The Lazarus Heart (7 page)

"You keep your hands right there, Linda, and you're gonna be just fine. Ain't nothing gonna happen to you if you do what I say. Do you
understand
me?"

"Yeah," she said, sounding very faint and far away from him. "Yeah, I know what you mean, Frank."

"I'll be right back, I
swear.
I'm only going as far as the patrol car, okay?"

"Yeah," she said, and he left her there and descended the steps to the crowd of people still milling about in front of the building. The fat woman with the green curlers looked at him and grinned, showing a bright silver tooth right up front.

"You leave anyone alive up there, young man?" she asked him as he stepped between their bodies. He didn't reply, ignored them all. It had started to rain again while he and Linda were upstairs and he felt the drops cold against his skin, washing him clean. He gripped the ring in his hand and walked toward the car, praying to no God he believed in that he could at least reach it before he puked, praying that he could get help before she died alone up there.

As he reached the curb there was the sound of thunder off toward the river, a rumble like muffled shotgun fire, and the urgent wail of approaching sirens.

Linda Getty didn't die, but she almost lost her leg and would walk with a limp for the rest of her life. Frank visited her only once in the hospital, when he returned the white gold ring to her. Linda accepted it as if she were taking back a confession. She was in fact doing something very much like that, Frank knew. Linda resigned from the force while she was still struggling through physical therapy, and Frank moved effortlessly up to homicide.

But not before he learned that there had been at least two squad cars within minutes of their location in the Iberville projects that afternoon. Both had reported engine trouble to dispatch when the call for assistance had come in over their radios. And when Frank got back to the station that day, he found that someone had spray- painted dyke in fat red letters across the front of Linda's locker and taped used and

bloody tampons to the locker's door.

He stood looking at it for a while, his old familiar fear of discovery wrestling an outrage he'd never felt before, not in all those times when he'd gone along with the idiot queer jokes or turned the other way when someone was roughing up a fag, all those times he'd played along for fear of arousing suspicion and drawing the bullies' wrath his way.

He stared at the desecrated locker and saw Linda Getty slumped limp against that wall, her life pumping out of her, the blood staining her blue cop pants black. She hadn't even fucking cried, had calmly slipped the ring off her finger.

Tell her I still love her.

The ring was still tucked in his shirt pocket, and the sticky blood staining its smooth metal surface was so much like the crimson graffiti slur splashed across the locker door. Later Frank would know that if each man is given only one moment when redemption is somewhere within his reach, that moment in the locker room had been his, his one chance to change the course of his life. A handful of seconds when everything was suddenly made so clear, as simple as the resigned tone of Linda's voice coming through the pain and shock.

And then Donovan said something behind him, "You gotta be careful who you ride with, Frank," just like that, and the anger rising inside him was drowned in the fear, the cold, watery fear that had put out so many fires before and would smother a thousand more. Frank turned and faced Joe Donovan, a heavyset man with acne scars, and the words were on his lips, the
right
words, but when he spoke they slipped away and all that came out was, "Yeah. Yeah, I guess you can't be too careful, can you?"

"No," Joe Donovan said, "you sure as hell can't, buddy." He smiled with the reaffirmation that he was speaking to one of his own, someone who understood that sometimes sacrifices had to be made for the sake of maintaining a greater purity. "It wasn't nothing personal, Frank. You know that."

"Yeah," Frank replied, "yeah, sure."

So the next day, hung over and exhausted from long hours filled with drunken nightmares where he was forced to face down Roy the psycho crackhead again and again, Frank went to see her and return the ring. When he arrived there was another woman in the room, a skinny white girl with a jewel in her right nostril and tattoos on her arms. Linda whispered something to the girl and she left them alone, glancing suspiciously at Frank as she passed him on her way out to the hall.

Linda's eyes were as glazed with the painkillers as they had been with pain the day before, her voice flat and raw, sludgy. She blinked at him and attempted to smile. Frank fished the ring from his pocket. He'd washed the blood off it, and it shone dully in the white light of the hospital room.

"Thank you," she croaked.

