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  Jeffrey said, “Where that knottyhead at?”

  Padgett pointed to a bottle of Seagram’s gin on the shelf above the oven.

  Jeffrey took it down, grabbed a glass. “Thought I told you about keeping it in the freezer. Like my shit cold, man.”

  Padgett said, “You need to get up on out of here, buy yourself a shawl. You become an old woman, Jeffrey.”

  The room swayed a bit as Eric scratched the back of his neck, his fingers going down behind his collar and then down between his shoulder blades. He felt hot and his head drummed and his mouth was dry. So dry. As if he’d never taste another drink till the day he died. He noticed his can of beer sitting where he put it when Jeffrey frisked him. He considered reaching for it, then decided he couldn’t afford to.

  “All I hear day in and day out, old man, is your mouth running. Running like fucking I-don’t-know-what. But running.”

  Padgett drained his Old Mil’, crushed it, and opened the fridge for another.

  Jeffrey rested his drink on the side of the sink, turned to look at Eric, and said, “Nigger, what?” in a tone of deflated surprise as Eric pulled his hand free of the back of his shirt, produced a small .22 with a flap of packing tape still stuck to the barrel, the flesh by his upper spine tingling from where the tape ripped free. He shot Jeffrey just below the Adam’s apple, and Jeffrey slid down against the counters below the sink.

  He put the next one in the wall beside Monica’s ear and she got her hand under the table, ducking, her chin between her thighs, and Eric fired a round through the top of her skull. For maybe a second, he paused, fascinated by the small hole that appeared in her head, as dark as any hole he’d ever seen, darker than her dark, dark hair. And then he turned.

  His next shot knocked into Padgett, knocked the beer out of his hand and turned the man around, banged his hip and part of his head off the fridge door.

  The echo of the gunshots made the whole room throb.

  The gun in Eric’s hand shook slightly, but not much, and the pounding in his head seemed to be going away.

  Padgett, sitting on the floor, said, “You dumb piece of shit.” His voice was high, girlish. He had a hole in the middle of his sweat-stained T-shirt that drizzled and kept growing wider.

  Eric thought, I just shot three people. Man, oh, man.

  He lifted the can of beer off the floor. He popped the tab and it sprayed into a table leg. He placed it in Padgett’s hand, watched the foam slide down and froth all over Padgett’s wrist and fingers. Padgett’s face turned the chalk of his hair. A distant whistle came from somewhere in his chest. Eric sat on the floor for a moment as Monica’s body tipped out of its chair and thumped to the linoleum.

  He ran his palm over the snowy coalfield atop Padgett’s head. Even in his condition, Padgett half flinched, trying to back away. He had no place to go, though, and Eric rubbed his palm back and forth over the hair several times and then sat back again.

  Padgett got a hand to the floor and tried to push himself up. The hand gave way and Padgett sat again. He gave it another try, reaching out blindly for a chair, finally getting the heel of his hand on the seat, tongue falling out of his mouth and hanging down over his lower lip as he gave himself a push up. He got to where he was half standing, knees bent and quaking, and then the chair slid away, and Padgett went back down, much harder this time, and sat there taking sharp, tiny breaths, mouth puckered, eyes on his lap.

  “What made you think you could get the better of me?” Eric asked Padgett, and his own lips felt like rubber bands.

  The old man took his tiny breaths, his eyes wide, his mouth open. He was trying to speak but all that came out was whu, whu, whu.

  Eric leaned back to take aim. Padgett stared at the barrel, his eyes wild and caged. Eric let him get a good long look. Padgett scrunched his eyes tight against the bullet he knew was coming.

  Eric waited him out.

  When he opened his eyes, Eric shot him in the face.

  “Rule Number Seven.” Eric stood. “Gotta move, gotta move.”

