“What’ll it be?” the attendant mumbled.
“Fill ‘er up,” Blunt answered.
The attendant staggered drowsily to the pump, snatched the nozzle from its metal cradle, and began to pump the gas.
His movements were slow, indifferent, and Blunt
thought that what this jerk really needed was a swift kick in the ass. But then, wasn’t that what everyone needed?
He thought of the meeting he’d had with the Commissioner an hour before, the way the Old Man had edged around what he wanted done, never saying it straight out. Smalls needed a swift kick in the ass, that was what the message had been, but the Commissioner had delivered it at a slant, going on and on about how it was a cop’s job to protect little kids from freaks like the one they’d found in the park, and how this fucking freak was going to have to be let go, and how he’d end up in the park again, and how some little girl would find herself wandering by this shit-hole the freak lived in, and how if the freak saw her, he’d do the same thing to her that he’d done to the little girl a few days before, and how that was terrible, terrible, and something should be done about it, right, Ralph, something should be done, you know what I mean, don’t you?
He’d known all right, Blunt thought now, he’d known from the first words the Old Man had said to him, known that he was headed for the cement house on Lake Warren at around dawn, him and the freak, and that maybe the freak wasn’t coming out of it again, at least not in shape to choke the life out of some little girl, not with his hands all fucked up the way they’d be, mangled to hell, thumbs broken. You break a guy’s thumbs, Blunt thought with deep philosophical satisfaction, he never fucks with you again.
“Dollar ninety.”
“Huh?”
“Dollar ninety,” the attendant repeated, this time a little sharply, so that Blunt had the urge to grab him by his scrawny neck, jerk his head into the car’s smoky interior, and give him the whack his smart-ass attitude was clearly begging for.
But he was a cop and so he couldn’t do that. The punk would yell it to high heaven if he did, scream to some fucking lawyer that some fat-assed cop had roughed him up. How did it happen, Blunt wondered, that the pussies ran things now? They couldn’t do shit without men like him. They couldn’t control the first grade at Our Lady of Lourdes without people like him supplying the muscle. He wondered if the Commissioner had now joined the ranks of the pussies who ran things, a guy who couldn’t do the dirty work himself anymore, afraid he might get something on those fucking pretty white gloves he’d worn in Molly’s Café.
“Dollar ninety,” the attendant said again.
When Blunt met his gaze, he saw something in the kid’s eyes he didn’t like, a vague contempt, or maybe just a question.
What’s the matter with this fucking guy?
He’d seen other people with the same look in their eyes but had never quite understood what he did that caused them to look at him that way. Maybe it was just that he didn’t answer them the way they expected, that it took him a few extra seconds to get things straight. He’d broken more than a few noses over that look but decided that breaking the attendant’s nose wouldn’t be a good idea. After all, he had bigger fish to fry than slapping the shit out of some night-shift grease monkey. He had fifty grand waiting for him, and that thought brought a smile slithering to his lips.
“Yeah, okay,” Blunt said lightly. “Dollar ninety.”
He reached for his wallet, drew out two singles.
The attendant snapped them from his hand and strolled, now even more slowly than before, back inside the station.
Waiting in the car, Blunt considered his next move. Drive to Titus, find that fucking storage shed, get the
money, haul ass back to the city in time to get the pervert. The last part was the easiest. The Old Man had made sure of that.
He’ll be in Interrogation Room 3.
What about the guys who are going at him?
They won’t be there. Pierce. Cohen. Neither one of them.
They know the setup?
Nobody will be there, Ralph. That’s all you need to know. You just go in and get Smalls. Nobody’ll stop you or question you or anything else. I’ll make sure of that.
Okay, Blunt thought now, okay, that part’s easy. He’d done it before, provided the muscle. But as to what he had to do before that, this whole business of the shed and the money, he was less sure of how that might go down. Maybe he should make a plan, he thought, and immediately began to do what he always did in such situations, figure that if so-and-so does this, I do that. One by one, he clicked off the contingencies: If a guy is at the gate, fuck Harry, I won’t go in. If the key don’t fit, I’ll snap the lock with some cutters. If the money’s not there, I’ll blow the place and get the hell back to town. If the money’s there, I’ll grab it fast and put it in the trunk. If anything goes wrong, I’ll kick Dunlap’s fucking ass.
