“He’s a sweetheart, this guy,” Devin said.
“Probably just needs a good hug,” Oscar said. “Straighten him right out.”
“No such thing as a bad boy,” Devin said.
“You’re damn skippy,” Oscar said.
I hadn’t said much since I’d seen her body. Unlike Oscar and Devin, I’m no pro when it comes to violent death. I’ve seen my share, but not on a level even remotely comparable with either of these guys.
I said, “I can’t handle this.”
“Yes,” Devin said, “you can.”
“Drink more,” Oscar said. He nodded in the direction of Gerry Glynn. Gerry’d owned the Black Emerald since the days when he was a cop, and even though he usually shuts down at one, he never closes his doors to people on the Job. He had our drinks in front of us before Oscar finished his nod, and he was back at the other end of the bar before we even realized he’d been by. The definition of a good bartender.
“Crucified,” I said for the twentieth time that night as Devin placed a fresh beer in my hand.
“I think we’re all agreed on that point, Patrick.”
“Devin,” I said, trying to focus on him, pissed off that he wouldn’t remain still, “the girl was barely twenty-two years old. I’ve known her since she was two.”
Devin’s eyes remained still and blank. I looked at Oscar. He chewed a half-smoked, unlit cigar and looked back at me like I was a piece of furniture he hadn’t decided where to place.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Patrick,” Devin said. “Patrick. You listening?”
I turned in his direction. For a brief moment, his head stopped moving. “What?”
“She was twenty-two. Yes. A baby. And if she’d been fifteen or forty, it wouldn’t be any better. Death is death and murder’s murder. Don’t make it worse by getting sentimental about her age, Patrick. She was murdered. Atrociously. No argument. But…” He leaned haphazardly on the bar, closed one eye. “Partner? What was my but?”
“But,” Oscar said, “don’t matter if she was male or female, rich or poor, young or old—”
“Black or white,” Devin said.
“—black or white,” Oscar said, scowling at Devin, “she was still murdered, Kenzie. Murdered bad.”
I looked at him. “You ever seen anything that bad?”
He chuckled. “Seen a whole lot worse, Kenzie.”
I turned to Devin. “You?”
“Hell, yes.” He sipped his drink. “Violent world, Patrick. People enjoy killing. It—”
“Empowers them,” Oscar said.
“Exactly,” Devin said. “Some part of it makes you feel pretty goddammed good. All that power.” He shrugged. “But why’re we telling you? You’d know all about that.”
“Excuse me?”
Oscar put a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt on my shoulder. “Kenzie, everyone knows you did Marion Socia last year. We got you pegged for a couple punks in the projects off the Melnea Cass too.”
“What,” I said, “and you haven’t had me arraigned?”
“Patrick, Patrick, Patrick,” Devin said, slurring just a bit, “it was up to us, you’d get a medal for Socia. Fuck him. Fuck him twice, far as I’m concerned. But,” he said, closing one eye again, “you can’t tell me some part of you didn’t feel real good watching the light go out of his eyes when you popped one through his head.”
I said, “No comment.”
“Kenzie,” Oscar said, “you know he’s right. He’s drunk, but he’s right. You drew on that pile of shit Socia, looked in his eyes, and put his ass down.” He made a pistol with his index finger and thumb, shoved it against my temple. “Bang. Bang. Bang.” He removed the finger. “No more Marion Socia. Kind of feels like being God for a day, don’t it?”
How I felt when I killed Marion Socia under an expressway as trucks hammered the metal extensions overhead was one of the more conflicted set of emotions I’d ever had in my life, and I sure as hell didn’t feel like reminiscing about it in a bar with two homicide detectives when I was half in the bag. Maybe I’m paranoid.
Devin smiled. “Killing someone feels very good, Patrick. Don’t kid yourself.”
Gerry Glynn came down the bar. “Another round, boys?”
Devin nodded. “Hey, Ger.”
Gerry stopped halfway down the bar.
“You ever kill anyone on the Job?”
Gerry looked a bit embarrassed, as if he’d heard the question too many times. “Never even pulled my gun.”
“No,” Oscar said.
