“Told us what?” Wiggy asked. “That you’re a mad old bat? Gee, what a surprise.”
“Maybe all three of us should think again about the active approach,” The Gent said. “Maybe the way to go is technological.”
“I haven’t got a computer,” I said. “It’s too late for me to learn, and anyway I can’t afford it.”
“Yes, you can,” The Gent said. “Besides what we took from the betting shop you’ve got…” He turned to Wiggy. “In her freezer she’s got dozens of oddly shaped packages labelled ‘Leg of lamb’ and ‘Ham hock,’ which, believe me, are not legs of lamb or hocks of ham or even sides of beef.”
“You’re mistaken,” I said. “I’m a vegetarian. I don’t buy ham hocks.”
“We know,” The Gent said. “You’ve got a freezer full of cash under all those woks. You’re like a squirrel who’s forgotten where she hid her nuts.”
“She’s certainly nuts,” Wiggy said. “But she might be right, Gent: We might just be home free. No one saw us.”
“Of course they saw us.” I waved at the TV. “They called me a man.”
“Exactly,” said The Gent. “They called two doddery old men and one dotty old lady ‘three very violent men.’ Longevity makes us invisible and prejudice renders us incapable.”
“Apart from ripping off a betting shop,” Wiggy said, “our second most serious crime was to get old.”
“But it saved our asses,” I said.
“Maybe,” The Gent said, “but not for long.”
“Don’t worry.” Wiggy consoled me. “He doesn’t mean the cops. He means the Grim Reaper.”
“Oh, that’s all right then,” I said.
One Good One
by Chuck Hogan
Copyright © 2007 by Chuck Hogan
Art by Mark Evans
Chuck Hogan sold his first crime thriller at age 26, while working in a video store. His 2004 novel, Prince of Thieves (Scribner), won the Hammett Prize, and a film version is now in production at Warner Brothers. He says he was inspired to try his hand at short fiction when he met one of the great current masters of the form, Ed Hoch. This is Mr. Hogan’s second short story. His latest novel, The Killing Moon, is just out from Scribners.
❖
Milky got home about nine that night, sweating and shivering like he had the flu. Which he did. He had the street flu; he was in a bad way. He opened the door to the house on O Street (Best thing about living on O Street? You only have to walk a block to P.) trudged up the stairs to the third-floor apartment, and watched his shaky hand try to fit the key inside the lock.
Ma was at the table. In her housecoat. Her close-set eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and Milky knew instantly.
“Why, Eddie?” she said. Grief tuned her voice up a notch. “Why?”
Edward Francis Milk felt his gut drop, like a sack of garbage hitting the floor.
He said, “What, Ma?”
“You know.” Her hands, worn like old dish towels, gripped her crossed arms tightly in hopeless self-consolation. “I know it when I see it.”
“Ma.”
“Eddie, you promised me. You always promised. My little boy…”
The guilt. Milky was thirty-one years old, still living with his mother. Then the anger. Milky was thirty-one years old, still living with his mother. “What were you doing in my room, Ma?”
“You been away two days. No phone call, no nothing. I’m scared, I’m all alone. What’m I supposed to do? Sit here and wait?”
“Not go through my things.”
“I was going to call the police. Report you missing. You should thank the man above I didn’t.”
“I was… I was working.”
“You used to want to be a cop.” She wept for him now. “You’d put on Dad’s shirt and hat and pretend you was him…”
This memory had lost all traction with him, the number of times she retold it. “Ma.”
“Jimmy’s passing killed him. Not the grief of it. The shame. Having it in our house? In his house? He told me, your father did, he said, ‘Eddie ever does it, Eddie ever follow in Jimmy’s footsteps, out of my house he goes. Put him right the hell out.’ You know I got to honor that, Eddie.” She looked at Eddie’s father’s picture, framed and standing on top of the stove. Him in his transit-cop uniform. A smaller photo of Jimmy laughing on the front steps was next to it. “This is still his house.”
“Ma.”
