She kissed my forehead and then my eyelids, the tears drying on my face, brought my head down to her shoulder, and kissed the back of my neck.
“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.
“Nothing to say.” I cleared my throat, wrapped my arms around her abdomen and lower back. I could hear her heart beating. She felt so good, so beautiful, so everything that was right in the world. And I still felt like dying.
That night we tried to make love, and at first it was fine, fun actually, trying to work around the heavy cast, Angie giggling from the painkillers, but then once we were both naked in the light of the moon shining through my bedroom window, I’d see a flash of her flesh and it would meld with a snapshot image of Samuel Pietro’s. I touched her breast and saw Corwin Earle’s flabby stomach splattered with blood, ran my tongue over her rib cage and saw blood splashed on the bathroom wall as if hurled from a bucket.
Standing over that bathtub, I’d gone into shock. I saw everything and it was enough to make me weep, but some part of my brain shut down as a protective impulse, so that the true horror of everything I was looking at didn’t fully compute. It had been bad, bloody and unconscionable—I’d known that much—but the images had remained random, floating in a sea of white porcelain and black-and-white tile.
In the thirty hours since, my brain had collated everything, and I was alone and in that tub with Samuel Pietro’s naked, ravaged, debased body. The door to the bathroom was locked, and I couldn’t get out.
“What’s wrong?” Angie said.
I rolled away from her, looked out the window at the moon.
Her warm hand stroked my back. “Patrick?”
A scream died in my throat.
“Patrick, come on. Talk to me.”
The phone rang and I picked it up.
It was Broussard. “How you doing?”
I felt a flush of relief at the sound of his voice, a sense that I wasn’t alone.
“Pretty bad. You?”
“Pretty real fucking bad, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” I said.
“Can’t even talk to my wife about it, and I tell her everything.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Look…Patrick, I’m still in the city. With a bottle. You want to drink some of it with me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be at the Ryan. That all right with you?”
“Sure.”
“See you when you get here.”
He hung up, and I turned to Angie.
She had pulled the sheet up over her body and was reaching across to her nightstand for her cigarettes. She placed the ashtray on her lap and lit the cigarette, stared through the smoke at me.
“That was Broussard,” I said.
She nodded, took another drag on the cigarette.
“He wants to meet.”
“Both of us?” She looked down at the ashtray.
“Just me.”
She nodded. “Best get going, then.”
I leaned in toward her. “Ange—”
She held up a hand. “No apology necessary. Off you go.” She appraised my naked body and smiled. “Put some clothes on first.”
I picked my clothes up off the floor and put them on as Angie watched from behind her cigarette smoke.
As I left the bedroom, she stubbed out her cigarette and said, “Patrick.”
I stuck my head back in the door.
“When you’re ready to talk, I’m all ears. Anything you need to say.”
I nodded.
“And if you don’t talk, that’s up to you. You understand?”
Again, I nodded.
She placed the ashtray back on the nightstand and the sheet fell away from her upper body.
For a long time, neither of us said anything.
“Just so we’re clear,” Angie said eventually. “I won’t be like one of those cop wives in the movies.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nagging and begging you to talk.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“They never know when to leave, those women.”
I leaned back into the room, peered at her.
She shifted the pillows behind her head. “Could you hit the light on your way out?”
I turned off the light, but I stood there for a few moments more, feeling Angie’s eyes on me.
27
It was one very drunk cop I met in the Ryan playground. Only when I saw him wavering on a swing as I entered, no tie, wrinkled suit jacket scrunched under a topcoat stained by playground sand, one shoe untied, did I realize that it was the first time I’d ever seen him with so much as a hair out of place. Even after the quarries and a jump onto the leg of a helicopter, he’d looked impeccable.
“You’re Bond,” I said.
“Huh?”
“James Bond,” I said. “You’re James Bond, Broussard. Mister Perfect.”
He smiled and drained what remained of a bottle of Mount Gay. He tossed the dead soldier into the sand, pulled a full one from his topcoat, and cracked the seal. He spun the cap off and into the sand with a flick of his thumb. “It’s a burden, being this good-looking. Heh-heh.”
“How’s Poole?”
Broussard shook his head several times. “Nothing’s changed. He’s alive, but barely. He hasn’t regained consciousness.”
I sat on the swing beside his. “And the prognosis?”
“Not good. Even if he lives, he’s had several strokes in the last thirty hours, lost a ton of oxygen to the brain. He’d be partially paralyzed, the doctors figure, mute most likely. He’ll never get out of bed again.”
I thought of that first afternoon I’d met Poole, the first time I’d seen his odd ritual of sniffing a cigarette before snapping it in half, the way he’d looked up into my confused face with his elfin grin and said, “I beg your pardon. I quit.” Then, when Angie’d asked if he’d mind if she smoked, he’d said, “Oh, God, would you?”
Shit. I hadn’t even realized until now how much I liked him.
No more Poole. No more arch remarks, delivered with a knowing, bemused glint in his eye.
“I’m sorry, Broussard.”
