A Drink Before the War (7 page)

Angie said, “Are
you out of your fucking mind?” It came out in a harsh whisper. We were sitting in the alcove, looking out at the street. Jenna and Simone were in the kitchen, probably having a similar conversation.

I said, “You don't like it?”

“No,” she said, “I don't like it.”

“Twelve hours more or less won't make much difference.”

“Bullshit. Patrick, this is retarded. We were hired to find her and call Mulkern. OK. We found her. Now, we should be making the call and going home.”

“I don't think so.”

“
You
don't think so?” she hissed. “How nice. Except you're not the only component in this equation. This is a partnership.”

“I know it's—”

“Do you? I have a license too. Remember? You may have started the agency, but I've put my time in now too. I get shot at and beat up and sit on forty-eight-hour stakeouts too. I'm the one who had to sweat out the DA's decision whether to indict on Bobby Royce. I have a say, here. Fifty percent of one.”

“And you say?”

“I say this is bullshit. I say we do what we were hired to do and go home.”

“And I say…” I checked myself. “And I
ask
that you trust me on this and give me till morning. Hell, Ange, we'd
end up sitting on her till then anyway. Mulkern's not going to get out of bed and drive up to Wickham at this time of night anyway.”

She considered that. Her olive skin was darkened to the shade of coffee in the ill-lit alcove and her full lips were pursed tightly. She said, “Maybe. Maybe.”

“Then what's the problem?” I said and started to get up.

She grabbed my wrist. “Not so fast, boy.”

“What?”

“Your logic is good, Skid; it's your motives I have a problem with.”

“What motives?”

“You tell me.”

I sat back down, sighed. I looked at her, gave it my best “Who me?” look. “I don't see that it hurts to learn everything we can while we have the chance. That's my only motive.”

She shook her head slowly, watching me steadily and with some sadness. She ran a hand through her hair, let the loose bangs fall back down on her forehead. “She's not a cat somebody left out in the rain, Patrick. She's a grown woman who committed a crime.”

“I'm not so sure,” I said.

“Either way it's irrelevant. We're not social workers.”

“What's your point, Ange?” I said, suddenly tired.

“You're not being honest with yourself. Or me.” She stood up. “We'll play it your way if you want. I can't say it'll make all that much difference. But, remember something.”

“What?”

“When Jim Vurnan asked us if we'd take the job, I was willing to refuse it. You're the one who said working for Mulkern and his kind wouldn't be a problem.”

I held out my hands. “And my position hasn't changed.”

“I hope it hasn't, Patrick, because we're not so goddamn successful that we can afford to botch a job like this.”

She walked out of the alcove, into the kitchen.

I looked at my reflection in the glass. It didn't seem too pleased with me either.

 

I pulled my car in front of the house where I could keep an eye on it from the alcove. Nothing was stolen or broken or keyed and I thanked the great auto god in the sky.

Angie came back out of the kitchen and called Phil to tell him she'd be staying overnight and it turned into an ordeal, his voice plainly audible through the receiver as he ranted on about
his
fucking needs, damnit. Angie got a blank, faraway look on her face, and she held the receiver in her lap and closed her eyes for a moment. She turned her head and opened her eyes. “You need me?”

I shook my head. “I'll see you at the office tomorrow around ten or so.”

She spoke back into the phone in a voice so soft and placating that it made me nauseous, and shortly after she hung up, she was gone.

I'd checked to see that it was the only phone and bolted the back door so no one could open it without making noise. I sat in the window seat and listened to the house. Through the bedroom wall, I could hear Jenna still trying to explain our deal to Simone.

Earlier, Simone had made some squawking noises about kidnapping and federal offenses, quoting me a whole shitload of legal references that she learned from
L.A. Law
. She was on something of a tear, babbling at the top of her voice about “enforced incarceration” or some such nonsense, when I assured her that the alternative to my handling of the situation would be a swift legal execution of her sister's affairs by Sterling Mulkern and company. She shut up.

