By this time, he had already made up his mind.
A better opportunity might never come.
It had to be tonight.
Before he left, he picked up the long scissors with the rubberized orange handles. He'd set them next to the phone the other day, knowing she'd be bound to pick them up. He dropped the scissors carefully inside a Ziploc bag.
Then he let himself out, reconstructing the security system that no doubt gave Jill Coffey such a great sense of well-being.
CHAPTER 10
Church wasn't something Mitch Ayers had planned on. He wasn't the churchgoing type. From his Catholic boyhood he had a sentimental belief in a personal and caring God, but when he looked around at the predators he saw every dayMitch being a homicide detectivehe wasn't sure that Anybody was up there at all. At least, Nobody who cared much about all the sad, maimed, despairing creatures who crawled around in the mud below. But he needed a place to think and he'd been driving by and so, on impulse
Took him three tries to remember the Hail Mary and he finally had to resort to a prayerbook to remember the second part that began, 'Holy Mary, Mother of God.' That part. The Our Father he had no trouble with at all, nor the Glory Be.
After he was finished praying, he sat back in the pew that was very near the front of the church. He liked the way the blue and red and green and yellow votive candles flickered in the dusky shadows. He liked the faint smell of incense on the quiet air. He liked the dignified beauty of the altar, sad Jesus on His cross looking out on His flock. He saw himself at three different times of his life in this very same churchas a twelve year old in white-and-black surplice and cassock serving High Mass with Monsignor O'Day, who always massacred the Latin language; as a twenty-four-year-old police rookie standing next to Sara Byrnes, the most beautiful girl in their graduating class at St Malachy's; and as a twenty-six-year-old father watching Monsignor O'Day sprinkle Holy Water on the forehead of tiny pink Frances, their first daughter. Following that there was the funeral of his father, and then the death of his beloved Aunt Lavina, and then the funeral of a one-time good friend and classmate Phil O'Herlihy, and
And then Mitch and Sara Ayers moved away from the old neighborhood, out to a suburb where everything was sleek and sophisticated, and where over a period of a few years they seemed to change, somehow. At least Sara had. She took a job in administration at a hospital; she started flying to conferences and meetings all over the country, leaving the two girls more and more to Mitch; and three years ago, this same kind of lingering smoky autumn, she took a lover. He was a doctor and a handsome bastard and a rich bastard to boot and he seemed to represent something to Sarasome kind of approval that Mitch could never give her. To Sara, the doctor had been everything; to the doctor, Sara had been just one more affair. One night Jessica ran downstairs and told Mitch that Mommy was making funny noises up in her bedroom. Thank God for seven-year-old Jessica. Sara had intentionally overdosed on Xanax. Mitch called an ambulance. They got her to the hospital in time to pump her stomach. A week on the psych ward. A marriage counselor for them. Then a six-month trial separation. Sara's idea.
It had been during this time that Mitch met Jill Coffey. He'd liked her right away. There was a curious mixture of amusement and sorrow in those pretty dark eyes that fascinated him right away. And she was something of a smart-ass, so she made him laugh a lot of the time. He hadn't been honest with her. Told her that his impending divorce was a sure thing. Told her that he didn't much care about his wife anymore. They went out for several weeks and it was like being in high school again, the intensity of the romance and all the laughter. Jill surprised him one night by telling him that she was in love with him. And he'd been touched. For all her good looks and poise he saw that she was a very vulnerable person for whom loving and trusting someone was a very difficult prospect. But then Sara gradually decided that maybe it was time she gave her marriage another serious shot and if Mitch was willing…
Mitch never did get around to telling Jill that he loved her back.
What he did get around to telling her was that he thought maybe he should give it another try with Sara. He tried to make it sound noble. For the kids' sake, he said. 'You knowI've got to think of them first.'
Noble.
Right.
So he moved back to suburbia and they did ten months together, ten fragile months, and then one night a month ago, Sara said, after the girls were in bed, 'I met somebody.'
'You what?' He could still hear the keening wounded sound in his voice, and was both embarrassed and ashamed.
'I met somebody. Not on purpose. I mean, I wasn't looking to. It just happened.'
And he did something he had rarely done.
He went down into the basement family room and closed the door and wept. Actually wept. So hard in fact that he thought he was going to throw up. And when he was finished, he lay back against the couch and looked at all the merry crayon drawings the girls had affixed to the wall with scotch tape, and then he started weeping again.
Round two.
At one point, Sara knocked gently on the door and said, 'Are you all right?'
'Yes,' was all he said. Quietly. No dramatics. 'Yes.'
There was a round three. Around midnight. This one snuck up on him totally. He'd just gone upstairs and fixed himself a bologna and swiss sandwich and opened a can of Hamms and made himself comfortable on the family room couch for the second part of Letterman and thenbam!
And round three was worse than either of the other two because he was crying so hard he couldn't muster the strength or savvy to set down either his sandwich or beer. He held them all during this final attack of the weepies, literally crying in his beer.
Near dawn he went upstairs and got an hour and a half of turbulent sleep and when he woke up, he felt as if a dire fever had been broken. He looked over at the slender and very beautiful woman next to him and realized that just as she no longer loved him, he no longer loved her.
He was in love with that goddammed crazy photographer Coffey and she'd practically handed herself over to him and look at what he'd done to her.
He sat in the church of his boyhood, the church from which he took a sneaky agnostic comfort, and thought of Coffey, Jill Coffey. She really was sort of crazy in a lot of ways, and he realized that he could no longer put off what he'd been wanting to do ever since Sara had told him about her new Significant Other.
He was going to look up Jill Coffey and beg her to take him back.
Boy, was she going to be pissed when she saw him.
He apologized for using the word pissed and then got up and left the church.
Jill Coffey, here I come.
Ready or not.
CHAPTER 11
There was nothing like sex in the office.
Everybody on the other side of his door working their butts off, phones ringing, faxes humming, elevator doors opening and closing, conferences conferencing…
And where was the boss?
Well, the boss was in his big lavish CEO-type office, looking right out on the Chicago Cultural Center, getting a BJ.
Today her name was Cini. Not Cindy, which is what he'd thought she'd said last night when he'd taken her to the Brass Pump. Cini.
