” said Gallagher. “I know who you are, and I know what you’re trying to write. Cops talk. I knew about you from the moment you started sniffing around in things that don’t concern you. Take my advice: let this one go. You don’t want to go nosing around in these corners. Nobody worth talking to is going to help you, and you may just bring a heap of trouble down on your head in the process.”

Mickey’s eyes glittered. They had turned to hard little jewels set into his head. He was getting tired of being warned off.

“I’m a reporter,” he said, even though this was no longer the case. Then again, there was no such thing as a former reporter, just as there was no such thing as an ex-alcoholic. The old hunger never went away. “The more people tell me not to look into something, the more I want to do it.”

“That doesn’t make you a reporter,” said Gallagher. “It makes you a fool. You’re also a liar. I don’t much care for that in a man.”

“Really?” said Wallace. “You’ve never lied?”

“I didn’t say that. I like it as little in myself as I do in you.”

“Good, because I believe that you lied about what happened on the day that Will Parker killed those two teenagers out in Pearl River. I’m going to do my best to find out why. Then I’ll be back here, and we’ll talk again.”

Gallagher looked weary. Mickey wondered how long he’d been waiting for all of this to come back on him. Probably since the day his partner had turned into a murderer.

“Get off my step, Mr. Wallace. You’re spoiling my evening.”

He closed the door in Mickey’s face. Mickey stared at it for a moment, then took the business card from his pocket and tucked it into the door frame before heading back to Manhattan.

Inside the house, Jimmy sat at his kitchen table. There was an empt J Q was an ey glass beside him, and half a bottle of Syrah, along with the remains of his evening meal. Jimmy liked cooking for himself even more than he liked cooking for other people. When he cooked for himself, he didn’t have to fret about the results, about what other people might think of what he’d prepared. He was able to cook entirely to his own satisfaction, and he knew what he enjoyed. He’d been looking forward to a quiet evening with a good bottle of wine and an old noir movie on TCM. Now his sense of calm, which had already been fragile, was shattered. It had been fragile ever since Charlie Parker came to his door. At that moment, Jimmy had felt as though the ground were slowly being eroded from beneath his feet. He had hoped that the past had been laid to rest, however uneasily. Now the earth was shifting, exposing tattered flesh and old bones.

He had always been troubled by the possibility that, in lying to the investigators, in keeping silent over the decades that followed, he had done the wrong thing. Like a splinter buried deep in the flesh, the knowledge of how he had conspired with others to bury the truth, even the little of it that he knew, had festered inside him. Now he knew that the time was fast approaching when the infection would either be purged from his body, or it would destroy him.

He filled his glass and walked to the hallway. Taking a sip of his wine, he dialed the number for the second time since Parker had visited him. It was answered after five rings. In the background, he heard noises-plates being washed, the laughter of women-as the old man said hello.

“It’s Jimmy Gallagher,” he said. “There’s another problem.”

“Go on,” said the voice.

“I’ve just had a reporter here, name of Wallace, Mickey Wallace. He was asking about…that day.”

There was a brief silence. “We know about him. What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I stuck to the story, like you told me to, like I’ve always done. But-”

“Go on.”

“It’s coming apart. First Charlie Parker, now this guy.”

“It was always going to come apart. I am only surprised that it has taken so long.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“About the reporter? Nothing. His book will never be published.”

“You seem very certain about that.”

“We have friends. Wallace’s contract is about to be canceled. Without the promise of money for his efforts, he’ll lose heart.”

Jimmy wasn’t so sure about that. He’d seen the look on Wallace’s face. Money might have been part of the impulse behind his investigation, but it wasn’t the sole motivation. He was almost like a good cop, Jimmy thought. You didn’t pay him to do his job, you paid him not to do something else. Wallace wanted the story. He wanted to find out the truth. Like all those who achieve success against the odds, there was a touch of the fanatic in him.

“Have you spoken to Charlie Parker?”

“Not yet.”

“If you wait for him to come to you, you may find that his anger is commensurately greater. Call him. Tell him to come down and talk.”

“And do I also tell him about you?”

“Tell him everything, Mr. Gallagher. You’ve been faithful to your friend’s memory for a quarter of a century. You’ve protected his son, and us, for a long time. We’re grateful to you, but it’s time now to expose these hidden truths to the light.”

“Thank you,” said Jimmy.

“No, thank you. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

The phone was hung up. Jimmy knew that it might be the last time he heard that voice.

And, in truth, he wasn’t sorry.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE DAY AFTER MY confrontation with Mickey Wallace, I decided to tell Dave Evans that I wanted to take a week off from the Bear. I was determined to put pressure on Jimmy Gallagher, and maybe hit Eddie Grace again. I couldn’t do that while commuting back and forth between Portland and New York and relying on having Sundays off.

