A Dark and Broken Heart (41 page)

“You think I don’t know this? You think I don’t understand the situation I am in? And you think I don’t see you for who you are, Vincent? Sure, you’re a drunk. Sure, you screwed up your marriages, your kids, your job, everything. Same as me. Same as most of us. It isn’t about being perfect. It isn’t about always telling the truth and making everything happen the way you want it to. Hell, if that was the way it was, then none of us would ever get into trouble and I sure as hell wouldn’t need someone like you to help bail me out.” She reached for his hand again, took it, then the
other, and she was holding both of them, the sensation of her skin against his almost electric.

“Look at me,” she said, and Madigan did so.

“I am who I am. I have no hidden agenda here. I am scared for my own life, for the life of my daughter . . . And you’ve even gotten me scared for you too. We can’t just quit now. I can’t just walk away from here. Sandià will kill me. He thinks I’m a witness to what he did to David Valderas, and he will kill you for harboring me from him, and that’ll be the end of it. And if he finds it in his heart not to kill Melissa, then she will go to Child Services, and somewhere up the line they’ll find someone who’ll take her on or she’ll be a ward of the state until she’s eighteen. And then she’ll come back here and turn tricks for crack and die before she’s twenty-five. That’s what I have, Vincent. Those are the choices . . . All except for one. I can work with you. I can fix this thing with you. Or I can at least give it the best I’ve got. I just believe one thing, Vincent . . . That you and I could actually work together on this thing. I can help you somehow, surely? There has to be something I can do to help fix this fucking disaster . . .”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Madigan said. “Everything is in place. In the next twenty-four, forty-eight hours this thing will end well, or it will not. We will walk away from this thing or we won’t . . .”

“You think I’m not capable, is that it? You think I’m not tough enough?”

Madigan laughed. “Christ no, Isabella, it’s not that—”

“So it’s because you don’t want to put me in any danger, right? You know Sandià is after me and you want to make sure he doesn’t get me?”

“Yes,” Madigan said. “That’s right.”

“And is that because you want me to testify against Sandià, or because you actually give a damn about me?”

“Jesus,” Madigan said. “How the hell do you do that? How the hell do women do that? They can take anything you say, anything at all, and somehow turn it around and make it personal.”

“Everything’s personal, Vincent . . . Everything in life is personal. If it has something to do with people, then it’s personal. So answer up. You want me to testify, or do you actually give a damn about what happens to me and my daughter?”

Madigan looked at the fire in her eyes. He couldn’t lie to her—not about this.

“I care,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“I care, Isabella, I actually
do
care, and though it might not seem like it, it means a great deal to me . . .”

“Then why is it so goddamned hard for you to say what you think, to say what you feel?”

He smiled. “Because I’m a man, and we don’t do all that crap about thoughts and feelings. That kinda thing is just for you girls.”

“I keep telling you, but you won’t believe me. You are a good person, Vincent Madigan—”

“No, sweetheart, you got me all wrong on that one. I am an asshole of the first order. I am a first-class asshole. You have no idea . . .”

“You don’t think so?”

“I
know
so.”

“You think I don’t see what you’re capable of? You think I don’t recognize the liar, the cheat, the thief, the corrupt cop in you . . .”

Madigan couldn’t speak. He wanted to, but he couldn’t.

“I’m not so naive, Vincent. I’ve been around people like you and Sandià all my life. You don’t think you’re that different from him. Well, you are. It’s true what they say. Everyone’s a hooker. Everyone is screwing someone for money. You think I don’t see the pills in your bathroom cabinet. They’re not for anything that’s wrong with you. You are not in pain, Vincent Madigan. You’re not an insomniac or a depressive. A drunk you might be, but there’s nothing wrong with you that would justify taking those pills. And people take drugs and they drink for the same reasons, Vincent . . . Because they’re running away from all the bad shit they’ve done. Not what’s been done
to
them, because people get over that. They survive that crap. They can let go of it. But the stuff they’ve done . . . They can never escape that . . .”

