Meanwhile, though, there was this reckless young woman to worry about. “I just had a little talk with John Carpsio,” Jack told her.
Duffy stayed quiet, but her somber green eyes opened wider.
“He says you’ve got something that belongs to him. My guess is it’s just cash, or he wouldn’t have let me know about it.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “You have three options here. You can cooperate with me, tell me what’s going on. Or you can cooperate with Carpsio. The third option is not very pretty.”
Duffy still wouldn’t talk, but he had her full attention.
“These guys will get to you eventually, Maureen. Don’t doubt it. They’ll hurt you really bad, or worse. You could try running, but I have to tell you that the track record of people who’ve done that is not very good. They’ll catch up with you, and by then they’ll be
really
pissed off.”
He stopped. Duffy walked on for a few steps, then stopped, too. She turned away from him, stood facing the harbor, thinking.
After a minute, she turned back. “I don’t know anything.”
Jack sighed. “Then I hope you pick option two, or else one of these nights I’m gonna get a call and I’m going to have to come look at your corpse.”
THE CHILL JANUARY WIND
sent dead leaves skittering across the sidewalk, swirling after Maureen Duffy. Jack just stood and watched her walk away. He didn’t know what game she was playing, but he knew she was in over her head. A man like John Carpsio would have no compunction about stuffing her battered body in a car trunk and dropping it off somewhere along the Belt Parkway.
The nurse turned the corner and disappeared. He glanced at his watch, though it was another day off and he didn’t have anywhere he needed to be. The Seven-six house was only a few blocks away, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to focus on work. He turned toward the waterfront and suddenly a massive wave of loneliness swept all thoughts of Maureen Duffy from his mind.
Michelle
, he wanted to shout into the breeze. He wanted to reach out and grab her shoulders and shake her. He wanted to strike her, or pull her close. He took out his cell phone and glanced hungrily at its little screen, wondering if he might have missed her call. He couldn’t believe the business about an affair. Maybe that was just a smokescreen; maybe she had gotten cold feet, scared off by his sudden proposal. Maybe she was nervous about marrying someone who was so clearly already married to his job. Maybe she was worried he would never want to have kids. He felt a rush of sympathy. Maybe she was scared and lonely, too. Maybe he could help her.
Then he remembered what she had actually said.
I’m seeing someone. It just happened. It’s nothing to do with you.
His fists tightened. She had betrayed him, plain and simple. How could he have been so incredibly, stupidly blind?
S
OME BARS HAD REGULARS
; Tony B’s had irregulars. Give me your poor, your huddled masses, your toothless, gimpy weak of liver. A sign over the garish jukebox summed up the clientele:
WE’RE ALL HERE BECAUSE WE’RE NOT ALL THERE.
The old dive was down near the East River, stuck like a barnacle to the edge of swanky Brooklyn Heights. Jack had always joked to himself that if he was ever searching for Popeye, this was where he’d start. The old sailor would feel at home here, with the life preservers hanging overhead, models of ships on the walls, dusty semaphore flags. Old photos and newspaper clippings recalled the waterfront’s World War Two heyday, when hundreds of craftsmen built great navy ships and thousands of sailors roamed this shore.
Normally he came here only when he needed to consult one of his neighborhood informants. The snitch, a scrappy little bantam who went by the nickname T, was sitting under the fog bank that enveloped the bar, accompanied as always by his true love, Janelle, who looked like a bobby-soxer ravaged by crack. The little guy straightened up expectantly, but Jack just shook his head.
He had eaten some crappy lasagna at a pizza joint a few blocks away. After, he hadn’t been able to face the thought of returning to his empty apartment, so he had just driven around aimlessly for a while, killing time, trying to keep his mind off his troubles. Now here he was, Tony B’s…The bar was crowded. He took one of two remaining seats, over by the front window, which was made of glass blocks heavy enough to deflect a wandering punch or a tossed barstool. He ordered a Rolling Rock. Wrapped his hand around the cool green bottle, took a swig. He had never been much of a drinker, but tonight he was considering putting a dent in that reputation. It was hereditary, after all. He thought of his father on paydays, spinning like a tornado through Red Hook’s waterfront bars.
