Now there was a tough one. He thought of her mother, Christina Shepard, saying to him on the night she died, the night she killed him, Would you like to speak to my daughter? Ask her questions? Foul questions, no doubt. What kind of man wheedles his way into working with children every day, Mr. Flynn? What thoughts go through your piggy mind?
What kind of thoughts were in his head when he was more worried about this girl than he’d been for his own wife? As worried for her as he was for Emma Waltz, another complete stranger? Maybe it was just easier caring for people who didn’t know you.
“I meant to,” he said.
“But you’ve been busy?”
“I’ve been…distracted. Does Miss Humbold ever mention me?”
“No. She said you worked together but that was all. I’ve asked a couple times but she doesn’t answer. She says we should make peanut butter. So we do. There’s a lot of people to feed. I help out, a little.”
“I bet you help out a lot.”
“Not really.”
“Do you need anything? Can I get you anything?”
“Like to buy me?”
“Yes,” Flynn said.” Or anything else. Whatever.”
“No, I don’t need anything.”
A slight tinge of sadness invaded her words and Flynn thought she might ask him, confidentially, when she might be going home. How much longer she had to stay here with these people who weren’t her family. But then she looked at him and her eyes brightened again and the moment passed.
He said, “Kelly, has anyone tried to contact you since you’ve been here?”
“Contact me?”
“Get in touch with you. Anybody saying they were your family? Any letters or notes? Any phone calls?”
“No, no one. Nothing like that. Nobody calls me. There’s nobody to call me.”
“You’re sure?”
That made her laugh. “Well, I wouldn’t say it otherwise!”
He had to keep reminding himself this girl was only seven no matter how she talked or how much maturity she projected. The weight of his useless sympathy strained his chest. He could think of nothing to do to help her when the time came when the truth of the world flooded into her. When she visited her mother’s grave and when she met with her father’s dainty-featured doctor and had to watch him flashing that vapid, white-capped smile at her.
The garage door opened and Nuddin loped to Flynn with a wide smile, his eyes alive with joy. He held his arms open and hugged Flynn, stroking his back, patting him. Flynn clasped Nuddin and rubbed the top of his scarred, battered head.
Nuddin went, Whoo whoo whoo.
The teenager, Trevor, sauntered out as well, wiping his hands on a rag. He shut the garage and gave Flynn an uneasy smile. He said, not unpleasantly, “Who are you?”
Flynn reached over Nuddin’s shoulder and held his hand out to the boy. “I’m Flynn.”
“You work with Sierra.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the one who brought Nuddin and Kelly to us,” Trevor said. “It’s good to see him so happy.”
“From what I understand you’re mostly responsible for that. You’ve helped him out a lot.”
“I don’t know how much gets through to him. I try to show him about cars and games and downloading music. It makes the time go by.”
Kelly said, “Trevor is his best friend.”
Nuddin hummed and murmured his childish tune. Flynn held him and sorta danced with him in the snow for a minute. As he circled around he spotted Sierra framed in the back door staring at him, munching absently on a bologna sandwich, her expression pure hellfire.
SIXTEEN
He stepped inside and sat at the kitchen table. Today Sierra wore brown hair with thick curls coiling all over the place. She said, “You’re fired.”
“I figured that.”
“You figure everything, Miracle Man, and you get it all wrong. You purposefully threw a wrench into that meeting with Mooney.”
“What makes you say so?”
“He gave me a full report.”
“That’s supposed to be confidential.”
“Not from me.”
He shrugged. “I gave it a shot. I gave him a chance. I did my best. And I didn’t smack him in the mush.”
“You’ve got no right to be here, I told you to stay away.”
“They seemed happy enough to see me.”
“It wasn’t your call to make.”
“I think it was.” He locked eyes with her. “You’re not their mother, Sierra. They’re as much my responsibility as yours. Maybe even more so.”
“God, I hope that’s not true.”
The tone hit him hard enough to lift his chin. “Oh, that’s nice.”
It was self-righteous judgment. Was she taking him to task now, saying he’d botched the Shepard case? Or was it a mother’s instinct to stand up against anything that might bring trouble to her house? He searched her face and saw strain and fatigue there. He hadn’t picked up on it before. He’d been too wrapped up in his own troubles to be interested.
“You’re blaming me?” he asked.
“You could’ve handled things differently.”
“How so?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
She was being petulant, something Sierra almost never did. Sarcastic, sharp, even embittered, you could expect that from her, but not this. It was a kid’s game, and she never fell back that way.
“Tell me how.”
Sierra said nothing. She was trying to flatten her lips together, but that never worked, the scars pulled them apart.
“What’s this about?” he asked.
One difficulty he had with her is that he couldn’t read her face very well. The plastic shifted in ways he couldn’t fully appreciate or understand. She was annoyed all right, but was she also scared? He couldn’t lock it down.
“What’s going on? Did someone threaten you?”
“No.”
“Tell me, Sierra. What’s happened?”
“Nothing happened. Don’t turn this around.”