Frank shrugged. "No problem. Hey, they treating you all right in here?"

"Everything a girl could ask for." She did smile then, a tired and honest smile that made him glance down at the scuffed toes of his shoes.

"Well, you let me know if you need anything. I gotta get back to the station. All the goddamn paperwork from yesterday. You know how that shit goes." She nodded, then reached out and touched his hand.

"Frank, you did know, didn't you?"

He didn't answer, looked nervously from his shoes to her to the door, just wanting to get the hell away.

"No," he said, and that part was the truth, he hadn't. "Shit. I'm sorry. I thought everybody knew."

"You just rest and get better, okay?" he said. The girl came back then and stood in the doorway, silently announcing that his time was up.

"Thanks," Linda croaked again. "You saved my ass out there." "Hey, just doing my job, right?"

"See you soon," she whispered as the drugs pulled her back down toward unconsciousness, releasing him, his duty done. Frank made it all the way to the elevator before he started shaking so badly that he had to sit down.

He often dreams about Roy the psycho crackhead these days. A very simple dream, a short-subject sort of dream where he's watching from somewhere outside himself but still close enough to smell the gunpowder and his own terrified sweat.

The details are always so much clearer than anything was that afternoon in the projects, edited and retouched for his viewing pleasure. The loud, mechanical sound of the Roadblocker ejecting the spent shell and chambering the next, the one with his name on it. The parchment yellow nicotine stains on Roy's teeth. The blue-gray loops of the dead woman's exposed intestines.

Sometimes in the dreams it all goes down the same way it did the first time and Roy takes two in the head before he can get off another shot. But sometimes it goes

other ways-Frank's revolver jams, or he's one second too slow, or his aim is just a few inches too far to the left or the right-and old Roy gets his second chance after all. The blast never hurts, or at least Frank never remembers the pain when he's finally awake and dripping cold sweat in the safety of his bed. There's only the impact, the mangling, bone-crushing force that takes his breath away, drives him backward and over the flimsy railing.

Sometimes he falls for a long, long time, like Alice dropping down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. And sometimes he only seems to fall for an instant before he jerks awake. But so far he's never hit bottom.

Frank Gray finally changes the channel on the cruddy thirteen-inch Zenith he got from St. Vincent de Paul's and finishes the bottle of bourbon to an episode of
The Untouchables
he's seen at least a dozen times before. Through the sleepy alcoholic fog cushioning his brain the scratchy black-and-white violence is comforting, the screech of tires and ricochet of machine gun bullets as reassuring as a lullaby.

He has to piss but thinks he can hold out a little longer, at least until the next commercial break, before he stumbles off to find the bathroom.

The pressure from his bladder reminds him of the kid from the bar, Huck Finn sucking dick for twenty dollars, makes him remember the surprise on the boy's face when he punched him. Like they all think it's gonna be so goddamn easy, having your cake and eating it too, taking advantage of someone and then robbing them in the bargain. He wishes he'd hauled the kid in for soliciting. Let him scream about faggot cops all he wanted, no one would have ever believed him anyway. At least it's nice to tell himself that, and when he's this drunk he can almost believe it, can almost pretend no one whispers behind his back or snickers or suspects him of being anything but one of the boys.

Frank closes his eyes as the credits roll, thinks maybe he can put off pissing long enough for a nap. Outside the rain falls from a black sky, and the sound of it follows him down to a deep and mercifully dreamless sleep.

An hour until midnight, and Jared and

Lucrece sit together on the floor of the bedroom. Lucrece has carried away the broken pictures and poured herself a glass of scotch. The crow watches them from the bed. Sometimes it squawks loudly, as if it's preparing to announce something urgent; each time they turn and watch the bird, waiting for something more, until it's clear it has nothing else to say for now.

Occasionally Jared begins crying again, deep, racking sobs that seem as if they will tear him apart, and Lucrece holds him until they pass and he is silent.

"I don't understand what I'm supposed to do," he says. Lucrece looks at the big black bird, guarded reproach in her eyes as if maybe she thinks it hasn't done its job and she'll have to fill in the blanks it has left.