“Your change.”
“Whuh?”
“I said, here’s your change.”
The attendant’s tone seemed sharp, as before, and Blunt noticed that he was looking at him that way again, giving him the once-over with the same look too many people had always had on their faces, everybody from the kids on the block to his own drunken mother, like
there was some secret that everyone else knew, and that he was supposed to know but didn’t.
“Yeah, okay.” Blunt snatched the coins from the attendant’s hand. “How far to Titus?”
The look remained in place, and for a moment Blunt wondered just how much he could get away with. Suppose he whacked the smart-ass, then sped away. Who’d know the difference, he asked himself, and after a few minutes of looking into it, who’d give a shit that some gas-pump jockey had gotten creamed at four in the morning? Nobody, Blunt decided, nobody at all. He felt his right hand curl into a fist. Just one word, you fuck, he thought, just one smart-ass word.
The attendant shrugged. “I’d say you’re about twenty minutes away.”
Blunt gave him another chance to fuck himself. “Twenty minutes, huh?”
The attendant didn’t take it. “This time of morning, you’ll have the road to yourself.”
“Okay,” Blunt said. He hit the ignition and pulled away, giving the grease monkey a final look in the dusty rearview mirror. Lucky bastard, he thought. He’s got no idea how fucking lucky.
3:38
A.M.
, Interrogation Room 3
“Anyway, I look for opportunities to run into her.” Cohen had resumed talking about Ruth Green after returning to the interrogation room following his talk with the Commissioner. “But she’s young. That’s the problem. Too young for me.” He shook his head at his own foolish hopes, then glanced at Smalls. “Embarrassing, right? Her twenty-six and me over forty.” He laughed.
“I’m a cradle-robber, that’s what you’re thinking. I can see it in your face, like I’m some guy after a kid, right?”
Something crawled into Smalls’ eyes. Not light, but darkness, not the glimmer of innocence Cohen thought he’d recognized an hour before, but its hideous opposite, the cold, hard, unmistakable glint of guilt. He looked at Smalls’ hands, the elongated fingers, delicate as reeds, the narrow wrists with their soft net of blue veins, and it rose before him in a macabre vision, full and dark and searingly real, the world of Smalls’ perverse desire, the parks and playgrounds where he lurked, watching children as they laughed and frolicked, waiting for one of them to break off from the rest, to wander into his dank tunnel and be forever lost.
He felt a shudder deep inside, then a wave of self-lacerating fury at the murderous consequences of his failure, time slipping away, Smalls about to go free, how he’d fallen into Smalls’ trap, been deceived by his frailty and his pose of helpless, wounded innocence, and thus been lured into a precious hour of idle talk, not interrogation at all, but idle fucking talk
about himself!
His eyes bore into Smalls, who smiled at him softly.
You fucking bastard
, Cohen smoldered, his eyes now leaping toward the window, the thick black thread of the river, the overarching bridge.
You bastard.
He saw the sprawl of small towns that spread out beyond the bridge, Titus, Englishtown, Seaview, and felt time like a burning fuse.
Find something, Jack
, he pleaded desperately.
Please.
P
ART
IV
Will you be with him till the end?
3:43
A.M.
, September 13, Route 6
Pierce gripped the wheel, looking for the turn off Route 6 that led to Titus. Time was pressure now, a swirl of ever-deepening water that would ultimately drown his promise to Anna Lake. Four years before, he’d made the same promise to Jenny but had failed to keep it. He must not fail Anna Lake, though even now he found no way to avoid the growing certainty that Smalls would go free, and thus trap Anna in the same poisonous chamber in which he had been imprisoned, and from which only Smalls’ apprehension could provide escape.
Escape.
