“Nah. First time. Lucky break bumping into you. Give us a chance to renew old acquaintances.”
“Can’t say it’s been an incredible pleasure, but I’m getting ready to shove off,” I told him. “Hey Dotty,” I yelled at the kitchen door. “I need my check.”
“Not a problem. I think we’re done here, too,” said Patrick. The other guys looked at their half-finished meals. “I heard this was a tough neighborhood. We should escort you to your car.”
“Thanks, but I’m all set. It’d be bad for my bodyguard business. Send the wrong signal.”
Patrick looked like he was considering that.
“Not when they see you got an armed escort,” he said, looking down at his lap. I followed his eyes and saw that he was holding an open five-inch buck knife flat against the top of his thigh. “Much more impressive, huh?”
“Sure. Would get my attention. Already has.”
“So, what say we just pay our bills and get on out of here. I could use the air. This place stinks of fish.”
Dorothy came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dishrag, followed by Vinko carrying a plastic pail, which he filled with dirty glasses stowed below the bar. She stood at the register and printed out my check. Patrick asked for his, too. She nodded without looking over and continued to punch in the bill.
“I want all of you to look at these carefully,” she said, slapping little slips of paper down in front of each of us. “I’m not sure I got it right.”
Patrick picked his up and looked at it like he’d never seen a check before. When he looked up again he saw Vinko with the business end of Hodges’s 12-gauge pump-action shotgun pointing at his chest.
“Hands on the bar everybody,” said Dorothy quietly. Vinko racked a shell up into the firing chamber as further inducement. We all complied.
“Not you, Sam.”
She stood on a step stool and looked over the bar.
“Say, Vinko, guess what Mr. Personality’s got in his lap.”
He stepped back a pace, then leaned over to take a look.
“Eez big knive,” he said.
“That’s what I thought. Sam, see if you can pick it out of there without getting your arm in his line of fire.”
First I put my left hand through Eddie’s collar. He hadn’t moved from the foot of my stool, but I felt better getting a grip on him. Then I reached in and picked up Patrick’s knife by the heavy wood and chrome handle. It had the heft and wear of an old weapon. Locking blade notched on the back, razor sharp. I pressed the release, folded it up and stuck it in my pocket.
“I’ll mail it to you.”
As Vinko watched me extract the knife, the barrel of the shotgun drifted toward the left. I reached up and gently moved it back in Patrick’s direction.
“Okay, fellas,” said Dorothy, “it’s time to move on. Your meal’s on the house. Our way of greeting new customers. Sorry about the knife. House rules. If I didn’t enforce ’em those fish heads over there would be flashing all kinds of hardware in here, wouldn’t you Pierre?”
We all turned around to look at Pierre, who was leaning back in his chair, enjoying the show.
“For sure, Dotty. Filleting all day you forget and slip ‘em right in your pocket. Isn’t that true?” he asked the half dozen fishermen sitting with him at the table, all of whom nodded enthusiastically.
“Better to listen to Dotty, is what I’m thinkin’,” said one of them. “We all seen Vinko handle that thing.”
“Shoot the pecker off a mallard at a hundred yards,” said Pierre.
Not surprisingly, Patrick saw the wisdom in making an orderly withdrawal. Which is how he did it. Calm and easy, with a grin. His boys looked less sure of themselves, but had the forethought to bring along their uneaten burgers. Before he backed out the door, Patrick gave Dorothy the same little bow I saw him give Jackie at the job site. Both had an air of uncompleted business. Vinko used the end of the shotgun to wave him along and he left.
A ragged round of applause came from the twenty or so men and women sitting around the bar and grill, most of whom I assumed were fishermen or mechanics from the marina. Dorothy gave a bow of her own and took the shotgun from Vinko and stowed it back behind the bar.
“Shit, Dotty, I ain’t never bringing this in here again, I swear,” said Pierre, holding up a greasy-looking filleting knife. His chorus of fellow fishermen repeated exaggerated denials and waved around their own knives. She told them all to shut up and handed out a free round of beers.
“Once I start giving things away, I can’t stop,” she said to me as she filled the mugs. “Though it’ll keep them in their seats until Will Ervin gets here. Vinko’s calling him now.”
“Ervin know about the shotgun?”
“Sure. It’s not the first time it’s been above the bar. I think you should let him follow you home.”
“What about you?”
“Pierre’s one of my roommates. Half of these other guys live on my street. Not a problem. Here, you get one more on the house, too. Shotgun special.”
“Black belt?”
“All my belts are black,” she said.
Will Ervin showed up soon after that, and I didn’t argue with him when he offered to follow me home. He’d bought the basic story we’d told him at the Pequot, which included everything but Patrick’s knife. That’d be too much for the cops to ignore. As much as I hated it, I needed Patrick out on the streets, free to act. I didn’t know enough yet. Even if he easily made bail, he’d just go to ground.
So I told Ervin I understood why Robbie’s boys would be sore at me, and that I was hoping we could just forget about the whole thing. Ervin shared Sullivan’s zeal to protect his North Sea flock, though with a guileless, forthright style of his own. It took some convincing for him to let it go, aided by a promise that I’d report everything to Sullivan in the morning.
He hung in the driveway while I checked the house then took a brisk walk with me to look around Amanda’s. It was still dark and empty.
I kept Eddie in the house that night, shutting him off from his secret door. He didn’t seem to care. Especially since I let him up on the bed, which I normally didn’t do. Mostly because he usually snored, or acted out his dreams with twitches and weird little barks, which would fill my own dreams with phantasms, or wake me up and leave me lying there for an hour or two at the mercy of whatever litany of dreads thrust themselves on my weakened state, suspended between uneasy wakefulness and nightmarish sleep.
ELEVEN
JACKIE SWAITKOWSKI NEVER MET a piece of 8?-by-11-inch paper she didn’t cherish or seek to preserve for all eternity. Sometimes filed in a manila folder or stuffed in a big envelope, or functioning as a structural unit within one of the towering stacks of documentation that rose like volcanic eruptions from every horizontal surface in every room of her house, and even more frighteningly in the glassed-in rear porch she called her office.
Over time, the paper piles began to merge with other classes of printed material—magazines, newspapers, continuing education course descriptions from Southampton College—creating a tangled mass within which lurked material objects of entirely different composition—CDs, Christmas wreaths, used plastic dinner plates, hookahs and bongs, triple-decker skirt hangers, framed watercolors. As these piles coalesced, mountain ranges rose, swallowing up coffee tables and sideboards, engorging spare closets and bedrooms, twisting through the house, the strata folding and contorting in a domestic diastrophism that eventually formed the component parts into an unrecognizable concretion.
All of which escaped Jackie’s notice until the day her computer keyboard dropped in her lap, having slid off the desk on the crest of a breaking wave of Victoria’s Secret catalogs.
Her solution was to take the computer and move to a rented office above an antique shop on Montauk Highway in Watermill. Looking around the place only a week into her occupancy, and making a rough estimate of available cubic footage, I gave it about a year before she’d be searching for more capacious accommodations. As of now, however, there was an upholstered love seat to sit on, facing a set of leather club chairs, and a coffee table in between to rest your feet.
