The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “Why does he call you Ace?”

  “The Ace of Spades is the death card,” he said. “The Vietnamese thought it was bad luck. Grunts would wear them on their helmets. Sometimes they’d leave one sticking out of a corpse’s mouth. They did it to scare the enemy, and sometimes as a warning.”

  I sneaked a glance at the ear. “Do you think this means Jimmy’s killed someone else?”

  “I don’t know, Alex. Why did you go out there by yourself?”

  “Damon said he wouldn’t talk to me if you came. I tried to call you, Jack. Check with your service. I left a message.”

  “I went to meet Bobby,” he said, “and I tried to call you. We must have missed each other. Bobby called and asked to meet. He said he was ready to talk.”

  I searched my memory for the last thing I remembered about Bobby Avidor. “He’s not dead?”

  “He wasn’t earlier this afternoon,” he said. “Although he might be lighter by one ear. He could be dead and missing an ear.”

  “You didn’t see him?”

  “He never showed. Didn’t call. I went to his house. No sign of him.” He slipped the bowl of ice onto the table and set the ear gently on top. Most of what blood there had been in the bag had already seeped out when Jimmy had squeezed it into my hand. But there was still enough to dribble down and stain the ice cubes pink. He put the whole thing in the refrigerator, leaned back against the counter, and crossed his arms.

  “Jack, do you think Damon set me up?”

  “That’s what it feels like to me.”

  “He didn’t even give me a chance.”

  “A chance for what?”

  “To go home. To… he said…”

  I realized I hadn’t shared with Jack any of the prestorm, pre-ear conversation I’d had with Damon. “I need to tell you what he said.”

  “Tomorrow. You don’t look too good. I want you to sleep.”

  “Can I stay here?” The words flew out of my mouth. The important parts of me were functioning on some back-up power system, because the primary source, my brain, had shut down.

  “I wouldn’t give you any other choice.”

  My eyes started to burn again. I pulled the blanket around me, but no matter how tight I made it, it didn’t feel like enough protection. If I was going to sleep, I needed the protection of his arms around me. “Jack, will you stay with me?”

  He tilted his head and looked as if I was handing him a monumental responsibility that he took very seriously.

  “Until I fall asleep. I feel safe with you.” I was afraid he would say no. Instead he came over to me and reached for my hand. When I gave it to him, he pulled me up, put his hands on my shoulders, and steered me into his bedroom. He pulled back the covers and tucked me in, then he lay down and pulled sweatshirt, sheets, blankets, covers, and me all into a sheltering embrace. I closed my eyes and the world disappeared and I fell asleep.

  The sun was trying to get in through the blinds when I opened my eyes again. Sounds from the unit next door floated in from somewhere, through the walls or the windows or the vents. Kids getting ready for school, so it must not have been too late.

  I felt the weight of Jack’s arm across my waist. I felt the solid comfort of his body curved around mine. He was still asleep, his breathing steady against my neck. I kept still and enjoyed the feeling. It had been a long time since I’d opened my eyes in a man’s arms.

  My mobility was limited if I didn’t want to wake him up, so I let my eyes wander around his bedroom and saw what I could in the alternating light and shadows. It was neat, but not in a finicky way. More utilitarian. There wasn’t much—a bed with a headboard, a tall four-drawer dresser, a closet with the door closed. But everything that was there had a place. All the books were on the bookshelves. The hardback titles, which were the only ones I could read, tended toward biographies and war books, many on Vietnam. Hell in a Very Small Place, Vietnam: A History, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. There were several books by O’Brien. Books on World War II and some on law enforcement, and rows and rows of what looked like paperback mysteries. A compact and not very complicated stereo system fit on top of the dresser and I wondered where the CDs were. Sharing the space on the dresser with the stereo were three framed photos. I couldn’t see what they were, but one looked like a graduation day, maybe his son graduating from high school. Along the floor leaning against the wall were a few citations from his days at the FBI and I wondered if they were going up or coming down.