The Old Man would certainly have appreciated Tony B’s. For years he had made his living as a stevedore in Red Hook, hauling cargo out of ships. And then some bright mind came up with the idea of
containerization
: instead of using muscle to lift boxes from the holds, the shipping companies could stack their cargo in huge metal containers, which could be hoisted out by cranes and set directly onto railroad cars. For every twenty men who had worked the docks before, only one was needed now. Most of the work had moved to New Jersey, where trains could roll right up to the shore. The Old Man lost his job, and then he started drinking in earnest. He’d always been a scrapper, but how could he fight something as abstract as technology? He became a walking mourner of his own ruined life.
Jack had always sworn he would never end up like that.
He glanced at the other people huddled around the bar and—as if his own suffering had lifted a veil—he noticed the pain and loneliness in their faces.
Midway through his fourth beer, he started thinking about the night he had been shot. He pictured the other man who had lain dying on the basement floor with a bullet-torn mouth. This was the sort of thing he was supposed to come upon later, when he’d arrive with a group of fellow detectives and Crime Scene guys and everything was quiet and safe. Somebody would make a gruesome joke about the victim—“This guy must’ve drank like a fish”—and they’d all chuckle and be very calm and clinical about the whole thing. And he wouldn’t have to think about how much pain that man must have been in before he died.
A woman took the stool next to him and leaned into the smoky yellow light. She was middle-aged. At first glance she seemed out of place in her businesswoman’s suit. Jack glanced again. She was pretty attractive, but a touch the worse for wear. Her silk blouse was unbuttoned enough to reveal the edge of a satiny black bra. And deep, freckled cleavage. She reminded him of some star of the seventies, Joan Collins maybe, or that one who got famous for the scene where she went swimming in a T-shirt…
She ordered a gin-and-tonic. From her purse she removed a pack of cigarettes, tapped the end, and set it neatly along the bar’s scarred edge. There was a precision to the gesture that spoke of many nights in many bars.
She turned to Jack. “Do you have a light?” Husky voice.
One look in her eyes and he could see that she wasn’t so out of place after all. They said
There’s something broken deep inside me, but I could fuck you all night long.
He thought of Michelle again, and got angry at himself. Michelle was with someone else. Her choice. He didn’t have to take her goddamn feelings into account anymore. Besides, wasn’t it better not to depend on anyone?
The woman was waiting for an answer. He supposed he should say something smooth, something witty, but he’d never had the knack. He reached down the bar and scooped up a book of matches. She touched his hand as he lit her cigarette and it occurred to him that he might not have to say much at all.
“My name’s Natalie,” she said, her speech slightly slurred. Evidently Tony B’s had not been her first stop this evening.
“Jack.”
She held up her pack of smokes. “Would you like one?”
He hesitated. He imagined the nicotine reaching out to him, swelling into his lungs. He shook his head.
The woman took a deep drag of her cigarette. “So, Jack, what do you do?”
“I’m a detective. NYPD.”
She sipped her gin. Smoothed her lipstick with a long-nailed finger. “That sounds like fun.”
Some women had a thing for cops.
A Johnny Mathis song came on, “Chances Are.” It was that kind of juke. Barry White was probably next.
They shot the breeze. She worked in a real estate office in the Heights—she gave him her business card, in case he was ever “looking.” (Looking for what, she didn’t say.) He bought her another drink. She drank it. Then she stood up and rested her hand on his for a pulse-quickening second. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go away.”
He remembered a sign over the bathroom door:
ONLY ONE PERSON AT A TIME.
Natalie made him think about why the sign was needed. He thought about unbuttoning that blouse all the way, watching sweat run down between those heavy freckled breasts…A guy next to him laughed loudly, turned, and spilled his drink—some of it splashed on Jack’s hand. He jumped up. All of a sudden, he wanted to punch somebody.
The man raised his hands. “Sorry, buddy. No problem, okay?”
“I’ll tell
you
if there’s a problem,” Jack muttered. But he sat down, breathing heavily. He could feel the adrenaline cycling through his system like a red, live thing. How many times had he seen the aftermath of a moment like this? Too much booze, an unintended slight, a concealed weapon no longer concealed. A star-flash; a body splayed on a grubby floor. He gulped down the last half of his beer.
