He dropped his beer and stumbled back. Crashed into the jukebox. A mechanical squeal and “Gimme Shelter” started up.
Movement from my left. Jimmy closing in with a pool cue in his hand. Mick Jagger started wailing over the guitar intro as Wifebeater came to life and threw himself at me.
We fell across the room. Somehow I managed to turn him as we collided with those fixed barstools. We flew apart. I stayed on my feet but he went tumbling to the floor. I ducked just as Jimmy swung his pool cue. It cracked in two on the bar, shattering glass. Mary shouted as Mick threatened to fade away.
I scrabbled for my beer bottle and swung wildly. By some miracle it connected with Jimmy’s face. He howled and staggered back. I leaped at him, landed a couple of blows. Blood sprayed and an audible crack. I pushed him away and he collided with the door, half stumbling out into the cold street.
Then thick, pudgy hands were on me. Clutching at my neck and chest. I struggled but he was too strong. Reaching back, I went for his eyes, my fingers inching across his cheekbones. With a yell he threw me across the room and into a small table. Wood splintered around me as I crashed through it. Rolled onto my back just in time to see him reaching down to grab my shirt. I braced myself as he started punching. The back of my head bounced off the floor.
Then from behind the bar, the unmistakable ratchet of a shell sliding into a chamber. Wifebeater froze. I focused my gaze and saw Mary, standing across the room with a pump-action shotgun in her hands.
“You,” she said, pointing the barrel at him. “Out. Now.”
Afterward I sat at the bar with a shot of Jim Beam and a damp cloth. Mary swept up the fragments of broken table as I picked at glass shards. The back of my head was pounding and someone else’s blood was dotted down my front. I was starting to make a habit of that.
“Sorry about the mess,” I said.
Mary stared at me as she emptied the dustpan. She still looked pissed.
I started to explain. “I was just trying to—”
“I know,” she said.
“I’ll pay for the damage.”
“You can certainly afford it.”
I ventured a smile; tentative, unsure. Fleetwood Mac played on the jukebox, one of my favorites. A soft beat, slow and steady. Mary smiled at me and I felt relief expand in my chest.
“About before,” I said, and Mary shook her head.
“Forget about it,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked her.
“I work here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
It was the second time she’d dodged the question. She didn’t want to give me an answer and that was fine with me. We all had our shit to deal with.
Mary stood up straight and stretched her back. I heard it pop. She tossed the dustpan on a shelf below the bar and wiped her hands. She stopped there, on the other side, looking at me, leaning on her broom, sweeping her dark hair out of her eyes.
“It’s late,” I said. “You got a ride home?”
She gave me a look. “You sober enough to drive?”
“Hey, I never did get that beer.”
Mary laughed and put the broom to one side. “You eaten dinner yet?”
“Not really.”
“You like Chinese?”
“Sure, I like Chinese.”
“You drive me home, I’ll let you pay for takeout.”
“That make me even for the table?”
She grinned. “Not even close.”
Chapter Eighteen
Turned out Mary didn’t live far away. Drive only took a couple of minutes. We didn’t talk but it wasn’t awkward. It was nice.
“That’s me,” she said as we approached an apartment building.
It was a rundown-looking place. Dirty brick, the kind that’s gone black from exposure. It wasn’t late but, even so, most of the windows were unlit. White garbage bags were piled on the sidewalk outside, and one of them had split open across the front steps.
“It’s not much,” Mary said, and gave what sounded like an embarrassed laugh.
“Hey,” I said, “it looks a hell of a lot better than my place.”
Mary led me through her narrow entryway and into the front room. Turned on a couple of lamps along the way. A soft glow fell about us. I stood by a large window and looked out onto the building’s backyard but all I saw was myself and Mary and the rest of her living room. It was a barrier. The lamplight shielding us from the snow. From the darkness, from the cold, from whatever else lurked out there in the night. I thought back to Brian Ackerman and his view of the river. I wondered if he was sitting at his window, looking out, same as me. What was it he’d said? What we did. What did you do, Brian? You and Joe, all those years ago?
“You alright?”
Mary was standing behind me. I focused and saw her in the window.
“Sorry,” I said. “Long day.”
She held up two takeout menus. “You got a preference?”
“Whatever’s good.”
“Not sure I’d call either of them ‘good’ . . .”
“What is it with this town and bad Chinese food?” I said. “I swear that’s all I’ve seemed to eat since I got here.”
“There used to be a pretty nice pizza place on the east side,” Mary said. “Someone tossed a couple firebombs through the front window.”
“Why does that not surprise me?”
Mary grinned and held up a menu. “I’ll be right back.”
She left to make the phone call. I ran my gaze around the place. Looked for the things that others might not. A detective’s eye; a habit that’s hard to shake.
Artwork on the walls. Framed prints, mostly. Abstract stuff. All I could see were the brushstrokes, the thick lines of paint. I didn’t get it, I never had. Modern art always went over my head.
