He slowly nibbled his way around to the front until he found her lips.
‘I’m starved,’ he murmured.
‘Me, too,’ she said, pulling away, ‘but you’ll have to settle for chicken breasts.’ She picked up the bags and headed for the kitchen. She looked back. ‘You may get a chance at mine later. If you’re lucky.’
McCabe loved watching Kyra cook. A foodie in her natural habitat, she moved around the kitchen with ease and an economy of motion. The simple act of chopping a bunch of scallions became performance art, Kyra’s fingers manipulating both the vegetables and the finely honed blade with astonishing speed. He poured a Macallan single malt for himself and a chilled Pouilly-Fume for her. They clinked glasses and sipped.
‘Tell Casey we’ll be eating in twenty minutes.’ He slid off his stool and went to deliver the message. Then he came back and climbed onto the stool again.
‘Okay?’ Kyra asked.
‘Yeah, fine. She’s in a bit of a sulk right now. Worried about seeing Sandy again.’
‘I don’t blame her. I would be, too, after three years.’
McCabe got up, stood behind Kyra, and began kneading the muscles along her shoulders and nuzzling the back of her neck.
‘Alright, that feels great, but either I cook or you nuzzle. We can’t do both.’
‘Are you sure — ’
‘Yes, I’ll cut my finger off.’
‘What I was going to say was, are you sure what you said about us not getting married being the right answer?’
She put the knife down and turned to face him. ‘Why are you bringing this up again?’
‘Because I love you?’
‘I love you, too — but it strikes me that your timing, bringing it up right now, just might be more about you and Casey and maybe you and Sandy than it is about you and me. That somewhere in your devious mind you think giving Casey a substitute mother will somehow take the pressure off.’
McCabe didn’t know if Kyra was right. She might be. He backed away and went to refill his Scotch. ‘Let’s wait until this visit with Sandy is over,’ said Kyra. ‘We can talk about it again.’
That night, after they made love, he dreamed of TwoTimes.
He dreamed he was climbing the stairs inside the house on Merced Street. Flight after flight of rotting boards wrapped around a central well. His two hands clutching a Glock 17. Pressed against the wall at the side of the stairs. No lights. No backup. Pitch black. Yet somehow he could see through the dark. A stink of decaying flesh growing stronger as he climbed each floor. His foot hit something soft.
‘Hey, kid, watch where you’re walking.’
He looked down. His brother Tommy splayed out on the stairs looking up. Smiling that patented smile no one could resist. Even though Tommy was dead, even though his smile was marred by two large exit wounds where the bullets that entered the back of his head came out the front, carrying with them a spray of brains and bits of Tommy the Narc’s oh-so-blue right eye.
Looking down he saw that the dead, but not dead, Tommy had a girl on each arm. Ellie Pearlman to his right. The Jewish girl who lived on the next block. His father’s voice rang out. ‘Tommy, are you still messing around with that Jew girl?’ On Tommy’s left was Mag O’Connell, her shirt off, her bra unhooked and hanging by one strap. Then Ellie Pearlman was gone and Tommy was standing behind Mag, his arms wrapped around her, one hand cupped under each of Mag’s large, soft white breasts with the big pink nipples. Tommy holding Mag’s breasts out for the ten-year-old McCabe to admire. ‘Hey, Mikey, bet you never saw anything like these before.’ He shook his head. No. No, he hadn’t. ‘Wanna have a feel?’ He hesitated before putting his hand out and stroking Mag’s soft, pliant flesh.
McCabe looked down. Tommy was dead again, Mag O’Connell gone. He climbed over the body and continued up the stairs. At the top, he saw TwoTimes, a black cigarette, the color of a cigar, dangling from his lips. ‘I’m tellin’ you like I told your brother, you may fuck with me once, but there’s none what fucks with me two times.’
By TwoTimes’s side stood a fat white man with a round pasty face, speaking in a white pasty voice. ‘Your Honor, we find the drug pusher, pimp, and cop-killer TwoTimes not guilty.’
‘Not guilty,’ repeated TwoTimes, still on the stairs. ‘I told you, hot shot, nobody fucks with TwoTimes two times.’
Then TwoTimes reached into his waistband and pulled out a small silver metal pistol, a little. 22, shiny like a kid’s cowboy cap gun. TwoTimes fired from the hip; the slug whizzed by McCabe’s left ear and embedded itself in the plaster wall. McCabe aimed and fired before TwoTimes could fire again. The shot from the Glock, so much louder than the. 22, echoed up and down the endless stairwell. McCabe watched the 9 mm slug, visible like a cartoon bullet, traverse the twenty feet between the end of the barrel and TwoTimes’s head. It entered TwoTimes precisely at the tip of his wide flat nose.
McCabe continued up the stairs. TwoTimes was gone. Now Sandy stood at the top, wearing a sheer silk nightgown, her naked body gleaming under it, white in the moonlight, her hand out, beckoning him. ‘Come on up, McCabe.’ Once again, Sandy as the young Lauren Bacall.
McCabe reached for her, but his hand still held the Glock. The gun brushed against her body. He squeezed the trigger and the image of Sandy shattered into a thousand fragments, images in a broken mirror he could never put together again.
He woke with a start, his body soaked with sweat. He looked across the bed at Kyra, still sleeping. He thought about waking her, but whatever this feeling was, he knew it was not about Kyra, and not about making love. So instead he just lay there, staring into the dark shadows, breathing slowly and deeply until his bad dreams went away.
25
Tuesday. 6:30 A.M.
Kyra and McCabe lay, side by side, holding hands, legs touching, in the queen-sized bed.
‘Tell me about TwoTimes,’ she said.
He glanced over, a frown appearing at the bridge of his nose. ‘I already told you about that.’
‘Not everything, I think.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I want to know why you’re having nightmares and muttering his name in your sleep. His name and your brother’s name. And Sandy’s.’
McCabe stared silently up at the plaster ceiling in the old room, his eyes tracing the route of a crack that had been patched over and had now reappeared for about the tenth time. ‘Got to fix that crack,’ he said.
‘Look, McCabe, you say you love me. You say you may even want to marry me. If that’s true and you want me to be your wife and not just a warm body to get cozy with, I have to know it all.’
‘You already know most of it,’ he said. ‘TwoTimes was a small-potatoes crack dealer in the South Bronx. Just a kid, really. Nineteen when I planted the bullet in his skull. He ran a network of street sellers, other kids, all of them underage, some of them as young as ten or twelve. The idea was if the kids got picked up they’d only do juvie time.’
‘And Tommy was a narcotics cop?’
‘Yeah. Tommy the Narc. Real hotshot. I dropped out of NYU and transferred to John Jay to follow in his footsteps. Tommy knew his way around the trade. Made some big busts. What I didn’t know, what I should’ve known, was that by the time TwoTimes came along, Tommy had turned.’
‘Turned?’
‘Turned bad. Gone on the take. He was pocketing money and drugs from half a dozen dealers in the Bronx. Most of them more powerful than TwoTimes.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘It’s not anything I like talking about. Anyway, TwoTimes was getting too big for his baggy britches. He was trying to expand his territory and pushing up against some guys who didn’t take kindly to being pushed. So they