Gerry shrugged, his kind eyes completely at odds with the job he’d done for twenty years. He scratched Patton’s abdomen absently. “Those were different days, then. You remember, Dev.”
Devin nodded. “Different days.”
Gerry pulled the tap to fill my beer mug. “Different world, really.”
“Different world,” Devin said.
He brought our fresh drinks down to us. “Wish I could help you out, guys.”
I looked at Devin. “Someone notify Kara’s mother?”
He nodded. “She was passed out in her kitchen, but they woke her up and told her. Someone’s sitting with her now.”
“Kenzie,” Oscar said, “we’re going to get this Micky Doog. It was someone else, a gang, whatever, we’ll get ’em all. In a few hours, we know everyone’s awake, we’re going to recanvass every house and someone probably will have seen something. And we’ll pick the punk motherfucker up and sweat him and mess with his head till he breaks. Won’t bring her back, but maybe we speak for her a bit.”
I said, “Yeah, but…”
Devin leaned toward me. “The prick who did this is going down, Patrick. Believe it.”
I wanted to. I really did.
Just before we left, while Devin and Oscar were in the bathroom, I looked up from the blurred bar top and found both Gerry and Patton staring at me. In the four years Gerry’d had him, I’d never known Patton to so much as bark, but one look in the dog’s still, flat eyes and you’d never consider messing with it. That dog’s eyes had probably forty different casts for Gerry—ranging from love to sympathy—but it had only one for everyone else—bare warning.
Gerry scratched behind Patton’s ears. “Crucifixion.”
I nodded.
“How many times you think that’s happened in this city, Patrick?”
I shrugged, not trusting my tongue to enunciate properly anymore.
“Probably not many,” Gerry said, then looked down as Patton licked his hand and Devin came back into the room.
That night, I dreamed of Kara Rider.
I was walking through a cabbage field filled with Black Angus cows and human heads whose faces I didn’t recognize. In the distance, the city burned, and I could see my father’s silhouette standing atop an engine ladder, hosing the flames with gasoline.
The fire was rolling steadily out from the city, kissing the edges of the cabbage field. Around me, the human heads were beginning to speak, an incoherent babble at first, but soon I could distinguish a stray voice or two.
“Smells like smoke,” one said.
“You always say that,” one of the cows said and spit cud onto a cabbage leaf as a stillborn calf fell from between its legs and puddled by its hoofs.
I could hear Kara screaming from somewhere in the field as the air grew black and oily and the smoke bit my eyes, and Kara kept screaming my name, but I couldn’t tell the human heads from the cabbage heads and the cows were moaning and tipping in the breeze and the smoke was all around me, and pretty soon Kara’s screams stopped and I felt grateful as the flames began to lick at my legs. So I sat down in the middle of the field to get my wind back and watch the world burn around me as the cows chewed the grass and swayed back and forth and refused to run.
When I woke up in bed, I was gasping for air and the smell of burning flesh clung to my nostrils. I watched the sheet shake over my racing heart and swore I’d never go drinking with Oscar and Devin again.
/> 10
I’d crawled into bed at four that morning, been awakened by my Salvador Dali dream sometime around seven, and didn’t fall back asleep until about eight.
Which meant nothing to Lyle Dimmick and his buddy, Waylon Jennings. At exactly nine, Waylon started screaming about the woman who’d done him wrong, and the harsh grate of a country fiddle climbed over my windowsills and rattled china in my brain.
Lyle Dimmick was a permanently sunburned housepainter who’d come here from Odessa, Texas, because of a woman. He’d found her, lost her, got her back, and lost her again when she ran back to Odessa with some guy she met in a neighborhood pub, an Irish pipefitter who decided he’d always been a cowpoke at heart.
Ed Donnegan owned almost every three-decker on my block, save for my own, and every ten years, he got around to painting them, and every time he did, he hired a single painter for as long as it took to paint them all, rain, snow or shine.
Lyle wore a ten-gallon hat and a red handkerchief around his neck and black wrap-around Gargoyle sunglasses that took up half of his small, pinched face. Those sunglasses, he said, seemed like something a city boy would wear, and they were his only concession to living in a god-awful world of Yankees who had no appreciation for God’s three great gifts to mankind—Jack Daniel’s, the horse, and, of course, Waylon.
