The Odds (37 page)

“Okay.”

She will give him that, she seems to be saying.

Her face gives in to a flickering smile when her pig lifts her up, up. There is something generous in her face already, young as she is. The light catches her hair so that she seems to glow.

   IT’S CHRISTIE, POTOCKI, AND Greer at six o’clock on Sunday. They settle in Christie’s office.

He looks cheerful. “Well, I just came from Farber,” he says. “He’s almost out of his mind with ecstasy. He’s got the Philly men on Costanzo, and—this is top secret, you understand—it looks good, good. Which is good for all of us. They found Costanzo leaving his house. His behavior suggests … Well, what he did was he drove his nice Lexus into this dumpy garage, stayed maybe three minutes, and drove back out of it. Huh? The garage had enough room for two cars, so after Costanzo left it, a couple of the Philly men followed him home—it turns out he stayed put the rest of the afternoon—but Farber had another couple of men watch the garage. They might be still watching it. You gave them that,” he said to Colleen.

“When do you think he’ll move on it?”

“He’s hoping Wednesday.”

“Boss, does he really have the Chief’s—?”

“I think it’s true. It’s very flashy to make a bust like this. I said we’d hold off on our end as well as possible.”

So Farber can be the big eagle swooping down. Colleen can read on Christie’s face that he thinks Farber is teetering on crazy.

Let them continue
, Colleen thinks. That damned line from a book, a play, a movie. Something like,
Let them continue in their crimes
. Something like that.

“Bus station was a bust, huh?”

“I showed Nick’s picture, but the people on duty weren’t the same ones who worked the morning shift. I quizzed drivers coming in and going out about a man on crutches. Potocki sat in the office getting the phone numbers for the other drivers who were either off-duty or on another trip. Maybe he didn’t take a bus.”

“People slip through cracks all the time.”

She’s made lists: Columbus. Cleveland. Erie. New York. Baltimore. “If he really had only twenty dollars, that would limit where he went to any city costing twenty dollars and under with him possibly getting off at an early stop on the way. That’s between thirty and fifty possibilities if he took a bus in the early morning. More possibilities if he rode later. And of course, he could have gone somewhere and hitched. He could be anywhere.”

“I hope Farber doesn’t sit on it,” Potocki says.

“He tells me he has eight guys tailing Markovic tonight. A ton of guys in Philly on Costanzo. Philly detectives.”

“And still no Feds?” Potocki asks.

Christie smiles. “He thinks all they do is come in at the last minute and crow.”

Colleen puts her head down right on Christie’s desk.

“Greer, let’s get you somebody for the bus station. You have to take a break sometime. How long you been going round the clock?”

“It’s okay,” she says.

“A break is good. I’ll get you somebody for today. Dolan gets back tomorrow. You all can talk to more of the drivers tomorrow if you need to.” He points to Potocki. “Take a couple of hours.”

“Thanks. I promised my son a steak for dinner. I was going to cancel if I had to, but— He’s going to have to see my place sooner or later. Might as well be tonight, then.”

Colleen can imagine what will happen. The kid will explore, go up and down the steps, look into the back garden—exploring, trying to make it his. He’ll like it and hate it, both.

“You’re the one who should rest,” she tells Christie. “Take your own advice.”

“I will. I will.”

They depart from each other reluctantly.

Colleen drives home, beating at her steering wheel. If she could find Nick and get him to talk, she’d be closing BZ maybe and Earl Higgins for sure; she’d have enough on Markovic to put him in jail for a long time; and she’d have a shot at protecting Nick. It’s hard to let down.

When she’s finally inside her house, she tries for a catnap, but it doesn’t work. Her eyelids are propped open. So she vacuums; she makes herself a salad big enough for four people and forces herself to go out to grill some chicken to put on top.

While she’s grilling, her neighbor comes out to her deck and says, “I watered your lawn.”

“Oh, you didn’t have to do that.”

“Well, things were dry.”

“My fault. I got busy. Sorry about that.”

“I watered it good.”

“Very good of you.”

“Well, it needed done.”

Needed to be done. Needed doing
. “I’m really grateful. Let me know how I can repay you.”

