the doorbell, I rolled slowly by the house. The door swung open, revealing a man with a wine glass in his hand. He handed it to her, and she took it. Then she stood on her tiptoes, and he brought his face down to hers.
As I pulled away, Veronica and Brady Coyle were still in a lip-lock.
* * *
I didn’t feel much like driving back to Providence. I took 114 south to Newport, parked on Ocean Avenue, and sat there all night listening to the breakers beat their brains out on the rocks. I thought about the dead twins. I thought about Tony. I thought about Mr. McCready. I thought about the bullet holes in Scibelli’s body. I thought about Rosie. I wondered if Veronica had asked Coyle to get an AIDS test. I wondered if she’d ever talked to him about the future. I wondered if she’d told him she was her father’s girl. She certainly wasn’t mine.
I wondered if I’d see the bullet coming.
74
There was nothing to do but run.
In the morning, I crossed Narragansett Bay on the majestic Claiborne Pell and Jamestown bridges. When I reached the little town of West Kingston, I parked Gloria’s car at the train station and bought a northbound ticket.
As the local pulled into Providence, I buried my head in a newspaper and kept it there until we arrived at Boston’s South Station. Before I got off, I turned my cell phone on, muted the ringtone, and wedged it between the seat cushions. If Giordano had any cop friends who could track me through its signal, they’d go crazy chasing me up and down the Northeast Corridor until the battery ran down.
Aunt Ruthie put me up in my cousin’s old room. She was glad for the company.
I bought a Nokia prepaid to keep track of things back home. McCracken said he’d locked the original documents and the Giordano recording in his safe-deposit box, and that as far as he could tell, no one but Mason and I knew he had them. Whoosh said the word on the street was that someone, he wasn’t sure who, had a contract out on me, and what the hell had I gotten myself into? Mason said he didn’t think they’d be coming after him, but that Daddy had hired a couple of former Treasury agents as bodyguards just in case. Jack said Polecki and Roselli hadn’t hassled him lately, but that he still wasn’t welcome at the firehouse. Gloria said her first plastic surgery had gone well and that her mother had found the car right where I’d left it. The hospital said Rosie was still critical.
I didn’t give anyone my number. I didn’t tell anyone where I was.
I grew a beard and let my hair grow. The beard surprised me by coming in gray. Weekdays, when Aunt Ruthie went to her job at Fleet Bank, I’d get into a pickup basketball game at the Y or stretch out on her floral damask couch and devour Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. I was used to writing every day, and I missed it. After a couple of weeks, I’d read so many crime novels that I started thinking I could write one. I banged out sixty pages on Ruthie’s old Smith Corona before I realized I was wrong.
Rosie and Veronica haunted my dreams. Each morning I awoke with a strand of razor wire wrapped around my heart. First thing, before sitting down to breakfast with Aunt Ruthie, I’d punch the familiar numbers into my prepaid and always get the same news about Rosie. And the wire around my heart would tighten.
Ruthie insisted on buying the groceries and wouldn’t hear of me paying rent. With Maalox and cigars my biggest expenses, the twenty-six hundred dollars in vacation pay I’d withdrawn in cash before leaving Rhode Island just might last till Christmas. I didn’t dare use my credit card.
Nights and weekends, we sat together in her parlor and watched the Red Sox on TV. By the beginning of June, Ortiz was on the shelf with a torn tendon, Ramirez was day-to-day with a hamstring, and the team had slipped a game and a half behind the upstart Rays.
On rainy days, I used Ruthie’s laptop to check the news from Providence. When the weather was good, I took the Red Line to Cambridge in the afternoon and bought the Providence newspaper at Out of Town News in Harvard Square. Summer headlines heralded Carozza’s big lead in the polls, bid-rigging at the Providence Highway Department, kickbacks in Pawtucket, the exposure of another pedophile priest, and sixty-three parishioners getting sick on polluted shellfish at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus’s annual summer clambake. None of the stories carried my byline. I missed the rush.
I tried to distract myself on those daily subway trips by reading the graffiti or inventing lives for my fellow riders. But my mind wandered. Suddenly Veronica would be sitting beside me, reaching for my hand. I imagined whole conversations, trying out different explanations for her betrayal. Each day, she had a new reason. None of them mattered. People are what they do.
It was a summer of painful obituaries. First George Carlin. Then another of my favorites, Bernie Mac. I never believed the old saw about death coming in threes, but I found myself dreading the third one anyway. Then Carl Yastrzemski checked into a hospital for triple-bypass surgery. Yaz had been one of my father’s favorites, which made him one of mine too, but given the alternative, I almost hoped the third one would be him.
The news about the newspaper business was all bad. Desperate to stem the tide of red ink, papers all over the country slashed employee pay and laid off journalists by the thousands.
By late July, I was no longer a suspect, and the paper had reinstated me. Wu Chiang’s lawyer, more grateful than she needed to be for the credit-card records I’d mailed to her, had followed Brady Coyle’s script exactly, providing Polecki with my alibis and pressing the chief of police for a public exoneration and apology. Polecki dragged his feet as long as he could before grudgingly issuing a statement. The cops had released my Bronco and my grandfather’s gun, and the lawyer said she was holding them for me. I didn’t give
I wanted to go home. I missed the scent of salt, spilled petroleum, and decaying shellfish that rose like Lazarus from the bay. I missed the bellowing of the parti-colored tugs that bulled rusting barges up the river. I missed the way the setting sun turned the marble dome of the statehouse the color of an antique gold coin. I missed Annie’s tattoo, Mason’s fedora, Charlie’s omelets, Zerilli’s Cubans, McCracken’s crushing handshakes, Jack’s Italian curses, and Gloria’s one good eye. I missed knowing the names of almost everyone on the streets.
But there was still a price on my head. And it was only a matter of time before Providence joined the layoff trend. Would there be a job waiting if it were ever safe for me to return?
One evening Ruthie pulled out her photo albums, and we paged through them together on the couch. Ruthie and her sister—my mother—holding tennis rackets and mugging for the camera. Their father looking sharp in his Providence PD uniform, his chest bedecked with medals. Aidan and Meg ripping open Christmas presents. Little Liam playing with a Tonka hook-and-ladder truck.
When I was six, that truck and I were inseparable. I’d even slept with it. “Wow!” I said. “I’d forgotten how much I loved that thing.”
Ruthie smiled, got up, rummaged in the hall closet, and came back cradling the truck in her arms. I remembered it as a huge thing in my life, but when she handed it to me, I was surprised how small it was.
“I rescued it from the basement after your mother died,” she said. “You should have it.”
Maybe I’d sleep with it again. Better than sleeping alone.
In early August, the paper’s owners finally tired of bleeding money and laid off 130 employees, 80 of them news staffers. I called Mason to learn the names. Abbruzzi. Sullivan. Ionata. Worcester. Richards … So many old friends.
“You and Gloria were on the list, too,” Mason said, “but I talked to Dad.”
I was touched that he’d done that for me. I wasn’t surprised he’d kept his promise to her. But if readers and advertisers kept on deserting us, this wouldn’t be the last of the layoffs. Mason might not be able to save us next time.
By mid-August, the Yankees were finished, their stars looking old and slow and the young pitchers they’d counted on not yet ready for the big time. But the Sox trailed the surprising Rays by seven games now, and three of
