“And when he lays his hands on me? Will he know?”
I remembered how Vic had turned at just the moment I ought to have thrown. I hadn’t made a sound; I was a professional, after all.
“Two more bodies showed up this morning. Missing hands.” He couldn’t get any more out.
I closed my eyes and pulled him down to me, until his head lay on my chest and his hair tickled my chin.
“I have to try again,” I whispered.
His chest shook with a sob. “Couldn’t you just let Walter kill him?”
“He won’t. A debt, he says. The best he can do is not to stop me.”
He sighed.
“What, you’re not even going to try to beg me to go to the police?”
“Too late for that. Besides, most cops aren’t … Some days it seems like they’re just the other side of the same damned coin.”
“Valentine wouldn’t like to hear you say that. He’s cleaned the force right up, he says.”
“Valentine’s … a good man, from what I can tell. But political ambitions cloud one’s vision.”
I wondered at the stories behind that bleak sentiment, so different from the idealistic determination that had taken me away from the city back then. A wave of vertigo rolled through me, a dizzying awareness of how little we knew about the everyday business of each other’s lives. And now we were going to run away? Live together? Gloria would call me ten kinds of fool for thinking it was possible, and maybe she was right.
And yet—I pressed my cheek into the crown of his head and held him so tight it hurt. Just like ten years ago, I swelled so full with love there was nowhere to displace it. I could only sit inside its permeable borders, scared and hopeful.
My voice shook. “I had a second dream, Dev. And now it’s chasing me. Every time Tammy reads the cards for me, they come up all knives and broken hearts. The hands won’t let me turn from this—from him. I’m the one with all those bodies on my back.”
“So what’s one more, you mean?”
“This one I’ll take,” I said. “I craved it, you know—the killing. Like dope. A hit of justice. But there’s no such thing, he took that illusion away from me, though Lord knows you tried, and now even real justice feels like—even Victor is still a person. A creation unique and irreplaceable, remember when you said that?”
He kicked off his pants and slid slowly up my body until we were nose to nose on the pillow. “We were on the water, the Hoboken ferry at sunset, wasn’t it? A regular date, like two civilians.” He laughed. “And I came out with that? No wonder you left me.”
Regret, with its unmistakable stink, spilled between us.
“Can you do it?” he asked.
“I have to,” I said, which was not a yes, which we both knew.
“When it’s done,” Dev said carefully, “we have to leave. That’s my news from the precinct. The knife you left in Maryann West matched the wounds of two unsolved murders. My friends on the job promise no one will look very hard, but it has to be soon.”
Shock kept me still. I should have realized—but what else could I have done? Pulled the knife from her shoulder? She would have bled out on my stairwell. “You must have good dirt on someone,” I said.
“I suppose I do, but that’s not why. Or not mostly. Victor didn’t always lie to you, Pea. The two they’ve matched to you, one was a petty dope dealer and the other a corrupt prison guard. No one was terribly sad to see them go.”
Somehow, the fact that my justice hadn’t always been a lie made me angrier. “Doesn’t that take the cake. And you won’t miss it? Your thrilling double life?”
Something grim shuttered his eyes; he busied himself unbuttoning his shirt. “No. If we can make it out of this city, Pea, I’ll make it up to you, as much as I can.”
I pulled him down gently and ran my fingers over the soft hair on his naked chest. His breath came short.
“Is it possible,” I said, “that you are assuming blame for sins that have never been and could never be yours?”
He groaned. I slid my hand lower. His muscles trembled against my palm. “I never told you!”
I waited. My heart pounded in my ears, but the pulse by his temple jumped faster.
“I assumed you knew how Victor used you. The way he lied and stretched the truth. I assumed that you only pretended to care about justice. And I should never have assumed it, Pea, because I know you, better than anyone. And I decided that you were worse than my dreams of you, because that made it easier to live as I did. And now I know—what it has done to you, while I thought I was somehow better, or purer, or more enlightened. I let you have that sin, that bad karma, when it was mine—forgive—try—please—”
He broke against me. And I held him hard and I forgave him without reservation.
9
Dev left early the next morning. I resolved to finish this business, one way or another, before he returned. If this killed me, well, wasn’t that all I deserved?
I would not consider how Dev would take it.
I found Walter in the basement of the Pelican, where they stored the legal liquor along with linens, extra furniture, cleaning supplies, and whatever odds no one knew what to do with. Victor never dirtied his oxfords on the basement steps, but Walter did on Fridays, when a delivery was due.
“Is that the last of it, Jack?” he called when my shadow fell across the dim room.
“Jack’s having a smoke with the boys,” I said. “We need to talk.”
Walter turned around slowly, like he thought I might have a gun. He squinted at me, and then nodded. “Close the door,” he said.
By the time I did that and came down the stairs
