Day One (4 page)

“You got no business here. Get lost.”

“Don’t be that way, baby.”

She dragged deep on her cigarette. “Drop dead, and when you do, make sure it’s not on my fucking porch.”

“Jesus, Charm. You’re so dramatic. I happened to be in town and wanted to see you and the kids.”

“Ever think I don’t want to see you? As for the kids, I doubt you could pick ‘em out in a room full of monkeys.”

“They’re that wild, huh?” The big man’s laughter rattled the window frames.

“No, asshole, you’re that stupid.”

“Aww, come on. I thought we could spend some time together.” He reached through the opening, grappled her breast with his meaty hand.

She swung the knife up so quickly the big man barely yanked his hand clear in time. “You are out of your fucking mind if you think I’m letting you or your septic cock anywhere near me.” She
brandished the blade. “Grab my tit one more time and you’ll wake up in a body bag.”

Eager reached the bottom of the stairs and slipped up behind his mother. “Who’s that?” He caught a glimpse of the man’s big face and crew cut through the open door.

“Nobody.” Charm spat smoke through the gap in the door. “Fuck off, asshole. I squared my debt with you and Hiram ages ago.” She pushed the door shut in his face, flipped the deadbolt as he shouted out on the porch.

“Charm, goddamn you! Open the door, you skanky bitch!”

She swept into the front room and closed the windows, muffling the shouts of the big man on the porch. Eager followed her through the dining room into the kitchen. The air in the house seemed to condense behind her.

“How come he wanted to see us kids?”

“Shut the hell up.” She grabbed the phone off the charger and punched the number pad like she was trying to poke out someone’s eyes. “Police, yes, goddammit.” She looked like she wanted to swallow the handset. “There’s a goddamn psycho screaming on my porch and I want to know what the hell you’re gonna do about it.”

The guy beat feet long before the cops arrived.

Next day, Eager asked his mother about him while she drank her coffee at the kitchen table. “Just some crazy asshole who overreacted to a misunderstanding a long time ago. None of your concern.”

“Why was he yelling like that?”

“What did I tell you? I’ll kick your balls up into your belly you don’t shut up about it.”

He shrugged and munched cereal. Charm was a big talker; he got worse from bullies at school. The girls came down, poured cereal and spilled orange juice on the kitchen table. They started flicking Cheerios at each other. Charm ignored them. She sat haloed in
smoke and stared into her coffee cup until her cigarette burned down to the filter. Then she dropped the butt into her cup and got up.

“Eddie, Gem, Jewel, I expect you all to get this shit hole cleaned up while I’m at work. And don’t you dare leave this house.”

The girls stopped playing with their cereal and looked at Eager. He rolled his eyes. Charm didn’t seem to notice. She left her cup on the table. Ten minutes later, Eager was out the door and skating down to Hawthorne to scare up some spending money. Beg, borrow, or steal, only there’d be no borrowing and little enough begging. The girls were on their own, digging holes in the yard or setting fires or whatever it was they did all day.

The last thing he expected was to see the big man from the porch again, this time in the auto repair parking lot next to the coffee shop, with his hand clasped around some woman’s throat.

November 11

MERRILL, OR: County police were called in to help control a disturbance at the Upper Basin Center for Cognitive Medicine outside Merrill last night. Staff at the private clinic report a female visitor became agitated with a patient. When asked to calm down, she responded with verbal abuse and threats of violence toward staff members. The woman fled before police could arrive, but in the ensuing confusion a number of patients left the facility.

County sheriffs are currently searching for the missing patients, who suffer from a variety of cognitive impairments. Deputy Raelene Suggins of the Klamath County Sheriff’s Office asks area residents to report anyone seen wandering or suffering apparent disorientation or confusion.

November 19 — 8:20 am

I’
m not part of this. This electronic buzz, this steadfast authority. Cops move from here to there in the street out front of my house, pre-programmed automatons following invisible tracks. Some enter Mitch’s; others come out. A few stand at the crowd control barricades, shaking their heads and repeating the phrase, “We’ll have this cleared up as soon as we can, sir and/or ma’am.” Others work the street, knocking on doors or interviewing neighbors. On his porch, the EMTs crawl over Mitch like ants scaling a picnic lunch. Everyone has a job. Each knows exactly what to do.

I have no idea what’s going on anymore.

A typical November drizzle falls, too thin to send gathered onlookers looking for umbrellas. I feel it in my shoes. I ask a few people about Eager, but no one has seen him. The EMTs are focused on Mitch and don’t have time for me. I’m only allowed inside the barricade out of deference to my status as a former one-of-us—a pity lay. Or maybe it’s the fact they still have command of my house. I’m talking to one of my neighbors, a woman with two daughters in pre-school, when Mitch goes into cardiac arrest.

“What an awful thing.” She’s watching the EMTs. Her name is Helen, and this is the most we’ve spoken since she and her husband moved in three years before. “Right here on our street.”

It can happen anywhere, I tell her. “A street full of manicured lawns and well-maintained minivans sure as hell didn’t stop Mitch from going off the rails, did it?” She looks troubled, mutters about her daughters stuck inside with her mother. They need to get going. Everyone is late for everything: work, day care, bridge club. Helen flinches when, up the street, a television news van backs up under a birch tree and catches a branch with a satellite dish raised up on its telescopic armature. The branch snaps with a sound like a gunshot. Helen trots toward her house, hands gripping her upper arms, cotton-swathed thighs swishing. No doubt I’ll see a For Sale sign in her yard in the next couple of weeks, she and her husband convinced life is more certain out in Forest Grove or Happy Valley.