“Now I got to put you out.” She pushed herself up from the chair, and in her housecoat nearly flew to the sink. She clung to it as though hands from the floor had her by the ankles, pulling her down. “My baby boy. I should of dragged you to church with me. Should of dragged you. You’re leaving me all alone in the world!”
“Ma.” He just couldn’t do this now. “Ma, sit down.”
“Where you been all this time, Eddie? Where?”
“Working, Ma.” He hit his chest where the letters MBTA, for Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, were stitched over the pocket. Milky had been fired five months before, but still left the house most mornings dressed for work. For her sake.
“Two days straight, and no call?”
“Work is work, Ma.”
“How could you bring this evil down upon me? You’re all I got, Eddie! Daddy’s in heaven and Jimmy’s in the ground and you… you…”
She felt her way back into the chair, a handkerchief clutched in her hand over her heart. She looked gray. She wasn’t breathing right.
“Ma. Ma, listen to me. Where is it? Tell me what you did.”
“How you could bring it in this house after your only brother…”
“Ma, where’d you put it?”
“I didn’t touch it!” Her arm fell dead on the table. “I don’t touch that stuff. I know better.”
“Ma.” Milky grabbed a seat, pulled it near. Her voice was like raccoon claws scraping at the insides of his eyes. He ran his hand through his hair and it came back wet with scalp sweat. He wasn’t moving out. He wasn’t going nowhere except down the hallway to his room to cook a foil and do up. “Listen to me, Ma.”
“Both my boys, these drugs…”
“Ma, shut up!”
He wasn’t yelling at her. He was yelling at himself.
“Look,” he said. “This is something I’m not supposed to tell. Not to anyone. Not even my own mother. No one, you understand?”
He got right up again and paced in the kitchen. His angst was real. This was a leap off a cliff. A Hail Mary pass. The kind of lie that had no end, but he knew he had to follow through anyway, and hope for some miracle. He was too dopesick to argue with her. He was sweating like an egg left out on the counter.
“Ma, it’s this way, okay? I’m a cop. Not really a cop — not a full cop. Not yet. But I’m on that track. I’m working for them now, you see? Undercover. And this — this breaks every rule in the book, me telling you here. If only you hadn’t gone into my room…”
He spun around, gripped a handful of his own hair. He wished he could rip it out. Focus the pain on his flesh, instead of underneath where it wriggled through him like bloodsucking worms.
“But Eddie, how could—”
“I worked it out with them. They know Dad, of course — they remember him, they all still talk about him. And they approached me about maybe doing this… and I tell them, I says, ‘I got some priors, some trouble in my youth, maybe a little even beyond juvie.’ And they says, ‘That little stuff we can work out. If you can show and demonstrate who you are now. Make up for those mistakes, balance the books. If so, then clean slate.’ ”
She said, “They talked about Dad?”
“I told them up-front, I says, ‘I don’t want to coast. Don’t bring me in on the old man’s reputation alone.’ Because who could live up to that anyway? But they says, ‘Milky’ — or, actually, it’s ‘Eddie’ they call me. ‘Eddie, you got to be your own man. We know that. There’s room for you with us if you work hard now. But it’s dangerous, this thing. This is li
on training without no whip. You’ll be in that ring all alone.’ ”
He could see emotion tugging at her face. Like waves washing seaweed forward and backward. She wanted to believe him. To commit to this. To crash onto the sandy beach of good news.
He felt the crinkle of the Summons to Appear still in his back pocket, from just having been cut loose of the Suffolk County Jail. “Here,” he said, taking out the pink form, folding it so that she could see only the official seal and the lettering above his typed name. “See that? City of Boston, right there. Boston Police Department.” He put it away again before she could reach for it. “I’m breaking rules left and right here, Ma. I’m jeopardizing my place with them as it is, just telling you this. Risking everything. So you gotta trust me now. Please. And for Christ’s sake, stay outta my stuff from here on in.”
“Eddie… I just don’t know. I remember Jimmy, all his lies.”
