Pulse
Page 30
He slept on a mattress laid out on the floor of a converted pantry. Down the hall, his sisters slept in one of the two real bedrooms. Kevin eased their door open, an ear tuned to the Sox game blaring on the TV in the living room. A pair of single beds filled the narrow room from wall to wall. Plastered above one bed were posters from movies. Bambi, Dumbo, The Wizard of Oz, anything with Julie Andrews in it. Kevin’s baby sister, Colleen, was nine and already hooked on make-believe. All things considered, he couldn’t blame her. On a shelf above the other bed was a thick medical dictionary and a lumpy copy of Gray’s Anatomy. Those belonged to Bridget. She was three years younger than Kevin and liked to take things apart to see what made them tick. Except instead of a toaster, Bridget picked the legs off spiders she caught in the yard. More than anything, however, she liked to dissect her little sister. And then watch her squirm. Kevin was about to back out of the room when Colleen lifted her head, shook out her long, rumpled locks, and yawned.
“What time is it?”
“Almost ten. Go back to sleep.”
She yawned again and stretched her legs under the covers. Colleen still slept the sleep of a child and Kevin envied her without really understanding why.
“Did you win?” she said.
“Sure.”
She held out her hand. He deposited a baseball in it. It was a ritual they’d started at the beginning of the summer. She dated each ball and kept them in a cardboard box under the bed. Kevin played it off like he was doing a favor for his kid sister but was secretly thrilled, feeling a little bit like a big-leaguer signing autographs every time he handed over a ball. Colleen was studying the latest addition to her collection when a hand snaked out from under a lump of blankets and ripped it from her fingers. Colleen looked up at Kevin, enormous eyes already beginning to fill.
“Cut it out,” he whispered.
Bridget peeked out from beneath the bedding, a lurid smile slumming on the twelve-year-old’s lips. “Let her cry.”
Colleen was about to burst and Kevin could hear movement in the living room. “Here.” He had another ball in his glove and gave it to Colleen. “This is the one that won the game anyway.”
She immediately brightened. “Really?”
“He’s lying,” Bridget said. “This is the real one. That’s why he gave it to you.”
An image shot through Kevin’s head. His mom, fingers greased with Dippity-Do, fashioning thick rings of curls in Colleen’s hair, then oohing and aahing as they cascaded down her back. Bridget, sitting in the corner and watching in the mirror, hating everything and everyone she saw reflected there. Nothing and no one more than herself. Kevin felt a pinch of sorrow and plucked the ball from Bridget’s hand in the smooth, easy motion of an older brother. “Both of you go to bed. Colleen, keep that one for now and we’ll figure it out later.”
There was another creak in the hallway—someone walking to the front door and back into the living room.
“Better get out of here before he comes down.” Bridget’s tone screamed coward, and Kevin felt her eyes drilling into his spine as he walked back down the hall toward the pantry. He lay in the bed he’d made under a high window, watching the world turn in long beams of moonlight, listening for footsteps until he fell asleep.
2
KATIE PEARCE drew hard on her cigarette, letting the smoke soak into her lungs before exhaling into the sharp morning air. HE would be up soon. She needed to get Kevin out of the house, get going on breakfast. Her eyes traveled across the brooding presence of Indian Rock. Her mind climbed the hill that lived behind it. At the top of that hill was Saint Andrew’s Academy, an all-girls high school. Twenty years ago, her high school. Class of 1955. Katie took another suck on her cigarette and poured out the memories in twisted ribbons of smoke. Old men, long-nosed and rawboned, yellow teeth and whiskers, perched on thin wooden chairs, cheeks coarse and ruddy under cold, black eyes. Boston. Brahmin. Blue bloods. She conjured up her opponents as well. Four other students, all boys, sizing up one another as they waited. Two whispered in a corner. One looked like he wanted to talk, but she froze him out. Fear curdled her stomach. They were from Latin School, BC High, Exeter, Groton. Crème de la crème. Goliath to her David. Finalists for the state oratory medal. St. A’s had never hosted the event, never won it either. Katie would be the first. The nuns were certain of it, and so they’d heaped everything on her seventeen-year-old shoulders. The Smart One. And she’d loved them fiercely for it. Until now. Now that the moment was here. It wasn’t like practice, standing at one end of the gleaming third-floor hallway while Sister Ellen stood at the other, snapping a wooden clicker and telling her to enunciate. Not like the prelims where they’d arrived as a team, the Academy girls, smart as whips, quiet, modest, confident. Feared. That was then. This was different. They trotted out the finalists one at a time. The first speaker was a senior from Groton. He rested his hands lightly on the lectern and leaned forward, every gesture polished and easy, his speech little more than a private chat between two generations of New England privilege and power. When he was finished, the boy took his time, gliding past Katie with barely a glance. Then her name was announced, and a tiny trickle of piss leaked down her leg.
