BELLE DIED in the spring. I went cold through the summer. Waiting.
Her father was in a prison in Florida, finishing up a manslaughter bit. I did some checking- learned they'd cut him loose in late October.
Michelle wrote the letter, copying Belle's handwriting from a poem the big girl once tried to write.
If her father had any family left to spend Thanksgiving with, there'd be an empty chair at the table.
But the cold was still in me.
5
I SLIPPED MY PLYMOUTH through Chinatown, heading for Mama's. The car didn't feel the same since Belle left. I couldn't make it sing the way she could. Her Camaro was cut up into a thousand pieces in the Mole's junkyard. Her body was in the ground. She left her clothes at my office, her life savings stashed in the hiding place in my garage. I burned the clothes. Kept the money. Like she would have wanted.
It was the fourth day I'd made the run past Mama's, checking the dragon tapestries in the window. One red, one white, one blue. Mama's a patriot. But not a citizen. None of us are.
The blue tapestry had been up for days. Cops. The newspapers said the porno theater had been blown up by some extremist group. The searchers found enough evidence to drop Salvatore Lucastro- drop him hard. His snuff- film business was as dead as the little girls he made into movie stars. Sally Lou was looking at a bunch of life sentences, running wild. Some flowers can only grow in the dark. The local badges had a bad attitude. They weren't surprised that the
That was months ago. By now, the cops knew they'd never find the bodies. But they knew where to find me.
It played the same way it had for the last few dead months. The cops would come around, ask their questions, make their threats, go away.
When they got tired of sending around the hard boys, they sent McGowan.
'I thought we had a deal,' he said, his cop's eyes sad and hard at the same time. A good trick. Pimps can do it too. He and his partner, Morales, they had let me run a massage parlor in Times Square with police cover. The perfect bait for a maggot who took his pleasure in women's pain. Blood-orgasms. I was supposed to leave them something when I cleared out, but I took it with me. And left it in a junkyard.
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Yeah you do. You think you walk away from this, you're wrong. I don't give a good goddamn about another collar. You know that. But you're on the list now. I don't know how you made the shooter disappear, but they found pieces of that karate freak all over the lot.'
The karate freak who'd crippled the Prophet to send me a message.
'What karate freak?' I asked him.
'You want to play it that way?'
'I'm not playing.'
'Not anymore you're not,' he said, getting up to leave.
THE WHEEL spun too many times. They'd always be them- I'd always be me. Some cops went bad. I couldn't go good.
I stayed low to the ground for months, waiting for the Greyhound to deliver Belle's father. Didn't get a parking ticket, didn't bet on a horse. Lived like Gary Hart should have.
There was nothing else to wait for.
7
IT PLAYED the same way with Max too. He'd sit across from me, make the gesture for 'Why?' I'd shrug my shoulders. Who knows? He never pushed it past that.
Mama knew why. Maybe she'd told Immaculata, I didn't know. But she'd never tell Max.
Only the white tapestry was in the window. I pulled into the alley behind the restaurant, just past the Chinese characters neatly marked on the wall. I didn't bother to lock the car.
I went through the back door, barely glancing at the collection of thugs pretending to be the kitchen staff. Took my table at the back.
Mama was saying goodbye to a customer at the front by the cash register. She didn't put her heart and soul into it- the customer had only bought food.
She came back to where I was sitting, waving her hand at the waiter. He knew what to do.
I got up as she approached. Thick glossy hair tied in a rigid bun at the back of her head, plum-colored sheath covering her from neck to ankles, same color nail polish and lipstick. Dignified, not sexy. Mama never got older.
I bowed to her by way of greeting. 'Cops all gone?'
'They come back soon.'
'I know.'
'Something else happen. Soon enough. Police get tired easy.'
'Yeah.'
The waiter brought a steaming tureen of hot-and-sour soup. Mama filled my bowl first, then hers.
We ate the soup in silence. She filled my bowl again. I finished it. Shook my head no at her unasked question. The waiter took the bowls away.
I lit a smoke. 'It's done,' I told her.
'All finish now?'
'Yeah.'
She bowed slightly. 'Soon, be yourself again?'
I tried a smile, watching her face. She knew a three-dollar bill when she saw one.
'Max on his way.'
I didn't say anything.
'Time to stop all this, Burke. Max your brother.'
'You think I don't know that? It's not my fault. I did the right thing.'
It didn't even feel right saying it.
I felt Max behind me. I didn't turn around. Lit a cigarette as Mama bowed to him. She went back to the front desk. He flowed into the booth across from me, watching my face the same way he had ever since he came back from Boston. Where Mama had sent him on a phony mission to clean up some problem she was supposed to be having with a street gang shaking down one of her joints.
Max the Silent doesn't speak. He can't. He was a freelance warrior until he met Mama. I met him in the jailhouse- he brought me to Mama when we got out. I took a fall that was part his years ago, when the wheels came off a sting we'd put together. I was there when he met his woman, Immaculata. His baby daughter, Flower, was named for another baby- a baby who never lived to grow up. A baby a chubby little blonde fought a death-duel to avenge. Flood was her name. She loved me and she went back to Japan.
