“Lunch with my girl.” He turned to point her out, but the table his hand aimed for was empty. At the far end of the room, a lanky redhead in a scrub shirt and white slacks, stride like a puma, cruised to the bus tubs, tossed her plate and silver, stacked her tray. No glance back as she left.
Oops, ouch, and over. That’s what you get, Jacqi thought, for getting mixed up with me.
He tried to cover by checking his watch, but his eyes were someplace else. “She’s due back at work. Upstairs. RN, oncology clinic.”
“Busy busy.”
“Anyway—”
“Yeah, I came here to see somebody. Not anyone I know well. Just, you know, around.”
“I’m sorry. Everything okay?”
“It’s a hospital. How can things be okay?”
“I meant relatively speaking.”
“Relatively speaking, four million dead is ‘okay.’ Better than four million one.”
“I forgot.” He pulled up a chair and sat. “You’ve got a head for numbers.”
For some reason, that made her laugh. She tapped her teacup, watched her reflection vanish in the dark ripples. “You’re funny, Phelan Tierney.”
“I’m here through the weekend. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.”
It hit her then, the thing he’d said, or the thing beneath the thing. “Your wife died of cancer—and you’re dating a nurse?”
If she wasn’t mistaken, he blushed just a bit. The sad smile turned uneasy. “She was one of the nurses in the cancer ward, actually, when my wife was here. Roni passed away upstairs.”
I was wrong, she thought. He isn’t funny. “And you come back here, like it’s some kinda shrine.” In love with his misery, she thought. There’s probably a word for it. “God, that’s so like you.”
He looked right through her. “Given what you know,” he said. “About me.”
“I know enough.” She wiggled her fingers, a conjurer of knowledge. “You’re, like, an easy read.” It was such a lie—the man baffled her—and judging from the look on his face, he knew that.
“Yes, well,” he said, “I’ve been learning a great deal more about you as well. How popular you are, in particular. Since last time we talked, I’ve had several unique encounters. Just a little while ago a detective named Skellenger got in touch.”
The lingering taste of her tea went sour in her mouth. “Imagine that.”
“You know him, I understand.”
“Could say that.”
“Seems he’s heard from your mother as well. Not to mention Lonnie, who had the distinction of an actual visit. Your mother makes quite an impression apparently.”
“You have no idea.”
“I had a visit, too. Couple of characters tracked me down to give me the news.”
“What news?”
“About your family stepping in, taking care of your problem with Lonnie.”
The room suddenly felt smaller, colder. “Two,” she said. “Big guy, little guy?”
“Exactly. Slapped a GPS on my bumper to bring the point home.”
“Smaller one’s Ben Escalada.” GPS, she thought, glancing at her phone to be sure it was off, remembering Skellenger’s warning. “The moose is Hector Mancinas.”
“So you know them.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Can I assume that means it’s okay, then, the fact they’re looking for you?”
“Do I look like it’s okay?”
He studied her across the table, and for just a moment she wished he’d get up, come over, put his arms around her. She would’ve given anything in the world.
“No,” he said. “You don’t look like it’s okay.”
28
Tierney sat there, waiting for her to say something. She couldn’t meet his eyes. It was like some kinda spell he had. Cancer nurse for a girlfriend. Jesus. Meanwhile the unseen moaner from earlier broke into soft, muffled sobs.
“If you’re not going back to Winchinchala,” he said, “and given how the wind’s blowing, I’ve got a pretty strong sense you’re not, what exactly do you intend to do?”
She opened her hands around her cup, a shrug. “Any suggestions?”
“There’s still a court order to worry about.”
No there isn’t, she thought, thanks to Skellenger. “Yeah. Whatever.”
“You mentioned a man who was willing to help you. Is that still an option?”
Her eyes started to burn, she could feel the tears welling in her eyes. No, she thought, biting her cheek, digging her nails into her palms. Don’t you dare.
“I haven’t heard from him in a while.”
“Are you all right?”
“How about I camp out at your place? Just till I sort things out.”
He chuckled, this far-off look. A vato sleeved in banger tats pushed a stroller past. “Uh, no. That’s not going to happen, sorry.”
“Yeah.” Give the man a prize for being honest, she thought. Except there is no prize for being honest. “You see my problem.”
“You should’ve seen your face just now, when I brought up those two men—Mancinas, Escalada.”
Good memory, she thought. Tierney the tutor. “So why not front me the two grand I asked for?”
Like she’d told him she was carrying his kid. “We’ve been through this.”
“You’ve got the money.”
“Do I?”
“Look, you’re right, there’s a lot going on. A lot of, I dunno, pressure. All of a sudden. And I need to get out of town. Not soon, not later. Now.”
“Why all of a sudden?”
“Trust me, the less you know—”
He reached across the table, took her wrist, not hard. “Why . . . all of a sudden?”
Go on, she thought, tell him. He’s an all-right guy, for a mope.
Jesus, no. You nuts?
“Let go of me.”
He took back his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t touch me, understand?”
To his credit he didn’t shrink back in his chair, look around, see who was watching. His eyes remained fixed on hers. “Yes. I understand.”