In the long weeks after Debra’s murder he’d wanted escape more than vengeance. Just to escape the tormenting truth that he was condemned to breathe the
same air as the man who’d killed his daughter. He saw Costa stagger out of the bar and into the fog of Harbor-town, gazing blearily as he tottered forward, his red-rimmed eyes working to peel away night’s black curtain, cursing the fog and the darkness and the deserted street where he could find no one to direct him home.
“You asked what happened to me,” Pierce blurted out suddenly.
Yearwood looked at him but said nothing.
“A guy killed my daughter,” Pierce said. “Four years ago.” He expected a question from Yearwood, but none came. “I dropped her off at a park near our house. She walked over to where some of her friends were standing around. I never saw her again.” He recalled his return to the park two hours later, the way his eyes had searched for her among the other children, the stab of unease he’d felt when he hadn’t seen her, then the steadily building panic. “They found her three hours later. In a ditch about a hundred yards from the park.”
“Did they catch the man who did it?” Yearwood asked.
“The next day,” Pierce answered. “Some people had seen a guy hanging around the girls’ bathroom. A couple of people recognized him from the neighborhood. But there was no physical evidence, so he got away with it. Even moved to the city. Free as a bird.”
Pierce saw Costa stumble out into the fog-shrouded street, weaving drunkenly as he sought his way home.
“He fell in the river a year later though,” he said. “Drowned.”
“An accidental death,” Yearwood said.
“Yeah.”
“So in the end he didn’t get away with it.”
Pierce remembered Costa’s body faceup on the deck of the tug, lips purple and bloated, eyes popped, a look
of utter terror in his features. At that instant, he realized what he could not have known before, that vengeance was a stale bread. It did not fill the emptiness within him, nor grant him the slightest peace.
“I promised Cathy Lake’s mother that Smalls wouldn’t get away with it either,” Pierce said. Anna appeared in his mind, and he felt something unravel within him, the hard knot of his loneliness. “Anna is her name.”
Yearwood’s smile came from the ages. “And you’re in love with her,” he said.
3:47
A.M.
, Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Room 704
Dr. Wynn stood at Scottie’s bed when Burke entered. He drew the curtains of the oxygen tent closed.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Burke told him. “I don’t want him to die alone.”
The doctor toyed with the end of his stethoscope. “Will you be with him till the end?”
“Yes,” Burke said.
The doctor nodded. “Well, if there’s anything I can do.”
“Thank you.”
Once the doctor left the room, Burke was not at all sure he wanted to spend the final minutes of his son’s life alone in this sterile room, Scottie little more than a blur behind the translucent plastic of the oxygen tent, a silent room save for the ragged edge of his son’s breathing. But was that not how he’d always reacted to his son? Had he not always chosen flight? After that last battle, when Scottie had screamed in his face, declared that he would never, never be the son Burke wanted, had he not simply turned and walked to his car and
gone to headquarters and sunk himself in whatever case first greeted his arrival? And after that, each time his wife had begged him to find Scottie, accept him, welcome him into his arms, had he not muttered that yes, yes, he would do that, and then fled downtown?
But now he felt that he had no choice but face this solitary vigil with the same fortitude with which he’d sat alone with his dying wife six years before, Scottie’s whereabouts unknown, so the possibility existed that even now, in his last hours, his son did not know that his mother had died before him, drowning in a sea of worry for her wayward son, whispering his name over and over,
Scottie, Scottie
, her last plea. If she were here now, what would she say to him? Burke wondered. Only that she loved him, he supposed, always had and would, the fabled words of motherhood, older than the Virgin. But Ellen was not here, and so it was up to Burke to carry on alone.
Alone.
Burke thought of the many nights he’d left Ellen and Scottie to sit alone at the dinner table, then in front of the radio, and later still to go to their beds without his touch, then rise alone, dress and eat alone, while all that time he’d remained at headquarters or in some blood-spattered room. Had he been so deeply engrossed in the lonely death of someone far away that he had not for a moment grasped the lonely lives of those who’d been infinitely near? Had Scottie known him only for his willful absences, a father who found distasteful the very presence of his son, and so avoided contact, and by that means erased him deliberately from his life?