The Blade Itself (26 page)

He looked down. ‘Oh.’

She stepped forward, took his hand gently in hers. The cut was in the meaty part beneath his little finger. There was a chunk of glass stuck there, and she used her nails, catching
a reflection of herself in the mirror as she pulled it from his skin. Thick blood oozed. She looked around for a rag or a cloth, and seeing nothing, pulled off her shirt to wrap his hand. He gasped as the fabric touched the gash. ‘Come on.’

She led him up the hall to the bathroom. Spinning the faucet to cold, she held his hand under the water, the blood streaming thin and pink to spatter against the porcelain. ‘Keep it there.’ She went to the kitchen pantry, found gauze and Neosporin. Back in the bathroom she used a paper towel to pat the wound dry. Clean now, it didn’t look so bad. Jagged, but not too deep. The lips of it already quivered red, so she moved fast, squeezing the ointment, placing the rectangle of gauze and then deftly affixing it, wrapping the white tape in a stripe across his palm. She didn’t meet his eyes, just worked on his hand, and throughout he stood silent and let her. It was calming, something she could handle. Just a cut, a perfectly normal cut. It was life-sized.

But eventually the bandage was in place, and she couldn’t distract herself from everything larger.

‘Danny.’ She held his hand by the fingers, her gaze darting around the room. ‘What are we going to do?’

He put his other hand on her cheek. It was so familiar, so safe, that she both feared and wanted to fall into it. She met his eyes, saw herself mirrored in them. She saw him weighing words, and realized she was praying he found the right ones. Whatever they were.

‘I don’t know.’ He paused. ‘But,’ his hand caressing her cheek, ‘I’d like your help figuring it out.’

For a long moment she stared at him, tried to think dispassionately. She wanted to make proclamations, to hear him swear that there would be no more lies. She wanted him to feel what she’d been going through, and promise that he would never turn away from her again. But none of the
phrases she auditioned sounded right. Maybe there was nothing to say.

In the end, she just put her arms around him and laid her head on the hollow of his chest. They stood together under the bright bathroom lights, holding on to keep from being swept away.

For a moment, it worked.

And then she realized something terrible.

Despite the impossible mess that had become his life, despite the soreness of his aching body and the steady throb of his cut hand, as Karen put her head on his chest Danny felt strangely safe. Spent, both physically and emotionally, but safe nonetheless, as though the confession had created some sort of karmic loophole, a time away from reality. He knew none of their problems had been solved. But he was so tired. Everything could wait, at least a little while. He just wanted to lose himself in their warmth.

Then she pulled away from him. ‘Baby?’

‘Yeah?’

‘What about Patrick?’ She bit her lip. ‘Did he know about Evan threatening us?’

He’d been honest with Patrick, but not with her. That would cut. But he’d had enough of lies. ‘Yes.’ He stepped away and leaned against the counter, his good hand holding the lip of the sink. ‘I told him when he came over for dinner.’ She stared back at him with an intensity that scared him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I needed to talk to someone, and it should have been you.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not that. It’s –’ Her voice broke.

Fear ice-picked him. ‘What?’

‘Patrick…’ She paused. Took a deep breath, very deliberately, then stepped closer, her eyes locked on his like she was trying to beam him something from inside herself. ‘He was murdered.’

‘What?’ He couldn’t have heard her right.

‘He was shot. That’s why Nolan called.’

No.

Oh Christ, no.

The room seemed to pitch, the ceiling looming. A giant fist gripped his heart. Not Patrick. The ten-year-old boy who’d replaced the holy water with Sprite. The joker who always had a story. The friend who’d been part of every stage of his life.

The closest thing he had to a brother.

Spots danced in front of his eyes, and he squeezed the counter. He willed his lungs to breathe, to suck oxygen in, but the air felt thick. He let himself slide down the face of the cabinet to squat on the floor. ‘What happened?’

Karen’s voice was raw. ‘Nolan wouldn’t tell me very much.’ She sat across from him, her legs folded, and took his hands in hers.

‘What did he tell you?’

‘Just that Patrick was shot last week.’

His throat filled with bile. Last week. His friend had been dead for days, and Danny hadn’t known it. Then a far worse idea occurred. ‘When?’

