“Hey, Pavel?”
He looked back, one hand on the door.
“You have any ice in there?” I held up my scorched palm.
“I take a look.” He went back into the trailer.
I put the Blu-Ray players on the ground at the back of the Suburban, and my phone rang. I read the caller ID: ANGIE CELL. I flipped the phone open as fast as I could and walked away from the Suburban toward the river.
“Hey, babe.”
“Hi,” she said. “How’s Boston?”
“It’s nice here right now. The weather.” I reached the river-bank, stood watching the brown Charles slosh along, ice chips surfing along the top every now and then. “Thirty-eight, maybe thirty-nine degrees. Blue sky. Feels more like Thanksgiving. How’s it there?”
“It’s about fifty-five. Gabby loves it, man. All the squares, the horse-drawn carriages, the trees. She can’t get enough.”
“So you’re going to stay?”
“Hell, no. It’s Christmas Eve. We’re at the airport. We board in an hour.”
“I never gave you an all-clear.”
“Yeah, but Bubba did.”
“Oh, really.”
“He said it was just as easy to shoot Russians in Boston.”
“A solid point. All right, then, come home.”
“You done?”
“I am done. Hold on.”
“What?”
“Hang on a sec.” I crooked the phone into the space between my ear and my shoulder, never as easy to do on a cell as it is on a home phone. I pulled my.45 Colt Commander out of the holster at my back. “You still there?”
“I’m here.”
I ejected the clip, then jacked the round out of the chamber. I pulled back on the slide and disengaged it from the grip. I tossed the slide in the water.
“What’re you doing?” Angie asked.
“I’m throwing my gun in the Charles.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.” I tossed the clip in, watched it sink beneath the sluggish current. I flicked my wrist and the grip followed. I was left with one bullet and the frame. I considered both.
“You just threw your gun away. The.45?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I tossed the frame up and out in an arc and got a respectable splash when it hit.
“Honey, you’re going to need that for work.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing this shit anymore. Mike Colette offered me a job in his freight company and I’m going to take him up on it.”
“You’re serious?”
“Know what it is, babe?” I looked back at the trailer. “When you start out doing this, you think it’s just the truly horrible shit that’s going to get you-that poor little boy in that bathtub back in ’98, what happened in Gerry Glynn’s bar, Christ, that bunker in Plymouth…” I took a breath, let it out slowly. “But it’s not those moments. It’s all the little ones. It’s not that people fuck each other over for a million dollars that depresses me, it’s that they do it for ten. I don’t give a shit anymore whether so-and-so’s wife is cheating on him, because he probably deserved it. And all those insurance companies? I help them prove a guy’s faking his neck injury, they turn around and drop coverage on half the neighborhood when the recession hits. The last three years, every time I sit on the corner of the mattress to put my shoes on in the morning, I want to crawl back into bed. I don’t want to go out there and do what I do.”
“But you’ve done a lot of good. You do know that, don’t you?”
I didn’t.
“You have,” she said. “Everyone I know lies, breaks their word, and has perfectly legitimate excuses for why they do. Except you. Haven’t you ever noticed that? Two times in twelve years, you said you’d find this girl no matter what. And you did. Why? Because you gave your word, babe. And that might not mean shit to the rest of the world, but it means everything to you. Whatever else happened today, you found her twice, Patrick. When no one else would even try.”
I looked at the river and wanted to pull it over me.
“So I understand why you can’t do it anymore,” my wife said, “but I won’t hear you say it didn’t matter.”
I kept looking at the river for a bit. “Some of it mattered.”
“Some of it did,” she said.
I looked at the bare trees and the slate sky that stretched behind them. “But I’m all the way out. You okay with that?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Mike Colette’s having a good year. His distribution warehouse is thriving. He’s opening a new warehouse off Freeport next month.”
“And you, having worked your way through college in the freight business…” she said. “And that’s where you see yourself in ten years?”
“Huh? No, no, no. That where you see me?”
“Not at all.”
“I thought I’d get my master’s. I’m pretty sure I could secure some kind of financial aid, a grant, something. My grades were pretty stellar back in the day.”
“Stellar?” She chuckled. “You went to a state college.”
“Cold,” I said. “Still counts as stellar.”
“And what will my husband become in his second career?”
“I was thinking a teacher. History maybe.”
I waited for the sarcastic assessment, the playful dig. It didn’t come.
“You like that idea?” I asked her.
“I think you’d be great,” she said softly. “So what’ll you tell Duhamel-Standiford?”
“That this was my last lost cause.” A hawk glided low and fast over the water and never made a sound. “I’ll be waiting at the airport.”
“You just made my year,” she said.
“You made my life.”
After I hung up, I looked out at the river again. The light had changed while I’d been on the phone and now the water was copper. I perched the last remaining bullet on the end of my thumb. I peered at it for a bit, squinting until it looked like a tall tower built along the riverbank. Then I flicked my middle finger off the center of my thumb and fired it into the copper water.
“Merry Christmas,” Jeremy Dent said when his secretary put me through. “You done with your charity case?”
“I am,” I said.
“So we’ll see you the day after tomorrow.”
“Nah.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t want to work for you, Jeremy.”
“But you said you did.”
“Well, then, I guess I led you on,” I said. “Doesn’t feel good, does it?”
He was calling me a very bad name when I hung up on him.