  He went under the stairs and into the back bedroom and opened the closet door. There was a safe there. It was about three feet tall and two feet wide and Eric knew from many late nights with Padgett in their cell that there was nothing inside but phone books. It wasn’t even bolted to the floor. He pulled it out, grunting with the effort, wrestling it from side to side until it cleared the threshold and sat to the left of the door. He was left looking down at floorboards scratched and torn with divots. He lifted a slat and it came up easy. He tossed it behind him and lifted out four more and looked down at the stash—bags and bags of the black tar, tightly packed. He pulled out the bags one by one and placed them on the bed until the hiding place was empty. There were fourteen bags.

  He looked around for a suitcase or gym bag, but there wasn’t one and he went back to the kitchen. He had to step over Padgett’s legs and Monica’s head to open the doors under the sink. He found a box of trash bags there at the same moment it hit him that he’d left Jeffrey propped against these same doors, Jeffrey in his bathrobe and tan socks with the fucking bullet in his throat.

  He noticed splashes and gouts of blood on the drawers to his left and then others on the floor and on the door and the jamb leading into the hall. The spray patterns were fat red moths that he followed into the hall, where he expected to find Jeffrey on his belly, wheezing or dead.

  But he wasn’t there. The blood moths turned at the staircase and then disappeared in the darkness of the narrow, sagging steps and the faded, tattered rug in the center. A naked lightbulb hung from the low ceiling up top.

  Standing there, he could hear a ragged breathing. It came from the right of that lightbulb, back in one of the rooms above him. He could hear a drawer being pulled open.

  He swallowed against a flutter of panic. Rule Number Seven, Rule Number Seven. Don’t think, do it. He backed out onto the porch quick and and grabbed the bag of charcoal he’d seen there. Match Light. No lighter fluid needed. They thought of everything these days.

  In the hall again, he took it slow as he craned his head around the staircase, listening for the rattle of breath from an open throat. When he was sure there was no Jeffrey waiting on the dark stairs or at the top of them, he came around to the bottom step and laid the bag of charcoal there.

  It took about thirty seconds to get the ends of the bag going, and he singed his thumb on the striking wheel of his Bic. Then, all at once, the flames got dancing. Someone must have spilled a shit-ton of liquor on the stairway runner over the years because the flames caught the edges of the faded rug and streaked up the stairs like runway lights. The carbon monoxide got to his head and he stepped back. The smoke was black and insane with that kerosene smell and Eric went to step around the fire, and a bullet chocked up the floor in front of him. Another bullet zipped past his head and hit the door to the porch.

  Eric aimed past the fire and shot up into the darkness. A flash answered him back, several of them, and the bullets hit the walls and spit splinters into his hair.

  He crouched against the wall. Flames licked his ear and he saw that his shoulder was on fire. He slapped at it until it went out, but now the wall was on fire. The wall, the staircase, the bedroom on the other side of the wall. Fuck. The heroin was in that bedroom, waiting on the bed.

  The whole hallway was on fire now and the black billows of oily smoke tore at his eyes and lungs. He shot Jeffrey as Jeffrey jumped over the staircase railing and descended through the flames, a useless 9mm in his hand. Eric shot him again as he landed in the hallway and Jeffrey tipped back off his heels and into the fire, his bathrobe alive with it, one hand still grasping his open throat.

  Eric tried to get around the fire, but it was pointless. It was everywhere now. And anywhere it wasn’t was black with smoke.

  Stupid, he thought. Eric, you’re stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  But not as stupid as the three dead assholes he was leaving behind.

  Eric walked out
the door and back up the cracked stone walk with its ticking trees dripping and ticking, and he climbed in his car and drove out down the dirt road. He turned onto another road of cracked and rubbled tar, and he wondered how the hell people lived in such a shithole of a neighborhood. Get a fucking job, he thought. Lay off the crack. Get some self-respect or you’re no better than gerbils. Yippy fucking gerbils in a shitty little cage.

  Even if his plan had succeeded and he had walked back out of there with several kilos of black tar heroin, there was no guarantee he could have sold it. Who would he have sold it to? He didn’t know anyone back in Boston who could move that kind of weight, and even if he was introduced to that type of person, they’d probably rip him off. Probably have to kill him while they were at it so he didn’t come back at them.