  I reached up as quietly as I could to the headboard, remembering that I had put my watch there the night before. My fingers brushed across a row of plastic jewel boxes. The CDs. I tried to crane my neck without moving too much to read the titles.

  Classical, jazz guitar, rock—not much after 1975, a big blues collection with B. B. King, Keb Mo’, and John Lee Hooker, what looked to be everything Leonard Cohen had ever recorded. At the far end was an entire section of artists I’d never heard of. I slipped one out but had to reach across Jack to do it and, in the process, woke him up. I could feel the shift in his breathing, followed by the slow turning and testing and stretching that signaled the return to consciousness.

  He lifted the arm that had been wrapped around me, and left a cold swath where it had been. And when he untangled from me and rolled over on his back, I felt the chill of sudden and unwanted exposure.

  I turned toward him but got twisted up in all the covers. His weight on top of the sheets and blankets held them taut and pinned me to the mattress. I had to pull some slack from the other side of the bed so I could roll up on my elbows and see his face.

  His eyes were only half open when he looked at me from the cushy middle of one of his big pillows. “Feeling better?”

  “Like a new person.” I showed him the CD. “Jack, gospel music?”

  He lifted his head enough to see what I was looking at. It was a small move that seemed like a big effort in the lazy glow of a good night’s sleep. “What about it?”

  “Do you like gospel music?”

  “I do.”

  Huh. I’d never actually met anyone who liked gospel music. Or at least that I knew of. “What do you like about it?”

  He let his head sink back on the pillow, rubbed his eyes, and yawned. “The singers are glorious. Their voices are amazing, and it’s the most uncynical music there is. You don’t have to figure anything out. Just listen. Simple. I like that.”

  “Quite a contrast to Leonard Cohen.”

  “I like them both.” He smiled with his eyes closed. “I guess that makes me complex.”

  He drew in a deep breath and let it seep out slowly through his nose. He did it a few more times and almost seemed to be breathing in the energy he needed to get up and start the day.

  “Thank you for staying with me last night.”

  “You slept well,” he said. “I woke up a few times and you never moved.”

  I had to reach over him to slip the CD back in its slot. Everything in its place. I felt him under me—solid, substantial, real. When I pulled back, he was looking at me, searching my face. “Your eyes are gray,” he said.

  “Ever since I was born.”

  “They’re pretty.” His hand was close enough that I could feel the warmth from it, and I knew he wanted to touch me and I was desperate for him to do it, but all he did was barely brush close enough to touch my hair.

  “Jack…”

  He took my left hand, the one that had held the severed ear, and pushed up the sleeve of my sweatshirt. He inspected the palm, the fingertips, the fingernails. Every part of my hand with his hands. He was in no hurry, and he was driving me crazy.

  “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  “My head hurts.”

  He rolled up on his side and reached around and felt the tender place on the back of my skull. He ran his fingertip along the bare ridge where Jimmy had pulled out a handful of hair. “Here?”

  “Yes.” My face was very close to him now, to his chest. We were bot
h wearing his sweatshirts, and I could smell the scent of his laundry, the sweet fragrance of the dryer sheets that had filled the Miramar Coin Op the night I’d sat on a pile of his laundry and put my arms around him. This time I decided to hold still and be quiet, go at his pace and hope he went where I wanted to go. “Jimmy pulled me out of the car,” I said. “I hit my head on the cement.”

  “I’m sorry.” He pulled me closer and kissed the top of my head. Then he lifted my chin and kissed my forehead. And then he rolled back and looked at me. “Why did you kiss me the other night?”

  “Because… I was…” His hand had moved from my head to my shoulder, and his fingertips were exploring along the edge of the collar and underneath. “I kissed you because I was attracted to you. I am attracted to you.”