“What’s happened,” she said, “is just, you know, something out on the street. Nothing, you know, major, but I was there. I’m a witness, I guess.”
He sat back in his chair, looking puzzled, like something had changed. About her. About them. “Witness to what,” he said, “exactly?”
To the crap in my head, she thought. Can’t get it to stop. “Nothing. Everything. I see a lot out there. You’d be surprised.”
“No doubt,” he said. “But this one thing in particular.”
“It’s nothing. Really. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Does it have to do with the friend of yours who’s in here?” He gestured toward the corridor. “The one you came—”
“Seriously. It’s nothing.”
He looked at her like she was about to catch fire. “This have anything to do with Mike Verrazzo getting killed?”
“No, no, Jesus. Look . . .” Her voice quavered. She swallowed, telling herself to calm down. “Please. Just . . . drop it. Okay?”
His fingers did a little dance on the tabletop. “Maybe this is off topic, maybe not, I don’t know. But I spoke with your brother.”
For just a second, she thought she might puke. “I heard.”
“He got a little testy when I mentioned I ran into Pete Navarette at your mom’s house earlier this morning.”
She started to tremble. Come home. Te amo. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“The two goons who told me to take a hike, they work for Navarette, am I right?”
“What difference does it make?”
“You okay with him hanging around your house?”
Like
it’s up to me. “Compared to who, the other weasels in my life? You?”
“How long has he been involved with your mom?”
No. Not going there. “Your nurse left in a huff. How’re you gonna make up?”
“What’s Navarette got on your brother?”
“Gonna come clean about us, honey bear?”
“Whatever it is, he’s using it against him, against your mom, you—”
“You high? My mom doesn’t get used.”
“You saying she’s in on it?”
She snatched up her cell, dropped it in her pocket. “I gotta go.”
“Witness to what, Jacqi? Something happened. Not just out there on the street, not just this morning.”
“You misunderstood.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I already did.”
She pushed out her chair. He reached out, grabbing her sleeve this time.
“Let go of me or I’ll fucking scream.”
“What’s Richie’s thing with Clint Eastwood about?”
This time she really did think she might heave. The walls buckled in. Buckled out.
“What’d he say?”
He didn’t answer, just drilled her with those arctic eyes. She heard a voice from somewhere. Her voice. “What did he say about Eastwood?”
“He said not to be surprised if you looked the way you do right now when I brought it up.”
She snapped to, shook off his hand. “That’s a crock.” She shot out of her chair.
He stood too, but only so he could lean in, lower his voice. “Maybe I’m wrong, but despite all the lip service, all the phony concern from damn near everybody—and yeah, I’ll even throw in Lonnie with the rest of them now—it seems I might just be the only friend you’ve got.”
“You’re my friend? Loan me two thousand dollars.”
“Loan you? That’s funny.”
“How about one thousand, a couple hundred—”
“Tell me about Eastwood. Who is he? What is he?”
“Eastwood, Eastwood, Eastwood. It’s a word. It’s nothing.”
“What’s Pete Navarette got over on Richie? On you. You’re angry because you’re scared. What is it? What are you so scared of?”
“Leave me. The fuck. Alone!”
She snatched her arm away like he was trying to eat it. Heads shot up and turned—everywhere, all across the cafeteria. Insomniac moms. Leg-kicking kids. Pill-zonked cholitos. Don’t make a scene, she thought, not here, not now.
She moved in close to whisper. Make it look like a spat. They were family. Letting off steam. It’s a hospital, for chrissake.
Meeting his stare, fending off the voodoo in those eyes: “What am I scared of? Guys like you.”
PART IV
29
Skellenger’s cell started buzzing as he hit the squad-room door. Flipping it open, he checked the incoming number—his wife—then gestured to Dick Rosamar from the SCU that he’d be a second.
“Hey, what’s up? Kinda crazy here right now.”
An uneasy pause, crackling with static, not all of it the kind you hear. Lot of tension between them lately. Life didn’t feel like life anymore, she’d said. It felt like a deck of cards always getting shuffled, never getting dealt.
“It’s Ethan,” she said, sounding like a roof had collapsed. “They sent him home from school. He had pictures in his backpack. Drawings. Very elaborate drawings, if you get my meaning. Male and female both.”
Ethan was the artistic one. Emily the pragmatist, obsessed with becoming a vet. Three more years, hopefully, they’d both be out of the house. Maybe he and Rosellen could slip back into the old routine, something that felt more like a marriage, less like a root canal.
Who was he kidding? Kids didn’t move out anymore. This economy?
“They’d be impressive,” she said, “the drawings I mean, if they weren’t so . . . unsettling.”
It hit him then. Not just women.
“Listen, seriously, I don’t know if you heard—”
“About Mike Verrazzo? In an hour he’ll still be dead. It’s one of those times, Jordie.”
“It’s gonna have to—”
“I know staffing’s down, but you’re the only guy down there?”
