by P. J. Tracy
“My friend lives at 1240 Gleason. Can I get there another way?”
The cop gave him a pained look. “I’m sorry. That’s the address where the explosion occurred.”
Chuck shook his head. “No, it can’t be. You must have the wrong address, or maybe I do, because I was on the phone with Wally when he was attacked.”
“Wally?”
“Yes, dammit, Wally Luntz, 1240 Gleason. On the phone I heard someone come into the house, then there was a struggle, but there was no explosion, just Wally screaming for help.”
The officer winced. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid your friend died in the explosion.”
For a moment, Chuck thought he might throw up, and he pressed his sweaty brow against the cold steering wheel. “Are you sure?”
“Yes sir.”
“Oh my God.”
The officer squatted next to Chuck’s open window, giving him a few moments to compose himself. “I know this is a shock for you, sir, but you said you heard Mr. Luntz being attacked, is that right?”
All Chuck could manage was a nod.
“I think you should talk to a detective. Can you manage that?”
Chuck nodded again, or maybe he was still nodding.
FIVE
As Christmas crept up on the calendar and reliably cold weather settled in for the long haul, Minneapolis homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth were enjoying day six of their seven-day vacation. Only they weren’t enjoying it at all.
A few weeks back, it had seemed like a great idea to take some time off after chasing around armed terrorists in the north woods and spending the emotional equivalent of twenty years in FBI debriefings so repetitive and boring the idea of pulling out your own fingernails had suddenly seemed like a terrific alternative.
But in retrospect, vacation in the middle of dreary December in Minnesota had been even worse, and they were bored out of their minds. The need for distraction of any kind had become absolutely essential, which was why, on a frosty winter evening, Magozzi and Gino were in the western suburbs, currently freezing their balls off while simultaneously getting the crap kicked out of them in a bush-league, two-on-two broomball game by a couple of Neanderthal firemen buddies out of Station Seven. It was cold, painful, and humiliating.
“Come on, Detectives!” Freddie Wilson taunted them, expertly sweeping the stupid ball back and forth on the ice with his tricked-out tournament broom, daring them to move on him. “You’re only ten points behind! Make an effort!”
Gino gave him a ferocious sneer and shouted back, “You look hungry, Freddie! Wish we had time to eat chili on the job!”
“Oh yeah? Looks like you’ve had plenty of time to eat on the job, Rolseth!”
There was a chorus of “oohs” from the handful of spectators along the boards of the outdoor hockey rink, the crowd evenly divided between law enforcement and Fire. These interdepartmental matchups were more like the WWF—the more smack talk, the better.
Magozzi watched Gino’s demeanor change from competitive to bloodthirsty just as Freddie bent into shooting position and made a searing shot toward their goal. Gino launched himself across the crease, making a half-twist swan dive onto the ice as the ball sailed over his head to home for the score. One more goal for Fire, one seriously messed-up shoulder for MPD.
The firemen on the sidelines raised their hands and cheered. The cops booed and started chanting, “MPD! MPD!” along with colorful words of encouragement to Gino and Magozzi.
Gino rolled over onto his back, clutching his throbbing shoulder, wondering if it would have to be amputated. At least it wasn’t his shooting arm. He stared up at the dingy snow clouds above, which turned into Leo’s cold-reddened face.
“Are you okay, Gino?”
“No. I need morphine.”
“Time out, take five!” Magozzi heard the referee shouting, with no regard to the dying man writhing around on his patch of ice. What an asshole. Freddie and his fellow firefighter Jim Ames, über studs of the illustrious, hard-core broomball world, slid over to stand above Gino.
Freddie offered his hand and lifted him up off the ice as if he weighed less than a two-day-old kitten. When the guy wasn’t fighting fires or eating chili in the station house, he was throwing around iron.
“Nice move, Rolseth.”
“Fuck you, Freddie, I know where you live.”
“No, I mean it,” he chuckled. “You were just a millisecond too slow, otherwise it would have been a bomb save. Better luck next time.”
“Yeah, right.”
Magozzi gave Freddie a friendly bump on his inhumanly large arm. “Nice guns. But don’t forget, Gino and I get to carry real ones. All the time.”
Freddie and Jim both laughed. “Yeah, well, we’ve got big hoses we get to use all the time, so I guess it’s even.” He looked back at Gino, who was tentatively testing his injured limb. “Happy to see that.”
“What?” Gino snapped.
“You’re moving your arm. If you’d dislocated your shoulder, you’d be screaming right now—”
Suddenly, all the firemen’s phones beeped loudly in unison, creating an electronic orchestra around the boards and on the ice. Jim Ames pulled out his cell phone from a zippered jacket pocket. “We gotta go, Freddie. Gas explosion in South Minneapolis.”
“Aw, too bad you guys can’t finish the game,” Gino said smugly. “Leo and I were just heating up.”
Freddie snorted. “Yeah, you’re melting the ice now,” he said smoothly as he and Ames jogged away.
“Be safe, guys,” Gino called after them, meaning it. Then he turned to Magozzi. “Can I shoot him in the back?” he asked, also meaning it.
Gino shrugged off his parka in the warming house and slapped a cold gel pack on his shoulder.