“That’s just it, Ma. It’s because of Jimmy that I went to them. That’s what this thing is. Bringing those others to justice.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say. I can’t tell you nothing more, Ma, we won’t discuss these things. In fact, we should never talk about any of this again. Ever. Let it be an understanding.”
“The department, Eddie? For real?”
“I’m trying not to count my chickens too hard. Things haven’t panned out for me before. But they been good to me so far, and I’m trying to be good to them. Only now I got the added stress of worrying about you knowing.”
“No, Eddie.”
“This is a long-term project I’m on, understand. Nothing’s going to break overnight. They tell me these things take months, maybe years. But I’ll do what they say, however long it takes. This is my shot here, and I know it.”
These last words he felt in his chest. Felt them like they were the truth.
Ma was sitting back now, breathing easier. The strange look in her unfocused eyes, faraway yet so close: It was pride. It was love.
“Come here,” she said.
He did. He went and leaned down, and she placed her warm and trembling palms on his clammy cheeks. Her pale lips quivered as she stared at him, drinking him in like medicine. This clinch was as close as they ever got. The Milk family version of a hug and a kiss.
“My boy,” she said.
Milky hated himself then, and loved himself at the same time. A terrible sort of dreadful euphoria, as though he had shot his own mother up with smack. Tied her off and injected her himself and watched her eyes go liquid, and let her thank him for it, for delivering her from suffering. Delivering her from pain. Turned out both of them had needed to get high.
“You’re not going to tell no one,” he said.
“No, no.”
“Not until I let you know the time is right.”
“Then I shout it from the back porch. I dance up Broadway in heeled shoes.”
He had her soaring. Pipe dreams worked for everybody. He stood straight again, his mother sitting back.
“I thought I’d lost you, Eddie. Thought my best boy was gone from me forever.”
Milky squeezed her hand and stole a glance down the narrow hallway toward his room, needing to do up so badly right now.
The walk was an informal thing that, over time, had become consecrated. All the old war widows (staying married in Southie, that was a war) met at the rink down on the Point and walked Day Boulevard to Castle Island, around and around the old fort there at the edge of the harbor. Two shifts, a late-morning walk and a late-afternoon walk. A gang of gray ladies in white Reeboks and duck-brimmed visors, walking laps around the belly-ringed teenagers promenading their baby buggies.
That morning, there were only two of them. There was Rita and, wasn’t it just her luck, Patty Milk. Patty had stopped walking for a long time after her youngest boy Jimmy died up on their roof. Now she tagged along every once in a while, rarely with anything to say. Always a step or two behind the pack, just walking and looking out to sea.
The story was that Patty’s father had nodded off drunk one afternoon at Cushing Beach. Somebody else found Patty, who was only two or three at the time, facedown and floating in the surf. They pulled her out and got her to Mass. General, but she was never right after that. Growing up, she had that look, the chubby face, eyes a little off-kilter, her mouth thin-lipped and cornered down. The father insisted she was fine and was content to let the neighborhood raise her. No special schools. After puberty, she developed an infatuation with men of the cloth. Stalked them over at St. Brigid’s like a girl after a boy band. Many nights, the cops had to come pick her up for tapping on the rectory windows. It was scandalous. She should have been sent away.
Over time, her obsession switched to cops. The uniforms, Rita figured. And Jimmy Milk, he took what was offered him. For that, he was made to marry her, a shotgun wedding with the neighborhood and not the father holding the gun. But Jimmy Milk never regretted it. She waited on that man hand and foot, worshiped him as if he walked on water and cured the sick. Her boys, too, Eddie and Jimmy, Jr. Three men spoiled by a damaged woman, raised in a rent-controlled O Street walk-up on the salary of a transit cop too timid to grift.
Patty would often ask Rita about Rita’s son Billy. Going on about how proud she must be, her eldest son a builder, living up in Swampscott. And Rita always told her, not rubbing it in but trying to give the poor woman some hope: All you need is one good one.
“Ain’t that the truth,” answered Patty this day.