“I am not Sandià—”

“No, you’re not, Vincent. And that’s exactly what I’m saying. I know you better than you think. You have shadows and ghosts just like everyone else, but you are not evil like Sandià. If you spend your life holding on to those ghosts, well, you wind up a drunk and a pillhead, and that’s where you’re at right now. It pains me to see someone who can be a decent human being acting like such an asshole.”

“Hey, what the fuck is this?” Madigan said, suddenly angered by her accusatory tone.

Isabella held up her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just I saw the same thing with Melissa’s father, a good man gone to waste, and I see it in you and it hurts me. I didn’t mean to—”

“Enough,” Madigan said. “I’m not playing these games with you. You are here because I give a crap about you, same way I used to give a crap about most people . . . the reason I became a cop and all that. You are also here because I need you as much as you need me, and that’s all there is to it. This thing ends one way or the other, and either we’ll be alive or we’ll be dead or one of us will be dead and one of us won’t—and what the hell happens to your daughter I do not know. I hope she makes it out of here. I hope she doesn’t wind up orphaned and on the street and turning tricks for crack and dying before she’s twenty-five. Well, I really fucking hope that doesn’t happen because no one deserves that . . .”

“You want to tell Sandià that no one deserves that? I don’t think he has the same viewpoint about it as you and me.”

“I think Sandià is going to have a great deal more on his mind than however many girls he happens to be running out of that building on Paladino.”

“You’re gonna kill him, right?”

“I’m going to do what I can to stop him from killing you.”

“And if you have to kill him, then you’ll kill him, right?”

“If it’s between you and him, or me and him, then yes, I will kill him.”

“I want him to die.”

“I know you do.”

“I would be happy to see him rot in a jail cell for the rest of his life, but preferably I want him to die. Only sad thing is that I will not be there to see it happen.”

“I’ll make sure you get the full run-down, blow-by-blow.”

She smiled. It was brief, almost a fleeting expression, but it was there.

“I am sorry,” she said, “for giving you all this crap.”

Madigan dismissed her apology. “For a while I thought I was married again.”

She laughed at that, not because it was particularly funny, but because both of them were looking for the slightest thing that would ease the tension. Then she rose and said, “I’ll get the food.” She walked around the other side of the table and put her hands on Madigan’s shoulders and just that feeling—the awareness of real honest-to-God physical contact from another human
being—made every muscle in his body twitch. Madigan shuddered involuntarily, even let out a small audible gasp, and when she started massaging his shoulders he felt as if he could just sit there and weep until he collapsed from exhaustion.

“Too tense,” she said.

“You don’t say?”

“How long since someone was there for you, Vincent?”

“Was there for me?”

“Someone who didn’t just want something from you, you know? Someone who just gave a damn about how you really felt.”

Madigan did not know how to answer her question.

“A long time, right?”

Madigan felt her hands on his shoulders, the tips of her fingers on the nape of his neck. Her touch was gentle, sensitive.

He turned around in the chair, looked up at her. “No,” he said. “We went through this before, Isabella. This is not what this is about. We are not getting into this . . .”

Her hands were on his shoulders again. There was no pressure, but the mere fact that she was there made it difficult for Madigan to stand up.

“You don’t like me.”

“Isabella . . . seriously . . .”

She leaned down. He felt her hair against his ear, his neck, and then the warmth of her breath was on the side of his face. “What’s the deal here, Vincent . . . You don’t want to?”

He leaned forward. She stepped back instinctively. He took that split second to stand up.

He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but he was speechless.

He just didn’t know what to say.

“Nothing to say?” she asked, echoing his absence of thought.

Again, he didn’t speak. He wanted to stay. He wanted to leave. He wanted . . . He wanted someone else to make the decision . . .

