The Good Boy (15 page)

“All Sarah seems to remember is Elgin Poole.”

Rima opens her beer. “But he’s locked up, right?”

“That doesn’t stop the nightmares.”

“She needs you.”

Pete ducks under the bar. Ri must think he was talking about Sarah and her dreams; certainly, since she’s the one who saw Elgin with Joel. Elgin, making it known that things could still be handled the true Hustler way, right there in the street. And Sarah, letting Pete know she couldn’t handle it at all.
Fuck yes,
she said,
sell the house. We can’t live like this.

“She doesn’t need me,” he says, elbowing up next to Ri. “Hell, she doesn’t want me. And you know, it’s going to be her own fault if she stays married to me much longer, because half of nothing ain’t much.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were thinking about divorce.”

“I’m not thinking about it. Sarah’s the one. But she thinks—she thinks the kids don’t pick up on the things she says to me. And I’ll tell you, they do. Joel remembers everything he’s ever read and everything any teacher or adult ever said, verbatim. McKenna hasn’t opened a book since we moved, and every other day or so she’s completely hormonally impaired. But she can read people. She’s smart that way. They have to know.”

Rima pops the top off her new beer, says, “Then they also know you’re both good people who are in a bad spot.”

“They’re in it too, Ri. But thanks for trying to make me see the bright side.”

“There’s always a bright side. Which pisses me off. Which is also why I point it out.”

Pete’s cell buzzes on the bar. The display reads midnight, the caller’s number private. Not Sarah. And it wouldn’t be Kitty, would it? She wouldn’t call now, make it complicated. “Hang on,” he tells Rima, then answers, “Murphy.”

“Murphy, this is Craig McHugh, from Area Three? Listen, first off, your daughter is okay—”

“My daughter?” Pete’s heart feels hot and fucking trapped.

Rima puts down her beer, takes Pete’s from his hand.

“I’m here with her in Uptown. We were called out to this party—there was a shooting—”

“Give me the address.”

*   *   *

Pete uses the siren and blows every light on Clark Street.

When he arrives at the scene there are blue-and-whites everywhere, the dump of a house lit up accordingly. He parks in front of a fire hydrant, watches Jed Pagorski approach from the perimeter.

Jed’s a cop Pete knows from Twenty; Pete was getting out of there right when Jed was getting in. He’s maybe a little headstrong, but as loyal as they come. He’ll probably never leave the district, or the street. Have to respect a guy like that.

Pete gets out of the car and Jed notes his plainclothes, the empty backseat. He asks, “You sniffing this one out on your own?”

He must not know about McKenna. Pete doesn’t want him to know, either; the fewer the better. He says, “I’m looking for Craig McHugh.”

“He’s in the backyard.” Jed spits chew to the curb. “But you gotta go through the house, ’cause they taped off the gate over there.” As if it weren’t bright yellow, he points out the police line across the way.

“Thanks,” Pete says, and pops the trunk for his vest, hoping the police emblem is taken more seriously than the Metro’s on his shirt underneath.

Up the stairs and inside, Pete decides whoever owns the place must’ve quit the upkeep around 1977. He follows the worn track in the shabby orange loop-pile carpet through the living room to the kitchen, where the linoleum floor’s olive-green pattern could be hallucinatory, if you smoked the right pipe.

Somebody’s been smoking in here, all right, probably since ’77. It’s stale as a pack-a-day ashtray, the residue enough to cloud the window over the sink. The once-cream-colored wallpaper above the wood paneling is curled up and brown in spots, like tobacco tar through a butt.

Pete uses his shirtsleeve to rub a clean spot in the window, looks out back. There, four cops comb the yard, probably for shell casings. Off to the side along the fence, another uniform interviews kids who’re lined up there. By the garage, two more uniforms take orders from a third; Pete decides he’s the man to talk to and heads out and down the steps.

Across the yard, Pete stops a few feet from the threesome and says, “Detective McHugh,” with some certainty, but mostly hope.

The third man turns, stretches his jaw, and tries to place the latest disruption. “And you are?”

“Pete Murphy,” he says, and for the other two, “K-nine.”

“Right,” McHugh says; and to the others, “Excuse us.”