The voices in the bedroom died out and a few minutes later I heard the door open and Jenna's reflection rose up over my shoulder in the window. She was wearing an oversize T-shirt over a pair of old, gray sweatpants, and her
face was scrubbed clean of makeup. She held two cans of beer in her hand and when I turned, she put one in my hand. She said, “My sister made me promise to replace these.”

“I'll bet.”

She smiled and sat on the window seat across from mine. “She told me to tell you to stay out of her fridge. She don't want you touching her food.”

“Understandable,” I said and cracked the beer. “Maybe I'll go in after you guys fall asleep, move things around just to piss her off.”

She took a sip of the beer. “She's a good girl, Simone. Just really angry.”

“At?”

“Who you got? The world in general, I s'pose. The white man in particular.”

“I don't suppose I'm doing much to change her impression.”

“No, you're not.”

She seemed almost serene, sitting there in the window, head resting against the pane, beer in her lap. Without any makeup, she looked younger somehow, less exhausted. Once, she might have even been pretty, someone men commented on as she walked down the street. I tried to picture her that way—a young Jenna Angeline with a glow of confidence flushing her face because she was young and under the illusion that her youth and her beauty gave her options—but I couldn't. Time had laid too heavy a hand on her.

She said, “Your partner, she didn't seem all that pleased, either.”

“She wasn't. It was all up to her, we'd have made the phone call and gone home by now.”

She nodded and took another sip of the beer. She shook her head slightly. “Simone,” she said, “sometimes I don't understand that girl.”

“What's to understand?” I said.

“All that hate,” she said. “You know?”

“There's a lot to hate out there,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Believe me, I know. Seems there's so much, you got to kind of pick and choose. Earn what you hate, I guess. Simone, now, she just hate everything. And sometimes…”

“What?”

“Sometimes, I think she hate cause she don't know what else to do with herself. I mean, me, I got good reason to hate what I hate, believe me. But her, I'm not so sure she's…”

“Earned it?”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

I thought about that. I couldn't see much to argue with. I've learned more about the capacity to hate than anything else since I started doing this work.

She drank some more beer. “Seems to me, the world going to give you plenty to be angry about, either way. Getting a chip on your shoulder before you've even seen how bad it can be, what the world can do to you when it really sets its mind to it…seems to me, that's just foolish thinking.”

“Damn straight,” I said and held up my can. She smiled, a small one, and glanced her can off mine, and I realized what part of me had known since I'd first seen her photograph: I liked her.

She finished her beer a minute or so later and went to bed with a small wave behind her as she entered the bedroom.

The night passed slowly and I shifted in my seat a lot, paced a bit back and forth, stared at my car. Angie was home now, taking another few steps in that grotesque dance of pain she called a marriage. A harsh word, a slap or two, a few screamed accusations, and on to bed until the next day. Love. I wondered again why she was with him, what possessed a person of her quality and judgment to put up with such shit, but before I slipped completely into the
realms of the self-righteous, my palm rested on my abdomen, on the patch of scar tissue, which always reminded me of the price of love in its least idealized form.

Thank you, father.

Sitting in the quiet of the dark living room, I also remembered my own marriage, which had lasted about a minute and a half. Angie and Phil at least had a sense of dedication to the love between them, however twisted that love might be, which Renee and I never had. The only thing our marriage had taught me about love was that it ends. And looking out at the empty street from Simone Angeline's window seat, it occurred to me that one of the reasons I'm successful at the work I do is that come three o'clock in the morning, when most of the world is asleep, I'm still up doing my job because I don't have any place better to be.

I played some solitaire and told my stomach it wasn't hungry. I considered raiding Simone's fridge but figured she might have booby-trapped it; I'd grab the mustard and trip a wire, take an arrow in the head.