I move back to my front lawn. The EMTs have got Mitch on an IV now, oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. His face is bone white and the way his head flops side-to-side makes me wonder if I’ll ever see him again. A hand grasps my elbow. I turn and there’s Susan, my former partner in Homicide. Lieutenant Mulvaney now. She’s running the investigative side of this circus, coordinating with tactical from my living room. I’ve known Susan for a long time.

“Skin, do you have a cigarette?”

“You’re smoking again?”

She squeezes her lips together. “If I was smoking again don’t you think I’d have my own cigarettes?”

“I dunno. Maybe you’ve become a mooch in your old age.”

“Do you have a cigarette or not?”

“I quit.”

Susan is tall and slender, with dusty blond hair wrapped up in a loose bun under her hat. She’s in uniform this morning, a look I’m
not used to. Her green eyes appear dull in the watery light, and her hair sports more grey than I remember. She breathes through her nose. There was a time when I could read her every expression, but things have changed between us. “You’re sticking with it then.”

“Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes not so much. You know how it is.”

“I had Eric and Leah to keep me honest.”

I’m not sure if she’s tossing a jab my way or not—she knows enough of my own disastrous romantic history to be aware of my shortage of anyone to keep me honest. But with Susan it isn’t always easy to tell, especially since I retired and she got her promotion. Like a marriage falling apart, the collapse of our partnership had been driven by both bitterness and regret. To say our relationship is amicable these days is perhaps overstating the case. But at the same time, I’d still like to believe I can trust her when my nuts are in a vice.

“How long has it been?”

“A year and a half.”

She nods. “That long.” The skin under her eyes is dark. I can tell she has something else on her mind, but I’m not sure if she’s come out here to share with me or is taking a break from all the clanking brass furrowing their brows in my living room. I myself had fled at least two captains and a commander, and hell, even the Man herself, Chief Rosie Sizer, who solemnly shook my hand, thanked me, and apologized for my trouble before handing me off to some spit-polished sergeant who wanted to know where he could plug in a tangle of cell phone chargers. I can’t blame Susan for slipping away. She’s been juggling a lot all morning, and I almost feel bad about adding to her troubles.

“So. Who you got looking for Eager?”

Her posture goes taut. “Eager Gillespie? Why should I have anyone looking for him?”

“You didn’t see it? When Mitch got the shot off?”

“What are you saying?”

“Eager took the bullet in the eye.”

She doesn’t answer right away. “No one informed me.” I can tell she’s not pleased, but her only outward concession to an emotional response is to blink a couple of times. “Where is he now?”

I turn over my hands. “That’s what I’d like to know. The paramedics checked him out, but he got pissy the way he does and they turned their attention to Mitch. Next thing I know, he’s outa here. No one knows where.”

“You must not have seen it right.” I’m sure that’s what she’d prefer. If he wasn’t shot, he’s not her problem. She also won’t have to deal with the fact she wasn’t informed of another victim of this morning’s fiasco.

“I was looking right at him when the gun went off, Susan.”

Her tongue probes the inside of her cheek. She’s staring across the street at Mitch’s porch, but I don’t think she sees anything. “Maybe he’s all right.”

“Has Eager ever been all right?”

She drops her gaze and tilts her head, conceding the point. We encountered Eager the first time together after he was discovered at the scene of a homicide. Young woman shot to death, murder weapon never recovered. Eager the only witness—a useless witness, as it happened.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Skin.”

“Don’t you think it’s interesting he was here this morning?”

“I don’t know. Should it be interesting?”

“Well, we’re a short stroll from the scene of an unsolved murder he was part of and now he appears again the morning a straight goes Virginia Tech on his own family. I find that interesting.”

“You think Eager has something to do with this?”

“I think it’s pretty damn convenient he happened to show up this morning. Here.”

“Hmmm.” She’s wishing my interest in Eager would burn off like the morning fog. All Eager can do at this point is make her life more difficult, particularly if Mitch’s errant bullet is in back of his eyeball. “Skin, here’s the thing: Luellen Bronstein and the kid, Mitch Bronstein’s son?”

“What about them?”

“What do you know about them?”

“Only what anyone knows about his neighbors. They’ve only lived here a few years.” Susan cocks her head at me. For some people, that’s enough time to get written into the will.

“You’ve never talked to her?”

“Luellen? Sure. Mostly to say hi, lousy weather we’re having. Why?”

“What do you know about the kids?”

“Their names.”

“Jason and Danny.”

“Right.” I’m being more reticent than necessary, but I’m annoyed Susan isn’t concerned about Eager. I don’t want to tell her I’ve watched the little one for Luellen more times than I can count. Good boy, calls me Mister Skin. Beyond that, I know Jase has been in and out of trouble ever since his mother left Mitch when the kid was fourteen. But I also know if I tell Susan all this she’ll want to interrogate me, and I have no interest in becoming a part of her investigation.

I’ve also never been able to match Susan’s patience. “Jase is from Mitch’s first marriage.”

“He doesn’t get along with Luellen. I could see it in their body language.”

“Near as I can tell, Jase doesn’t like anyone.”