“Something did. I know you.”
A draft rolled in behind him. He turned and children were walking in, circling around the kitchen, laughing. The door opened and shut, opened and shut.
He stood and he and Sierra moved to the living room. She lowered her voice. “You don’t know shit about anything. You had to go and start something with that Emma Waltz girl, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“I did another check. She went to the emergency room Wednesday night. You went over there and got her boyfriend riled up, didn’t you? You bulled your way into her home and with your usual charm you heated him to his boiling point and he took it out on her. Not you. On her. After you left.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“He filed a police report on you. Got your name wrong as ‘Finn,’ which helps you out in a big way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they track you down and drag your ass into court sooner or later. You never think things through. You don’t give a damn about consequences, who might get hurt along the way.”
“I do care,” he said, and his voice sounded weak even to himself.
“You said she was a piece of your life that got away, with the same loss as you. That perhaps you’re both connected, and that if you could get back together, maybe it would help you both.”
“I know what I said.”
“But you didn’t think it through. You barreled in.”
“I was trying to help her. I made him leave. I didn’t know she’d take him back and he’d hurt her even worse.”
“You haven’t learned a damn thing about people in all the years you’ve been at the job. You think you can so easily unknot somebody’s wiring when they’ve got their signals between love and pain crossed? If you could do that you might not be so fucked up yourself.”
“I thought she might be ready.”
“Yeah? Why? You don’t know her. You don’t know a t
hing about her. You don’t even know yourself.”
He didn’t have to admit to it. He understood she was right. He’d gone to set Emma Waltz free from her past and he’d simply imposed more of it on her. He went to ease her pain and she’d taken another beating for it. Goddamn it.
The door opened and shut, opened and shut. Flynn wanted to snarl like an animal. Nuddin walked up behind him, ready to fling his arms around him again. But instantly sensing the mood, Nuddin began to moan.
Flynn turned and said, “It’s okay, buddy. It’s all right. This isn’t about you, everything’s fine.”
Nuddin tottered forward and rested his face on Flynn’s chest, then rushed out the back door to join the others.
Flynn stepped to the window and stared at Kelly out there surrounded by foster kids. Most of them had come from poverty and middle-class bitterness. From unemployed parents hitting the bottle too hard. From crack-head daddies and cocaine-heeled mommies who went in and out of rehab or jail.
Her story was different. Kelly would someday inherit millions. He didn’t know the legalities of it. He didn’t know how long each night Sierra spent talking with attorneys trying to help and protect the girl. What her attorney fees might be, how closely she dealt with Shepard’s doctors.
“Is Kelly all right?” he asked.
“She still hasn’t cried. I thought it would’ve happened by now. She’s seeing Mooney, and he’s helping a little. But you’re right, when it hits, it’ll hit hard. I hope it’s soon, so I can help her.”
And if it takes thirty years, he thought, she’ll wind up like me.
“You’re not fired. Go back to your desk. You’ve got cases.”
“But—”
“Shut up. Don’t argue. Maybe you’ve learned a lesson, maybe you haven’t. I’ll be watching even closer. You’d think a guy who’d come back from being dead for a half hour would learn to appreciate his second chances more.”
“I do. What about my psych evaluation?”
“Forget about that.”
“But then why did you—”
“Don’t give me any more lip. Just go. Kelly and Nuddin seem to really care about you. I was wrong keeping you separated from them. I can learn from my mistakes. Can you?”
That was the question all right. Flynn lit a cigarette and stood there thinking about it, the laughter and screams of children filling the yard and the house and his head.
SEVENTEEN
Jessie Gray showed up at his door while he was watching the seventies remake of Double Indemnity with Richard Crenna and Lee J. Cobb standing in for Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. It was an interesting failure, lots of flair cuffs, porkchop sideburns and shag rugs replacing the cool smoky shadows and Venetian blinds, but it still held Flynn’s attention. He had his .38 out in his hand, the barrel pressed to the door in case he had to fire through it.
She stood there smiling, slid inside followed by a swirl of falling snow, held him in her arms and turned her lips up to his. The gun didn’t bother her.
Her nose and lips were cold and she toyed with his tongue until her skin heated. She pressed a palm to the side of his face and kept it there rubbing back and forth. He had no idea what to say to her.
She threw her jacket on his kitchen table and asked, “What happened to your apartment?”
“What happened to it?”
“I mean, your walls. They’re mostly bare. Where’d all your rare original posters go?”
Like digging into a tender spot, it made him wince to focus on the empty walls. “I sold most of them,” he admitted. “I needed cash to get the Dodge fixed. The insurance hasn’t come through yet.”
“Your brother’s car.”
“Stop saying that. It’s my car.”
“But it has meaning to you because it was your brother’s.”
“So what?”
A shrug and a flutter of eyebrows was all he got. It was her way, to keep him on his toes, always aware that anything he might do or say could end up in ink. He had to face up to the fact that he was a little scared of her.