His father would have thrown the punch. He thought of the Old Man’s rages, the way he’d come trudging back from the bars, seemingly calm, only to flare up like a gas-soaked rag at the slightest provocation. A piece of undercooked chicken on the dinner table. A giggle from Jack or his brother Petey. The anger had always seemed incomprehensible, but Jack understood it better tonight. It wasn’t one little match that caused the fire—it was the heat of many matches, building…
Natalie came back from the ladies room. He could have sworn that she had undone another button on her blouse.
He threw some cash on the bar, stood up, and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t we go somewhere?”
M
ICHELLE WILBER TURNED THE
TV down so as not to wake Steve McCleod, who had retired to his bedroom early. (He liked to get up at five
A.M.
so he could visit the gym before work. She liked the results on his lean body, but didn’t enjoy waking in an empty bed.) She sat there on his expensive leather couch, and dug down into the bowl she held on her lap, seeking the last few little clouds of popcorn buried amidst the hard, unpopped kernels.
She licked her fingertips, savoring the last taste of butter and salt. Steve’s living room was dark, except for the big flat-screen TV over by the wet bar. (A true bachelor pad.) The airwaves tonight seemed dominated by so-called reality shows: people forcing themselves to eat disgusting things; people racing through airports and across foreign landscapes; housefuls of fake-titted bimbos and male models and second-string celebrities loudly failing to get along. Michelle’s attention wandered.
She looked around the room, noticing piles of things in the dim blue light: clothes, junk mail, rental videotapes, CDs. Steve was certainly not a neat freak like one Jack Leightner. She winced at the thought, and then glanced toward the hallway that led toward Steve’s room. In a little while she’d head back there, slip into his bed. “Six-hundred-thread-count,” he’d told her proudly about his bed sheets, an observation that was a little too metrosexual for her taste. There was nothing wimpy about him in bed, though. Maybe, when she came in now, he would wake up bearing the hardness he seemed perpetually graced with. Younger men. Maybe it was just the first flush of romance, though; maybe—if this kept going—things would slow down and get that usual relationshippy over-familiarity in the bedroom, like she’d started to feel with Jack.
There he was, intruding into her thoughts again. He’d been no sexual gymnast most of the time, but she
had
felt more comfortable with him, never self-conscious about her thighs or her un-plastic-surgeried breasts…She frowned; just the other night she’d gone out for dinner with Eileen Leonard, a friend from work, and Eileen had warned her about getting moony about the past. Eileen had walked out on her own mate the year before, and now all she talked about was how great it was to have her freedom, to be away from that unsupportive, boring lump. They were sitting in a Thai restaurant—unlike someone else, Eileen knew her way around the menu—and she had caught Michelle glancing at her cell phone.
“No,”
she’d said, as if reading Michelle’s thoughts. “
Don’t even think about it.
What’s the point? If you call him, he’ll just be angry and mean, or he’ll make you feel guilty, and the next thing you know you’ll go running back. Listen—you made the break; you did what you had to do. Don’t
engage
with him. Just let it go. He was never going to have a kid with you. Trust me.
Cops.
My sister was married to one and I know all about it.” She rolled her eyes. “All they want is to go out drinking after work and be all secretive about their little cowboy-and-Indian games.” Eileen’s face gleamed in the restaurant’s candlelight, fervent as if she were preaching. The thing was, sometimes it seemed as if she were really trying to convince herself. For all her vaunted “freedom,” she hadn’t actually seemed all that blissful the past year. Maybe there was something faulty with the notion that you could just leave all your unhappiness behind…
Michelle clicked off the TV and sat in the dark. As the night grew colder, Steve’s radiators began to hiss; the apartment was dry and stuffy, pulling the moisture from her lips. Eileen had been right: She had escaped a trap. Jack would never have agreed to have kids. And now she didn’t have to worry about growing old with an older man, someone so set in his ways, who never wanted to go out dancing, or do anything spontaneous. But he
had
been kind. And—when Jack wasn’t totally absorbed by some difficult case—he had been more aware of her somehow than Steve McCleod, he of the six-pack abs and youthful libido…