“Sorry about the shoulder,” Magozzi offered, rummaging in his duffel, pulling out a bottle of ibuprofen and tossing it over. “Take four.”
Gino gladly washed down the pills with the warm dregs of his Gatorade. “What an asinine sport.”
Magozzi gave him a long-suffering look. “I hate to remind you, but . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, it was my idea. Next time I recommend any recreational activity I ever enjoyed before I hit twenty-five, you have my blessings to pistol-whip me.”
“Deal. Is the offer retroactive?”
“No. You were an accessory to the crime because you were stupid enough to let me talk you into it.” He sagged onto a wooden bench and started stripping off his snow pants, wincing in pain whenever he moved his shoulder the wrong way. “God, this hurts. The only thing that’s going to save this day is the lasagna Angela has in the oven. Hey, you wanna come over for dinner?”
“Are you kidding, I always want to come over for dinner, but Grace and I have plans tonight. Thanks for the invite, though.”
SIX
Mid-December, and Magozzi was sitting outside in a light jacket, looking at Grace MacBride’s naked magnolia tree. Minnesotans were notoriously foolhardy when it came to maximizing their time outdoors, and although Grace wasn’t a native, she’d learned to adapt to the weather. This fall she’d put up a partially enclosed patio area at the back of the house, with insulated windows and a radiant heating system beneath the stone floor. The open front of the patio was flanked with big propane heaters that kept the space surprisingly toasty.
A gentle snow continued to filter down from the sky where a half-moon was rising. It was the first snow of the season, and although the temperatures had been low enough to freeze a broomball rink, there hadn’t been any bone chillers yet. When was the last time that happened in Minnesota?
Grace had put Christmas lights on the magnolia. Not that she thought of them as Christmas lights, of course; just decorative twinkle lights that had forgotten their original intent.
Magozzi was born and raised a Catholic, and he�
��d always been a little disturbed by the pervasive array of downtown trees adorned with twinkle lights all year round. The decorative fad had tried to creep into the Minnesota landscape, and although restaurants and clubs jumped on the bandwagon, the state as a whole had been unable to fully embrace this particular trend. In the Midwest mind-set, Magozzi thought, Christmas lights meant something special, something rare you waited for all year. If you had them all the time, they lost their magic.
Just like fireworks. Used to be you waited all year for the Fourth of July. Now they blasted them off at concerts, store openings, and amusement parks almost every night so you could watch them from the Ferris wheel. No one noticed anymore. They’d become too common to be special, and Magozzi missed that.
“I’m getting really old.” Magozzi talked at the magnolia tree rather than at his male companion one Adirondack chair over. Males didn’t look at each other when they talked in this part of the country, and that unspoken rule crossed species lines. Tonight Magozzi’s companion was Charlie, Grace’s dog, who woofed politely at Magozzi’s words, but didn’t look at him either. He knew the rules.
He heard the back door close, then Grace’s footsteps, then smelled something delicious wafting out of the kitchen and into the night air. These were the familiar sounds and smells he associated with most of their time together over the past two years—the back door closing, Grace’s boots on the three wooden steps down to the yard, Charlie’s chewed-off tail thumping against the back of his very own Adirondack chair as his mistress approached. And, of course, the aroma of spectacular food always simmering on Grace’s stove. They were warm, happy memories, but for some reason they seemed to be receding into what had been, instead of punctuating what was. Even here, in the place that had always felt like home because Grace was in it, things were a little off-kilter.
For instance, occasionally, like tonight, Grace wore some sort of silky, billowing slacks that moved like water around her legs and drove Magozzi nuts. But tomorrow she might appear in her old signature outfit of black jeans and T-shirts and tall, stiff riding boots. Sometimes she carried her Sig in the shoulder harness, sometimes it was in the new belt holster. It was confusing and disturbing, as if she were trying to shed her old personality with articles of clothing and couldn’t quite pull it off.
Magozzi didn’t like change. What if she wasn’t trying to shed parts of her old personality, but parts of her past? He was part of that past, and he wasn’t sure he would belong in whatever present she was making for herself.
“You’re awfully quiet,” she said, handing him a glass of wine. They tried a new one every Tuesday during their weekly dinner, and tonight’s was some French stuff that had more syllables than most spelling bees.
“Charlie and I were bonding. Men don’t talk or look at each other during the process.”
Grace settled into the chair to his left and took a tasting sip of her wine. “Tell me what you think of this one.”
Magozzi raised his brows. “Last week you told me I had the palate of a carrion eater. Tonight you’re asking my opinion on wine?”
“I was being polite.” She tossed her head a little, and the moonlight got all tangled up in her hair. She’d let that short, scary, pixie cut grow out over the fall and early winter, and she wore it loose tonight, brushing her shoulders like a tease.
He took a small sip of the wine, then a larger one, wondering how those stupid tasters ever spit out something this good. “This stuff is killer. I could drink it with oatmeal.”
“I have something better in mind.”
“I can smell it.”
She sipped her wine and stared out at the falling snow. There were often comfortable silences between them, but tonight the silence seemed itchy and weird, at least to Magozzi. It was the emotional equivalent of an arthritis sufferer getting stiff joints before a rain.