Dawn came in a faded line of pale gold that pushed up the black cover of night, then an alarm clock went off in the next room, and soon I heard the shower running. I stretched until I heard the satisfactory crack of bones and muscles, then did my morning regimen of fifty sit-ups and fifty push-ups. By the time I'd finished, the second turn in the shower had been taken, and the two sisters were standing by the door, ready to go.

Simone said, “You take anything from my fridge?”

“No,” I said, “but I think I may have mistaken it for the toilet last night. I was really tired. Do you keep vegetables in the toilet?”

She brushed past me into the kitchen. Jenna looked at me and shook her head. She said, “Bet you were real popular in the second grade.”

“Good humor has no age limit,” I said, and she rolled her eyes.

Simone had a job, and I'd debated all night whether I should let her go to it. In the end I figured Simone hadn't shown any homicidal tendencies toward her sister that I'd noticed, so I was pretty sure she'd keep her mouth shut.

As we stood on the porch watching her drive off, I said, “Does this Socia guy know about Simone?”

Jenna was working her way into a light cardigan even though the temperature was already on a steady cruise toward the seventies at eight in the morning. She said, “He met her. Long time ago. In Alabama.”

“How long since she moved up north?”

She shrugged. “Two months.”

“And Socia definitely doesn't know she's here?”

She looked at me like I was drugged. “We both be dead now, Socia knew that.”

We walked to my car and Jenna looked at it as I opened the door. “Never grew up totally, did you, Kenzie?”

And I'd once thought the car would impress people.

 

The drive back was as boring as the one up. I had Pearl Jam's
Ten
playing, and if Jenna minded, she didn't say anything. She didn't talk much, period, just stared out at the road and kneaded the bottom of her cardigan with her thin fingers when they weren't occupied with a cigarette.

As we neared the city, the Hancock and Prudential buildings rising up in pale blue to greet us, she said, “Kenzie.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever feel needed?”

I thought about it. “Sometimes,” I said.

“Who by?”

“My partner. Angie.”

“You need her?”

I nodded. “Sometimes, yeah. Hell, yeah.”

She looked out the window. “You best hold on to her then.”

 

Rush hour was in full swing by the time we got off 93 near Haymarket, and it took us close to half an hour to move the mile up onto Tremont Street.

Jenna's safety-deposit box was in the Bank of Boston on Tremont, across from the Boston Common at the Park Street corner. The Common runs back in a mall of cement here, past two squat buildings that serve as the Park Street T-station entrances, past a gaggle of vendors and street musicians and newspaper hawkers and winos. Crowds of businessmen and women and politicians walk briskly up the walkways where the Common turns green again and rises in a slope to the steep steps that climb to Beacon Street, the State House towering overhead, its gold dome looking down on the minions.

It's impossible to park on Tremont or even idle there for more than thirty seconds. A platoon of meter maids, imported from the female Hitler Youth shortly after the fall of Berlin, roam the street, at least two to a block, pit bull faces on top of fire hydrant bodies, just waiting for someone stupid enough to stall traffic on their street. Say, “Have a nice day,” to one of them and she'll have your car towed for being a smart-ass. I turned onto Hamilton Place, behind the Orpheum Theater, and parked in a loading zone. We walked the two blocks to the bank. I started to walk in with her, but she stopped me. “An old black lady going into a bank with a big young white boy. What they going to think?”

“I'm your gigolo?”

She shook her head. “They going to think you're the law, escorting the nigger who got caught doing something. Again.”

I nodded. “All right.”

She said, “I didn't go through all this just so I could run on you now, Kenzie. I could have climbed out a window last night, that was the case. So, whyn't you wait across the street?”

Sometimes you got to trust people.

She went in alone, and I crossed Tremont and stood near Park Street Station, in the middle of the mall, the shadow of Park Street Church's white spire falling on my face.

She wasn't in there long.

She came out, saw me, and waved. She waited for a break in the traffic then came across the street. Her stride was full, her purse held tightly in her hand as she came across the mall. Her eyes had brightened, brown marble with flames glowing in the center, and she looked much younger than the picture I'd been given.