A siren shrieked in the distance. Got louder.
The ultimate danger.
He pulled to the curb and an ambulance passed and Dopplered to silence.
Silence had been Irit's world.
Had she been cued into some internal universe, able to feel the vibrations of her own heartbeat?
He'd been thinking about her all day and into the night, imagining and supposing and replaying the scene. But when he began the drive to his friend's house he forced himself to stop because he needed to concentrate on the present.
Still, so many distractions. This city… this neighborhood, all the changes.
He turned off onto a night-black side street, then another, and another, until he found himself in a completely different world: dim, silent, the big houses austere as bureaucrats.
His friend's house looked the same, except for the FOR SALE sign staked in front.
It was good he'd caught him in time.
Surprise!
He pulled into the driveway, behind the dark van.
Touching the gun, he looked around again, got out, alarmed the car, and walked up the flower-lined pathway to the paneled front door.
Ringing the bell, he uttered his name in response to the shouted “Who is it?”
The door opened and he got a face full of smile.
“Hey!”
He stepped in and the two of them embraced briefly. To his friend's left was an old mahogany mail table against the wall. On it, a large manila envelope.
“Yeah, that's it.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem. Got time to come in? Coffee?”
“Sure. Thanks for that, too.”
His friend laughed and they went into the kitchen of the big house.
The envelope in his hand, stiff and dry.
The guy had come through. Taking risks.
But when had anything worthwhile ever come easy?
He sat and watched as his friend poured coffee, saying, “Easy drive over?”
“No problem.”
“Good. Told you it got bad.”
“Things change.”
“Yeah, but they rarely improve. So… you're back in the game. From the looks of it we've got plenty to talk about.”
“That we do.”
The hand stilled. “Black, right?”
“Good memory.”
“Not as good as it used to be.” The hand paused again. “Maybe that's for the better.”
10
“It's affecting my work,” said Helena. “I see a suicide attempt wheeled into the E.R. and I want to scream,
“You read the report?”
“I called the coroner until someone spoke to me. I guess I was hoping they'd find something- cancer, some rare disease- anything to justify it. But he was in the pink, Dr. Delaware… he could have lived a long time.”
She began crying. Pulled a tissue from her purse before I could get to the box. “The damn thing is,” she said, catching her breath, “I've thought about him more in the last few weeks than all the years before combined.”
She'd come straight from the hospital, still wearing her uniform, the white dress tailored to her trim frame, her nametag still pinned.
“I feel guilty, dammit. Why should I feel guilty? I never failed him because he never needed me. We didn't depend on each other. We both knew how to take care of ourselves. Or at least I thought so.”
“Independent.”
“Always. Even when we were little kids we went our separate ways. Different interests. We didn't fight, we just ignored each other. Is that abnormal?”
I thought of all the genetically linked strangers who'd passed through my office. “Siblings are thrown together by chance. Anything from love to hate can follow.”
“Well, Nolan and I loved each other- at least I know I loved him. But it was more of a- I don't want to say family obligation. More of a… general bond. A feeling. And I loved his good qualities.”
She crumpled the tissue. The first thing she'd done upon arriving was hand me insurance forms. Then she'd talked about the coverage, the demands of her job- taking time to get around to Nolan.
“Good qualities,” I said.
“His energy. He had a real-” She laughed. “I was actually going to say “love for life.' His energy and his intelligence. When he was young- eight or nine- the school tested him because he was goofing off in class. Turned out he was highly gifted- something like the top half-percent and he'd been tuning out because he was bored. I'm not stupid, but I'm not even remotely in that league… maybe I'm the lucky one.”
“Being gifted was a burden for him?”
“It's crossed my mind. Because Nolan didn't have much patience and I think that had to do with his intelligence.”
“No patience for people?”
“People, things, any process that moved too slowly. Once again, this was back when he was a teenager. He may have mellowed when he was older. I remember him always railing about something. Mom telling him, “Honey, you can't expect the world to go at your pace,- could that be why he became a cop? To fix things fast?”
“If he did that could have been a problem, Helena. There are very few fast fixes in cop work. Just the opposite: Cops see problems that never get solved. Last time you said something about conservative political views. That could have led him to police work.”
“Maybe. Although, once again, that's the last phase I knew about. He could have been into something completely different.”
“He changed philosophies often?”
“All the time. There were times he outliberaled Mom and Dad, radical, really. Just about a Communist. Then he swung back the other way.”
“Was all this in high school?”
“I think it was after the satanic phase- probably his senior year. Or maybe his freshman year in college. I remember his reading Mao's Little Red Book, reciting from it at the table, telling Mom and Dad they thought they were progressive but they were really counterrevolutionary. Then for a while he got into Sartre, Camus, all that existential stuff, the meaninglessness of life. One month he tried to prove it by not bathing or changing his clothes.” She smiled. “That ended when he decided he still liked girls. The next phase was… I think it was Ayn Rand. He read
