by H Hiller
I was shopping at the grocery on Royal Street a couple of weeks later when I spotted Amanda’s picture on a People magazine cover in the check-out aisle. The article inside included photos in which she was posed with the cute son of her new personal assistant. I had to look twice before I recognized the new assistant was Tyshika. Apparently Amanda had given up on trying to save an entire city and settled for reuniting one family. She had also traded one pit bull for another, but that was now her problem for her to solve by herself. Amanda also announced that she had moved back to Los Angeles to star in a television series being produced by her new boyfriend. I began missing her a little less each day after that.
Avery and I did not discuss the topic of Biggie’s murder case until he brought his family to the bistro for the Super Bowl party for the bistro’s regulars. We had a very large projection TV screen against one wall and every table was filled. Avery smiled a lot but said nothing about the hand holding between my chef and sister, or the displays of affection between me and the prettiest States’ Attorney either of us knew.
The time since Biggie’s murder had allowed us to reflect on the day I had accepted the arrangement which Avery and Tulip had hammered out with the commander of the State Patrol. The commander had actually argued against me being on anyone’s police force, even with Avery’s assurances that NOPD would take me off the Patrol’s hands from day one.
I had quoted Joseph Heller to Avery over lunch on my first day on the new job. It was a quote from Catch-22 that “justice is a knee in the gut from the floor.” I had proven my point when I put my knee into Bumper, but had also vindicated Avery’s faith in me when I didn’t pull the trigger.
There was apparently no record of any of the men, other than my father, who were machine-gunned by Gabb ever being investigated as missing persons by any law enforcement agency. The FBI had not yet seen fit to pursue the matter any further or to provide NOPD with the details from their interviews with Agent Gabb. There was no massacre as far as anyone else on the planet knew, which meant it would be eventually forgotten by everyone but my family.
I’m not satisfied that I have all of the pieces to my father’s disappearance, but that puzzle has been filed away and I have moved on with my life. Even so, a part of me wants to believe that one of the men Gabb and Eric had murdered actually was Arnold’s father and that Arnold somehow balanced the scale of justice for both of us.