her lush figure on the bed and ran his hand down her arm.
“I guess I’m not much good tonight,” she said.
“It’s okay. This is good. We can just do this.”
“You sure?” Stephanie smiled weakly as she reached down and brushed her fingers down the shaft of his hardening cock. “Because you’re mouth is saying one thing and your body’s telling me something else.”
Karras grinned crookedly.
Stephanie turned and looked at the photograph of Steve Maroulis on the nightstand. “You know, it wasn’t like me to get that way in the meeting. I’ve been doing pretty well up to now, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“But there was something about Bill Jonas being there that made me want to talk about it. About how it was for Steve, at the end.”
“I know.”
Stephanie had told the group how her husband had been robbed many years before at an after-hours, high- stakes card game down off New York Avenue, near the Henley Park Hotel. The gunmen had made the gamblers put their heads down on the carpet. Steve had been the last to comply; he thought that if he were to put his head down, they’d kill him. His fear was so great that he’d fouled himself that night. He had told Stephanie that putting his head down was the hardest thing he’d ever done.
“I didn’t mean to cry,” said Stephanie. “It’s just, when I was telling it, I could imagine seeing him there in that kitchen, how afraid he must have been… I couldn’t help myself, Dimitri.”
“I know,” repeated Karras. Her hair had fallen across her cheek, and he brushed it away. “I’ve been thinking of you these last few days, Stephanie. What I mean to say is, you’ve been in my head. I know this is supposed to be a once-a-week thing, us being together. But I was looking forward to seeing you tonight. I was hoping this night would come sooner, understand? I’m not certain that I know what it means.”
“I’ve been thinking of you, too.”
Dimitri Karras awoke in the middle of the night, confused and oddly ashamed. He felt a strange sense of having committed a betrayal. It was as if he were considering breaking a promise he’d made never to be happy again.
He walked barefoot down a hall to the darkened kitchen and found Stephanie’s wall-mounted phone. He dialed the number of his old house and let it ring several times.
Lisa’s tired, fragile voice came through from the other side. “Hello.”
Karras did not answer.
“Hello? Is anybody there?”
He listened to Lisa breathing, and then there was a soft, final click.
Karras stood in the kitchen with the receiver pressed against his cheek. After a while he hung the phone in its cradle and returned to Stephanie’s bed.
EIGHTEEN
The morning after he had spoken with Roman Otis, Frank Farrow phoned his boss and told him that he was going home to Wilmington to bury his father, who had died in his sleep the previous night.
“You comin’ back, Larry? You were the best dishwasher we ever had.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve got to look after my mother now. You understand.”
Farrow packed his personal belongings into a small duffel bag and threw the bedsheets stained with Grace’s blood in the alley Dumpster. He paid off his landlord, telling her the same story he had told his boss.
Farrow drove the Taurus SHO southwest toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and rented a room in a motel on Kent Island. He registered under the name of Louie Pino and paid cash in advance for a five-day stay.
The first day he kept to his room and read a paperback novel. That night he ate dinner at the bar of the Angler’s Restaurant, a small locals’ spot in Grasonville that served delicious vegetable crab soup and soft-shell sandwiches. After dinner he drank beer slowly until closing time and went back to his motel room with a Dundalk woman named Rita whom he had picked up at the bar.
In the next four days he read two paperback novels written by Edward Anderson and A. I. Bezzerides, and at night he ate and drank at the Angler’s with Rita and took her back to his room, where he made Rita’s eyes roll back in her head with his workmanlike, rhythmic thrusts. Rita said nothing to anger him, and he did not hurt her.
On the fifth day he drove the SHO down the road, parked it behind a restaurant, removed its plates, and walked back to the motel with his duffel bag in his hand. He had noticed that every morning a blue-collar man left his Ranger truck on the edge of the motel parking lot, out of sight of the manager’s office, and was picked up by another blue-collar man. The two of them would then go off together to their jobs. Farrow removed the Ranger’s plates, replaced them with the SHO’s plates, broke into the pickup easily using a bar tool he owned, hot-wired the ignition, and drove northeast. A bumper sticker on the Ranger read, “There Is No Life West of the Chesapeake Bay.”
He thought of his brother as he made open road.
Richard had always been somewhat of a follower. Frank had easily turned him against their father, a Beverly Hills lawyer, at a very young age. But Richard could never go all the way like Frank. So as Frank began to seek perfection in his chosen career of crime, Richard continued to stumble through the subworld of amateur criminals inhabited by the true lowlifes: meth-heads and dope fiends, runaways and their pimps, street grifters, fences, and the like.
In the meantime, Frank did his reform school stretches and then two major jolts as an adult, where he fell in love with the books in the prison libraries and made the contacts within the walls that would enable him to graduate to an ever higher level of success outside. Some believed that incarceration was a mark of failure, but Frank disagreed. Prison was an essential element of any career criminal’s education.
When he had been released from his last sentence and done his parole, Frank was ready, and Richard, of course, was not. But he had brought Richard along on that final job because that was what a brother was obligated to do.
Frank cracked the window and lit a Kool.
The Farrow brothers’ birth mother had died very young – Frank remembered her vaguely and Richard not at all – and their father remarried quickly. To Frank’s mind, the father loved only money and its accoutrements. Frank hated him and his friends, and he would always despise everyone like them. By the time his father married for the third time, there was no familial connection that remained. Their father no longer considered Frank and Richard, who had been in serious trouble since their teens, to be his sons. Frank and Richard had not had any kind of contact with him for years. For all Frank knew or cared, their father was dead.
Now Richard was dead, too. Frank didn’t dwell on it. He had loved Richard, he supposed, but he had no illusions of the afterlife, and he was free of sentiment. He knew there was no spiritual world where the two of them would meet again. Richard was now what all men were in the end: food for worms. Sentiment aside, though, Frank would have to kill the man who had killed his brother; retaliation was a part of the personal code he had adopted long ago.
Frank was fascinated by the murder trials he had seen on TV. He’d watch the victims’ families, how they sat quietly in court, their soft hands resting in their laps, waiting for a justice that would never fully come. He was sure that they thought of themselves as good people. He only thought of them as weak.
Weakness. It separated him from the straights. This separation would keep him alive.
Frank parked the Ranger alongside the platinum Park Avenue in the lot of the New Rock Church. He checked the load on the. 38 that Toomey had given him and holstered the gun against the small of his back. He reached into his duffel bag, retrieved a pair of latex examination gloves, and fitted them onto his hands. He looked around the empty lot and down Old Church Road. The road was clear. He stepped out of the truck.
Frank knocked on the door of the church and put his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. The door opened, and the Reverend Bob stood in the frame.
“Larry?” he said, donning his salesman’s smile. “Why, I heard you had left town.”
“I’m back. Can I come in?”