“Remy,” Broussard said, and handed me a plastic cocktail cup. “You never know. He’s the toughest bastard I ever met. Has a hell of a will to live. Maybe he’ll pull through. How about you?”
“Huh?”
“How’s your will to live?”
I waited while he filled half the cup with rum.
“It’s been stronger,” I said.
“Mine, too. I don’t get it.”
“What?”
He held the bottle aloft and we toasted silently, then drank.
“I don’t get,” Broussard said, “why what happened in that house has got me so turned around. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of horrible shit.” He leaned forward in his swing, looked back over his shoulder at me. “Horrible shit, Patrick. Babies fed Drano in their bottles, kids suffocated and shaken to death, beat so bad you can’t tell what color their skin really is.” He shook his head slowly. “Lotta shit. But something about that house…”
“Critical mass,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Critical mass,” I repeated. I took another swig of rum. It wasn’t going down easy yet, but it was close. “You see this horrible thing, that one, but they’re spaced out. Yesterday, we saw all sorts of evil shit and it all reached critical mass at once.”
He nodded. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as that basement,” he said. “And then that kid in the tub?” He shook his head. “A few months shy of my twenty, and I’ve never…” He took another swig and shuddered against the burn of alcohol. He gave me a slight smile. “You know what Roberta was doing when I shot her?”
I shook my head.
“Pawing at the door like a dog. Swear to God. Pawing and mewing and crying about her Leon. I’d just climbed out of that cellar, found those two little kid skeletons sunk in limestone and gravel,
the whole fucking place something out of a spook show, and I see Roberta at the top of the stairs? Man, I didn’t even look for her gun. I just unloaded mine.” He spit into the sand. “Fuck her. Hell’s too good a place for that bitch.”
For a while we sat in silence, listening to the creak of the swings’ chains, the cars passing along the avenue, the slap and scrape of some kids playing street hockey in the parking lot of the electronics plant across the street.
“The skeletons,” I said to Broussard after a bit.
“Unidentified. Closest the ME can tell me is that one’s male, one’s female, and he thinks neither is older than nine or younger than four. A week before he knows shit.”
“Dentals?”
“The Tretts took care of that. Both skeletons showed traces of hydrochloric acid. The ME thinks the Tretts marinated them in the shit, pulled out the teeth while they were soft, dumped the bones in boxes of limestone in the cellar.”
“Why leave them in the cellar?”
“So they could look at them?” Broussard shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?”
“So one could be Amanda McCready.”
“Most definitely. Either that or she’s in the quarry.”
I thought about the cellar and Amanda for a bit. Amanda McCready and her flat eyes, her lowered expectations for all the things that kids should have the highest expectations for, her lifeless corpse being dropped in a bathtub filled with acid, her hair stripping away from her head like papier-mâché.
“Hell of a world,” Broussard whispered.
“It’s a fucking awful world, Remy. You know?”
“Two days ago I would have argued with you. I’m a cop, okay, but I’m lucky, too. Got a great wife, nice house, invested well over the years. I’ll leave all this shit soon as I hit my twenty and a wake-up call.” He shrugged. “But then something like—Jesus—that carved-up kid in that fucking bathroom and you start thinking, ‘Well, fine, my life’s okay, but the world’s still a pile of shit for most people. Even if my world is okay, the world is still a pile of evil shit.’ You know?”
“Oh,” I said, “I know. Exactly.”
“Nothing works.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing works,” he said. “Don’t you get it? The cars, the washing machines, the refrigerators and ‘starter’ houses, the fucking shoes and clothes and…nothing works. Schools don’t work.”
“Not public ones,” I said.
“Public? Look at the morons coming out of private schools these days. You ever talked to one of those disaffected prep-school fucks? You ask ’em what morality is, they say a concept. You ask ’em what decency is, they say a word. Look at these rich kids whacking winos in Central Park over drug deals or just because. Schools don’t work because parents don’t work because their parents didn’t work because nothing works, so why invest energy or love or anything into it if it’s just going to let you down? Jesus, Patrick, we don’t work. That kid was out there for two weeks; no one could find him. He was in that house, we suspected it hours before he was killed, we’re sitting in a doughnut shop talking about it. That kid got his throat cut when we should have been kicking in the door.”
“We’re the richest, most advanced society in the history of civilization,” I said, “and we can’t keep a kid from getting carved up in a bathtub by three freaks? Why?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head and kicked at the sand by his feet. “I just don’t know. Every time you come up with a solution, there’s a faction ready to tell you you’re wrong. You believe in the death penalty?”
I held out my cup. “No.”
He stopped pouring. “Excuse me?”
I shrugged. “I don’t. Sorry. Keep pouring, will you?”
He filled my cup and sucked back on the bottle for a moment. “You capped Corwin Earle in the back of the head, you’re telling me you don’t believe in capital punishment?”
“I don’t think society has the right or the intelligence. Let society prove to me they can pave roads efficiently; then I’ll let them decide life and death.”
“Yet, again: you executed someone yesterday.”
“Technically he had his hand on a weapon. And besides, I’m not society.”
“What the fuck’s that mean?”
I shrugged. “I trust myself. I can live with my actions. I don’t trust society.”
