Mystic River (10 page)

Jimmy carried that exhaustion into the church the day one of Annabeth’s brothers, Val Savage, married Terese Hickey, both the bride and groom ugly, angry, and short. Jimmy pictured them having a litter as opposed to kids, raising a pack of indistinguishable, pug-nosed rage balls to bounce up and down Buckingham Avenue for years to come, igniting. Val had worked for Jimmy’s crew back in the days when Jimmy had a crew, and he was grateful to Jimmy for taking a hard two-year fall and another three suspended on behalf of the whole crew when everyone knew Jimmy could have dimed them all out and skated. Val, tiny-limbed and tiny-brained, would have probably idolized Jimmy outright if Jimmy hadn’t married a Puerto Rican chick, and one from outside the neighborhood, too.

After Marita died, the neighborhood whispers said, Well, there you go, don’t you? That’s what happens when you go against the way of things. That Katie, though, she’ll be a real looker; half-breeds always are.

When Jimmy had gotten out of Deer Island, the offers rolled in. Jimmy was a pro, one of the best second-story guys to ever come out of a neighborhood that had a Hall of Fame roster’s worth of second-story guys. And even when Jimmy said no, thanks, he was going straight, for the kid, you know, people nodded and smiled and knew he’d come back to it the first time things got tough and he had to choose between a car payment and Katie’s Christmas present.

Didn’t happen, though. Jimmy Marcus, B & E genius and a guy who’d run his own crew before he was old enough to legally drink, the man behind the Keldar Technics heist and a ton of other shit, stayed so straight it got to where people
thought he was taunting them. Hell, rumor was Jimmy had even been discussing buying out Al DeMarco’s corner store, letting the old man retire as owner-in-name with a chunk of the money Jimmy’d allegedly stashed away from the Keldar job. Jimmy as shopkeeper, wearing an apron—okay, sure, they said.

At Val and Terese’s reception at the K of C on Dunboy, Jimmy asked Annabeth to dance, and folks there saw it right away—the curve of them as they leaned into the music, the tilt of their heads as they looked right at each other, bold as bulls, the way his palm lightly caressed the small of her back and she leaned back into it. They’d known each other as kids, someone said, though he’d been a few years ahead of her. Maybe it had always been there, waiting for the Puerto Rican to pack up, or God to pack up for her.

It had been a Rickie Lee Jones song they’d danced to, a few lines in the song that always got to Jimmy for some reason he didn’t understand—“Well, good-bye, boys/Oh my buddy boys/Oh my sad-eyed Sinatras…” He lip-synced them to Annabeth as they swayed, feeling loose and at ease for the first time in years, lip-synced again at the chorus along with Rickie’s mournful wisp of a voice, “So long, lone-ly ave-nue,” smiling into Annabeth’s crystal green eyes, and she’d smiled, too, in a soft, hidden way she had that cracked his heart, the two of them acting like this was their hundredth dance instead of their first.

They were the last ones to leave—sitting outside on the wide entrance porch, drinking light beers and smoking cigarettes and nodding to the other guests as they walked to their cars. They stayed out there until the summer night had chilled, and Jimmy slid his coat around her shoulders and told her about prison and Katie, and Marita’s dreams of orange curtains, and she told him about growing up the only female Savage in a house full of maniac brothers, of her one winter dancing in New York before she figured out she wasn’t good enough, of nursing school.

When the K of C management kicked them off the porch,
they wandered over to the after-party in time for Val and Terese’s first screaming match as a married couple. They clipped a six-pack from Val’s fridge and left, walked off into the dark of Hurley’s Drive-in and sat by the channel, listened to its sullen lapping. The drive-in had shut down four years before, and squat yellow diggers and dump trucks from Parks and Recreation and the D.O.T. convoyed onto the land every morning, turned the whole area along the Pen into an eruption of dirt and torn cement. Word was they were turning it into a park, but at that point it was just a mangled drive-in, the screen still looming white behind mountains of brown dirt and black-and-gray cakes of disgorged asphalt.

“They say it’s in your blood,” Annabeth said.

“What?”

“Stealing, crime.” She shrugged. “You know.”

Jimmy smiled at her around his beer bottle, took a sip.

“Is it?” she said.