“What is Monkeewrench working on?” he finally asked, cringing because it sounded like a lame, first-date line.
She looked at him, and her blue eyes sparked with interest. Maybe it hadn’t been such a lame question after all. “Actually, while Annie and Roadrunner are trotting all over the globe cherry-picking new clients, Harley and I started a new corporate security project.”
Magozzi’s brows lifted. “No more educational software?”
“We’ll always do educational software, but this was a fresh challenge. We’re enjoying it. And Annie and Roadrunner are enjoying being on the road. I think we all needed a change.”
As far as Magozzi was concerned, Grace MacBride had changed quite enough in the past year, thank you very much. She’d cut her hair, she’d run away to sail the Caribbean with another man, and even if it hadn’t been a romantic relationship, she’d gone to someone else to get what she needed, leaving Magozzi behind. And he was beginning to wonder if he would ever get over it.
And then she did something so out of character he almost jumped out of his chair: she reached over and put her hand on his.
Grace never touched him beyond the darkness of the bedroom, where touch was an inherent and unavoidable part of the process and therefore meaningless. It seemed ass-backwards to him, that touching in bed was almost incidental while touching out in the open, in the light of day, somehow seemed more profound. Not that it mattered. Being touched by Grace, no matter what the illumination, was pretty much all he cared about. But it was strange.
“You’re touching me and we aren’t having sex at the moment. This is weird, Grace.”
She shrugged and almost smiled. Her shoulders went up to her ears and down again just like normal people, but Grace didn’t do that. Shrugs indicated uncertainty and she never experienced that. “Hormones, Magozzi. It happens.”
“Why didn’t it ever happen before?”
“I was stronger then. What do you think of the patio?”
“I love the patio. I feel like I’m having an après ski glass of wine at a Swiss chalet. I can almost see the Alps right there, by your security fence.”
She rolled her eyes, but there was a faint smile on her lips. “Nice of you to say so, but this isn’t exactly a Swiss chalet.”
And that was true. Grace’s house was a tiny structure with a tiny yard in an average city neighborhood. She could afford a real Swiss chalet if she wanted one, but she’d chosen this piece of real estate specifically for its size, because it had been easier to turn into an unbreachable fortress where she could shut herself in and shut everybody else out. “Do you ever think of moving, getting a different place?”
She shrugged. “I’m comfortable here.”
“Charlie wants a bigger yard, I can tell.”
“Charlie’s agoraphobic.”
“You used to be agoraphobic, too. Animals take cues from their owners, change with them, you know.”
“And this from a man who’s never owned an animal?”
“I might be watching too much cable TV. Do you know how many animal psychology shows are on now?”
Grace didn’t giggle exactly—that would have been outrageous—but she was clearly amused. “What about you? Do you ever think of getting a different place?”
“I’m comfortable there,” he echoed her earlier comment, and suddenly whatever strange tension had been tightening the air around them eased.
“Come on, let’s go eat.” She took his hand and led him into the house.
SEVEN
Chuck had only sketchy memories of driving back to the hotel after leaving the fire at Wally’s house. One minute he was at the fire, talking to a Detective Hudson, the next he was walking through the lobby of the Chatham to the lounge. He told himself he wanted a beer, needed a beer, but the truth was, what he wanted and needed was human contact. You could live a solitary existence for most of your life, but when you really came up against it, sitting alone in a hotel room was a miserable prospect. It would be nice to prefer the company and solace of particular
people, but if you didn’t have that, a bartender was the next best thing.
“Good evening, sir. What can I get for you?”
“Beer, please. Whatever you recommend.”
The bartender expertly tapped a perfect pour into a frosted glass and watched Chuck lift it to his mouth with a hand that still hadn’t stopped shaking. “Are you all right, sir?”
“I’m not sure. I lost a friend tonight.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe you can patch things up.”
“I don’t think so. He’s dead.”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”
Chuck stared down through the perfect foam head of his beer and felt sick. “His name was Wally.”
The bartender noted Chuck’s pasty face and his hunched posture and poured two fingers of amber liquid into two crystal lowballs. “This might go easier on your stomach than beer right now. To your friend Wally, sir.” He touched his glass to Chuck’s.
“You’re very kind.” Chuck downed his drink and set his glass on the bar, thinking that bartenders were actually quite brilliant. The scotch went down smoothly and settled like silk in his troubled stomach, much more soothing than beer.
When he tried to pay, the bartender refused, saying, “On the house, sir, with my sympathies.”
Chuck pressed his lips together and swallowed, wondering when people had become so nice, wondering if he’d missed that all these years.
After his second scotch with the sympathetic bartender, Chuck started to think he might actually be able to go to sleep—the unexpected infusion of alcohol in a body unused to it had calmed him a bit. And for a time, at least, he’d stopped dwelling on what had certainly been the worst day of his life. Even so, the circumstances surrounding Wally’s unexpected death still tormented him. He was no detective, but you’d have to be an idiot not to see just how wrong the whole thing was, how unlikely it was that your house would blow up from a gas leak just after you were attacked in a home invasion. Nobody had that kind of bad luck.