He glanced up and down the hallway, a sea of blues and browns and off-the-rack suits—cops from nearby cities, deputies from the sheriff, troopers from the highway patrol in their flying-saucer hats—humps and helpmates, gluttons for overtime. Here and there an honest-to-god cop.
“I’ll see what I can do. If I can, I will.”
He slapped the phone closed, put it away, but then stood there a moment, held by a fleeting thought, not of elaborate nudes or dead firemen but Bovoni Bay on Saint Thomas. Two years after the wedding, delayed honeymoon, before the kids. Last real vacation they had, snorkeling in water so clear you wanted to breathe it. Shimmering walls of fish. Ash-white beach and scalding sun and the constant churn of the surf. At night the rickety tin fan whirred nonstop on the cabana’s wood table, and despite the sunburn they couldn’t get enough of each other. Rosellen slim-waisted but big-hipped, high-chested, ashamed of her thighs. He’d never desired anyone so much, and told her so.
The words appeared on the squad-room whiteboard, upper left corner, testament to a training session in ethics the state had forced upon the whole force six months back:
Heave the Fat Man
An adjunct professor from Sonoma State, mumbler in tweed, attempted to explain—between pushing up his glasses and coughing into his fist—the inarticulate, often unexamined sources of morality.
The professor posed what he called a classic problem: you see a trolley coming, and the brakeman has suffered a heart attack. The trolley is barreling toward a group of five tourists who don’t see what’s happening. You stand by the switch. If you pull it, you can save the five tourists. But along the trolley’s redirected path is another unsuspecting soul, who will surely die. What would you do?
Overwhelmingly, research showed that people—including on this occasion the roomful of cops—believed the right thing to do was sacrifice the one for the five. Animal math. Unfortunate but inescapable. Right but not easy.
But imagine now you’re not on ground level but perched atop an overpass and can’t reach the switch in time. There is, however, a heavyset man standing nearby—so heavy that, if you can bench-press his heft and hurl him down onto the tracks, he’ll act like a well-placed baby whale and bring the trolley to a messy but fortuitous stop.
In the abstract, the moral calculus remained the same: the sacrifice of one life to save five. But research showed most people didn’t think that way. They recoiled at physically laying hands on another human being and causing him gruesome deadly harm, no matter how many others were saved.
The adjunct professor wrapped up with a nod and eyed the room with a pinched smile, hoping he’d made his point. A puzzled, cross-armed silence greeted him, until a voice in the rear of the room crowed out, “You kidding me? Heave the fat man.”
So much more vivid than “Whatever It Takes,” the motto it replaced.
Meanwhile, in the whiteboard’s lower right corner, much more modest in size, another epithet appeared, fresh from this morning, Hennessey’s penmanship:
Who Killed Rufus T. Firefly?
30
Dick Rosamar, Denny Copenhaver, and Marion “Don’t Call Me Sherlock” Holmes, all SCU guys, were gathered around a monitor watching, rewinding, watching again the security footage from the Pay-N-Go at the corner of Goldenrod and Buckeye.
Skellenger had probably ten more years on the job here than any of the others, an occasional point of tension. A wedge existed between the older cops, younger cops. The old guard, with its laid-back culture of “Blue Is True,” had been a little too close to the bikers in town, too prone to think of black neig
hborhoods as Indian Country, too cozy with their CIs. The younger ones were better educated, more professional, and their pay had always been generous, no need for side work as bouncers and such. That had all changed with the bankruptcy, of course, creating even more friction. Skellenger, something of a tweener, was usually considered okay, young enough not to be tainted, but too old to genuinely trust.
In particular, he and Holmes had never clicked. Ichabod Negro, some of the older crowd called him, but Skellenger liked to think of himself as more evolved than that. For him it was just a clash of styles. Holmes had been a star power forward in high school here, went off to Fresno State, collected splinters on the bench, but came back just as cocky. Lanky build, bony face, tiny ears. Ugly as he was, women still threw pussy at him.
Girls like Ethan too, Skellenger thought, or so it’d always seemed. Maybe the kid just didn’t like them back. Or not enough.
Male nudes. When it fucking rains.
He eased up from behind on the crew, leaned in toward the TV, squinting for a better look himself, the figures grainy, like video of Sasquatch.
“How we doing?”
Rosamar—thickset, black-haired, matinee smile—pointed with a pen. “Hennessey was right. This here’s Mo Pete Carson, Brickyard Cutthroat Killas. Raider gear’s the giveaway, white sideline snap especially, that’s BCK.”
“The Hispanic kid?”
“Most likely he’s Chepe Salgado, Southside Punk Stoners.”
Skellenger loosened his tie a little more, the room warm. “We know this how?”
“Been tickling Elmo,” Rosamar said. “Summoning all CIs. Bit of a gym rat, this Salgado nitwit. Stomped that kid at the Deer Valley game, sent him to the ER, eye socket crushed. Couldn’t nail him for it but, hey, we know. And he knows we know.”
Skellenger, still unsure: “What the hell are these guys doing together?”
“Ah. Time for this week’s puzzler.”
“Not real clear yet,” Holmes said. “But one of Dick’s guys—”
The Mercy of the Night Page 13