me. And for a change, I didn’t have to sleep with anybody to do it.”
Tired laughter ebbed briefly from the television room down the hall. “Back to Wrightsville Beach,” I said. “Jimmy never went out for beer like you said. He was there when Rosen’s boys came in. You must have signaled them somehow. But why didn’t they kill Broda too?”
She blew some smoke at her feet and spoke softly. “After you fought, Charlie Fiora called me at the motel to tip me off that you were on the way. They had just killed Eddie. There wasn’t time to do anything but take Jimmy and leave me behind, to slow you up.” She looked up at me with pleading eyes and began to cry, but I stopped it.
“You can save the crocodile tears,” I said coldly. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way Eddie looked, tied up on that bed. His throat had been cut, left to right. You could tell by the entry wound on the left, and by the direction of the skin as it folded out from the slice. Assuming he was killed from behind, that would have to be done by a right-handed person.” I stepped away from the wall and unfolded my arms. “The other night, I faced the man I thought had killed Eddie Shultz. He proved to me that he didn’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. In fact, before his brains were blown out, he dropped his weapon. And he dropped it from his left hand.” I paused and stared at the cigarette in her right hand, then into her eyes. “You cooled Eddie Shultz.”
The silence between us was heavy and long. Finally she spoke just above a whisper and with her eyes down. “They couldn’t do it,” she said. “They were tough, but even they couldn’t do that, not to a kid. ot to a They didn’t know Redman like I knew him. Him and his Nazi friends. They would have queered the whole deal, believe me. He had to die.”
“Everybody has to,” I said. “But nobody has to like that. What were you going to do about me?”
“Nothing,” she said, her voice rising. “Jerry just wanted me to keep you occupied until he could figure out what to do.”
“Relax. I’m not going to turn you in. They’d only treat you and set you free. I’d only be doing you a favor.”
“I know what I did was horribly wrong,” she said. “But this program here… I’m going to clean up.”
“There isn’t going to be any program. Not much longer. Your benefactor is going to be leaving town any day now. When the well dries up, you’re out. You’re a junkie, Kim. That’s your future.”
“I’ll make it,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
My landlord had wedged my mail in the screen door of my apartment. The cat nudged my calf as I carried in the letters and sorted them out.
There was a phone bill, which I kept, and a credit card offer, which I tossed. The last item in the stack was from the D.C. government. My application for a private investigator’s licence had been accepted. The notice instructed me where and when to pick it up.
I fed the cat, brewed some coffee, and took a mug of it and a pack of smokes out to the living room. I settled on the couch to read the Monday Post.
Andre Malone’s two little paragraphs were buried in the back of Metro, under a group head called “Around the Region.” He was “an unidentified N.W. man.” He died of “gunshot wounds to the chest and lower abdomen.” Police believed the killing, the article said, to be “drug related.”
One week later, McGinnes phoned.
“Nick?”
“Yeah?”
“Johnny.”
“Hey, Johnny. Where you at, man?”
“The Sleep Senter,” he said.
“That the place that spells Center with an S?”
“The same.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“The way they explained it to me, it has a double meaning. The sleep sent-her, get it? Like this place really sends her, it’s some kind of out-of-body experience.”
“Clever.” at, Yeah,” he said. “This place is okay. They got a bunch of schmoes on the floor, but they’re an all right bunch of guys. And dig this-they put a fifty dollar pop on the reconditioned mattresses. Fifty big ones, man, for something that’s recession proof. Everybody’s gotta sleep, right, Jim? Anyway, mattresses, electronics, what the hell’s the difference? I could sell my mother if they’d tack a dollar bill on her.”
“When did you make the move?”
“Today’s my first day. The last day I saw you, I kinda fell into a black hole. When I crawled out the next day, I quit my job at Nathan’s. Good thing I did. I talked to Fisher-they had some serious shake-ups after I left.”
“Such as?”
“Rosen resigned on Wednesday, effective that day.”
“Who’s running the show?”
“They booted Ric Brandon up to general manager. You believe that shit?”
“The cream always rises to the top,” I said.
“Yeah.” He laughed briefly, then coughed into the phone. “Listen, Nick, I gotta go take an up. I don’t want these putzes to think I’m weak. Talk to you later, hear?”
“All right, Johnny. Talk to you later.”
The next morning I was folding my clothes from the laundromat when some shells and stones fell from the pockets of my swimtrunks. An hour later I was driving south on 95, headed for the Outer Banks and Ocracoke Island.
The ferry was nearly empty that early November day, as was the island campground. I pitched my tent on a spot near the showers and, wearing a sweatshirt beneath my jean jacket, unfolded a chair on the beach.
I spent the first day reading the rather seedy biography of a relentlessly hedonistic musician, a story I lost interest in long before the inevitable overdose. Later I wrote a long letter to Karen that took two hours to compose and only a few seconds to shred. In between those activities I walked on the beach and stopped occasionally to talk with fishermen who were wading in the surf. In the evening I cooked hot dogs and ate a can of beans, and then crawled into my sleeping bag as soon as it was dark, as there was little else to do.
By the middle of the second day, I realized once again that being away from home clarifies nothing. Despite romantic notions, that’s been the case in every instance that I’ve left town to “think about things.”
An approaching northeaster shook me out of my stupor late in the afternoon. I broke camp as the slate sky blew in, and was packed and in my car when the rain came down, suddenly and quite violently, from the clouds.
I started my Dodge and drove through the storm to the gray house on pilings with the small gray sign. Running through the rain and up the wooden stairs, I entered Jacko’s Grille.
The door slammed behind me when I entme when ered and most of the heads in the place turned my way. There was a group of older locals in plaid flannel shirts and dirty baseball caps, all sitting at a couple of picnic tables that they had pushed together. Empty cans of beer dotted the tables. Full ones were in the men’s hands. Water dripped down through holes in the roof into more than a few spots in the room, though no one was taking much notice. The sound of the rain competed with the country music coming from the jukebox.
I nodded to the men and pushed wet hair back off my forehead. A couple of them nodded back. One of them smiled and said, in a startling island accent more northern European than American South, “Wet enough for ya?” I said it was and stepped up to the bar, where I ordered a burger and a beer.
I took the beer out to the screened-in deck and drank it while I watched the h ard rain dimple the wetlands as it blew across the sound. The beer was cold but warmed me going down, and I ordered another when I picked up my burger.
I ate the burger and drank the beer out on the deck. When I was finished, the first, beautiful verse of “Me and Bobby McGee” came from the juke, and the men inside began to sing. I listened as their drunken voices welled up on the achingly true chorus. When I went to the counter for another beer, one of them waved me over and I joined them.
I bought what was the first of many rounds. The water was coming in now all around the bar, and someone had turned up the jukebox to its maximum volume. One of the men produced a fifth of whiskey and some glasses,