“Maybe.” It was his turn to shrug. “Lotta things are in my blood. Doesn’t mean they have to come out.”

“I’m not judging you. Believe me.” Her face unreadable, even her voice, Jimmy wondering what she wanted to hear from him—that he was still in the life? That he was out? That he’d make her rich? That he’d never commit a crime again?

Annabeth had a calm, almost forgettable face from a distance, but when you got up close, you saw so many things in there that you didn’t understand, a sense of a mind furiously at work, never sleeping.

“I mean, dancing’s in your blood, right?”

“I dunno. I guess.”

“But now that you’ve been told you can’t do it anymore, you’ve stopped, right? It might hurt, but you’ve faced it.”

“Okay…”

“Okay,” he said, and slid a cigarette out of the pack that lay on the stone bench between them. “So, yeah, I was good at what I did. But I took a pinch and my wife died and that fucked my daughter up.” He lit the cigarette and took a long
exhale as he tried to put it exactly as he’d said it in his mind a hundred times. “I ain’t fucking my daughter up again, Annabeth. You know? She can’t go through another two years of me doing time. My mother? She ain’t a well woman. She dies while I’m locked down? Then they take my daughter, make her a ward of the state, put her in some sort of Deer Island for tots. I couldn’t take that shit. So that’s it. In the blood, out of the blood, whatever the fuck, I’m staying straight.”

Jimmy held her gaze as she studied his face. He could tell she was searching for flaws in his explanation, a whiff of bullshit, and he hoped he’d somehow managed to make the speech fly. He’d been working on it long enough, preparing for a moment like this. And, fact was, what he’d said was mostly true. He’d only left out that one thing he’d sworn to himself he’d never tell another soul, no matter who that soul was. So he looked in Annabeth’s eyes and waited for her to make her decision, and tried to ignore images from that night by the Mystic River—the guy on his knees, saliva dripping down his chin, the screech of his begging—images that kept trying to push their way into his head like drill bits.

Annabeth took a cigarette. He lit it for her, and she said, “I used to have the worst crush on you. You know that?”

Jimmy kept his head steady, his gaze calm, even though the relief flooding through him was like a jet blast—he’d sold the half-truth. If things worked out with Annabeth, he’d never have to sell it again.

“No shit? You on me?”

She nodded. “When you’d come by the house to see Val? My God, I was, what, fourteen, fifteen? Jimmy, forget it. My skin would start to buzz just hearing your voice in the kitchen.”

“Damn.” He touched her arm. “It ain’t buzzing now.”

“Oh, sure it is, Jimmy. Sure it is.”

And Jimmy felt the Mystic roll far away again, dissolve into the dirty depths of the Pen, gone from him, rolling off into the distance where it belonged.

B
Y THE TIME
Sean got back to the jogging trail, the CSS woman was there. Whitey Powers radioed all units on-scene to do a sweep-and-detain of any vagrants in the park and squatted down beside Sean and the CSS woman.

“The blood heads that way,” the CSS woman said, pointing deeper into the park. The jogging path went over a small wooden bridge and then curled off and down into a heavily wooded section of the park, circling around the old drive-in screen down at the far end. “There’s more over there.” She pointed with her pen, and Sean and Whitey looked back over their shoulders, saw smaller blood spatters in the grass on the other side of the joggers’ path by the small wooden bridge, the leaves of a tall maple having protected the spatters from last night’s rain. “I think she ran for that ravine.”

Whitey’s radio squawked and he put it to his lips. “Powers.”

“Sergeant, we need you over by the garden.”

“On my way.”

Sean watched Whitey trot onto the jogging path and then head for the garden co-op around the next bend, the hem of his son’s hockey shirt flapping around his waist.

Sean straightened from his squat and looked at the park, felt the sheer size of it, every bush, every knoll, all that water. He looked back at the small wooden bridge that led over a tiny ravine where the water was twice as dark and twice as polluted as the channel. Crusted with a permanent greasy film, it buzzed with mosquitoes in the summer. Sean noticed a spot of red in the thin, greening trees that sprouted along the bank of the ravine and he moved toward it, the CSS woman suddenly beside him, seeing it, too.

“What’s your name?” Sean said.

“Karen,” she said. “Karen Hughes.”