  His fingers kept moving back up to my head, then slowly down again, lower each time, finding their own path along the folds and crevices of the sweatshirt, like a stream following a dry creek bed. I was getting lost in his eyes, brown eyes that looked at me with the gentleness I had seen there from the beginning, and the desire he was letting show for the first time.

  “Why didn’t you kiss me back?” I whispered.

  “I wanted to.” He pulled me closer so he could reach all the way down my back. “It took all that I had not to.”

  “Why?”

  “What I said. I’m not good with people.” His hand had made its way under my shirt. The stream was more like a river now, pushing where it wanted to go, making its own way across my topography. “I get tired of disappointing people.” He brushed his lips across mine.

  “I’m not disappointed.” I moved with the rhythm of his hand floating over my skin. I reached for his leg and pulled it across my body. I wanted to feel him, too, but layers of bedding and clothing separated us and he seemed content to work through it all in his own time.

  “I don’t know why you want to be with me.” His voice was getting ragged, and I could feel him against me, responding to me even through all the layers. I moved in closer and began to explore on my own, feeling along the vertebrae that ran down the middle of his back, climbing the steps one by one along the graceful slope up to his shoulders, and all the way down to the back of his legs, where I found thick, sturdy muscles. He shivered against me as I followed their line down and around and back up until I found the drawstring to his sweatpants.

  “I don’t think I’m good for you,” he said, but not with much conviction.

  “You don’t get to decide that for me.”

  “I’m too old, I’m a drunk, I’m—”

  I shut him up with a deep lingering kiss as I pulled the drawstring on his sweatpants. He’d already found mine and loosened it, and it didn’t take long after that for me to crawl out from under the covers and for him to crawl out of his sweats and for both of us to kick all of it—covers and blankets and clothes and everything else that separated us—off of the bed and onto the floor until there was just the two of us making love.

  We had pulled the pillows off the floor and the sheets over us as we lay on the bed together. Jack had gotten up to open the window, so the sounds of the wakening neighborhood were coming through along with a slight, cooling breeze. A gospel singer was on the stereo, someone I’d never heard of, but someone he liked. I liked her, too.

  “Jack.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not like Jimmy.”

  He shifted, so my head rolled a little to the side and I had to readjust to fit again into the crook of his right arm and against his chest. He didn’t answer.

  “Jack.”

  “I heard you.”

  “That’s what scares you, isn’t it? You’re not scared of him. You’re afraid you’re like him. You’re not.”

  “How do you know?”

  I raised my head and crawled up to look into his eyes. I turned his face to make sure he was looking at me. “The only thing you have in common with Jimmy Zacharias is you were both from Florida, and you both served in Vietnam, which put the two of you in the same place at the same time with the same set of crappy options.” I curled into him and put my head down again. “It’s not in you to be like him.”

  I listened to the music and tried not to think about the moment, coming soon, when we would have to get up and take showers—or maybe one together—and put our clothes back on and go back to the world. He was quiet, stroking my hair.

  “Where did you grow up?” he asked.

  “All over.”

  “Where were you the longest? Where do you think of as home?”

  “Seattle.”

  “What neighborhood?”

  “Ballard.”

  “Try to picture a company of North Vietnamese soldiers coming out of the trees one night in Ballard. It’s foggy and it’s hard to see. They look like ghosts carrying machine guns and hand grenades and rocket launchers. But they’re not ghosts and they woke up in the morning pissed off and they walk in pissed off. They walk up and down the streets of the neighborhood rousting people out of bed, out of their homes. They bust into bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms and basements. They’re looking for the husbands and the sons because this is supposed to be an enemy stronghold. They think they’re there. They’ve been told they’re there, and they find weapons, but mostly what they find are mothers and sisters and grandmothers and daughters.” The slightest tremble crept into his voice. “They find babies.”

  I felt him stiffening. When I tried to put my arm around him, he turned so that it was hard to be close to him at all. I moved away and wrapped myself in the sheets.

