Only Child

her.

Mac told Flower I’d come a long way, and needed to sleep. Flower smiled sweetly and ignored her, demanding to know everything I’d done since I’d been gone, and who I’d done it with.

I fobbed her off with generalities, catching the caution lights in her mother’s eyes.

“The last time I saw you was when you were so...” The girl’s voice trailed away.

“I’m all right now, Flower. Just like I was before.”

“You don’t...look the same. Not at all.”

“Hey! I paid good money for all that plastic surgery. What? You don’t think I nailed the Robert Redford look?”

“Oh, Burke.” She giggled.

“I didn’t lose anything important,” I said gently. “You understand?”

“I remember what happened,” Flower said, as if reciting a lesson. “You were shot. You almost...died. They had to fix you. And so your face isn’t the same, that’s all. You look so much better than when you were here...before.”

“Yeah. The doctors said I’d get better-looking every day. Money-back guaranteed.”

“Mom! Make Burke be serious,” she appealed to Immaculata.

“This is Burke, child. Your uncle that you missed so dearly. You know he is never serious.”

The girl gave her mother a look much older than her years.

By the time I’d finished answering all Flower’s questions, light was breaking through the high industrial windows. “I know!” she called to her mother, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek before she ran off to get ready for school.

Max gestured as if playing the bongos, looking from side to side. Telling me the word was going out.

I lay back on the futon. Closed my eyes, waiting for the drift-down. Wondering when I’d feel strong enough to face my hometown in daylight.

“What I tell you, girl?” the small, handsome black man crowed. “Sweet-potato pie; the roots never lie. Didn’t I say it? Rhymed the poem—Schoolboy’s coming home.”

“Yes, Prof,” Michelle said. A wicked grin played below her loving eyes. “That’s what you said, all right. Every single day since he’s been gone.”

“My father—” Clarence stepped in to defend the Prof.

“Oh, honey, please,” Michelle cut him off at the knees. “Everybody knows the Prof can foretell the future and all that, okay? He was just a little out in front on this one.”

We were in Mama’s, at the round table in the corner. The one that permanently sported a fly-specked “Reserved for Party” sign. I never knew why Mama bothered—no tourist ever tried the food twice, and no local would risk it once.

“Give it up, pup,” the Prof said, his hand flashing to my shirt pocket, just like old times. “Huh!” he grunted, coming up empty. “Where’s your smokes, dope?”

“I don’t puff for real, anymore,” I told him. “Just use them as props.”

“Your ticker? From when they...”

His voice trailed away. Clarence bowed his head, as if the man he called his father had blasphemed in front of a priest.

“It’s okay,” I told them all. “My heart’s fine and”—looking around, to make sure they all got it—“I don’t do flashbacks. It’s just that, ever since it happened, cigarettes don’t taste the same.”

“Not even after...?”

“No, Michelle.” I laughed.

“It’s your call, Paul,” the Prof said, reluctantly extracting one of his own hoarded smokes and firing it up.

It took a long time to satisfy them all. Michelle was the worst. Little sisters always are. I must have told them a dozen times that I was okay. Just wanted to come home.

“What I don’t know is how things...are,” I said.

“At first, the drums really hummed,” the Prof said. “But, last few months, anyway, the wire’s been quiet.”

“And the people who started it...?” Michelle anted up.

“Gone,” I said, watching her arched eyebrows so I could avoid her eyes. “All gone.” The Prof and Clarence had been around at the beginning, Michelle for the middle, but none of them at the end. “If there’s any trouble here, it’s only from the cops. They may still be looking for me.”

“You had a right to walk out of the hospital, mahn,” Clarence said indignantly. “It is not as if this was a jailbreak.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking it through. “But I’m not supposed to be missing, right? I’m supposed to be dead.”

“Yes,” Mama put in. “Bone hand.”

“That was slick,” the Prof acknowledged. “I would have never thought that dinosaur roller had it in him.”

He meant Morales, the pit-bull cop who had hated me since forever. But he’d owed me, too. And he was the kind of man who couldn’t sleep with his books unbalanced. After I’d split, he’d come around to the restaurant, told Mama he needed a surface where I would have left a print. Next thing anyone hears, somebody finds a human hand in a Dumpster. Not the flesh, just the bones. And, right next to it, a pistol. With my thumbprint on the grip.

NYPD put the pieces together. Decided it was payback for a Russian gangster who had been blown away in his own restaurant. The Russian had arranged a transfer—cash for a kidnapped kid—and for me to be the middleman. That’s when I’d been shot. And when Pansy, my blood-loyal Neapolitan mastiff, had been killed trying to protect me.

Like everyone else who lives down here, my rep depends on who you talk to. And how you ask. But the whisper-stream always carries this piece of truth: Burke’s religion is revenge. If you took someone of mine, I was going to take you. Send you over, or go there myself, trying.

So the cops had made me for Dmitri’s killer. And they read the Dumpster’s contents for how that had all played out in the end.

They were half right.

I’m listed as deceased in all the Law’s computers now. Not a fugitive. Not a parole violator. No warrants, no APBs. Maybe the first time in my life the State that had raised me didn’t want me for anything.

But my prints hadn’t changed, and we all knew how that worked. I might look golden today, but it would all turn a sickly green in a heartbeat if I got myself into custody.

Nobody would ever be able to ask Morales. When the remote-controlled planes took down the World Trade Center, he was one of the first cops to charge the flaming ruins. If I know Morales, he wasn’t looking to do any rescue work. He never made it out.

“So who am I going to be?” I asked my family.

Into the silence, Mama replied, “Still be you.”

“I don’t get it,” I told her.

“If family alive, never die, okay?”

“Sure, in spirit, Mama. But I’m talking about—”

“Spirit? Not spirit. Not die,” she spat fiercely, her ancient eyes challenging anyone to disagree.

“You saying Schoolboy be Burke, with a new face, Mama?” the Prof asked her.

“No, no,” she snapped. “People owe money, okay? Why pay? Burke gone. Who come to collect? Nobody. Right?” she asked, looking around the table for confirmation. “Nobody collect?”

“Not me or Clarence,” the Prof said.

Max shook his head, agreeing.