“Nothing. I just saw it needed it.”

“Very thoughtful. Many thanks for that,” Colleen says, taking her chicken off the grill before she’s absolutely sure it’s cooked. She eats her dinner inside in front of the TV. How familiar it feels, being utterly alone, eating in front of the TV. It erases the last two weeks somehow.

She watches a rerun of
Desperate Housewives
, deciding for the hundredth time that she needs to go clothes shopping. She watches CNN and tries to figure out how the network has managed to find so many women anchors with no lines on their faces, no shadows or bags under their eyes.

Around eleven at night, she decides she really needs to try to sleep. She drops into bed, numb, almost high, with fatigue.

   THE ROOM AT THE JOHNSTOWN Salvation Army, a kind of barracks, holds twenty cots and each is occupied. He keeps the cap over his face. His arms ache from the distance he’s covered on crutches. He’s waiting for the others to sleep. Then, maybe he’ll go down, too.

Scared. As usual. All his life, scared.

He has a job prepping food tomorrow at a diner, a gift of the old lady who put in a word for him and who is about as royal as they come. She bought him lunch and she knew not to ask too many questions. Mo Weaver, short for Maureen. She’s going to check on him tomorrow, she said, to see how the diner thing is working out. Nick will have to do most of the prepping sitting on a chair or a stool. The owner, a crusty type, hardly looked at him, just said, “So long as it gets prepped.” Nick now has twenty bucks’ food money—emergency money—in his pocket from the Catholic Social Services. Twenty—funny—as if his pockets somehow filled up again with what the kids gave him, magic money.

A ride out of town was his initial plan, but he owes it to the old lady to show up for work tomorrow. Because of her, he’s had two free meals: soup and a sandwich for lunch, bought by her; some kind of ground-meat stew for dinner at the homeless shelter.

Hundreds of people have seen him today. Earlier, in the bathroom at the Salvation Army, he studied himself in the mirror. He’d made it out of town, possibly because he looked clean and respectable and you couldn’t tell the cast was homemade. Tomorrow more people will see him. With the backpack on, he is Charles Philips, a guy, Charlie, still going for his degree. Hide the backpack and he’s Charlie Philips, father of four, injured on the last job, down on his luck.

   MEG LIES IN HER BED AT THE Pocusset Safe House. Joel has his own room, but she’s been given a room with her sisters. Each of them has a single bed with a thick mattress and layers of covers, the top one being a quilt made of different fabrics. They aren’t quite asleep yet. Every once in a while they murmur something. Trying to remember their lines, probably, things they have to say in court tomorrow.
We missed Alison when she was gone. We’re used to her. She cares about us. She was looking for a job, thinking we should move somewhere else. Because of the sad memories
.

Move to New York City, just like that? It isn’t exactly believable.

Meg rehearses something that’s a closer bet on a truth.
To New York because she knew a guy there and thought he could be a father to us
.

She will gag to say it. She will say it.

If Alison doesn’t pull it together tomorrow, they’ll end up in foster care after all they did to avoid it. She closes her eyes and sees Nick, out there somewhere, alone, uncertain.

He liked her. He did.

The covers are soft. Laurie noticed the smell—very clean. The room is decorated with curtains that match the bedspreads, a muted pink and blue and cream. Paintings deck the walls. One is abstract, thousands of colored dots. The other one is something like bits of a seashore vacation house blown by a tornado or a hurricane and reassembled as a jumble.

Her sisters seem to have adapted more easily than she to sleeping in a new place. She doesn’t like this about herself, this stiffness of hers. She can remember Alison calling her an old lady, and it still stings.

   MIDMORNING MONDAY, Colleen is back at the bus station, where a different ticket seller, a very tiny woman, thinks she remembers Nick. “State College, I think. Or maybe not.”

“Could a person get to State College on twenty dollars?”

“No. It’s more, twenty-two dollars and fifty cents.”

Did he really have
only
twenty?

The neon pizza sign in the terminal winks at her. Talk about a terminal lunch. She’s glad that for once in her life she isn’t ravenously hungry. She takes in her surroundings. Signs in Spanish as well as English. Uncomfortable metal mesh chairs. And televisions going, of course, of course.