I stuck my head in between the shade and the screen and saw that his back was to me as he painted the house next door. The music was so loud he’d never hear me, so I pulled down the window instead, then stumbled up and pulled down all the others in the bedroom, and reduced Waylon to just another tinny voice ringing in my head. Then I crawled back into bed and closed my eyes and prayed for quiet.
Which meant nothing to Angie.
She woke me shortly after ten by bouncing around the apartment making coffee, opening windows to another fresh autumn day, and rattling through my refrigerator, as Waylon or Merle or Hank Jr. poured back through my screens.
When that didn’t rouse me from bed, she opened the bedroom door and said, “Get up.”
“Go away.” I pulled the covers over my head.
“Get up, ya baby. I’m bored. Now.”
I threw a pillow at her and she ducked and it arced over her head and shattered something in the kitchen.
She said, “You weren’t fond of those dishes, I hope.”
I stood and wrapped the sheet around my waist to cover my glow-in-the-dark Marvin the Martian boxer shorts and stumbled out into the kitchen.
Angie stood in the middle of the room, coffee cup held in both hands, a few broken plates on the floor and sink.
“Coffee?” she said.
I found a broom, began sweeping up the mess. Angie put her cup on the table, bent by me with a dustpan.
I said, “You’re still a bit unclear on this sleep concept, aren’t you?”
“Overrated.” She scooped up some glass and dumped it in the wastebasket.
“How would you know? You’ve never tried it.”
“Patrick,” she said, dumping another load of glass, “it’s not my fault you stayed out until the wee hours drinking with your little friends.”
My little friends.
“How do you know I was out drinking with anybody?”
She dumped the last bit of glass, straightened. “Because your skin is a shade of green I’ve never seen before, and there was an incredibly drunken message on my answering machine this morning.”
“Ah.” I vaguely recollected a pay phone and a beep from some point last night. “What did this message say?”
She took her coffee cup off the table, leaned against the washing machine. “Something like ‘Where are you, it’s three in the morning, something’s really fucked up, we gotta talk.’ The rest I couldn’t understand, but by then you’d started speaking Swahili anyway.”
I put the dustpan, broom, and wastebasket in the pantry, poured myself a cup of coffee. “So,” I said, “where were you at three in the morning?”
“You’re my father now?” She frowned and pinched my waist just above the sheet. “You’re getting love handles.”
I reached for the cream. “I don’t have love handles.”
“And you know why? Because you still drink beer like you’re in a frat.”
I looked at her steadily, poured extra cream into my coffee. “You going to answer my original question?”
“About my whereabouts last night?”
“Yes.”
She sipped her coffee, looked over the mug rim at me. “Nope. I did wake up with a warm, fuzzy feeling, though, and a big smile on my face. Big smile.”
“Big as the one you’re wearing now?”
“Bigger.”
“Hmm,” I said.
She hoisted herself up onto the washing machine. “So, you called me, shit-faced, at three A.M. to do more than check up on my sex life. What’s up?” She lit a cigarette.
I said, “You remember Kara Rider?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone murdered her last night.”
“No.” Her eyes were huge.
“Yes.” With all the extra cream, my coffee tasted like baby’s formula. “Crucified her on Meeting House Hill.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. She looked at her cigarette like it might tell her something.
“Any idea who did it?” she said.
“No one was parading around Meeting House Hill with a bloody hammer singing, ‘Boy, oh boy, do I like to crucify women,’ if that’s what you mean.” I tossed my coffee in the sink.
Quietly, she said, “You done snapping for the day?”
I poured fresh coffee into the cup. “Don’t know yet. It’s still early.” I turned around and she slipped off the washing machine and stood in front of me.
I saw Kara’s thin body lying in the cold night, swollen and exposed, her eyes blank.
I said, “I ran into her the other morning outside the Emerald. I had a feeling, I dunno, that she was in trouble or something, but I let it go. I blew it off.”
“And what?” she said. “You’re somehow to blame?”
I shrugged.
“No, Patrick,” she said. She ran a warm palm up the side of my neck, forced me to look in her eyes. “Understand?”
Nobody should die like Kara did.
“Understand?” she said again.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess.”