Rachel knew about stuff like that. Art. Nature. She was the cultured one. I hadn’t even set foot in a gallery until we started dating. She dragged me to a whole bunch of them at the start. Museums, too. Stood me in front of statues and photographs and weird sculptures made of welded metal. Asked me what I saw. What I thought it meant. Hidden meanings, all that crap. And look, I’m a surface guy. I told her. Straight up, no surprises. Symbolism was always wasted on me.
Only now I’m not so sure. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe she saw something in me after all, a part I’d tried to keep under wraps. A hollow space, filled with secrets.
Maybe she thought I just needed the exposure. That baring my soul might be a good thing. See, I got depths. I got that hollow space. It’s what it’s filled with that scares me.
And then—stay with me—you let that thought spark and burrow through the messed-up tunnels in my brain and now I’m wondering whether Rachel did see inside it. Whether the exposure worked. You want to know what really keeps me up at night?
What if the shit I’ve got inside of me was so bad it drove her insane?
A clatter from the kitchen brought me back. I stepped away from the print and moved through the rest of the room.
No photos—of Mary, of anyone. Flowers on the coffee table and not the romantic kind. It was cozy, sure, but it was bland. A rented life. A catalog life, lifted wholesale. It wasn’t hers. It wasn’t anyone’s. And there was something sad about that.
The one piece of Mary I recognized sat in the corner of the room. An expensive-looking record player with two floorstanding speakers either side and a set of shelves with more albums than most music stores I’d been to. I was thumbing through them when Mary came back. Two glasses of what might have been gin and tonic. The back of my throat went slick.
“Don’t be getting any marks on my collection,” she said, handing me a glass.
“I’ve never seen so much music,” I said. “The jukebox at Stingray’s must be like nails on a chalkboard.”
She shrugged. “It’s not so bad. It fits the place.”
“Bowie
, Prince, Dylan. Frankie Valli? You’ve got eclectic taste.”
“What can I say, good music is good music. What about you?”
“Anything but jazz.” I took a sip of my drink. “This is lemonade.”
“I can see why they made you a detective.”
Mary went to her record player and flicked it on. Spun a knob on an amplifier, moved some sliders. Changing settings only she could hear. Music faded in, filling the room. Something mellow. Guitar and sax. Roxy Music, maybe. She sat on an armchair by the window. I took the sofa.
“You’re working that murder, aren’t you?” she asked me.
“Which one?”
“The girl.”
“Yeah.”
Mary nodded. Took a drink and drew her legs up under her. “You want to talk about it?”
“Do you?”
“Not really.”
“Fine with me.”
“You want to talk about what happened back there?”
“Look, I really am sorry about that table.”
Mary shook her head. Lowered her lemonade onto her lap. “Forget the table, Thomas.” A pause. “Those guys could have really hurt you.”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking about me.”
“I don’t need protecting.”
“I never said you—”
“All I’m saying is I’ve been trying to keep my head down here . . .”
“You’re saying I made things worse?”
“Of course not. I mean, I do keep a shotgun—”
“How was I to know?”
“You think that’s the first drunk guy I’ve had try to put his hands on me?”
“Well, excuse—”
“You think I wasn’t able to manage until you came here?”
“Jesus, Mary, I wasn’t asking for a thank you, I was just trying to help.”
“And it was nice, alright? It was nice. And I never said thanks back there because I guess I was scared. I mean, that shotgun looks good, but I’ve never fired a gun in my life, not that most of those drunk assholes would ever know. But I know, alright? I know. And you think I don’t feel shitty when guys like them come in? Like I don’t feel their eyes all over me? Like I don’t know they’re going to do something the first step they take? But you know I’ve been managing just fine by myself and no one’s ever done that sort of thing for me before and I didn’t know how to take it, so yeah I never said thanks back there and now I feel shitty for that, too.”
I stared at her.
“Well, you know, don’t mention it,” I said quietly.
Mary looked over at me. Her face was flushed. “I do appreciate you trying to help, Thomas. Like I said, it’s been a while.”
“Been a while for me too.”
Something heavy in my throat. I took a large gulp, hid it with a swallow.
“You’ve got a lot of anger inside you,” Mary said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
It came out sharper than I’d intended. I saw her flinch slightly.
“Look, I get it,” I said, struggling to keep my voice level. “You want me to open up. See who I really am. Only you don’t, not really. You think you do. But this?” I beat my closed fist against my chest. “It’s better off staying inside. You’re better off. You wouldn’t much like the real me, I don’t think.”
“Thomas . . .”
“What was it you said? That whatever happened before didn’t matter? Well you were wrong, Mary, you were so wrong. It matters a hell of a lot. I’ll never escape it, and maybe that’s how it should be. This is my punishment.”
“Then start over. What do you want?”
“I want to be better.”
“Then be better.”
“I’m trying, Mary.”
“It was a woman, wasn’t it?”
I started a little. “What?”
“You think protecting me makes up for whatever happened to her.”
“Stop.”
Mary held up her hands. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried. You’re right. God knows we’ve all got our shit to carry.”
“You want to talk about yours?”
She fell silent.
I sniffed, drained the last of my lemonade. “Sometimes I wonder, I’ve been living with this so long I’m not so sure I know how to live without it. It’s a part of me now. Like a kidney, I need it. How pathetic is that?”