McHugh directs Pete to another spot, lifts his glasses, wipes his eyes and says, “Jesus Christ, the incompetence. We’ve got a revolver with three spent casings inside and only one bullet recovered in the victim’s chest. I want to know about shots two and three, and that boot wants to know if we shouldn’t check about the asshole kid’s FOID card. I do believe there is such a thing as a stupid question. I get ’em all the time.”

Pete doesn’t care about incompetence or guns or Jesus, for that matter, and McHugh must read it from his face because he says, “I’m sorry. Your daughter is waiting in my squad, north end of the block. Did you talk to anybody else?”

“Nobody who’d say anything.”

“Good. Then get her out of here before she winds up a witness.”

“Thanks. I appreciate this.”

“Hey,” McHugh says, “
this
is nothing. Kids do stupid things, I don’t care how smart they think they are.” He puts out his hand, and Pete shakes it. “It’s what you do that matters now. Make sure you tell her you love her but that next time, you’ll kill her.”

“You’ve got a daughter?”

“She continues to narrowly survive.” He touches his hat, walks back to his team.

Pete waves at Jed on the way out and drives the block north to find McKenna. He double-parks behind McHugh’s squad and rounds the back bumper to the passenger side. He sees her recently really-blond head; she’s right where McHugh said she’d be, front seat.

Pete opens the door and McKenna looks up at him from her slump, eyes dark. She says, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

Daddy.
Going for the heartstrings already. “Yeah yeah,” Pete says. “Let’s go.”

She gets out and she’s wearing someone else’s coat; it hangs well past her hands and balloons over her backside. She’s gained some weight, despite the fact that Pete rarely sees her eat. Then again, Pete rarely sees her, period.

In the squad, Pete smells smoke again. Could be sticking to his clothes from the quick trip through the house, but probably not. He cracks the windows to make that point, and waits to speak until he turns out onto the main drag toward home.

The first thing he wants to know is: “Does your mother have any idea where you’ve been?”

“I tried to tell her. She was on the phone.”

Of course she was. Much of Sarah’s despondence is kept afloat by her network of hawkish friends—mostly women from the old neighborhood, and her cousin in DeKalb—the kind of ladies who love to know they aren’t as miserable as so-and-so. Sarah’s been so-and-so for a while now: if Pete’s headline hadn’t been enough to get attention, Elgin Poole was right in many of their backyards. Ricky’s death was just a new reason to call.

The silence in the car makes McKenna say, “Dad, I don’t know what happened. I was inside when—”

“Stop right there. Stop at ‘I don’t know’ and keep it that way, because I don’t want to know, and I certainly don’t want the state’s attorney to know. I mean, have you paid a shred of attention to what’s happened to me? Do you want to be the star of the next scandal?”

“No.”

“No, you haven’t been paying attention?”

“No,” she says again.

He waits to continue, hoping what he said is sinking in. He turns at the next light, a shortcut to the house; they aren’t far away. Not far away at all from the party his fourteen-year-old could walk to. Not too far at all from where his daughter dodged a fucking bullet.

He wants to make sure: “You didn’t tell your mother where you’ve been?”

“I told her to call if she wanted. She didn’t call.”

Pete turns onto their street, kills his headlights, drives past their house and U-turns.

McKenna asks, “What are you doing?”

“I’m saving your ass. If your mom is up and she actually asks where you’ve been, you better have a short and sweet story, because the last thing any of us need is for
her
to know about
this.
”

“You won’t tell her?”

He jams on the brakes. “Look, I don’t care if you drank or smoked or tried things you know better than to try. I know you’re smarter than all that back there, and so do you. And what I also know, that maybe you need to get through your head, is that you will
not
be a witness. Understand?”

She nods, slow and circular, yes and no.

“Yes or no?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Good. Then give me that coat, pull yourself together, go inside, and Go. To. Bed. If you can manage that, we might just keep this teetering world we’ve got from flipping over and shattering.”

“Okay,” she says and she sounds afraid but fuck that, she should be.

“I don’t have to tell you you’re never associating with those kids again,” he tells her anyway.

She takes off the coat. “I’m sorry.”

Pete releases the door locks and lets her have the last, sorry word.