And she did. Isabella Arias. She took three or four steps, and she held his forearms, and before he understood what was happening she was kissing him and he was kissing her back. And he could see right through himself to the small black stone that was his heart, and around that heart were wrapped all the lies he had ever told, and in the middle of those lies—perhaps the greatest lie of all—was the lie he told himself each and every day.

You did it all for the right reasons, Vincent Madigan
.

And a close second—even as he felt her hands around his waist, even as he felt the pressure and warmth of her body against his, even as he passed the point of no return with Isabella Arias—he could see the other lie . . . the thing he’d never said . . . the thing he knew he’d have to one day tell her . . .

I am responsible for what happened to Melissa
.

I nearly killed your daughter
.

It was me—Vincent Madigan—and no one else
.

And then there were thoughts of Sandià, of Larry Fulton and Chuck Williams and Bobby Landry, and blood up and down those stairs, and pieces of people, just fistfuls of human beings scattered back and forth up and down that stairwell. The way in which the bodies had just exploded as they were hit by a wall of gunfire . . . a massacre . . . a turkey shoot . . . No one stood a goddamned chance . . . And Bernie’s face in that alleyway and how the blood was on Madigan’s hands as he walked away, all because he owed money to Sandià . . . Hunting through the dash for that wrap of speed or coke or whatever the hell it was . . . Meeting with Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo . . . And what in the name of Christ Almighty was he doing?

He tried to step back, but her hands were around him and he was still kissing her. And even as he was fighting it, he was giving in, succumbing to whatever was happening. And he knew it was just as much him as it was her. He felt the tension breaking down, felt the resistance folding, and he was holding her tight, as tight as anything, and he could feel her tongue inside his mouth, and he wanted nothing more in the world than to feel every inch of her, to be beside her, behind her, around her, inside her . . .

He started moving toward the front room, the door to the stairwell.

She went with him. She knew where he was going.

Halfway up the stairs she was taking off her T-shirt, unbuttoning her jeans. She was grabbing at his belt buckle.

“Take it off,” she said. “Undo the damned thing, for Christ’s sake.”

He laughed then, and she started laughing too, and whatever was happening meant everything and nothing. They fell through the door of Madigan’s bedroom, and by the time they reached the edge of the mattress most of their clothes were on the floor. And then everything slowed down . . .

There were tears in her eyes.

He saw that much.

Even as he was kissing her, even as she was kicking her jeans off her feet, even as he was aware of her hands all over him, there were tears in her eyes.

“What?” he remembered asking her. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and her voice caught in her throat as if she were having difficulty breathing.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s gonna be okay . . . I promise . . .”

And for the first time in as long as he could recall he believed that he was telling the truth.

Later, after it was over—after they had struggled with this new thing, the closeness, the physicality, the urgency, the passion, the fear, the release—he lay there with her in his arms and thought of the money beneath the bed, and he wondered what kind of human being he was.

He wondered if he could ever want to be near such a person as himself.

He questioned his own reasons, his motives, his rationale . . . and he listened to her breathing, and he tried not to cry.

He had done this terrible thing to her daughter.

He had killed people and lied—oh, so many lies—and he had worked with Sandià for fifteen years. He was as bad as Sandià, or at least on his way. Was there any hope of redemption?

He had to get out of this. He had to escape. He had to save her. He had to get her away from Sandià and all that Sandià represented. Melissa too. She had to survive.

They all did. All except himself and Sandià. They were the ones who deserved to be punished for what they had done.

And he asked himself then, asked himself if it came down to it, if it
really
came down to it, would he give up his own life to see Sandià fall, to see Isabella and Melissa away from this nightmare and Sandià buried in a hole somewhere or some stinking jail cell or anywhere where he could no longer hurt or abuse or maim or kill . . .

Could he give up his own life for this?

And beyond this—more important than any other consideration—could he give up his life to know that his children would never discover the truth of who he was?

Yes, came the answer.
Yes, I could do this
.

And Madigan, terrified at the prospect of such a thing, knew that
it was no longer a question of whether or not he could, but simply a question of whether he would.