missing.”
Helene. If it smelled of stupid, Helene just had to be somewhere nearby.
“Where’s my bag?” I said.
“Other drawer,” Tadeo said.
Augustan said to Bubba, “I can call your doc now?”
“Augustan always?” Bubba asked. “Never Gus?”
“Never Gus,” the big guy said.
Bubba gave that some thought, then nodded. “Go ahead. Call the number.”
Augustan flipped open a cell and dialed. I found my bag in the desk drawer, found Gabby’s picture and my case files, too. As Augustan told the doctor his buddy was losing a lot of blood, I put the laptop in my bag and walked to the door. Bubba pocketed his weapon and followed me out of the garage.
Chapter Eight
In my dream, Amanda McCready was ten, maybe eleven. She sat on the porch of a yellow bungalow with stone steps, a white bulldog snoring at her feet. Tall ancient trees sprouted from a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. We were somewhere down South, Charleston maybe. Spanish moss hung from the trees, and the house had a tin roof.
Jack and Tricia Doyle sat behind Amanda in wicker armchairs, a chess table between them. They hadn’t aged at all.
I came up the walk in my postal outfit, and the dog raised its head and stared at me with sad black eyes. Its left ear bore a spot the same black as its nose. It licked its nose and then rolled on its back.
Jack and Tricia Doyle looked up from their chess game and stared at me.
“I’m just delivering the mail,” I said. “I’m just the mailman.”
They stared. They didn’t say a word.
I handed Amanda the mail and stood waiting for my tip. She leafed through the envelopes, tossing them aside one by one. They landed in the bushes and turned yellow and wet.
She looked up at me, her hands empty. “You didn’t bring anything we can use.”
The next morning I could barely lift my head off the pillow. When I did, the bones near my left temple crunched. My cheekbones ached and my skull throbbed. While I’d slept, someone had seeded the folds of my brain with red pepper and glass.
And that wasn’t all-none of my limbs or joints were pleased when I rolled over, sat up, or breathed. In the shower, the water hurt. The soap hurt. When I tried to scrub my head with shampoo, I accidentally pressed my fingertips into the left side of my skull and produced a bolt of agony that nearly put me on my knees.
Drying off, I looked in the mirror. The upper left side of my face, one half of the eye included, was purple marble. The only part that wasn’t purple was the part that was covered in black sutures. Gray streaked my hair; it had even found my chest since the last time I’d paid attention. I ran a comb carefully over my head, then turned to reach for the razor and my swollen knee yelped. I’d barely moved-a minor shift of weight, nothing more-but my kneecap felt like I’d swung the claw end of a hammer into it.
I just fucking love aging.
When I entered the kitchen, my wife and daughter clasped their hands to their cheeks and shrieked, eyes wide. It was so perfectly timed, I knew it had been planned, and I gave them a big thumbs-up as I poured myself a cup of coffee. They exchanged a fist bump and then Angie opened her morning paper again and said, “That looks suspiciously like the laptop bag I got you last Christmas.”
I slung it over the back of my chair as I sat at the table. “One and the same.”
“And its contents?” She turned a page of the
“Fully recovered,” I said.
She raised appreciative eyebrows. Appreciative and maybe a little envious. She glanced at our daughter, who was temporarily fascinated by the pattern of her plastic place mat. “Was there any, um, collateral damage?”
“One gentleman may have a bit of difficulty entering a potato-sack race anytime soon. Or, I dunno”-I sipped some coffee-“strolling.”
“And this is because?”
“Bubba decided to speed the process along.”
At his name, Gabriella raised her head. The smile that spread across her face was her mother’s-so wide and warm it hugged your whole body. “Uncle Bubba?” she said. “You saw Uncle Bubba?”
“I did. He said to say hello to you and Mr. Lubble.”
“I’ll go get him.” She burst out of her chair and out of the room and the next sound we heard was her scrambling through the toys on the floor of her bedroom.
Mr. Lubble was a stuffed animal bigger than Gabby. Bubba had given it to her on her second birthday. Mr. Lubble was, as best we could figure, some kind of a cross between a chimpanzee and an orangutan, though it’s possible he represented a primate we were wholly unfamiliar with. For some reason, he was dressed in a lime- green tuxedo with a yellow tie and matching yellow tennis shoes. Gabby had given him the name Mr. Lubble, but none of us could recall why except to assume she’d been trying to say “Bubba,” but, at two, Lubble was the closest she could get.
“Mr. Lubble,” she called from her bedroom, “come out, come out.”
Angie lowered her paper and ran a hand over mine. She was a bit shocked at my second-day appearance, which was worse than my first-day appearance when I’d returned from the health center. “Should we worry about reprisals?”
It was a fair question. With any act of violence, you have to assume reprisal is a given. You hurt someone, most times they will try to hurt you back.
“I don’t think so,” I said, realizing it was true. “They’d mess with me, but not with Bubba. Plus, I didn’t take anything from them but what belonged to me.”
“In their minds, it didn’t belong to you anymore.”
“True.”
We shared a careful look.
“I’ve got that cute little Beretta,” she said. “Fits right in my pocket.”
“Been a while since you fired it.”
She shook her head. “Sometimes when I take those ‘Mommy time’ drives?”
“Yeah?”
“I go to the range on Freeport.”
I smiled. “You do?”
“Oh, I do.” She smiled back. “Some girls relieve stress with yoga. I prefer emptying a clip or two.”
“Well, you always were the better shot in the family.”
“Better?” She opened her paper again.
Truth was I couldn’t hit sand on a beach. “Fine. Only.”
Gabby came back in the room dragging Mr. Lubble by one lime-green arm. She placed him on the seat beside her and climbed up into her own.
“Did Uncle Bubba kiss Mr. Lubble good night?” she asked.
“He did.” I would have felt worse about lying to my child if I hadn’t already set the precedent with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
“Did he kiss me good night?”
