BLOOD AND BONE 379
“But if I happened to slip you a twenty?”
The clerk’s eyes brightened. “Well, you know, there are always exceptions.”
“Good, so here’s the way it’s going to work. I’m not going to slip you a twenty. But if you show me the card, I also won’t grab your nose in my fist and kick you in the head either.”
“Just a second, sir,” the clerk said as he made his way behind the desk with surprising alacrity.
The room was registered to a Byrne, all right, but to a Kyle Byrne, with the signature suspiciously like Kyle’s own, and paid for in cash. The son of a bitch hadn’t used his real name. If indeed the son of a bitch had signed the card, as opposed to Kyle himself in a fit of psychotic self-identity theft.
Back in the room, Kyle grabbed the little chair from the desk, put it on the cement walkway outside the door, and sat down facing the parking lot and the Target beyond that and the McDonald’s beyond that. He leaned back, propped his feet on the railing, tried to make sense of things.
Maybe he had made the whole thing up. Maybe his dead-father mania had grown like a spider to spread its hairy legs into his brain and drive him, finally, insane. Other than that lawyer at Ponzio’s, whom Kyle would never be able to find, or Robert Spangler, who now was dead, no one besides Kyle had seen him clearly. And without any physical evidence, to even broach the story to someone, anyone, even that Detective Ramirez, would be a no-win proposition. If he was telling the truth, she would mistakenly think him crazy; if he was relaying the cracked fantasies of a schizophrenic personality, she would correctly think him crazy. No, he’d keep it to himself, tell no one, except maybe Kat, only because he told everything to Kat.
But he wondered if the truth or falsity of his father’s reappearance even mattered. As he sat there, in the cool of the early dawn, watching the horizon lighten above the hard landscape of the asphalt parking lot and the cornucopia of crap beyond, waiting for his father to return and prove him sane, the years suddenly contracted like a clap of hands. And here he was, sitting on the porch of his mother’s house, waiting for his father. Or on the mound, waiting for his father. Or in a bar or at a softball game or in the heat of the night, waiting for his father. A lifetime spent waiting for his father.
Sitting there now, facing the coming of a new day, Kyle realized, whether the old man was a figment of Kyle’s own feverish imagination or a brutal and disappointing reality, that Liam Byrne wasn’t coming back. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever. And Kyle was okay with that. Surprisingly. Astonishingly. Okay.
Whatever had happened in these past few days had burned the need right out of him. It was as if the filial relationship he had craved for so long had happened in a matter of hours, moving swiftly from childish love to adolescent rebellion to a sort of blind adult mimicry to a declaration of independence. And he no longer felt deprived, he no longer felt gypped out of some grand paternal presence, he no longer harbored any illusions about how terrific his life might have turned out if his father had only been a father and not some detached presence that died way too soon for Kyle to cope. No, as the bright top of the sun rose above the cement boxes of New Jersey, he felt lucky. Lucky to have had his mother to himself for as long as he had. Lucky to be young and strong, with opportunities to seize and a future to mold. Lucky to be free.
He was certain that would be the end of the father sightings that had plagued him since the funeral fourteen years before, but he was wrong.
SHE WASN’T DETECTIVE RAMIREZ on this night, she was Lucia,
her badge and gun worn not on the hip but stashed inside her bag, her hair up, her lips freshly glossed. She was wearing a silk blouse, a pleated skirt, spiky red high heels, and she didn’t need any leering Neanderthal to tell her she looked damn good, she knew it already.
Even as she had passed through the administrative and media whirlwind that accompanied the closing of the Laszlo Toth murder case, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking of this night with a visceral anticipation. She had imagined something romantic and intimate, something candlelit and soft, something leading to something, leading most definitely to something. And so she was keenly disappointed to find herself vastly overdressed while sitting at a Formica table at Bubba’s with Kyle and his motley crew, drinking from pitchers of Rolling Rock and just hanging.
“So is it heavy?” said Kyle’s squat friend with all the tattoos, who was named Skitch.
“I’m used to it,” said Ramirez.
“Can I see it?”
“No.”
“Dude, lighten up,” said Kyle.