Karen hesitated. ‘They think Monday or Tuesday.’

Right after Danny had told him about Evan. Patrick had promised to stay out of it, but Danny knew with bitter certainty that this was one promise his friend had broken. ‘Evan killed him.’

Karen stared at him, her lips trembling, and nodded.

Blackness swam at the edges of his vision, and his chest felt tight. He scrambled to his feet and stormed out of the bathroom, habit carrying him toward the front door before he realized he had nowhere to go. He wanted to smash something. To smash everything. He spun in the living room and kicked one of her moving boxes, sending a pile of loose photos flying, each image spinning in flashes of color and memory as it fluttered to the floor.

Patrick was dead.

Because of him.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Karen said from behind him, her words so eerily aligned with his thoughts that he wondered if he’d spoken aloud. ‘It’s not. If you want to blame someone –’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I do want to blame someone. I want to blame Evan.’ He looked at the mess of photos around him, then sighed and dropped on the couch. ‘But it’s not that simple.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because none of this would have happened if I’d just.. .’ He trailed off.
If you’d just what? Not told Patrick? Not walked out seven years ago? Not swiped that first
Playboy
in ’81? How far back do you want to go with this? Because your catalog of errors is many things, but short ain’t one of them
.

‘I fucked everything up, baby.’ He felt bone weary. The world had hollowed him out. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’ She sat beside him and stroked his hair. Her voice was soft and unhesitating. ‘We’ll find a way.’

He wanted a quiet, dark place to cry. To mourn his brother.

But more than that he wanted to find Evan, pin him to the ground, and beat him to death. Punch and kick until his legs failed and his knuckles broke.

Hold on to that. Anger is a gift
.

One deep breath, and then another. There would be time to mourn Patrick later. The question was how many other regrets he’d be carrying at that point. Painful as it was, he couldn’t think about Patrick right now.

Instead, he had to think about the man who killed him.

‘Evan is still out there.’ He could feel her muscles clench at the mention of his name. It didn’t matter. ‘I’ve got to go after him.’

‘You?’ She jerked away. ‘No. We’ll call the police.’

‘They can’t help us.’

‘If we tell them about Patrick –’

He shook his head. ‘It’s past that.’

‘Is this some macho thing?’ She stared at him. ‘I don’t want to lose you over something from the movies.’

‘It’s not that. It’s Tommy. Richard’s son. Evan will kill him at the first siren.’

‘So why does that mean you have to stop him? Why don’t we just get out of here, get away?’

‘You’d do that?’

She hesitated, looked around their living room, and then nodded slowly.

He leaned in and kissed her soft lips, let himself dream it for a moment. Just hop in the car and go, take what money they had and start over. Somewhere without winter winds and bleak history. Somewhere they could be different people.

It was a beautiful dream, but that was all it was.

‘Evan would kill the boy just to spite me. And maybe Richard, too. And even if he wouldn’t,’ he paused, ‘I think I’ve done enough running in the last seven years.’

‘Then what?’ She stared at him. ‘Pretend you’re John Wayne?’

He sighed, closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’ Unbidden, an image of Patrick rose up in front of him. That day at the pub, not a month earlier, when he’d watched in the mirror as Patrick came in, flirted with the girls in the corner booth. How he’d thrown his head back and howled with laughter when Danny shot him in the mirror. Danny rubbed at his eyes, wanting to smear the image. ‘“Running just breeds faster problems.”’ He opened his eyes. ‘Dad used to say that.’

She was silent. He knew her mind was working, trying to
find them a way out, an option where they walked away unscathed. A smart play.

‘Did I ever tell you how my dad died?’

She softened. ‘Of course. In a car accident.’

He nodded. ‘His brakes went out. He drove an old Ford pickup with big tool chests in the back.’ He smiled. ‘My friend Seamus and I used to take the tools out of the compartments and climb inside, pretend we were smuggling ourselves in the
Millennium Falcon
. We’d fight over who got to be Han and who had to be Luke. That was twenty years ago, and Dad was still driving it when he died. The money was never there for a new one, so he just rode it into the ground, even as the salt ate holes in the underbelly and the rust crept up the doors.’ He sighed. ‘You know the last time I saw him, I was in prison?’

