shout. The only thing missing was a robotic voice assuring me that resistance was futile.
Joy met us at the front door, Lucy handing me off with a sad smile like I was a favorite uncle who’d had too much to drink at the family reunion. Roxy and Ruby swarmed around me, jumping and scratching my legs, indifferent to my condition as if to say Don’t make your problems our problems. I couldn’t and wouldn’t, sliding to the floor and gathering them in my lap.
“Thanks for leaving me a message,” Joy said, when the dogs lost interest, having smelled my breath, nipped at my nose, and allowed me to scratch their bellies.
She sat on the floor across from me, her head tilted to one side, her sweater hanging off her shoulders, billowing. Though she ate with gusto, she had struggled to put enough weight back on, and no matter what size she wore, it always looked too big.
“I’m sorry about yesterday. I knew you would be worried, and I should have called.”
“It’s okay.”
“And I’m sorry about Kate. I don’t know what to tell you. She just showed up.”
She let out a long sigh. “You never knew my mother. She died of breast cancer when I was a teenager. I remember sitting around the dinner table with her and my father and my brothers. Once she knew she was terminal, she talked about what would happen to my father after she was gone. She knew he’d be no good by himself, that he wouldn’t be able to take it being alone. She’d look at him across the table, pointing at him with her fork, and tell him it was fine with her if he could find someone who would take him.”
“What did he say?”
“He’d laugh and say thanks a lot, but since he’d fooled her into marrying him there wasn’t much chance he’d get that lucky again.”
“Your father was a wise man.”
“Yes, and my mother had more wisdom. She was right about him. And I’m right about you.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re like my father. You’re no good alone. So it’s okay with me. Whether it’s Kate or someone else.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I just hugged her until I felt her tears on my neck. She pulled away, wiping her nose.
“So, tell me what’s happening on your cases.”
She was letting me know that she wasn’t hiding or walking away, that our home was my refuge and she was, in the truest sense of that tired cliche, there for me, making me feel at once grateful and shabby.
“I solved one case today, but it wasn’t one I was working on.”
She boosted me off the floor, spotting me as we climbed the stairs. I told her about my day, leaving nothing out while we undressed, showered, and fell into bed.
“The boy from the gang who was at the Farm,” she said, “you think he works for this Cesar Mendez?”
“I’d bet on it.”
“And you think Mendez is also looking for Brett Staley?”
“You’re two for two.”
“And you said that Jimmy Martin and Nick Staley are friends and that you think Brett Staley helped Frank Crenshaw buy the gun he used to kill his wife.”
I rolled over on my side, propped on my elbow. “Don’t stop now. You’re on a roll.”
She gave me a smile, the first real one I’d seen in days, and stroked my face with her palm. “Then they’re all connected, Frank Crenshaw, the Staleys, Jimmy Martin, and Mendez. The question is how? Figure that out, and you’ll be home in time for dinner tomorrow night.”
She kissed me on the cheek and turned off the light. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, my eyes adjusting to the dark, the final spasms of the long day bouncing me from the inside out, my brain clear enough to know that her last question was the right question, but too muddled to hazard an answer. I reached for her hand, squeezing it beneath the covers.
“How was your day?”
“Go to sleep. We can talk about it tomorrow.”
“I don’t deserve you.”
“You never did, but that’s okay. Even a blind squirrel gets lucky and finds an acorn now and then.”
“A blind squirrel? Really?”
“I read it somewhere. No shut up and go to sleep.”
Chapter Fifty-three
Braylon Jennings was sitting in my kitchen when I wandered in the next morning, drinking my coffee, reading my newspaper. Joy was eying him with crossed arms, the dogs flanking her, tails down, casting their votes with soft growls. I was wearing the T-shirt and boxer shorts I’d slept in, scratching my crotch, tasting my morning breath.
“You look like hell,” Jennings said.
If he’d been a dog, he’d have peed on the floor, staking his claim to my territory, and if I’d been a dog, I’d have bit him in the ass.
“Get out.”
He folded the newspaper, sipped his coffee, and leaned back in his chair. “Your ex-wife invited me in. She’s got better manners than you do.”
“He said it couldn’t wait, Jack. I’m sorry.”
I picked up Jennings’s coffee cup, poured it out in the sink, and pointed to the front of the house. “Get out. You want to talk to me, make an appointment.”
“You got a short memory, Jack. Must be all that shaking. Tell you what, I’ll wait in my car while you get dressed.”
I followed him to the door. He glanced at his watch. “Hurry it up,” he said. “I’ve got a full day.”
There were two ways I could deal with Jennings: wait for him to tell me how high to jump, or push back, figuring he needed me enough to take a certain amount of flack until he got what he wanted. If I made it too easy for him, he’d use me till he used me up, and if I busted his chops too hard, he’d make good on his promise to throw Roni Chase back in the soup. It was that prospect that made me shave, dress, strap my gun on my hip, and sneak out the back door, climb over our fence, cut through our neighbor’s backyard, and get on a bus at Sixty-third and Brookside, Joy’s question from the night before rattling around in my head.
Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley were first cousins. Jimmy Martin and Nick grew up together and were army buddies. Frank was in the scrap business, Nick sold bread and milk, and Jimmy worked construction. Their relationships were typical, friends and family, lifetimes spent in the daily struggle, grateful for the good times and sorry for the bad times, wondering whether they’d be missed or remembered when it was all over. Brett Staley tied his father and cousin to Cesar Mendez, but that left Jimmy Martin as the odd man out, his connection to Mendez the missing piece of the puzzle.
I would make good on my side of the deal with Jennings and give him what I had about the stolen guns, which was more guesswork than fact, but I wasn’t going to do that until I was satisfied that Roni was in the clear. If Frank Crenshaw, the Staleys, and Jimmy Martin were into something with Cesar Mendez, the blowback could easily drown her.
She kept the books for Crenshaw and Nick Staley, and she dated Brett. Those connections would deafen the feds to her denials that she had no idea what they were doing. And she was already working without a net, offering no explanation for how her gun had been used to kill Crenshaw and refusing to talk to me. The only way I could protect her from Jennings and whatever else was happening was to figure out where she fit in.
I got off the bus on Broadway at Thirty-eighth, taking the stairs two at a time to Simon’s office. I hadn’t spoken to him since Lucy gave him the files on the Martin and Montgomery cases. I needed to work the puzzle with him. I breezed through the door, stopping short when I saw Jennings sitting in my chair, Lucy and Simon standing behind Simon’s desk, glaring, Kate along another wall, taking X-rays of Jennings.
He pointed his finger at me. “You got more balls than sense. I give you that. And don’t tell me to get out. I
