“What the hell are you after, Patil?”
“We’re at war now. That changes things. You know Valentine. Duty above all. It looks good for his reputation to have officers in the ranks. We need every able-bodied man to serve his country, isn’t that what they’re saying?”
He leans back in his chair. Chews the dead end of another cigarette. Cautious relief has made him wobbly at the waist. “That may be.”
“So you ship us off. All of us questionable cases, the ones injudicious enough to find ourselves in some mobster’s little black book. Send us over there and Valentine gets a big publicity boost for his contribution to the war effort. Even better, we’re no longer a liability to him. Or you could string me up as an example. That might be the end of it. But Dewey wants one last big victory as DA. He likes Valentine, but he’s more ambitious than loyal. A big Seabury-style investigation of the police might be even better, as far as his prospects are concerned, than yet another gangster arraigned on charges that won’t stick.”
“Dewey wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t he? It would be a big deal, Finn. Bigger than ’35. Probably bigger than the Seabury commission. A hurricane can uncover a great deal of old dirt.”
Finn closes his eyes as though in pain. “You won’t talk to Dewey?”
“Not if you drop the charges against Phyllis and Alvin.”
“We need someone to pin this on.”
“Craver. Let it end with him. I go off to war with the rest of the bad apples and Valentine’s political path is strewn with roses.”
Finn snorts. “Even easier for a stray bullet to get you in the Pacific.”
“But you wouldn’t order it.”
“Jesus, kid, what kind of pull do you think I have?” He laughs, a little too high, a little too fast. “Or that I’d want to do it anyway, you goddamn bastard.”
We arrange it. He says it might take a few days to go through. It might not work at all—Valentine still has to agree. But I know that it will. Because I can feel the hot whisper of Victor’s curse. I’ll haunt you. But I have volunteered to wade waist-deep in all the bloody hell that he promised me.
Pea is waiting for me when I get home. Knees drawn up by the fire, eyes on a book she isn’t reading.
“I made a deal,” I say. “I’m getting drafted and you and Alvin go free.”
“That’s what this has been, all this time? You were drafted?”
“Yes. And then I…”
“Well?”
“I had a dream. A second dream.”
“You’ve always been this good at lying to me, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you lie about loving me?”
“Plenty.”
“Is that right?”
“Anytime I pretended that I didn’t.”
“Marry me, then,” she says, after a few strained seconds.
I laugh. “Sure, Pea.”
15
I saw Trent in the city that day. He told me he was worried. There were rumors that the angel was going to get someone that night. Someone who had crossed Victor.
I told him not to worry, that the angel was with me, in my house upstate. I was going back to see her right now. Trent was supposed to have gone into protective custody a month ago, but Valentine had demanded harder evidence, enough to set up a sting.
“I’m off the case,” I told Trent. “But don’t worry. I’ll talk to my superior about you when I’m in town again.”
Pea was gone by the time I got back. She had left a note. Three words.
I had to—
A line, drawn in blood, to separate the halves of my life.
—but the woman was already screaming in the bathroom. But a man’s head was already thumping against the back wall. Then the body of a smaller woman. A series of grunts. A gasped question. There passed a moment without any sound at all. I panicked and shot the lock.
Pea was curled beside Trent’s half-naked body. One knife was in the wall, the other buried in his chest. Her fingers slipped in the blood that coated the hilt. Her eyes were wide and black. They stared at Trent’s slack and stubbled jaw.
“But tell me why you did it?” she whispered.
My erection dimmed very slightly. I pretended I didn’t hear her. I opened the bathroom door and hit Maryann in the back of the head with my gun handle. She slid to the floor without even seeing me.
Pea let me drag her away from Trent—from the body. She was limp in my arms. She stared at him and asked, again, the question that I refused to hear. I collected her knives and cleaned off any places that looked like they might hold fingerprints. My colleagues would know who did this, but they wouldn’t be able to pin it on her. Not any better than they had those twenty other similar murders.
I took her to the apartment that I kept in the city. Steam filled the tiny bathroom as I filled the tub. It spilled out of the little high window that opened onto the shaftway. I wondered if someone else would smell the blood. If they would know it. If they would care.
Not the way I cared.
I undressed her like a wax doll. Like my fingers were hot coals. My desire was my enemy. Pea was my enemy. The thing that she was—I couldn’t love her without hating everything I had ever believed about myself. She climbed into the tub after I led her there. She flinched at the heat of the water. She lowered herself to her shoulders, then her chin.
“It’s a sunset, Dev,” she said to the water. She ducked her head under. The water sloshed pink over the edge. It soaked my pants, my bloodstained sleeves. I would never undress in front of her again. This was the last time I would ever see her naked.
I started crying. The tears splashed where her hair floated on the surface of the steaming water. And when she emerged to take a gasping