Stupid Irish cow. Dumb cunt. Whore.
Her father’s whispers hissed and snapped all around her as she walked on wooden legs to the lectern. He’d noticed the attention his daughter was getting. Fuck yes, he’d noticed. His attention. His spotlight. And that could never be. So he’d taken her for a drive two nights before the final and explained the pecking order—where she stood, what she was, what she’d always be.
Stupid Irish cow, dumb cunt, whore.
Katie looked out at her audience. One of the judges, the oldest with white hair and purple lips, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and waved at her to begin. She opened her mouth and a dry croak hopped out. The patrician wiped his lips clean and leaned to his left for a whisper, then a delicious smile. Katie felt the shame well in her chest as a chair scraped and her head emptied. She turned and fled, running from her stillborn future, hiding somewhere in its cooling past. Eventually, one of the nuns found her in a bathroom stall. She told Katie it was all right. She’d do better next time. But Sister Ellen never spoke to her again, not like she had before. No one at the Academy did. And the only foothold she’d ever had in the world was scrubbed away in a flush of tears and fear and cunning. And she slid back down the hill, back into the valley of soot and ash where she belonged, where they all waited with their eager, misshapen smiles and sharp, shining teeth. And the bulb that had burned so brightly, so briefly, popped inside her head, the filament glowing red for the briefest of moments before her mind went dark forever.
Stupid Irish cow. Dumb cunt. Whore.
Katie Pearce flicked her cigarette into the morning breeze and watched it catch in the grass before winking out. There was more movement inside the house. HE would be up soon. She had to start the breakfast. And she had to get her only son out before they ate him alive as well.
3
KEVIN WOKE to the rough burn of tobacco and squinted at the smell in his sheets and on his clothes. His mom was awake, standing on the back porch with the kitchen door open, enjoying a smoke in the cold. He pulled the blanket up to his chin, relishing the warmth of his bed for another moment or two. In the concrete distance, he could hear the early morning rounds of the ragman. He haunted the neighborhood at five miles an hour, hanging his head out the window of an ancient pickup, beating a spoon against a tin pan dropped on a rope over the driver’s-side door and sawing away in a singsong voice.
Any old rags, any old rags, any old raaaags . . .
Kevin listened to the wax and wane until the ragman’s call had faded down the hill. Then it was quiet again. His mother came back inside, slippers scraping across the cracked linoleum as she went back and forth. Kevin waited until the kettle began to whistle, then got dressed and crept into the kitchen.
It was cold for early September. The radiator heat wasn�
��t up, so his mom had lit the stove and left the oven door open. Kevin pulled a chair next to the heat and drank from the cup of Barry’s she’d fixed.
“Want me to make some?” She held up a package of Jiffy corn muffin mix. Kevin loved corn muffins and his mom thought it made up for everything else. At nineteen cents a package, it was a cheap fix.
“Sure, Ma. Corn muffins would be great.”
That was all the absolution she needed. Ten minutes later, they were ready—thin, gritty meal, but hot with a dollop of butter. Kevin ate two of them with tea. His mom sat with him and stared into some blank space only she could visit. After a few minutes, she stiffened in her chair, eyes moving to the hallway.
“Your father’s up.”
Kevin heard the hollow fear in her voice and felt it balloon in his belly. He scooped up another muffin, wrapped it in a paper napkin, and made his way to the back door. She helped him slip on his coat.
“Ma.” He pulled away, but she still managed a kiss on the cheek.
“Got you.” She wiped at the spot with the flat of her thumb and pushed back the hair from his forehead. “I love you, Kevin.”
“I gotta go.”
She took him by the chin and forced his eyes onto hers. “I do, Kevin. You know that.”
“Yeah.” There was the sound of water now from the bathroom. “I gotta go.”
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Stop upstairs and see her.”
“I’m running late.”