Somebody will know eventually. But for now, Christie is demanding she get to the office to plan for the court hearing on the Philips kids.

   FOUR MOUTHS TO FEED. Five if she counts herself. She has half a mind to skip the hearing and take off again, but if they find her, it will mean jail or some fine she can’t pay, so, sitting at the kitchen table, having the last of the coffee, Alison decides it’s better to do the contrite thing, the act she’s done most of her life.

She is thirty-seven, but she could easily pass for twenty-four.

She didn’t obey the police last night. She didn’t stay the night with her friend because the woman wasn’t all that friendly, really, and the last thing she wanted to do was pack another suitcase. Badly needing something familiar, she sneaked back to her own bed, her own shower, and it helped.

If she thinks about what happened in New York, she starts to cry, so she tries not to think about it, but it edges in anyway. She was brave in a way—tried to strike out for herself for once, the way she called Juan, after all these years, to tell him she had often thought of him. How warm his voice had been on the phone.
We should get together. It should be you and me. Is it too late? Why didn’t we know this?
He meant it at the time.

She said, “I’m ready to work it out.”

He said, “Get here. I can’t wait. Please. Come.”

And she did, drove the whole way to the Bronx and got there at eight in the morning with the traffic thickening by the minute. Shaking, she drove through the unfamiliar streets to his apartment house, a huge thing, not too clean looking.

When he came to the door—and the bell brought him the whole way down to the outside door—he stood holding it open and just looking at her for a very long time. “Truth is, I never expected to see you on my doorstep.”

“You said …”

He smiled a little. “You better come in. The thing is, I wasn’t even planning to stay here. I was going to hit the road, find a place closer to—”

“What?

“Oh, where the work is.”

“Is my car okay out here? There?” She pointed.

“No car is okay out here, but it’s as okay as you can get.”

“I have luggage in it.”

“No, that’s not okay. We’ll have to take it in.” He checked for his keys in his pants pocket before accompanying her down the street to the car. “The place is a wreck,” he said.

“I won’t look.”

“I couldn’t believe you called me. You thought about me?”

Upstairs where he lived, it was pretty chaotic. But there was no one else there. He looked at her for a long time, then pulled her to him and gave her a rough kiss. She almost laughed. It was something out of an old movie, but the truth is, it went the whole way through her body.

Why didn’t she guess that he had kids of his own, five of them, and a wife? He looked like a man who would have those things. She didn’t know he was a dreamer until the third day.

He’d moved some clothes off the sofa and made her sit, lit a cigarette and handed it to her, then lit another for himself. He did try to pause, she can give him that.

She tried to get used to the new lines in his face. He was still good-looking.

“I need to calm down,” she said.

“You ever been to the city before?”

“No.”

“I’ll take you for Cuban tonight.”

Her breath caught. “Sure. Okay. Sounds good.”

“You wouldn’t believe how good it is.”

So, the strange thing started, with the gradual truth-telling and the impossible fantasies. She should have guessed it wasn’t going to work when he kissed her again. The second kiss was like one from Charlie Philips. Inquiring, too soft. She needed for him to be crazy hungry for her. Then, later that morning, he was. And for a while she believed in it.

And now, as if it never happened, she’s back where she started, except she’s in trouble.

When she dresses to get ready for court, she chooses a baggy dress, not formfitting, and old-fashioned high heels. Her long hair she plaits into a French braid. She hardly looks like a woman who broke bedsprings in New York a week ago.

Dressed long before she is due in court, she wanders the house. They kept it neat, clean as ever. They are good kids—as kids go, but kids are certainly overrated.

When she’s hungry, she opens the cabinets and the refrigerator. Leftover Chinese. No, she’ll have toast and butter—little kid food, sick food, good, especially if she dunks the toast.

   AT THE COURTHOUSE THEY SEE Littlefield walking the kids into the building and talking to them. Alison is nowhere in sight. Christie keeps trying to phone those people, the professors from Pitt, the ones he thinks are a match for the kids. Colleen manages to turn in her seat enough to catch Potocki’s eye. Potocki’s look says, yes, their boss is pretty ragged around the edges today.