“I’m just asking to see it. It’s not like I want to take out a window or anything.”
It was a laid-back gabfest, going nowhere quite slowly, and she was frankly bored. Add to that the way Kyle was back to dressing in his black Chuck Taylors, cargo shorts, and a ringer T-shirt, looking very young and very aimless and very much without the dangerous edge she had found so attractive during the Toth affair, and the whole thing left her wondering what she’d been so hopped up about in the first place. She began checking her watch, wondering when would be a polite time simply to leave.
“Don’t mind Skitch,” said the bar’s owner, that skinny Bubba Jr. “It’s not often we have a celebrity with us,” he said, hoisting a beer in Ramirez’s honor.
Ramirez forced a smile and raised her beer in return. She and Henderson had become briefly famous on the local and national news shows for neutralizing the now-infamous Toth murderer as he’d tried to add a U.S. senator to his list of victims.
“You seemed to like being in front of the camera,” said Kyle.
“Just part of the job,” she said. But she had liked it, and was good at it, and realized during her fourth television interview that the center of attention was exactly where she wanted to be. But hanging at a bar with these losers wasn’t helping her get there, that was for sure.
“You know where they make this now?” said the old toothless man, staring sadly at his beer. “New Jersey. It makes me want to puke.”
“I feel the same way,” said another older man, with a bulbous nose, whom Kyle had introduced as his Uncle Max. “But it’s from them pills I take for my back. So what’s going to happen to that senator?”
“My guess is not a damn thing,” said Ramirez.
Senator Truscott had held a press conference to announce his horror at what his cousin had done. Truscott had promised full cooperation with the ongoing police investigation even as he vowed to continue to vigorously represent the interests of Pennsylvanians in the United States Senate.
“But it’s the end of his presidential ambitions at least,” said Bubba Jr.
“Don’t bet on that,” said Ramirez. “He’s getting coverage in the national press, he’s gaining a celebrity beyond politics. That stuff can be intoxicating.”
“And it’s not really his decision to run or not, is it?” said Kyle. “His mother has been calling all the shots for him since he was a baby. That’s a hard habit to kick.”
“It’s going to be tough for her to keep doing it from where she is now,” said Ramirez. “They put her in an asylum in North Carolina. We’ve been trying to speak to her, but they claim she’s suffering from shock and dementia.”
“The only dementia she’s suffering from is her own overblown sense of entitlement,” said Kyle. “She married a Truscott, her offspring is entitled to the presidency, and there’s nothing she won’t do to make it happen.”
“What a fun gal,” said Kat.
“Maybe sometime I’ll show the movie we found in Spangler’s apartment,” said Ramirez. “Puts the old lady in a whole new light.”
Kyle raised his beer. “Dudes, I have, like, a toast.”
Cutlery clanked against beer mugs.
“It’s been an insane couple of weeks, starting with my wig-out at the ball game—”
“We had that game won, bro,” said Skitch.
“Yeah, maybe, though it wasn’t exactly Willie Mays in the on-deck circle. But from the ball game through the violence of last night, I have to say, the whole experience for me wasn’t altogether horrible. You might have heard I lost my dad when I was twelve—”
“No, we hadn’t,” said Bubba Jr. “You ever hear that, Kat?”
“Not in, like”—she checked her watch—“the last ten minutes or so.”
“And my mom died last year,” continued Kyle, ignoring the sarcasm, “and I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, abandoned and alone, the poor little orphan boy.”
“You’re making me cry,” said Tommy. “Stop it. No, really, stop it.”
“But in the middle of the insanity,” said Kyle, “each of you guys came through for me when I needed it. Junior letting me use his bar for the meeting even after giving me the heave-ho, which I fully deserved. Kat getting me out of jail, staying in touch with the police, and keeping me grounded. My Uncle Max, who’s like family to me—”
“I am family to you, you putz.”
“For giving me his sage advice and his unflinching honesty.”
“Does that mean we’re good again?”
“No,” said Kyle.
“You let me know.”
“I also need to thank Lucia, who saved my life not once but twice from a homicidal maniac. And finally Skitch, who stood with me during the entire time and helped out in ways we won’t talk about with a cop present.”
