“Did you know he dreams about your dad every night?”
I turned my head. “He told you that?”
“Yeah.”
He’d never told me. “I’m sure he misses him,” I said.
“He said, when he’s wandering all these different cities in his sleep, he keeps seeing your dad sitting in cafes and restaurants.”
That made me sad.
“And you remember Margaret Tursky?” Julie asked.
I had to think. “Yeah, I do. Red hair? Braces?”
“Thomas had a real thing for her.”
I looked at her skeptically. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s true. He told me. He was eating a drumstick at the time.”
“He and I, we don’t really talk about stuff like that. We kind of deal with more immediate issues. There’s kind of a lot going on around here, Julie, since our dad passed away.”
She turned, leaning her hip into the counter, and said, “Look, I know I’m speaking out of turn here, that’s it’s none of my business. There’s just more to Thomas than meets the eye. Reminds me of my aunt. She’s gone now, bless her, but she was in a wheelchair for a while, and whenever I took her out, like to a restaurant or whatever, people would ask me what she wanted. ‘Would your aunt like to start with a drink? Would your aunt like an appetizer?’ Assholes. ‘Ask her,’ I’d say. Just ’cause she couldn’t walk didn’t mean she was deaf. It’s like that with Thomas. Just because he’s got a few screws loose, and I say that with respect, there’s still a lot of other shit going on.” She reached out and poked me in the chest. “And you’re not mean.”
“But he said I was.”
She nodded. “He did. But after that, he said you’re just trying to do the right thing. Ray, he loves you, he really does. I didn’t mean to give you the gears.”
“No, you’re right,” I said. “I guess…I guess all I tend to see when I look at him is his, you know, handicap, although he doesn’t see it that way. I don’t always look at the entire person.”
She took a step closer and gave me a friendly punch in the shoulder. “Maybe this is why I do what I do. I like to try to see all sides, to see the whole picture. I’m not claiming to be all holier than thou or anything. You’re just really close to the situation, and like you say, you’ve got a lot on your plate. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“He must trust you, to tell you those things,” I said.
“Maybe it’s just that nobody asked,” Julie said. “When we were having our chicken, I got talking to him about high school. And speaking of chicken.” She touched her lower belly. “I don’t think that stuff totally agreed with me.” She drank down the rest of her beer. “That’ll help.”
“Let me just try again and say thanks, without it meaning anything derogatory about anyone.”
She smiled and nodded. “You are welcome.” She took another step, closing the distance between us, went up on her toes, and gave me a peck on the cheek. “All is forgiven.”
I set my beer on the counter and took hold of Julie’s arm. I leaned in to kiss her, and not on the cheek, and she was showing no signs of trying to stop me from doing this, when Thomas started shouting from upstairs.
“Ray!”
I let go of Julie and moved back as I heard Thomas coming down the stairs. He said, “I called the landlord.” I recalled that he’d lingered on that picture on my phone of the tenement building’s directory. He’d memorized the number.
Thomas continued, “He had some interesting things to say, which you would have found out if you’d taken the time to ask.”
Julie started heading for the door. “G’night, guys,” she said.
THIRTY-FOUR
There were times when Nicole wondered how she’d gotten here.
Not exactly here, in Ohio, in this Dayton apartment across the street from Allison Fitch’s mother’s residence. She’d gotten here by car.
But hold on-that really was what she was pondering. How was it that someone who’d beat all the odds to make it to the Olympic Games, who had returned home from Sydney with a silver medal hanging from her neck-how could it be that that same person could be sitting here now, surrounded by electronic eavesdropping equipment, waiting for a break so she could find Allison Fitch and kill her?
How did that talented young athlete, who’d performed her routine on the uneven bars for thousands of spectators in the stadium and millions more on television around the planet, end up killing people for a living?
Well, you had to do something, right?
Anyone else might have returned from the Games with their head held high. Okay, so maybe you didn’t win gold, but bringing back a silver medal, doesn’t that say you came pretty damn close?
“Close only counts in horseshoes,” her father had always liked to say.
And it was true what they said, that winning silver, it was worse than coming in third and taking the bronze. You won bronze and you thought, Okay, I’m coming home with a medal, and that’s pretty fucking awesome, and the great thing is, I don’t have to beat myself up over coming so close to winning. But when you came in second, when the gap between your score and the winning one came down to inexplicable differences of interpretation by the judges, you drove yourself mad. The “what-ifs” made you crazy. What if your landing had been just a bit steadier? What if you’d held your head up a little straighter? Was it because you didn’t smile? Did they just not like the look of you?
Was there anything you could have done to win gold?
You lay awake at night, wondering.
“Close only counts in horseshoes.”
The bastard.
And her coach wasn’t much better. The two of them, those two impossible-to-please men, had put all their hopes and dreams on her. She’d been a fool to ever think she was doing it for herself. Turned out she was doing it for them. She just might have been proud of herself for winning silver, but not them.
“Look at the endorsement deals you’ve lost,” they told her. “Millions of dollars, thrown away. The life you could have had.”
Her father didn’t talk to her all the way home. Pretty long flight, Sydney to L.A., then the connecting trip to New York, the limo ride back to Montclair.
She started doing poorly in school. Went from being an A student to getting Cs, and worse. Her father wanted to know what the hell was wrong with her. Did she take a stupid pill in Australia? Was it something in the water?
Nicole-of course, that wasn’t her name then-knew what the problem was. She could never make the man happy, so why bother? Maybe, if her mother hadn’t died from cancer when Nicole was twelve, things might have been different. That woman, she had a life as a successful real estate agent. She didn’t have to live through her daughter, unlike her dad, whose greatest achievement in life was being assistant manager at a Payless Shoes outlet.
She didn’t just let her grades slip. She partied. She slept around. She did drugs. Let her once perfectly toned body get out of shape. When she was eighteen, she met up with a man thirty years older than her who didn’t actually run a meth lab, but worked for someone who did.
His name was Chester-honest to God, like from an old Western-and he had one of those RV things, a Winnebago, and he used to load that thing up with product. Maybe Chester was the perfect name for him, given that the RV was like a modern covered wagon. Meth was stuffed everywhere. In the fridge, under the beds, in the actual walls of the RV. Because you couldn’t send meth by FedEx or Purolator and you couldn’t take it on a plane, if you wanted to get it from one part of the country to the other you had to damn well take it there yourself. And because Chester’s boss was linked into a major distributor based in Las Vegas, it meant making plenty of trips to Nevada.