“No guessing,” she said. She removed her hand and pulled a white envelope from her purse and handed it to me. “This was taped to the front door downstairs.” She pointed to a small cardboard box on my kitchen table. “And that was leaning against the door.”
I have a third-floor apartment with a bolt lock on both the front and back doors and usually two guns stored inside somewhere, and none of this probably deters break-ins as much as the two front doors to the three-decker itself. There’s an outside one and an interior one, and they’re both reinforced with steel and made of heavy black German oak. The portal glass in the first one is wired with alarm tape, and my landlord has fitted both doors with a total of six locks that require three different keys. I have a set. Angie has a set. My landlord’s wife, who lives in the first-floor apartment because she can’t stand his company, has one. And Stanis, my crazy landlord—terrified that a Bolshevik hit squad is going to come for him—has two sets.
All in all, my building is so secure I was surprised someone could even tape an envelope to the front door or lean a box against it without setting off nine or ten alarms and waking five city blocks.
The envelope was plain, white, letter-size with “patrick kenzie” typed in the center. No address, no stamp, no return address. I opened it and pulled a piece of typing paper from inside, unfolded it. There were no address headings, no date, no salutation, no signature. In the middle of the page, centered, someone had typed one word:
HI!
The rest of the page was virgin.
I handed it to Angie. She looked at it, turned it over, turned it
back to the front. “’Hi,’” she read aloud.
“Hi,” I said.
“No,” she said, “more like ‘Hi!’ Give it that girlish giggle.”
I tried it.
“Not bad.”
HI!
“Could it be Grace?” She poured another cup of coffee.
I shook my head. “She says hi an entirely different way, believe me.”
“So, who?”
I honestly didn’t know. It was such an innocuous note, but weird too. “Whoever wrote it is a master of brevity.”
“Or has an extremely limited vocabulary.”
I tossed the note on the table, pulled back the tape on the box and opened it as Angie looked over my shoulder.
“What the hell?” she said.
The box was filled with bumper stickers. I pulled out a handful, and there was still another two handfuls waiting.
Angie reached in, grabbed a fistful.
“This is…odd,” I said.
Angie’s brow was furrowed and she had a curious half smile on her face. “You could say that, yeah.”
We took them into the living room and laid them out on the floor in a collage of blacks and yellows and reds and blues and shiny iridescents. Looking down at all ninety-six of them was like standing over a world of petulance and hollow sentiment and the hopelessly inept search for the perfect sound-bite:
HUGS NOT DRUGS; I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE; LOVE YOUR MOTHER; IT’S A CHILD NOT A CHOICE; I JUST FUCKING LOVE TRAFFIC; IF YOU DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT; ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING; IF I’M A ROAD HOG, YOUR WIFE’S A PIG; VOTE FOR TED KENNEDY AND PUT A BLONDE IN THE WATER; YOU CAN HAVE MY GUN WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS; I’LL FORGIVE JANE FONDA WHEN THE JEWS FORGIVE HITLER; IF YOU’RE AGAINST ABORTION, DON’T HAVE ONE; PEACE—AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME; DIE YUPPIE SCUM; MY KARMA BEATS YOUR DOGMA; MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER; POLITICIANS LIKE THEIR PEASANTS UNARMED; FORGET ’NAM? NEVER; THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY; HONK IF YOU’RE RICH AND HANDSOME; HATE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE; I’M SPENDING MY CHILD’S INHERITENCE; WE ARE OUT & WE ARE EVERYWHERE; SHIT HAPPENS; JUST SAY NO; MY WIFE RAN OFF WITH MY BEST FRIEND AND I’M SURE GOING TO MISS HIM; DIVERS DO IT DEEP; I’D RATHER BE FISHING; DON’T LIKE THE POLICE? NEXT TIME YOU’RE IN TROUBLE, CALL A LIBERAL; FUCK YOU; FUCK ME; MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT ST. CATHERINE’S ELEMENTARY; MY CHILD BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT; HAVE A NICE DAY, ASSHOLE; FREE TIBET; FREE MANDELA; FREE HAITI; FEED SOMALIA; CHRISTIANS AREN’T PERFECT, JUST FORGIVEN…