“That why you’re a PI, Patrick? The lone knight and all that?”
I shook my head. “Piss on that.”
Another laugh.
“I’m a PI, because—I dunno, maybe I’m addicted to the great What Comes Next. Maybe I like tearing down facades. That doesn’t make me a good guy. It just makes me a guy who hates people who hide, pretend to be what they’re not.”
He raised the bottle, and I tapped my plastic glass into the side.
“What if someone pretends to be one thing because society deems he must, but in reality he’s something else because he deems he must?”
I shook my head against the booze. “Run that one by me again.” I stood up, and my feet felt unsteady in the sand. I crossed to the jungle gym opposite the swings and perched myself on a rung.
“If society doesn’t work, how do we, as allegedly honorable men, live?”
“On the fringes,” I said.
He nodded. “Exactly. Yet we must coexist within society or otherwise we’re—what, we’re fucking militia, guys who wear camouflage pants and bitch about taxes while they drive on roads paved by the government. Right?”
“I guess.”
He stood and wavered, grasped the swing chain, and tilted back into the pools of dark behind the swing-set arch. “I planted evidence on a guy once.”
“You what?”
He tilted back into the light. “True. Scumbag named Carlton Volk. He was raping hookers for months. Months. A couple pimps tried to stop him, he fucked them up. Carlton was a psycho, black-belt, prison-weight-room kind of guy. Couldn’t be reasoned with. And our buddy Ray Likanski gives me a phone call, lets me in on all the details. Skinny Ray, I guess, had a soft spot for one of the hookers. Whatever. Anyway, I know Carlton Volk is raping hookers, but who’s going to convict him? Even if the girls had wanted to testify—which they didn’t—who would believe them? A hooker saying she was raped is a joke to most people. Like killing a corpse; supposedly it ain’t possible. So I know Carlton’s a two-time loser, out on probation; I plant an ounce of heroin and two unlicensed firearms in his trunk, way back under the spare where he’ll never find ’em. Then I put an expired inspection sticker over the up-to-date one on his license plate. Who looks at their own plate until it’s near renewal time?” He floated back into the dark again for a moment. “Two weeks later, Carlton gets stopped on the inspection sticker, cops an attitude, et cetera, et cetera. Long story short, he gets dropped as a three-time felon for twenty years hard, no parole possibility.”
I waited until he’d swung back into the light again before I spoke.
“You think you did the right thing?”
He shrugged. “For those hookers, yes.”
“But—”
“Always a ‘but’ when you tell a story like that, ain’t there?” He sighed. “But a guy like Carlton, he thrives in prison. Probably goes through more young kids sent up for burglary and minor dope-dealing than he ever would have raped in hookers. So did I do right for the general population? Probably not. Did I do right for some hookers no one else gave a shit about? Maybe.”
“If you had to do it again?”
“Patrick, lemme ask you: What would you do with a guy like Carlton?”
“We’re back to the death penalty again, aren’t we?”
“The personal one,” he said, “not the societal one. If I’d had the balls to whack Volk, no one gets raped by him anymore. That’s not relative. That’s black and white.”
“But those kids in prison, they’ll still get raped by someone else.”
He nodded. “For every solution, a problem.”
/> I took another swig of rum, noticed a lone star floating above the thin night clouds and city smog.
I said, “I stood over that kid’s body and something snapped. I didn’t care what happened to me, to my life, to anything. I just wanted…” I held out my hands.
“Balance.”
I nodded.
“So you popped a cap in the back of a guy’s head while he was on his knees.”
I nodded again.
“Hey, Patrick? I’m not judging you, man. I’m saying sometimes we do the right thing but it wouldn’t hold up in court. It wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of”—he made quotation marks with his fingers—“society.”
I heard that yuh-yuh-yuh yammering Earle had made under his breath, saw the puff of blood that had spit from the back of his neck, heard the thump as he’d fallen to the floor and the spent shell skittered on the wood.
“In the same circumstances,” I said, “I’d do it again.”
“Does that make you right?” Remy Broussard ambled over to the jungle gym, poured some more rum into my cup.
“No.”
“Doesn’t make you wrong, though, does it?”
I looked up at him, smiled, and shook my head. “No again.”
He leaned back into the jungle gym and yawned. “Nice if we had all the answers, wouldn’t it?”
I looked at the line of his face etched in the darkness beside me, and I felt something squirm and niggle in the back of my skull like a small fishing hook. What had he just said that bugged me?
I looked at Remy Broussard and I felt that fish hook dig deeper against the back of my skull. I watched him close his eyes and I wanted to hit him for some reason.
Instead I said, “I’m glad.”
“About what?”
“Killing Corwin Earle.”
“Me too. I’m glad I killed Roberta.” He poured more rum into my cup. “Hell with it, Patrick, I’m glad none of those sick pricks walked out of that house alive. Drink to that?”
I looked at the bottle, then at Broussard, searched his face for whatever it was about him that suddenly bothered me. Frightened me. I couldn’t find it in the dark, in the booze, so I raised my cup and touched the plastic to the bottle.