"What has the crow told you?" she asks Jared.

He just stares at the bird on the bed, watching its vigilant eyes. In a little while he answers her, speaking slowly, as if he's uncertain of the words or the way they fit together.

"Because there are scales and Benny's death left them unbalanced." He stops, remembering a statue of Justice outside the courthouse where he was sentenced to die, the ageless bronze woman blindfolded and holding her sword and balanced scales. The memory of her and the sick irony there makes him laugh.

Jared sneers at the bird. "No," he says. "It's more than that. If all that was required to bring back the dead was a little injustice, the fucking graveyards would be empty."

The crow caws in response.

"It's not the injustice," he says to Lucrece, to himself and the bird. "It
can't
simply be the injustice,
can
it?"

"Then what?" Lucrece whispers, afraid Jared knows the answer, more afraid he doesn't. She knows, has heard it in the bird's grating voice; she could tell Jared but knows that he should be the one to see it for himself.

"Fuck you both," he mutters, and she holds his face gently between her hands. His skin is cold. The coldness hurts her like a bad memory, or a memory so good it hurts to recall.

"It's your pain, Jared," she tells him, not letting him look away from her eyes. "It's your pain that is creating the imbalance, your pain that has to be satisfied before order is restored."

"That's bullshit, Lucrece. . . do you even know how ridiculous you sound?"

She ignores him. "Not just the pain, though. Your love for Benny. That's part of it

too. That's the part you were supposed to carry with you to the other side. It's the pain and anger that you were supposed to leave behind. There's no room for them among the dead."

Jared pushes her away then, the sneer dissolving into hateful laughter, an ugly, predatory sound that Lucrece would hardly believe is human if she weren't seeing it come from his lips.

"There's no room for
anything
among the dead, Lucrece, except the hungry worms."

She cannot look him in the eye now, cannot face the ebony glimmer there. She knows that it's part of what he has become, part of what he will have to do if he is ever to find peace, but that knowledge makes it no easier for her to face.

"You can hear the crow, Jared. You know I'm telling you the truth."

He doesn't say anything. When she raises her eyes and looks back at him Jared is watching the bird perched on the footboard of the bed. His lips are pulled so far back that his teeth look like fangs, bared for fresh meat.

"An avenging angel," he snarls. "So the gods can rest easy and still keep their hands clean. Is

that what you're saying?" The bird ruffles its feathers and shifts from foot to foot.

"That's all there is to it,
isn't
it? Find the bad guys and make them pay, so my niggling soul doesn't disturb the spooks roasting down in hell."

The crow tucks its wings close to its body and huddles as if it expects Jared to strike it. "Yeah, well, you tell me what good that does Benny, you black-hearted son of a bitch.

You tell me that it's going to
fix
what some depraved motherfucker did to Benny and
maybe

then I'll want to play along with your little game."

Lucrece can feel his fury in the close atmosphere of the bedroom, more immediate than the storm outside, can feel his anger crackling through the damp air around them.

"Nothing's going to help Benny, Jared. Unless you can find peace and return to him, nothing's ever going to help Benny." The last part catches in her throat like broken glass, but she knows it must be said.

"Right now Benny is
alone,
Jared, alone in the cold and the dark, waiting for you to come back to him."

And she braces herself, ready to feel his fist or ready to put herself between him and the bird again. But Jared sits very still and stares at the crow, the muscles in his face relaxing by almost imperceptible degrees.

"Ah,
God"
he says softly. She wants to hold him again, wishes there were words that she could say.

"But that's not all, Lucrece. If you can hear what he's saying, then you
know
that's not all."

"Yes," she says, because she can understand the bird voice, its shrill, uneasy mind, the way she understood the thoughts that Benny never spoke to her out loud, the way she knew when his dreams were troubled.

"You're supposed to know who killed him," Jared says to the crow, spitting out the words like a bad taste in his mouth. "That's the way it's supposed to work. You drag me back here and
show
me. But you
can't
show me the killer, can you? You can't show me shit!"