That was strange. Patty had a little extra spring in her step, Rita noticed. She wasn’t trailing behind like the runt of the litter. And didn’t Rita hear that Eddie Milk lost his T job some months back?
“You have news?” said Rita, these being the most words the two women had exchanged in the last five years.
Patty gazed out at the sea, the gulls coasting with their dirty wings spread wide in the salt air, and Rita realized that Patty Milk was positively bursting.
Derrick sliced up the whiskey bread his mother had baked. Irish soda bread with raisins soaked overnight in Hennessy’s. When the mood struck, she would bake up a few loaves for neighbors and friends, whoever was on her good list that month, and always one to take by Marian Manor, where she worked. The bread was soft enough and safe enough for the elderly patients to gum, and the raisins put them right to sleep.
Derrick paused a moment, realizing that the knife in his hand, the one with the splintered handle, was the same knife he had used to slice up Sulky Nealon. But that was a month or so ago, and besides, the blade had been washed and dried.
His mother baked bread today because Billy was home. Derrick’s brother, the golden boy who married a fat girl from the North Shore and moved out of Southie. Today he had returned for a rare Sunday dinner.
“Slice that thicker, Derr,” said Rita, Derrick’s mother. And for some reason, he did. He had a lot of patience today. Because there was something good on his horizon. Something big.
“You get down to the Island today, Ma?” he asked from the kitchen.
“I got my walk in, yeah,” she said, from the parlor. To Kelly, Billy’s pregnant wife, seated next to her on the divan all polite and shit, she said, “Good for my lungs.”
“Still rollin’ with the gray ladies?” said Billy, an inch taller in new, heeled shoes.
“I’m to be the fifth grandma in the bunch,” said Ma. “Today out there, it was just two of us. Me and Patty Milk.”
“Milky’s ma, huh?” said Billy, some of that North Shore condescension crawling into his voice. “Good old Milky. What’s that mope up to these days?”
“That’s the thing,” said Ma. “Derrick, you hear anything about Eddie joining the force?”
Derrick almost laughed out loud. “Eddie what?”
She went on, to Billy, “I was telling Patty about you putting up the new development in Wilmington. She said her Eddie had some good news coming. That he was working for the police on something, a special project. I figured MBTA, b
ut she seemed to say no. Derr, didn’t you tell me he got clipped from the T?”
Derrick had stopped slicing. He was staring down at the sliced bread, the whiskey-soaked raisins swollen, yellowed. He set the knife down on the carving board.
Derrick stood with Milky outside Hub Video. Milky was scratching lottery tickets with his thumbnail and dropping the losers to the sidewalk, one after another.
“Still playing, huh?” said Derrick.
“You kidding me?”
“I quit that.” Derrick shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “I’m quitting a lotta things. Thinking about it.”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“Don’t know exactly. Change in the air around here, I guess.”
Milky dropped his last scratch ticket. He looked concerned. “Well, maybe that’s a good thing.”
“I think it is. Like, you getting pinched again a couple of days ago. Not good. How’d that thing go?”
“The usual. Except they forgot about me in there and I was in longer than I should’ve. I pay this fine, I avoid the thirty days. Which I have to do. My ma.”
“Yeah,” said Derrick.
“I was going to see, maybe, if you could front me some. Against this thing at the end of the month.”
Derrick said, “You want some up-front?”
“Fine’s twelve-fifty.”
Derrick’s eyebrows climbed. “That’s steep.”
“I need the dough to stay out here. Think you can do?”
Derrick put one sneaker tread flat against the brick wall behind him and crossed his freckled arms. “Pushy. This ain’t like you, Milky.”
“I’m walking a tightrope here, you know?”
“How’s your ma doing, anyways?”
“Her? She’s good. She’s all right. She’s got her TV. Her chair.”
“Been walking with mine out on the Island.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know that. Good. Keep her from turning to stone.”
Derrick watched Milky step foot to foot on the sidewalk in the cooling night air. Milky was straight now, but the dancing-in-place told Derrick he didn’t intend to be for much longer.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007 Page 27