Mary fixed me with a smile. “Plenty of people give up a kidney just fine.”
I laughed at that. Rubbed at my face.
“Look,” Mary said. “Let’s just have a normal evening, alright? Let’s forget everything else that’s going on in our lives for a few hours, eat some shitty takeout, and watch a dumb movie. How does that sound?”
I started to speak just as my cell buzzed. I pulled it out but the number was withheld.
“Hello?”
There was a brief silence before a man spoke. He had a soft voice. “I’m looking for Detective Thomas Levine.”
“Speaking.”
“I saw what you did.”
“Excuse me?”
“On the highway, Detective. And in the quarry. I watched you burning your car.”
I sat up a little when he said that.
“Who is this?”
“I want to meet, Thomas, you and me. Let’s do lunch.”
“How did you get this number?”
I turned away, but I could feel Mary watching me. The man on the other end of the phone groaned theatrically. “Oh do we really have to do the usual dance? It’s so boring. You don’t believe me, I don’t know if I can trust you . . .” He made an eurgh sound. “How about we skip straight to the part where I stick a photograph under your windshield wiper and call it a day, hmm? What do you say?”
I rose from the sofa, clutching for my firearm, said, “What photograph?”
The line went dead.
I glanced back at Mary. She was leaning forward, staring at me.
“Is everything alright?” she asked.
I was already moving for the door. “It’s fine.”
“Who was that?”
“No one. Thanks for the talk. Sorry about dinner.”
I stumbled out into the cold evening. The street was empty and my car was a hundred yards away. Lit up under the harsh yellow of an aging streetlight. I half ran toward it, scanning the area for any sign of movement. As I neared I saw something white under the wipers. An envelope, and inside a photograph of me and Joe standing next to a burning car. I felt my stomach flip.
On the back of the photo was a phone number, and as I dialed I tried to remember if he’d given his name. He answered on the first ring.
“What the hell do you want?” I growled.
“I already told you, Detective,” the man said, and I could practically hear him smiling down the line. “Now tell me, how do you feel about Italian?”
Eddie and Nancy’s backyard looked out onto a forest, and I’d wander it, running my fingers along the rough bark of the trees and jumping back and forth across the little winding stream that snaked through it. Nancy would ask what I got up to in there. She’d be watching from the living room when I got home and she’d call me in and ask why I was covered in dirt, or water, or blood.
The blood . . . she only saw that the once, and she beat me something fierce because of it. It wasn’t my blood, I know that. This was later, after Eddie had taught me how to hunt. Gave me an air rifle for my tenth birthday. I guess I got pretty good at it. Rabbits, mainly. And I was curious, what can I say. What ten-year-old boy doesn’t want to see what’s underneath the skin?
I’d emerge from those woods, blinking from the sudden light with crimson coating my fingers, or smeared up to my elbows, or splashed across the front of my shirt. I quickly learned to wash it off in the lake, to bury my clothes in the soft earth. Getting a slap for tracking mud into the house or losing my sweater I
could handle.
It all probably sounds worse than it was. I wasn’t some psycho, I was just bored.
Grandpa Eddie was big. But I guess everyone’s big when you’re little. He was fat, with a red nose and patchy stubble over his double chins. He had some sort of liver problem, most likely on account of the fact that he’d drunk a half-rack a day since he was seventeen, and his eyes bulged a little because of it. It gave him a constant expression of surprise. A lot of people called him names behind his back; a couple said them to his face. I once saw him arguing with some guy at a barbecue in our front yard. Eddie was breathing heavy and his face was red, I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I was hoping he’d have a heart attack.
The hunting I enjoyed fine. The quiet, the creeping, the stillness of it all. The half hour of tension and the split second of release. We’d camp for the weekend. Come back with a collection of rabbits and squirrels, all trussed up and hung over our shoulders.
Only we didn’t just hunt, me and Eddie. I don’t remember much of it. Bits and pieces. The silence as we walked home together. The way he’d give me a piece of candy from his pocket, bubblegum or licorice or a Snickers, like I’d done a good job, like it was our little secret. I threw it away once, and he beat me for it. After that he made sure I ate it in front of him.
Nancy would skin what we brought home, and she’d let me watch. I tried it a couple times and at first I wasn’t any good at it. I’d slice the meat, or my fingers, and Nancy would yell and slap me across the back of the head. But I kept at it, and before long I could skin a squirrel just as fast as her. Faster, even, on account of her twisted-up hands.
Eventually Eddie let me go out on my own. Maybe he figured he was getting too old to be spending the weekend outdoors, sleeping on a tarp and shitting in a dirt hole. Or maybe I was getting too old for him. I didn’t really care.
There was one evening, after a particularly successful hunt, when I asked Nancy if I could keep one of the rabbits for myself. She looked at me for a minute, and I’m not sure what was going on inside her withered skull, but she said if I was going to start stuffing animals I’d do it properly or I wouldn’t do it at all, and that if I didn’t the smell would bring rats, and I said okay.
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