She nodded, her face creased.

‘He came to see me. He looked so out of place. He’d worked his ass off since he was a teenager. Work was part of being a man to him. Criminals, people who would steal instead of earn, they were beneath his contempt. He hated that I was there, hated what I’d become. But I was his son, so he came to see me.’ He shook his head. ‘We talked about baseball.’

‘I’m sure he knew that you loved him.’

He blew air through his mouth, stared at the ceiling. ‘That was December. A couple weeks later he was driving that ancient piece of junk down the Eisenhower. It was snowing, and the roads were very slippery. Sunday morning, but he was on his way to a job anyway. His brakes failed.’

Karen moved behind him, put her arms around his neck, her chest warm against his back. ‘Baby, you’ve told me all this. You don’t have to relive it now.’

He shook his head. ‘What I didn’t tell you was that the cop who’d responded to the accident call came to the
funeral. That really touched me.’ Danny remembered him perfectly. A football player’s build, cop mustache, and bone-cracking handshake, but a voice that was almost a whisper. ‘I went over to thank him, and he told me something that I’ve never been able to forget.’

Karen tightened her grip on him, but it felt like he’d gone numb.

‘He was a beat cop, and he’d seen a lot of accidents. After a while, he said, you learned to read them. A story written in skid marks and broken glass and points of impact. They were mostly the same, he said. People asleep at the wheel, or drunk, or careless. But Dad’s had been different.’

‘How?’ Karen said, her cheek against his.

‘It was the tire marks, the cop said, that gave it away.’ Danny sighed, remembering the ‘of course’ feeling. The way the scene had flashed in his imagination, clear in every detail. Dad at the wheel, talk radio playing low, a cigarette in his mouth. The patched seats radiating cold. Suddenly, the sense that something wasn’t quite right. His father pumping the brakes, feeling them go soft. Staring out at the snowy morning, at the lines of cars crowding him.

‘Dad swerved into the concrete barrier on purpose.’

‘Suicide?’ Her voice was incredulous.

Danny shook his head. ‘His brakes were gone. The roads were icy, and there were a lot of cars. He could have tried to move to the right, off the road, hoped that everyone would get out of his way. But if it didn’t work, he might have crashed into another car. Maybe a family.’

He turned to look at her. ‘So instead of risking other people, he jerked the wheel to the left. They were widening the road, and there was a concrete construction barrier on that side. The cop said he was going fifty or sixty miles an hour. Dad didn’t have a chance, and he knew it.’

Karen held his gaze, but her eyes were wet.

‘I’ve been living with that for years. I had to be escorted to my father’s funeral by marshals. I thought that was bad enough. But worse was that three months later, when they let me out of prison, I went right back to my old life. Oh, I pretended to go straight. I got a new apartment, a job tending bar, but I knew I was bullshitting myself. It wasn’t two months before Evan and I ripped off the manager as he deposited the night’s take, and then it was back to old habits. It wasn’t until the pawnshop that I even started trying to do what I should have done all along. What my dad did without hesitation.’

The memory burned. For a guy who thought he brought intelligence to the table, he’d made a mess of a lot of things. When Evan had come back into his life, they’d sat in a hot dog joint and argued about the reasons, Evan claiming that it was economics, that the system put the gun in his hand. That they were in a fight to the death with the odds stacked against them. In a world where men like his father worked seven days a week just to survive while men like Richard had everything handed to them, he couldn’t deny that there was some truth to the argument. But it was too simple to be complete. Because the fact was that there had been moments when two choices had opened up before him, and he’d made the wrong one. Made it knowing it for what it was.

‘No more.’ As he said the words, looking into Karen’s eyes, he realized that he meant it. No more fear of consequences. No more convenient wrong choices.

No more smart plays.

And suddenly he knew what to do.

Through the broad front windows, menacing clouds mottled a chill blue sky. The morning sunlight was pewter, stark and lacking warmth. Halloween had always seemed like the first day of winter to Danny, and this year that felt particularly true.

‘I’m at the coffee shop.’ He heard a faint echo half a heartbeat behind each word. They kept making cell phones smaller instead of making them work. ‘I’m going to wait a few minutes to be sure. Then I’ll head over.’