Jessie met his eyes, grinned at him, and said, “You’re the ‘Finn’ guy that Chad Rocca of 121 Dolan Place put a complaint in about, aren’t you?”
She watched him. He thought he kept his features expressionless but her grin grew wider. He was really bad at this game. He had to stop letting her in.
She put her hand back on his face while he finally got around to holstering the .38 and said, “Emma Waltz’s boyfriend. You stormed in there to kick ass. Why? What’s this got to do with her?”
She was a better reporter than she’d originally led him to believe, all that crap about her father pulling strings to land her a job, making it seem like she didn’t deserve her position. Maybe it had been true at the time, but not anymore. She was first-rate. He wondered if the rest of them at Newsday worried about her working her way up the ranks, nabbing their jobs.
Every time he turned around somebody else was coming at him, aware of something he wanted to keep secret. As if he wasn’t backed against the wall enough. Knowing there were people out there digging beneath the floorboards of his life was getting to him.
“It has nothing to do with anything that might interest you,” he told her.
It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it the instant the words were out of his mouth. Her smile broadened. He thought it was beautiful, or would’ve been if it wasn’t always aimed at him like a high-powered spotlight.
He champed his lips shut and sealed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, wondering why the fuck he ever talked to anybody.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “It’s layering, it’s back story. It fleshes you out, that’s what makes this such a hot item. It ties together, it’s the reason why you’re who you are. That’s what people like to read about. And who knows, it may even have something to do with the Shepards. With Colonel Bragg maybe.”
Pleased with herself for a job well-done, she eased through the apartment like a woman deciding if she wanted to move in. She looked at the high corners. The empty walls gave an impression of space. She opened the blinds and his pulse picked up speed. He came up behind her quickly and shut them again. It made her giggle. The little girl’s voice slid into him like a fishing blade. He hadn’t shaved for three days and knew the white in his beard was showing. You could drive yourself crazy with your petty embarrassments in the light of major tragedy. Nothing could make you live with yourself any easier.
“You really should leave this case alone,” he said.
“Is that your way of saying you don’t want to see me anymore?”
He hadn’t been sure they were seeing each other any way, but she certainly knew how to work herself into his life and take different tacks whenever she thought they could help ease her forward. That’s what the kiss was all about. He thought she might even take it into the bed room, throw him a tumble just to see what else she could use to flesh him out. It both aroused him and really irritated the hell out of him.
“Are you still mad at me?” she asked, genuinely surprised.
“I told you already, you shouldn’t be with me.”
“And I told you I know what I’m doing.”
“But you don’t.”
She shrugged. “Well, nobody knows as much as they want to, right?” The idea seemed to inspire her. With a lot of loose action in her hips, she sort of sashayed to the kitchen. “The only plant you have is a cactus?”
“I have it for warmth.”
“It doesn’t look too good.” She scoped the nearly empty fridge and said, “Not even a beer? You may be the only guy I’ve ever met who doesn’t stock beer.”
“I don’t like it much.”
“Is that because of your father?”
Flynn flinched. She’d been talking to Marianne. Marianne was the only one alive who knew anything about Flynn’s father.
He waited to see where she would take this. If his feelings meant anything to her or if her emotional compass was s
o off that she felt she could push against all his black doors until they buckled.
She checked his eyes and her grin froze there and flaked apart. He thought she would apologize, but she didn’t. Perhaps she didn’t understand she was supposed to. She simply stood there with a sorrowful expression that lasted only as long as it took her to walk up to him and put her hand on his chest.
She patted him there, a sign of understanding but nothing more. Things with this girl, he thought, could go very bad very quickly.
“I interviewed Detective Raidin,” she told him. “I think he likes you.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“He didn’t say so, but I sensed his respect for you. What they call a grudging respect, no doubt, but it’s there.”
“I know what they call it,” Flynn said, “and no, he doesn’t feel that. He can’t afford to. He’s a cop. He doesn’t know where I fit in. He has to reserve judgment. It’s what makes him such a difficult bastard.”
“Are you still mad because he hit you in the throat?”
It made him frown. “You saw that?”
“Yeah, but I pretended not to. I didn’t want to embarrass you. And I didn’t want to irritate him.”
Of course. He clearly remembered Jessie Gray talking into the phone, glancing over at him anxiously but not coming to help. “No, you wouldn’t have been in as good a position to interview him then.”
“That’s right.”
He could only stare. It was what he found himself doing more than anything else in his relationships with women. Standing there watching, seeing Frickin’ Alvin climbing off the bed. Looking at his wife. Looking at Emma Waltz. Looking at Jessie Gray. An inability to comprehend.
“You still don’t trust me,” she said, “which is good.”
“It is?”
“It means you’re smart, but I already knew that.”
“You did.”
“Yes. That’s why we’re having something distinctive.”
There was that word again. It sounded even more hollow and cold this time around. The fact that she said it while showing her teeth gave him greater pause. She flipped her hair aside and a slash of light coming down from a bent edge of the blinds highlighted her face.
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