Safe House

I called Crystal Beth on the cellular to tell her we were on our way. As soon as I tapped lightly on her back door, it popped open. If she wondered how I could get past the padlock on the outside gate, she kept it to herself.

“Everything went fine,” I said to her. “Let me get Herk established in the basement and I’ll come back here and tell you about it.”

“I’ll help,” she said, starting to go downstairs.

“Go on up,” I said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“I’ll wait here,” she said firmly. “If you don’t want me to go downstairs, I’ll wait right here. You can’t wander around upstairs by yourself. If Lorraine saw you, it would be—”

“Okay,” I agreed, cutting off the speech.

In the basement, I went over everything with Herk again. Then I palmed the cellular and left a message for Wolfe.

As Crystal Beth and I walked past the doors, I noticed one of them was open just a crack, a yellow band of light outlining the frame. Lorraine’s room?

“Tell me,” she said as soon as we got into her room.

“There isn’t a lot to tell. We’re going to try to do it. Depends on a bunch of things that have to happen in the next day or so. Pryce, he’s going to call here. You reach out for me and—”

“You’re not going to be here?”

“Not twenty-four/seven. There’s people I have to see.”

“I could come with you.”

“No. You couldn’t.”

“Because—?”

“Because I fucking said so,” I told her, my voice as tired as I felt.

“You don’t have to snap at me.”

“And you don’t have to pout like a spoiled brat,” I told her. “This is business. My business, not your business.”

“I thought you trusted me.”

“I do trust you, bitch. That’s my risk. I don’t make my people take my risks, understand?”

She didn’t say anything, just stood there facing me squarely, one hand pulling idly at her hair. Then she said, “Why do you use that word like that?”

“What?”

“ ‘Bitch.’ You say it like some other man would say ‘honey’ or something.”

“I don’t know. I just—”

“You do know,” she said. “People know why they do things, if they would just think about them.”

“Okay, I guess I never thought about—”

“Do it,” she said. Then gave me a sweet smile. “Please.”

I sat down in the easy chair and closed my eyes. Crystal Beth came around behind me, put her hands over my eyes. Little hands. Soft. Smelled like purple lilacs and dark tobacco. Her nose nuzzled gently against the back of my head. I let myself go into it.

“When I was a kid, I had a dog,” I said, thinking and talking to her at the same time. “A fox terrier. A walking death warrant for rats. She was my great pal. I loved her. When I went to one of those foster homes, they took her away from me. I never saw her again.”

“Why wouldn’t they let you take your dog?” she asked, more anger than sadness in her voice.

“I’m sure they had their reasons. Reasons that looked good on paper. But I knew what it really was. They wanted to hurt me. They all did.”

“But . . .”

“I was right,” I told her, cutting that off before the feelings came back too strong. “I always swore I would have a dog someday. My own dog. In the juvie joint, the fucking ‘reform school,’ other guys dreamed of cars. Mostly cars. Where I came from, nobody thought about having a house, so it was cars we dreamed about. Fantasies, I guess they were.”

“You didn’t fantasize about girls?” she asked, her voice more flirtatious than teasing.

“I meant fantasies you could talk about,” I told her. “Out loud. Girls, the play was you already had them, see?” And mothers too, I thought to myself, remembering how kids in the joint would fight to the death if you called their mother a name . . . even if that mother was a drunken whore who never showed up on visiting day.

“And you could talk about them? About girls?”

“Lie about them mostly,” I told her, keeping my voice light. Thinking of the boys in there who were already talking about girls they hadn’t met . . . and what they were going to do to them when they did. “But me, my fantasy, my dream was to have a dog.”

“Did you ever get one?”

“I got the best dog in the world,” I said. “Her name is Pansy. She’s a Neapolitan mastiff. One of the original war dogs. They came over the Alps with Hannibal. Marco Polo took one to China.”

“Are they smart?”

“Smart? I don’t know. In some ways, I guess. But that’s not her big thing. Pansy would die for me. She’s not some pet,” I said scornfully, “like a tropical fish. Or one of those damn cats.”

“What do you have against cats?” she asked. “Lorraine has one, and it’s—”

“Cats are the lap-dancers of the animal world,” I told her. “Soon as you stop shelling out, they move on, find another lap. They’re furry little sociopaths. Pretty and slick—in love with themselves. When’s the last time you saw a seeing-eye cat?”

Crystal Beth took her hands away from my eyes and walked around the chair. She knelt in front of me, hunched forward, almond eyes widening, not listening so much as opening herself, as if to make her body understand me too.

“But when I come back to . . . where I live,” I went on, “Pansy’s always glad to see me. It doesn’t matter what I look like. It doesn’t matter whether I’m a success or a failure. Or even whether I have food for her. She’s so . . . loyal. Loyal and true.”

“And she’s a bitch?”

“And she’s a bitch. Maybe that’s it. I’m not sure. We get the words all wrong. A man steps out on a woman, he gets called a dog. But if the woman’s ugly, she gets called a dog.”

“I know. And if the girl’s pretty, she gets called something like ‘kitten,’ yes?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“It shifted again. Your aura.”

I didn’t need her to tell me that. I could feel the blue in the room. A mist rising from my . . . I don’t know what. “Kitten.” When I was a young man, I called a lot of girls that. They always liked it. I did it so I wouldn’t blow my cover, call one of them by the wrong name. I had a lot of girls then.

“Had.” Looking back, I know I never understood what that meant. But I remember the last one. Ruth. The more she loved me, the more I knew I had to go away. Before Ruth, it was all game. I knew what they wanted. They knew what I wanted. Fire-dancing, seeing which one of us would tumble in first . . . and get burned. It was never me. You can’t lose what you don’t ante up.

The only thing I knew for sure about myself back then was that I was no good. Ruth wasn’t like any of the other girls I’d been with. She didn’t want me stealing to buy her jewels, didn’t shake her ass in the street and then come running to me because some clown noticed it, demanding I defend her “honor” . . . be a man. I thought I knew what that meant too, back then—cause pain, and never show any.