O'Farrell's Law

against halting the outburst with kindness before it all came out. He compromised, reaching across for Billy’s outstretched arms and stroking his hand. It was a long time before Billy looked up, and when he did, his eyes were red-rimmed and his nose was running. O’Farrell gave him a handkerchief and Billy wiped himself. His mouth moved, unsurely forming the words. At last, broken-voiced, he said, “I’ve kept it all. The money I mean.”

“I heard,” O’Farrell said, still anxious not to block the flow.

“It would have been sixty dollars, today.”

So at ten dollars a delivery, he hadn’t lied about the five previous deliveries. “Yes,” O’Farrell said.

“Wanted a hundred,” Billy said. “There’s three months, to Mom’s birthday, so I guess I would have gotten it easily. She hasn’t had anything new, not for a long time. I was going to give it to her on her birthday so she could have something new. Hadn’t worked out a way to say how I’d gotten it, but I’d have thought of something, by the time. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. Honest.”

“I know that,” O’Farrell said thickly. “We’ll find something for Mommy, you and me, for her birthday. Okay?”

“Okay,” the boy said.

“They’re not your friends, Billy. Not these guys for whom you’ve been carrying packages.”

“I know that, really. They pretended to be, but when they said about Mom, I knew they weren’t.”

O’Farrell went from hot to cold. “What did they say about Mom?”

“That they knew where we lived and that they’d make her ugly—like me, said Rick; he’s got a big scar right over his nose—if I told her what I was doing, if I told anyone what I was doing. If I got caught, I was to say it was just an errand and that I didn’t know what it was and there was nothing wrong. That I wouldn’t get into trouble.”

“Was Rick the guy who took die stuff when you got off or who gave it to you near die school?” coaxed O’Farrell.

“He gave it to me, showed me first time how to put it in my backpack.”

“By himself?”

“No, he—” Billy stopped, looking pebble-eyed at his grandfather.

O’Farrell held the child’s hands tightly across the table, to reinforce what he said. “He can’t hurt you; none of them can hurt you now. I won’t let them.”

“They said.”

“They were trying to sound big. Important. It wasn’t true.”

The child stared across the table, his mouth a tight line, and O’Farrell could feel the fear shaking through him. “Have I ever told you something that wasn’t right? Wasn’t true?”

It was still some time before the boy spoke. “Guess not,” he said.

“So trust me now, Billy.”

“Felipe,” blurted the boy, looking down into his lap again, as if he were ashamed. “There was a man called Felipe. Sometimes he stayed in the car.”

“Was it a big car?” O’Farrell asked, imagining a block-long Cadillac with chrome and fins.

“Like Mom’s,” Billy said. “Gray too.”

“Just Rick and Felipe? Never anyone else?”

Billy shook his head.

“You ever hear their other names?”

The headshake came again.

“Remember anything else about them?”

The third headshake began and then, an afterthought, Billy said, “There was a ring.…” He extended his left hand, isolating the index finger. “Here, like a big bird. It was black and had its wings out. Rick said he might give it to me one day.”

“What about the man you gave the stuff to? He have a name?

“Boxer,” said Billy, not hesitant anymore, actually smiling in recollection. “Had a nose all squashy, like a boxer’s. He was different from the others. He was funny. Said that’s what he was doing when he was late sometimes, playing hide-and-seek.”

He probably would have been, literally, O’Farrell decided, watching from some vantage point to ensure Billy wasn’t under observation and that it was safe to make the pickup. “He have a car?”

“A bike!” Billy said enthusiastically. “A racing bike with lots of gears and drop handlebars. Blue. He let me touch it once.”

O’Farrell recalled that a lot of the houses in Evanston were unfeiuxu; a bicycie, capable of cutting through backyards from house to house and street to street, was a better vehicle than a car in many pursuits. “You never called him anything else but Boxer?”

“Nope.”

“What sort of person was he? He have any rings or stuff like that?” O’Farrell felt exhausted; damp from perspiration and aching in his shoulders and legs.

“He wasn’t American,” Billy said flatly. “Neither was Felipe. It wasn’t the same as us when they talked. And Boxer had a picture on his hand.”

“Whereabouts?” O’Farrell pressed.

Billy offered his left hand, the middle finger outstretched. He pointed near the knuckle and said, “A flower, just there. Red.”

It was enough. O’Farrell decided; it had to be enough. If he were exhausted, how must Billy be feeling? He said, “You’ve been very good.”

“You pleased?” The child smiled uncertainly, eager for die praise.

“Very pleased,” O’Farrell said.

“Can we go home now? I don’t want to stay here anymore. I don’t like it here anymore.”

“I’ll see,” O’Farrell said.

McMasters and the girl were waiting directly outside the door. O’Farrell closed it carefully and started, “Okay, the suppliers …” but McMasters raised his hand, stopping him. “I watched it live, in the control room. You did damned well.”

O’Farrell was impatient with the praise but didn’t show it. He said, “He wants to go home.”

“I heard that, too.”

“So what about it?”

“It can’t end just like this.”

“But can he go home, now!”

“I think he needs to,” McMasters agreed. “And whatever happens, I think he’s going to want help from a child psychiatrist. He’s one scared kid.”

“What about the descriptions? Enough for any identifications?”

McMasters studied him curiously and then said, “Not yet; there’s a lot of work to be done.”

O’Farrell was caught by the tone of McMasters’s voice, just as the other man had recognized the meaning in his. O’Farrell said, “And if you had an identification, you wouldn’t tell me?”

“Personal vengeance and vigilante stuff are for the movies, Mr. O’Farrell.”

It’s as good a description as any for what I do, for Christ’s sake! O’Farrell thought. He said, “I didn’t mean anything like that.”

“My mistake,” McMasters said, clearly not believing it was.

O’Farrell collected Billy, and then Jill and Ellen, and they rode home strangely embarrassed, no one able to find any conversation. O’Farrell tried baseball talk, but Billy didn’t respond. In the apartment there were the sleeping arrangements to make, moving the bedding, which gave them some activity, and at dinner O’Farrell decided to get the clouds out of the way. He did so entirely to and for Billy’s benefit, openly talking about drugs and the child’s part in what had happened but making it sound as if Billy had knowingly acted like some undercover agent, exaggerating McMasters’s reaction to the information the boy had finally provided. Ellen and Jill caught on to what O’Farrell was doing and openly praised the boy, and Billy started to relax, even smiling occasionally. O’Farrell was intent on everything the boy said, for any scrap of additional information, but there was nothing.

O’Farrell was ready for the going-to-bed request, agreeing at once that he should be the one to take Billy, and Ellen behaved like it was the expected thing. The story was predictably about some galactic exploration but