As she gets out of the car and starts for the house Pete’s heart feels trapped again, seeing her in her too-tight jeans, her flimsy shirt. It’s not all weight gain; she’s changing. She’s growing up. What really gets him right then, though, is that he can’t remember: did he tell her he loved her?

He waits there, squad in the street, lights out. He thinks about turning on the radio and then thinks better of it, since he’s probably a top story by now. He can only imagine what a shitstorm the press will make of tonight if they get hold of it. How quickly they’ll turn McHugh’s favor into a cop conspiracy: it’ll be a six-part story about the department’s thick and murky blue line. Pete will be a pretty sensational bad guy, arresting an innocent man one day, bailing out his not-so-innocent daughter the next.

Up at the house, the living room light is still on—same as when he drove by the first time. Pete stays parked in the street; he’s sure Mike could use a few more minutes. He looks at the strip of grass that’s supposed to be a yard and thinks about their old house, a real yard all around it. God, this fucking place. What he did, and didn’t have anything to do with, to get them here.

He rolls down the windows and closes his eyes and breathes the night air. He hopes Mike successfully bypassed Sarah. And that she brushed her teeth.

Eventually he starts the engine and drives around the block, turns into the alley, and backs into the garage.

On the way inside he stops by Butch’s cage to make sure he’s got water, and to say good night, but the run is empty, the lock open. The dog must be in bed with Joel; probably another thing Sarah didn’t say no to while she was on the phone.

Inside, he hears the TV blaring: some of Sarah’s stupid court-show characters arguing. The pretense in their voices puts him immediately on edge, his emotional guns locked and loaded.

Then he finds her there in the living room. She’s fallen asleep, her neck bent so her cheek rests on the sofa’s hard arm; she has a book in her hand, one finger marking her place between pages. The title:
Raising Troubled Kids.

The reading light glares at her, unforgiving, hollowing her face, defining the lines around her eyes. She has become so thin. On the side table next to the lamp, her empty wineglass sits, its rim stained the same purple as the purse of her lips.

Even fast asleep, her breath is slight, tense. As though she senses him watching, she adjusts to the sag of the couch, the book clutched. When she sighs, Pete wonders if she’s dreaming; if her dreams will ever be good again.

The TV says,
“This can’t happen, Cyrus.”

Cyrus says,
“Sometimes I was sitting there, Your Honor, right where you are, feeling like my hands were tied.”

Pete sits in his chair beside the couch and looks down at his hands. He hates himself. Hates that he’s made their lives no better than a bad TV show.

Below his feet, the carpet is stained, varnish bled out where the owner’s wooden bookcase sat for decades. Now his chair is here, along with what Sarah moved from the old place. The rest she had to put in storage, because of the space issue; still, none of what’s here really fits. The coffee table is contemporary, the chairs mismatched; even the little things seem disparate. Like the Americana-style plaque she bought at some craft fair years ago that says:
A HOUSE IS MADE OF WALLS AND BEAMS, A HOME IS BUILT OF LOVE AND DREAMS.
Or the family photos displayed in silver-lined frames, snapped back when smiles came easily. Happiness: a decoration.

But what can he expect? He said this was temporary, too. He promised her they’d move on from the last year, and from here. But here they are, and all he’s done, really, is ask her to live on promise. He never had any idea how to help her do that and now he’s certainly ruined it.

When the show cuts to a commercial Pete finds the remote and kills the TV. Sarah doesn’t stir, so he takes her book and puts it on the too-modern table. Then he covers her with the plaid afghan blanket that has never gone with anything. He’ll let her sleep here; she doesn’t sleep much.

“You’re home,” Sarah says as he reaches for the last light switch.

He whispers, “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Is McKenna home?”

“I guess so. Her shoes are.”

“Are you okay?” She rubs the sleep from her eyes.

“I’m fine.” He puts out a hand to help her up. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Okay.” Sarah takes his hand and she feels weightless. “I’m exhausted.”

He follows her steps, light but uneven, maybe tipsy. He remembers when late nights like these led to other things, and being quiet was an arousing game; now it’s quiet because there’s simply nothing to say.

Upstairs in the hall, there’s no life apparent in McKenna’s room. She’s hiding, Pete knows; probably wondering if he meant it when he said it’d all be forgotten.