  So maybe it was just as well, but now he was heading home with no stake and no way to make money. Not that there wouldn’t be a way to make money as long as he kept his eyes open and his ears to the ground. One good thing about shitty old East Buckingham, there was so much dirty money flowing in and out of that neighborhood on any given day—far more than any legitimate income—that a smart man just had to be patient.

  He pulled out his list of rules, unfolded it with one hand, and propped it on his thigh to read as he drove. It was dark in the car, but he knew it by heart, didn’t have to read it anymore really, just liked what it represented down there on his leg. In his handwriting, the letters carefully etched there—

  1. Never trust a convict.

  2. No one loves you.

  3. Shoot first.

  4. Brush three times a day.

  5. They’d do it to you.

  6. Get fucking paid.

  7. Work fast.

  8. Always appear reasonable.

  9. Get a dog.

  He took a left at the train tracks and saw the lights of the 7-Eleven ahead, thinking the trip down seemed twice as long as the trip back, and how it was weird that it usually worked like that, and then he thought: Nadia.

  I wonder what she’s up to these days.

  CHAPTER 9

  Stay

  THEY HADN’T SEEN RARDY since the robbery. He’d been discharged from the hospital the next day, they knew that much, but from there he’d gone ghost. They talked it over in the empty bar one morning, half the chairs still up on the tables and the bar top.

  Cousin Marv said, “It ain’t like him.”

  Bob had the paper spread on the bar before him. It was official—the archdiocese had announced the closing of Saint Dominic’s Church in East Buckingham, a closing the cardinal had described as “imminent.”

  Bob said, “He’s missed days before.”

  Cousin Marv said, “Not in a row, not without calling.”

  THERE WERE TWO PICTURES of Saint Dom’s in the paper, one taken recently, the other a hundred years ago. Same sky above. But no one who’d been under the first sky was still alive for the second. And maybe they were glad not to have had to stick around in a world so unrecognizable from the one they entered. When Bob had been a kid, your parish was your country. Everything you needed and needed to know was contained within it. Now that the archdiocese had shuttered half the parishes to pay for the crimes of the kid-diddler priests, Bob couldn’t escape the fact that those days of parish dominion, long dwindling, were gone. He was a certain type of guy, of a certain half-generation, an almost generation, and while there were still plenty of them left, they were older, grayer, they had smoker’s coughs, they went in for checkups and never checked back out.

  “I dunno,” Marv was saying. “This Rardy thing’s got me keyed up, I don’t mind telling you. I mean, I got guys after me and—”

  Bob said, “You don’t have guys after you.”

  Cousin Marv said, “What’d I tell you about the guy in the car?”

  Bob said, “He asked you directions.”

  Cousin Marv said, “But it was the way he did it, the look he was giving me. And what about this guy with the umbrella?”

  Bob said, “That’s about the dog.”

  Cousin Marv said, “‘The dog.’ How do you know?”

  Bob stared into the unlit sections of the barroom and felt death all around him, a side effect, he believed, of the robbery and that poor guy in the back of the van. The shadows became hospital beds, stooped old men shopping for sympathy cards, empty wheelchairs.

  “Rardy’s just sick,” Bob said eventually. “He’ll turn up.”

  BUT A COUPLE OF hours later, with Marv holding down the bar for the hard-core day drinkers, Bob walked over to Rardy’s place, a second-floor apartment sandwiched between two others in a weary three-decker on Perceval.

  Bob sat in the living room with Moira, Rardy’s wife. She’d been a really pretty girl once, Moira, but life with Rardy and a kid with some kind of learning disabilities sucked the pretty out of her like sugar up a straw.

  Moira said, “I ain’t seen him in days.”

  Bob said, “Days, uh?”

  She nodded. “He drinks a lot more than he lets on.”

  Bob sat forward, the surprise showing on his face.

  “I know, right?” she said. “He hides it pretty good but he’s maintenance nipping from the time he’s up in the AM.”

  Bob said, “I’ve seen him take a drink.”

  “The little airplane bottles?” Moira said. “He keeps them in his coat. So, I dunno, he could be with his brothers or some of his old friends from Tuttle Park.”