“Stop up and see her. It’ll only take a minute.” Kevin grabbed his glove and slipped onto the landing, his mom snapping the lock behind him. He listened to the scrape of a kitchen chair and the cut of voices through the thin wooden door. Then he turned and took the stairs, two at a time.
* * *
The big cat slouched in a shadow, easy in his skin, watching as the boy ran up the stairs, Indian quiet, a baseball glove slapping off his thigh as he went. The boy disappeared into the third-floor apartment and the cat waited, almond eyes tick-tocking back and forth between the front windows of the cab office and the top floor where the old lady lived. Leaves chattered in the breeze. The cat flared his nostrils and squinted against the sun, dipped in fifty shades of cold heat and rising fast, its nascent rays caught in a stray pane of white glass. He thought about the boy. Then the old lady. It would be another hour before she made her way across the yard. The big cat shrank back into the scrub and settled in to wait.
Notes and Acknowledgments
If you’re a nonscientist like me and would like to learn more about the world of quantum mechanics, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe is a great place to start. For the evolving relationship between quantum physics and spirituality, I would suggest The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama; The Divine Dance by Franciscan priest and spiritual leader Richard Rohr; and The Quantum and the Lotus, a conversation between Matthieu Ricard, a molecular biologist and Buddhist monk, and Trinh Thuan, an astrophysicist at Caltech. For a deeper dive, treat yourself to anything by Pema Chödrön, Eckhart Tolle, Thomas Merton, and any number of books by Father Rohr, who also runs the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. All of these writers provided critical background and context for this novel. All are profound thinkers and essential voices in this most uncertain of times.
And then there’s Daniel’s shape-shifting. My favorite Latin poet was (and is) Ovid. My favorite poem? A tie between The Iliad and Metamorphoses. If you haven’t read the latter, pick it up. It’s fun and funny. Timeless and timely. It’s a study in the human psyche—how we hide from the world, and particularly from ourselves.
The murder of Harry Fitzsimmons, while entirely an account of fiction, was inspired, in part, by the 1976 murder of Andy Puopolo in Boston’s Combat Zone. I won’t go into all the details of the actual crime, but Andy’s tragic passing had a big impact on the city and still resonates to this day. At the time of his death, I was a student at Boston Latin School, where Andy had graduated four years earlier. I didn’t know Andy, but I remember the pall it cast over the school. For many of us, Andy represented the future in all its infinite possibility. He was also a sudden reminder of how fragile life can be and how everything can (and does) change in a moment. As I said, Harry’s death is pure fiction. None of the details or characters in the novel are drawn from or based on anything in real life. At the end of the day, however, I’d like to think there’s a little bit of Andy in Harry. A little bit of the eternal nature of hope, the pristine wonder of youth, and the immutable power of love. If we can reflect on those simple principles and make them part of our DNA, that’s probably a pretty good thing.
Thanks to my editor, Zach Wagman, and everyone at Ecco for believing in this book. Thanks to my agent, David Gernert, and to Garnett Kilberg Cohen for her early read and wonderful editorial eye. Thanks to all the independent booksellers who are responsible for getting my novels, as well as those of other writers, into the hands of countless readers. And, of course, thanks to you, the reader. As always, it’s a privilege and an honor.
Thanks, finally, to my family and friends, and especially to my wife, Mary Frances. Love you.
About the Author
MICHAEL HARVEY is the author of seven previous novels, including Brighton and The Chicago Way. He’s also a journalist and documentarian whose work has won multiple news Emmys, two Primetime Emmy nominations, and an Academy Award nomination. Raised in Boston, he now lives in Chicago.
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Also by Michael Harvey
Brighton
The Governor’s Wife
The Innocence Game
We All Fall Down
The Third Rail
The Fifth Floor
The Chicago Way
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
PULSE. Copyright © 2018 by Michael Harvey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Richard Ljoenes
Cover photograph © Jaroslaw Blaminsky/Arcangel Images
Frontispiece art © Rio Nindyawan / Arts Vector / Shutterstock
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Harvey, Michael T., author.
Title: Pulse / Michael Harvey.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Ecco/HarperCollins, [2017] | Identifiers: LCCN 2017051998 (print) | LCCN 2017055909 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062443069 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062443038 | ISBN 9780062443045
Subjects: LCSH: Police—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Murder victims’ families—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.A78917 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.A78917 P85 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051998
* * *
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-244306-9
Version 09252018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-244303-8
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