And something else had emerged. Walter Cole had been unable to turn up anything new about the investigation into the Pearl River killings, except for one curious detail.

“The reports are too clean,” he told me over the phone. “The whole thing was a whitewash. I spoke to a guy in records. He said the file is so thin, if you turn it sideways it’s invisible.”

“That’s no surprise. They buried it. There was no percentage in doing anything else.”

“Yeah, well, I still think there was more to it than that. The record was purged. You ever hear of something called Unit Five?”

“Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“Ten years ago, all records relating to the Pearl River killings were ring-fenced. Any request for information beyond what was in the files had to go through this Unit Five clearance, which meant contacting the commissioner’s office. My guy didn’t feel comfortable even talking about it, but anyone who wants to know more than the bare details about what happened at Pearl River has to put in a request to Unit Five.”

But Walter wasn’t finished.

“You know what else is covered by the Unit Five order? The deaths of Susan and Jennifer Parker.”

“So what’s Unit Five?” I asked.

“I think you are.”

I met Dave at Arabica, at the corner of Free and Cross, which, as well as having some of the best coffee in town, now occupied the best space, with art on the walls and light pouring through its big picture windows. The Pixies were playing in the background. All things considered, it was hard to find fault with the place.

Kht=Ô[1]st

Dave wasn’t overjoyed at being asked to give me time away from the bar, and I could hardly blame him. He was about to lose two of his staff, one to maternity and the other to a girlfriend in California. I knew he felt that he was spending too much time doing general bar work and too little time on paperwork and accounts. I had been hired to take some of that burden off him, and instead I was leaving him mired even more deeply than he had been before I arrived.

“I’m trying to run a business here, Charlie,” said Dave. “You’re killing me.”

“We’re not real busy, Dave,” I said. “ Gary can take care of the Nappi delivery, and then I’ll be back in time for next week’s truck. We’re overstocked on some of the microbrews anyway, so we can let them run down.”

“What about tomorrow night?”

“Nadine’s been asking for extra shifts. Let her take up some of the slack.”

Dave buried his face in his hands.

“I hate you,” he said.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. Take your week off. If we’re still here when you get back, you owe me. You owe me big time.”

That night did nothing to improve Dave’s mood. Somebody tried to steal the ornamental bear head from the dining room, and we only spotted that it was missing when the thief was about to drive from the parking lot with the head sticking out of the passenger window. We were hit by cocktail freaks, so that even Gary, who seemed to have a better knowledge of cocktails than most, was forced to resort to the cheat sheet kept behind the bar. Students ordered rounds of cherry bombs and Jäger bombs, and the sickly smell of Red Bull tainted the air. We changed fifteen kegs, three times as many as the average for an evening although still some way off the record of twenty-two.

And there was also sex in the air. There was a woman in her fifties at the far end of the bar who couldn’t have been more predatory if she’d had claws and razor teeth, and she was soon joined by two or three others to form a pack. The bartenders called them “flossies” after a semimythical dental supplies saleswoman who was reputed to have serviced a series of men in the parking lot over the course of a single evening. Eventually, they attracted a couple of International Players of the World to themselves, macho types whose aftershave fought a battle of the fragrances with the lingering odor of Red Bull. At one point, I considered turning a hose on them all to cool them down, but before the need arose they eventually departed for a darker corner of town.

By the time 1 A.M. arrived, all fifteen of the staff were exhausted, but nobody wanted to go home just yet. After the beer towers were cleaned and the coolers stocked, we fixed some burgers and fries, and most people had a drink to unwind. We turned off the satellite system that provided music for the bar, and instead put a mellow iPod playlist on shuffle: Sun Kil Moon, Fleet Foxes, the reissue of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blues. Finally, people started to drift away, and Dave and I checked that everything was off in the kitchen, snuffed the last of the candles, checked the bathrooms to make sure everyone was out, then put the cash in the safe and locked up. We said good-bye in the parking lot, and before we went our separate J aur separaways Dave told me again that he hated me.

After I had opened the front door of my house, I paused at the threshold and listened. My encounter with Mickey Wallace, and his story about the two figures he had glimpsed, had unsettled me. I had let those ghosts go. They didn’t belong here any longer. Yet, as before, when I had gone through the house after Wallace’s departure, I experienced no sense of dread, no true unease. Instead, the house was quiet, and I felt its emptiness. Whatever had been here was now gone.

The message light on my answering machine was flashing. I hit the button, and heard Jimmy Gallagher’s voice. He sounded a little drunk, but the message was still clear and simple, and the timing of it preordained.

“Charlie, come on down here,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”