  “Now they’re really pissed off, these soldiers. So they go up and down the streets of Ballard from house to house, killing the family pets—shooting the dogs and running the cats through with their bayonets, just for the hell of it. Just because they can. Now they’re not sure what to do because if they leave all these people there alive, one of them could steal off and alert the enemy and they could end up in an ambush and all die.”

  “What do they do?”

  “After a lot of arguing, they set all the houses on fire and they leave. They’re walking out. They’re almost out of there, when someone fires a shot. A shot is fired and all hell breaks loose. The soldiers become convinced they’re under attack. They turn around and start shooting and they empty their weapons into this little neighborhood. They keep firing until there’s nothing moving. Nothing.”

  The song on the CD changed, and he seemed to be listening. “It was so easy to kill people over there because after you’d been there for a while”—he made a flourish in the air with his hand, a magician’s wave intended to make something disappear—“they weren’t people anymore. You got so that you didn’t even feel it. There never seemed to be any consequences.”

  “Is that story about you? Was it some village in Vietnam?”

  “We killed them all.”

  “How many?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Were you under attack?”

  “That’s what the report said.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think”—he pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead just over his eye—“unless you’ve seen it, you can’t imagine what the percussive force of an M-16 does to the human body. Bones shatter, organs and limbs explode, bits of skin and blood spray everywhere.” He stared straight up at the ceiling. “I think… it didn’t matter to us at all if we were under attack.”

  “Jimmy was there?”

  “It was a good day for Jimmy.”

  I found his hand among the covers and held it and listened to the gospel singer. Jack was right about her voice. It was glorious—strong with the fervor of what she believed, pure in the simplicity of her convictions, and irresistible in the strong current of hope that pulled you along to be saved with her.

  “Do you ever talk to anyone about this? Have you ever gotten help?”

  “I’ve talked to shrinks. Bureau shrinks. I go to A.A. meetings.”

  “Do you share
this stuff at your meetings?”

  “What they tell you at those meetings is to put your faith in the higher power. The higher power. What is that? That’s taking the weight off your own shoulders and putting it somewhere else. We all have to carry our own weight. In the end there’s no getting away from the things you did.”

  I put my hand on his cheek and felt the hard cheekbone beneath his rough skin. I felt his whiskers against my palm. I felt the edge of his hairline with the tips of my fingers—all things that made him a human being.

  “You said it yourself in the laundromat, Jack. The rules are different in war. You were twenty years old. It was dark. You were scared. You thought you were under attack. Whatever you did, you did. What happened there is part of you. It’s part of what you’ve become just as it’s part of what Jimmy has become. But in a different way.”

  “Different how?”

  “You think about the people who died. You think about them as fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, people who could just as easily have been living in Ballard, Washington as some province in Vietnam. You grieve for them. You understand that part of you was lost over there. Jimmy probably thinks… I can’t say what he thinks. Maybe that’s what makes him so mean.”

  “What?”

  “He sees you, and there is so much about you that is good and honorable, and so much about him that is twisted and dead. He knows what happened to him. He knows what he is, and it really pisses him off.”

  He smiled. “You give him too much credit.”

  “Probably.”

  “You give me too much credit.”

  “You don’t give yourself enough.”

  He pressed his cheek against my hand and closed his eyes. I looked at him and couldn’t stop thinking about something I’d seen once on the Discovery Channel. It was about a climber who had fallen eighty feet down an icy cliff and was stranded where he lay for two days. When the rescuers came to get him, you couldn’t tell by looking at him what his injuries were. He looked perfectly fine. But when they pulled off his boots, they were filled with blood, and when they cut away his pants, his injuries were almost too gruesome to look at. The misshapen forms below his knees were unrecognizable as part of the human leg. The sharp points of broken bones poked out through bloody gashes, and his toes were black, frostbitten stumps. Over thirty years later, Jack was still bleeding into his boots, getting up every day and trying to stand on broken and bloody stumps. I put my arm around him and pulled him close and wondered what, if anything, would ever help him heal.