who’d said that to her. Certainly not any of the people who should have. Somehow that made it worse.
She shook her head. Somehow it hurt not to feel the way she’d always thought she would when a man she admired finally said he loved her. Safe and secure and happy like in the movies. A lot of things were in the way. A cop couldn’t be unpredictable, couldn’t fly off like that—should never, never fall in love with a partner and go crazy over her honor. Love made Mike dangerous, not safe. He was always going to be dangerous. She wondered if real love was like this.
“
“You’re coming with me?” He was surprised.
“Yeah.” Wearily, she reached for her bag.
sixty-nine
Bobbie left the police station on Eighty-second Street and headed west toward Broadway. He had a lot of things to be angry about—the humiliation of cops coming to get him at work was the least of it. Then, as he thought about it, he got angrier and angrier. The cops had evicted him from his home, from life itself. He wanted to go to work, back to his patients and his old life at the Centre, even headed in that direction. But even as he walked west, he knew he couldn’t risk going back there right now. Maybe later.
He told himself he didn’t give a shit about the tail. He didn’t see a tail, but he knew there had to be one. The cops and the FBI asshole thought he’d killed Dickey. That had to be the biggest laugh of all time when they were the ones who almost killed him. Where was the justice? There was no justice. Had to be cops and FBI behind him. They wouldn’t let him go without a tail.
Whoever it was, Bobbie wasn’t about to give the bastard the satisfaction of turning around. He didn’t care. He didn’t give a shit, craved a drink, wanted to think things over. The temperature was dropping. It felt as if there’d be another freeze that night. Bobbie was wearing his nylon zip jacket. He needed something warmer, couldn’t decide where to go.
If he went to the French Quarter, the Mick might bother him. It wasn’t safe to hang out at the hospital now. Someone might hassle him. He picked up a bottle in a liquor store he never bought from and walked around with it for a while, trying to figure out where to go. He didn’t like not having a place to go. It upset him. He drank from the bottle as he wandered the area. When he was tired of looking at people, he headed over to Riverside Park and watched the Hudson turn into a choppy black oil slick.
He was angry that the only thing the assholes did all day was bug him about old stuff from his life, real old stuff nobody in the world could possibly care about anymore. Who gave a shit what happened thirty years ago? It didn’t matter anymore. No one cared. Bobbie sat on the cold ground and watched the lights in New Jersey, knowing that the old bitch was responsible for all this. She’d given his file to Dickey. She’d talked to the cops. She’d told them things about him that were private, that he’d never told anybody else. He didn’t know why he’d ever bothered to talk to her. He felt hurt and wounded. After all those things she said about loving him, she turned out disloyal, just like everybody else. She talked to a douche bag of a cop who didn’t know anything—anything about life at all— and who tried to kill him. A piece of shit who worked with a slope almost killed him. She’d told the FBI guy that he’d killed Dickey. That really made him mad.
As he sat in the park, he was aware of the dog walkers and joggers running on the paths after work. He knew the old bitch was out there somewhere anxiously trotting around like someone hunting for a lost dog. He was pretty sure if he went one block up Riverside Drive, he’d run into her. He hoped a car ran her over.
As he took some time to think about that, Bobbie was aware of some black guys hanging around thirty yards up the hill from him. The hoods of their sweatshirts covered their heads, and they were smoking dope. The sweet smell of grass drifted out toward the Hudson in the frosty air. The whole thing disgusted him. He’d never smoked dope himself. He thought it was dangerous, made a person stupid. He muttered to himself, really annoyed about these coons menacing people and polluting the environment. For a while he thought they were going to come over and try to mug him. If they did, he knew they’d be stupid, and he’d bash their coon brains in.
They left him alone, and after a while he was mad enough to go home.
seventy
Bobbie liked the basement apartment even though the heat from the hot-water pipes was so intense, no one else could stand it. He said it reminded him of Louisiana. Sometimes in winter the pipes were so hot a splash of water could turn the place into a steam bath. Bobbie said where he came from there had always been a lot of steam rising off the bayous, where his father and brothers went out fishing almost every day before the war in ‘Nam changed everything.
Bobbie said he never did have the patience for fishing himself, and even now the smell of fish made him sick. He told Gunn how his father used to tease him about his chickens. The men in his family fished and never did anything else since time in Louisiana began. Gunn imagined Bobbie as a good boy. He always gave his mother the money he made from those eggs.
Bobbie, Bobbie, Bobbie. Gunn’s head was full of him, his stories of the oyster pies and tickling the crayfish holes in the hard ground with a stick to tease them out, and the heat, and the father who wasted away for years before he finally died coughing up streams of bloody phlegm. And his brother who went to prison for killing a man Bobbie knew for sure his brother never even got close enough to touch. And Bobbie’s humiliation in Vietnam, where everybody saw things through the haze of drugs and Bobbie was the only one sane enough to see what was going on. He was too good. Gunn reviewed the events of the last year in the light of the questions the Chinese cop had asked.
Gunn remembered Bobbie’s gentle way with the patients on his ward, how soft and kind he had been no matter how crazy and vicious and off the wall the patients had been. He had picked them up and put them down, wrapped them and unwrapped them like precious dolls, never, never hurt anyone. She knew he’d been hurt over and over, but he had never hurt anyone else.
For hours Gunn lay rigid on her bed in her pull-on pants and several layers of tee shirts. She had not wanted to go to bed in case Bobbie called, even though she knew Bobbie would not call. He was mad at her for not destroying his file a long time ago, for keeping it there in the wall of files for somebody to find someday and use to put him out of the Centre. He’d been afraid of dying, homeless, on the street. No matter what she said to assure him such a thing would never happen, he had refused to believe her. He didn’t understand that the files were sacred. Gunn knew other people tampered with them, lost them, destroyed them, but she never would. That’s why she’d had to get Bobbie’s file from Dickey’s office and put it back. The whole point was to keep Bobbie out of it.
In the flickering light of the TV, Gunn shivered, even though the woman cop had pointed out it was warm in the building. Very warm. She turned off the TV and lay back on her bed, shivering in the dark. She worried about the toilet flushing in an apartment where no one was home and wondered if she was just a crazy old fool.
Her eyelids began to feel heavy, and she drifted off into a familiar nightmare. She dreamed her cozy little apartment—with all its overstuffed furniture, floral fabrics, pillows, and lace—burst into a wild, raging fire that forced her up against the leaded window, which she could not open. With the fire at her back, Gunn tried and tried, but the window would not budge. It was rusted shut.
She could hear the crackling flames eat up her couch, her rocking chair and the lace shawl hanging over the back, feel the heat press her against the frozen, leaded glass. Then a burst of cold air hit her face as the window opened. She whimpered with terror as the dream changed shape and she tried to wake up.
As she struggled in her dream, she heard a voice in her ear. “Gunn, wake up.” Two powerful hands took her shoulders and shook her roughly.
She opened her eyes. “Bobbie?”
“Get up,” he ordered.
Gunn started crying. “Bobbie, please don’t be mad at me. I’ve been so worried.”
“I said, get up.”
“All right, all right.” She got up, pulled her tee shirts down over her hips, and scrubbed at the tears on her