  “When’s the last time?” Bob asked.

  “I saw him? Couple days. Prick’s done this to me before, though.”

  “You try calling him?”

  Moira sighed. “He don’t answer his cell.”

  The kid appeared in the doorway, still wearing pajamas at three in the afternoon. Patrick Dugan, nine or ten, couldn’t remember which. He gave Bob a blank gaze, even though they’d met a hundred times, then looked at his mother, all itchy, thin shoulders bouncing.

  “You said,” Patrick said to his mother. “I need help.”

  “All right. Let me finish talking to Bob here.”

  “You said, you said, you said. I need help. I need it.”

  “And, honey?” Moira closed her eyes for a brief moment then opened them. “I said I’d be right there and I will. Just show me like we talked about, that you can work by yourself a couple more minutes.”

  “You said, though.” Patrick bounced from one foot to the other in the doorway. “You said.”

  “Patrick.” Moira’s voice was tight with warning now.

  Patrick let loose a howl, his face an unattractive blend of fury and fear. It was a primal sound, a zoo sound, a wail at limited gods. His face turned the red of a sunburn and the cords in his neck stood out. And the howl unfurled and went on and on. Bob looked at the floor, looked out the window, tried to act natural. Moira just looked tired.

  Then the kid clamped his mouth shut and ran away down the hall.

  Moira unwrapped a stick of gum and put it in her mouth.

  She offered the pack to Bob and he thanked her as he took one and they sat there in silence and chewed gum.

  Moira jerked her thumb at the doorway where her son had stood. “Rardy would tell ya that’s why he drinks. They told us Patrick has HDHD? And/or ADD. And/or cognitive disso-something-something. My mother says he’s just an asshole. I dunno. He’s my kid.”

  “Sure,” Bob said.

  “You okay?”

  “Me?” Bob sat back a bit. “Yeah, why?”

  “You’re different.”

  “How?”

  Moira shrugged as she stood. “I dunno. You’re taller or something. You see Rardy? Tell him we need 409 and Tide.”

  She went to see her son. Bob let himself out.

  NADIA AND BOB SAT on the swings in the empty playground in Pen’ Park. Rocco lay at their feet in the sand, a tennis ball in his mouth. Bob glanced at the scar on Nadia’s neck, and she caught him as he looked away.

  “You never ask about it. Only person I e
ver met didn’t ask about it in like the first five minutes.”

  Bob said, “Not my business. It’s yours.”

  Nadia said, “Where are you from?”

  Bob looked around. “I’m from here.”

  “No, I mean, what planet?”

  Bob smiled and shook his head. He finally understood what people were talking about when they said “tickled pink.” That’s about how she made him feel—from a distance, in his mind, or, like now, sitting close enough to touch (though they never had)—tickled pink.

  He said, “People used to use the telephone in public? They went into a booth, they closed the door. Or they talked as softly as they could. Now? People talk about their, ya know, their bowel movements while they’re having them in a public restroom. I don’t understand.”

  Nadia laughed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. No.” She raised a hand in apology. “I’ve just never seen you get worked up. I’m not even sure I follow. What’s a pay phone have to do with my scar?”

  “No one,” Bob said, “respects privacy anymore. Everyone wants to tell you every fucking thing about themselves. Excuse me. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that word. You’re a lady.”

  She smiled an even broader smile. “Keep going.”

  He raised a hand by his ear and didn’t notice until he had. He lowered it. “Everyone wants to tell you something—anything, everything—about themselves and they just go on and on and on. But when it comes time to show you who they are? Their shit is weak, Nadia. Their shit is lacking. And they just cover it up by talking more, by explaining away what can’t be explained away. And then they go on talking more shit about someone else. That make sense?”

  Her big smile had turned into a small one, curious and unreadable at the same time. “I’m not sure.”

  He caught himself licking his upper lip, an old nervous habit. He wanted her to understand. He needed her to understand. He’d never wanted anything so much that he could remember.

  “Your scar?” he said. “That’s yours. You’ll tell me about it when you’ll tell me. Or you won’t. Either way.”