Two Time

“And no prints, hairs, anything traceable?”

“Oh, you think we shoulda checked for prints? Geez, didn’t think of that.”

I saw something that made me go over and take a closer look at his right hand. He pulled it away and looked at me like I’d tried to give him a kiss.

“Give me the hand,” I said. “Palm down.”

He did it despite himself.

“Interesting. Did Markham say anything about this?”

“What?”

“The abrasion. Been over a week and it’s still healing. Must have been a good shot. Can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

Sullivan took a look himself, rotating his hand under the pale bedside lamp.

“It’s been sore. Though not a big deal given the hole in my gut.”

“You see? You got one in. Probably a couple. They had to club you or you would’ve beat the crap out of them. You were unarmed. Nothing you could’ve done.”

Sullivan looked at his left hand.

“Not much on this one. Little sore, though.”

“You’re too much of a righty I’ve seen the way you use your left. More defensive. Your right’s the big one.”

As we talked the climate in the room took a decided turn for the better. Clouds of humiliation cleared enough to let a little sun peek through. A little sea breeze blew away some of the fear and the unfamiliar shame of vulnerability.

“I bet I remembered to keep my shoulder up,” he said.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

There wasn’t much else he could tell me. It might be that Ross was holding out on him. Though probably not. Ross had a high regard for Sullivan, trusting his basic good sense and honest cop way in the world. So I chatted some more with him about everything but getting stabbed, until the evening shift nurse showed up, which was good timing because now I was having trouble getting him to shut up so I could leave.

I was half out the door and he was about to chug a little white cup full of pain pills when another thought intercepted me.

“Joe, tell me something.”

“What.”

“Why didn’t you have your gun?”

“I never carry it when I’m off duty. Don’t believe in it.”

“But if you were going to do a little off-hours, semi-official thing, like get in your civvies to pay a call on Ivor Fleming, you’d bring your gun.”

“In which case, I’d be wearing my sport jacket that’s cut for the holster, because yeah, sometimes there’s call to wear civvies on duty. I thought about that. Don’t know what it means.”

“Me neither. Just interesting.”

I left him to think for a few minutes before those happy pills knocked out his ability to think and then knocked him out for the night. But he’d keep chewing on it. Maybe it’d help him turn something up. There wasn’t much else I could do. I really didn’t know what I was thinking about any of it, except to think I wasn’t really thinking properly at all. Ever since Jackie told me Jonathan Eldridge had ginned up his credentials I’d slipped my moorings and been carried off by the tide. With a central assumption destroyed, every other assumption looked devious and contorted.

Just thinking about that gave me a slight case of vertigo as I walked out of the hospital into the early evening light, the sun low on the horizon, casting the surrounding neighborhood into a shadowless glow and capping off the treetops with what looked like gold paint against the deepening blue sky. Seemed like the right time for a drink, and luckily, I’d arranged to rendezvous with Amanda at the big bar on Main Street, so my powers of judgment hadn’t completely abandoned me.

TWENTY-ONE

MONTAUK HIGHWAY, the east-west artery of the South Fork, established an economic Maginot Line as it ran through Southampton. To the south you had to add a decimal point or two to the price of a house, but it also marked a horticultural divide between a hundred years of decorative landscaping and open farm country, now interrupted by strips of new construction featuring halfhearted nods to late-twentieth-century architectural detail appliqued over standard suburban boxes, and an occasional old farmhouse accompanied by a cluster of outbuildings of the same vintage, tucked inside a grove of sugar maples or white oaks once planted by an actual farmer. When I was growing up one of these places had evolved into an auto repair and body shop specializing in foreign sports cars when the farmer’s kids, Rudy and Johnny Fournier, returned from World War II thoroughly seduced by the exotica of Alfa Romeos, bathtub Porsches and T-series MGs. It was called Contemporary Car Care. I liked to hang around there and watch the mechanics, some of whom were French and Italian imports themselves, deconstruct peculiar little engines and transmissions and restore lithe lowrider auto bodies to their original insouciance. Eventually they started to ask me to hold a wrench or change a tire, which led to simple repair tasks, which evolved into summer and weekend jobs managing progressively more sophisticated undertakings. It was good training for an engineering career, in some ways better than what they taught me at MIT, where the puzzles were more logical and failure had less immediate consequence.

The mechanical design of those postwar European cars was idiosyncratic at best. Parts were hard to come by, or completely unavailable. What manuals we had were usually in the car’s native language, like British English, which stubbornly renamed every automotive component and included tips on driving like “when coming upon an unexpected incline, briskly engage the braking mechanism.” It made working on their American counterparts, with their cavernous engine compartments and adjustment tolerances as wide as the Great Plains, seem entirely sensible and effortless.

So when Amanda gave me the directions to Butch’s place, I knew exactly where it was. The big painted sign with three nesting Cs had disappeared years ago. When you live in the place where you grew up you get used to the continual destruction of familiar reference points. After the sign was gone and the jumble of sports cars in various states of disassembly and repair had vanished from around the only outbuilding visible from the road, I’d never bothered to see what had taken its place. It turned out to be Butch’s Institute of the Consolidated Industrial Divine.

We pulled in the driveway and rounded the first big curve into the main area. The tall trees on the property had grown considerably, crowding the house in a leafy embrace. The house itself was almost unrecognizable. The screened-in front porch was furnished in mismatched overstuffed chairs and couches, bicycles, a refrigerator, an old streamlined gas pump that used to sit over by the repair bays, a pair of armless mannequins standing front to back, and a jumble of coffee cups, oriental vases, carved wooden statues of Dali’s camel-legged elephants, hookahs, a TV set and a big scale model of a three-masted schooner. On the wall hung a large abstract painting in predominantly reds and oranges, which contrasted alarmingly with the flaky putty-gray color of the cedar siding—the result of some distant ill-advised paint job. I vaguely remembered a neat lawn, which was now full of rocks, weedy broad- leafed plants and feral perennials. Though long gone to neglect, you could discern an underlying order, suggesting the tangled remains of a Japanese garden.

I turned off the engine and was about to get out when the door of the house and the garage doors of the closest outbuilding were flung open and people in bright red jumpsuits, black ski masks and goggles poured out. They quickly surrounded the car and opened both doors, motioning with a flourish for us to step out. Amanda was saying things like, “well, hello,” but I was too busy keeping an eye on everybody. They all carried some sort of tool, and two of the bigger ones were rolling a big hydraulic jack out of the garage. No one spoke, but their gestures were exaggerated, theatrical, like mimes. One motioned for us to step back from the car while the others circled it, using a lot of extra steps and movements, nodding at each other and shrugging and waving their tools in the air. The pair with the jack rolled it under the car and one dropped to the ground to set the lifting pad under a sturdy