head snapped back. He staggered as he tried to regain his balance, arms flapping. Blood gushed from his forehead, blinding him. I held the bat with my left hand and plucked the automatic out of his waistband with my right. I tossed the gun into the bushes, then stuck a right jab into the red pulp that used to be his mouth. He fell back further, swatting open handed at the air.
“Motherfucker!”
I dropped the bat and hit him again with my right. I didn’t measure out the punches the way the trainers always told me to do. I didn’t care if I kept my balance, stayed up on my toes or exposed my right kidney. I didn’t have to care. The bear was through. I hit him with a combination. His knees began to bend and he had to spread his feet to stay upright. He was mumbling something, but I couldn’t hear him through the roar in my ears. I brought my foot up between his legs and felt the splash of soft tissue. He doubled up and fell headfirst into the grass. I kicked him in his bloody face and went back to get the bat.
I scooped it up off the ground and walked over with it held slightly off my right shoulder. I stood over him, picking a spot. He wasn’t moving. The last kick had rolled him over on his back. The mass of crushed tomatoes that now composed his face stared up at the moonlit sky. He was still breathing, rasping wetly through the blood in his mouth. I let the bat down slowly. I nudged him with my toe. Still didn’t move.
I pulled the automatic out of the bushes, found the release and dumped out the clip. I put the gun in the big inside pocket of my jean jacket and the clip in my pants pocket.
Then I went inside to call Joe Sullivan.
NINE
THE WEEKS AFTER leaving Abby and my job have always been a bit of a blur. Mainly because I was drinking a lot and disregarding common conventions like mealtime and Monday Night Football. I stayed in my room at the hotel, or drove my car, the company car I was supposed to return, around western Connecticut and up into the Berkshires and southern Vermont. Not because I wanted to visit those places, they were just where the roads I knew tended to go. I daydreamed a lot while I drove, and tried to remember moments in my past that weren’t freighted with impossibly painful associations.
I kept clear of thinking about the immediate past. I pretended I didn’t have one, as if I’d awakened from a five-year coma, slightly brain damaged. Not a hard act to sustain, given my condition at the time.
My hotel was off the Merritt Parkway not far from the house in Stamford. It was the kind frequented by middle and upper level executives passing through the economic distortion field of Fairfield County. Big comfortable double beds, disinterested employees and a vapid overpriced bar and restaurant filled with forced theme entertainment and lonely distracted guys trying to look comfortable in conformist casual clothes. A dozen or so TVs disturbed the utter silence and saved the tired blond woman working the bar from having to indulge people from other parts of the country in desultory conversation.
I’d left all my belongings at the house in Stamford so I had to go into town to provision. I’d never been to a store in the middle of a working day to buy a can of shaving cream. I felt impossibly alien walking down the crammed retail aisles surrounded by stay-at-home mothers and retired guys in Jeff caps and polyester stretch pants. The woman behind the checkout counter wore a red smock uniform and a distant, disorganized expression. I bought enough shaving cream to keep me out of places like that for at least as long as I thought I’d survive.
I bought a few pairs of jeans and some T-shirts, but held on to the suit, thinking I might need it some day. Abby had paid a lot of money for it at Brooks Brothers. It was a Christmas gift one year. I remember it fit perfectly and that she was disappointed when I didn’t fuss over the label. I wondered why just liking the suit for its fine intrinsic qualities wasn’t enough.
I used to watch television when there was a game on, but now avoided it completely. I lay on the bed in the quiet of the room and drank Jack Daniels until I fell asleep. I paid my bill a month in advance, so everyone left me alone.
Two weeks into that month a private investigator showed up with a letter from Barry Mildrew in Mason Thigpen’s office. It was my copy of the signed agreement. Also a letter outlining my severance package, if I agreed. I signed that, too, and sent it back with the PI after getting him to buy me a round of drinks. He was an ex-fighter and a night school student at Central Connecticut, so by definition my kind of thug. The salesmen at the hotel bar kept their distance. Survival instincts.
Abby’s lawyers sent their own guys a few days later. I entertained them in the same venue. These were more like paralegals than knuckle busters so we had less to talk about. But at least they knew to buy the drinks.
Their paperwork was a little more troubling, which resulted in my field trip to the Meadowlands with the interior of Abby’s house, but that came later, after I’d sobered up enough to actually make out the text.
My daughter was the last visitor to my hotel. She found me in the bar, at one of the heavy oak cocktail tables surrounded by an overabundance of padded rolling chairs. It was about four in the afternoon, so I was already ramping up nicely to the first real drunk of the day.
She wore faded blue jeans decorated with runic symbols drawn with indelible ink, a wool sweater and silver wire-rim glasses. Her dirty blond hair was pulled back with a cotton scarf rolled into a headband. She carried her jacket hugged tightly with both hands against her midsection, as if trying to contain her entrails. Her face was pale, her eyes braced.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
She sat in one of the chairs and rolled back from the table to give herself ample running room. I had to greet her again before she’d say anything.
“I can’t believe this.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Your choice.”
“I really can’t believe this.”
“You look great.”
“How can you say that?”
“It’s great to look at you.”
“You should see yourself. That wouldn’t be so great.”
“No argument there.”
“Mommy’s beside herself.”
“And behind herself. All the way.”
“Everything’s always a joke.”
“And not very funny, either. How’s school?”
“I can’t think about school right now.”
“Now’s the best time. Throw yourself into your work.”
“That’s your deal. Throw yourself in and never come out.”
“I’m out now.”
“Too late.”
“You forgot the ‘too little.’”
“The what?”
“Too little, too late. Those things usually go together.”
“With you too little’s assumed.”
“That’s my girl. Sharp as a dart.”
“When are you going to stop this?”
“Stop what?”
“What you’re doing. It’s crazy.”
“You got your tenses goofed up. I’m not doing anything. I’ve done something.”
“You and your word games. Mommy’s just as bad.”
“The heart of the relationship.”
“No relationship I can see. And certainly no heart.”
“Then why all the fuss?”