“He’s just talking hypothetically,” said Skitch to Ramirez. “What I would have done if it wasn’t, you know, against the law.”
“You all helped, each of you, except for Tommy, actually, who didn’t do a thing except call a United States senator a pussy to his face.”
“I was right about him, wasn’t I?” said Tommy.
“Yes you were,” said Kyle. “So I just wanted to thank you. We all want to know we’re not alone in the world, and right now I feel less alone than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Which is good, since after Kat kicks me out, I’m going to need a place to stay. So here’s to all of you, even to Old Tommy Trapp. Thanks for taking up the slack in my life.”
They were clinking glasses, and Ramirez was ready to take her cue to up and leave, when she saw it, above the neon hanging in the window, a quick bob of gray hair passing to the left. And even as she saw it, she noticed that Kyle saw it, too, and reacted to it like a slap in the face. He stared for a moment, dropping his jaw like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and then he was on his feet and heading out of the bar without so much as a word to anyone else at the table.
“What the hell?” said Ramirez, as she stood to go after him.
“Leave him be,” said the pretty lawyer, smiling kindly at her as she put her hand on Ramirez’s arm. “Welcome to Kyle World.”
Ramirez sat down again, and Skitch leaned over to her. “Just a peek?”
“Forget about it.”
“There any other hotties like you on the force?”
“You mean,” she said, “hotties who’d be interested in someone like you?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
KYLE KNEW IT wasn’t his father. It didn’t even look right, and after his morning watching the new day dawn he would have been ready to bet that the sight wouldn’t affect him like it had in the past. But then the emotion rose in him, pure and full of its lovely pain, and he was up, and out of his chair, and out of the bar. He couldn’t help himself. He would never be able to help himself. Despite everything he had learned, he’d never be totally free of him, because it was his father, and as someone told him long ago, that’s just the way of it with sons and their fathers.
He looked left, nothing. He looked right, nothing. He ran to the other side of the street, climbed onto the roof of a car, scanned as far as he was able, and from there he saw it, the head of gray hair bobbing atop a bent figure that had just turned the corner.
He jumped down, chased the man around the corner, saw him, gained on him, grabbed his shoulder as he called out, “Dad?”
The man spun around, old, decrepit, his pocked face marked with fear. The man raised his gnarled hands to ward off Kyle’s attack.
“I’m sorry,” said Kyle, backing away. “I didn’t mean. . . . I’m sorry.”
He felt deflated as he walked back to the bar, when he saw it, resting against the wall of Bubba’s, right by the door. An envelope. He stared at it for a moment before picking it up. No address, no postage, just his name scrawled across its surface. Kyle Byrne. With shaking hands he opened it, reached inside, pulled out a piece of paper wrapped around something flat and rectangular, bound with a rubber band.
A few moments later, he opened the door, leaned into the bar, and motioned for Ramirez to come out. She glanced around, puzzled, as if he were surely looking for someone else, but then grabbed her pocketbook.
“What happened?” said Ramirez, outside now. “Your jaw dropped as if you saw a ghost.”
Kyle laughed. “I have something I need to give you.”
“Flowers?”
“Better,” he said as he handed her the tape that he had found in the envelope.
Ramirez stared at it for a moment before glancing up at Kyle, who beamed at her, like a hunting dog who had just retrieved a dead quail. She gave him a questioning look, he nodded. She took a tissue from her bag, wrapped the cassette carefully.
“Where’d you get it?” she said.
“I found it right there on the street.”
“Just sitting there, outside, just like that.”
“Strangest thing,” said Kyle.
But he didn’t tell her who the tape was from, he didn’t tell her that there was no reason to dust the cassette for fingerprints because he had wiped them off on his T-shirt, he didn’t tell her anything. He just stood there for a moment, smiling and letting the emotions that blossomed from the envelope, all good and all surprising, rise through him.
“My father once told me,” he said finally, “that life was about seizing glory. I didn’t know what he meant then, but I think I know now.”
“And what’s that?” said Ramirez.
Without any preamble or his usual grab bag of feints or tricks, he leaned forward and kissed her.