Sean shook her hand, the two of them focused on that spot of red as they crossed the joggers’ path, not even hearing
Whitey Powers until he was almost on top of them, trotting, short of breath.

“We found a shoe,” Whitey said.

“Where?”

Whitey pointed back down the joggers’ path, past where it curved around the garden co-op. “In the garden. Woman’s shoe. Size six.”

“Don’t touch it,” Karen Hughes said.

“Duh,” Whitey said, and got a look from her, Karen Hughes having one of those glacial looks that could shrink everything inside of you. “Excuse me. I meant—duh,
ma’am
.”

Sean turned back to the trees, and the spot of red was no longer a spot, it was a torn triangle of fabric, hanging from a thin branch about shoulder high. The three of them stood in front of it until Karen Hughes stepped back and snapped several photographs from four different angles, then dug in her bag for something.

It was nylon, Sean was pretty sure, probably from a jacket, and slick with blood.

Karen used a pair of tweezers to pull it from the branch and stared at it for a minute before dropping it into a plastic baggie.

Sean bent at the waist and craned his head, looked down into the ravine. Then he looked across to the other side, saw what could have been a heel print dug into the soft soil.

He nudged Whitey and pointed until Whitey saw it, too. Then Karen Hughes took a look and immediately snapped off a few shots from her department-issue Nikon. She straightened and crossed over the bridge, came down on the embankment, and took a few more photographs.

Whitey dropped into a squat and peered under the bridge. “I’d say she might have hid here for a bit. Killer shows up, she bolts to the other side and takes off running again.”

Sean said, “Why’s she keep going deeper into the park? I mean, her back’s against the water here, Sarge. Why not cut back toward the entrance?”

“Could be she was disoriented. It’s dark, she’s got a bullet in her.”

Whitey shrugged and used his radio to call Dispatch.

“This is Sergeant Powers. We’re leaning toward a possible one-eighty-seven, Dispatch. We’re going to need every available officer for a sweep of Pen Park. See if you can scare up some divers, maybe.”

“Divers?”

“Affirmative. We need Detective Lieutenant Friel and someone from the DA on-scene ASAP.”

“The detective lieutenant is en route. DA’s office has been notified. Over?”

“Affirmative. Out, Dispatch.”

Sean looked across at the heel mark in the soil, and he noticed some scratches to the left of it, the victim digging her fingers in as she’d scrambled up and over the embankment. “Feel like taking a guess what the fuck happened here last night, Sarge?”

“Ain’t even going to try,” Whitey said.

S
TANDING ATOP
the church steps, Jimmy could just make out the Penitentiary Channel. It was a stripe of dull purple on the far side of the expressway overpass, the park that abutted it serving as the only evidence of green on this side of the channel. Jimmy spied the white sliver top of the drive-in movie screen in the center of the park peeking just above the overpass. It still stood, long after the state had grabbed the land for short money at the Chapter Eleven auction and turned it over to the Parks and Recreation Service. Parks and Recreation spent the next decade beautifying the place, ripping up the poles that supported the car speakers, leveling and greening the land, cutting bike paths and jogging paths along the water, erecting a fenced-in garden co-op, even building a boathouse and ramp for canoers who couldn’t get very far before they were turned back at either end by the
harbor locks. The screen stayed, though, ended up sprouting from the edge of a cul-de-sac they’d created by planting a stand of already-formed trees shipped in from Northern California. Summers, a local theater group performed Shakespeare in front of the screen, painting medieval backdrops on it and skipping back and forth across the stage with tinfoil swords, saying “Hark” and “Forsooth” and shit like that all the time. Jimmy had gone there with Annabeth and the girls two summers back, and Annabeth, Nadine, and Sara had all nodded off before the end of the first act. But Katie had stayed awake, leaning forward on the blanket, elbow on her knee, chin on the heel of her hand, so Jimmy had too.

They did
The Taming of the Shrew
that night, and Jimmy couldn’t follow most of it—something about a guy slapping his fiancée into line until she became an acceptable servant wife, Jimmy failing to see the art in that but figuring he was losing a lot in the translation. Katie, though, was all over it. She laughed a bunch of times, went dead silent and rapt a few more, told Jimmy afterward it was “magic.”

Jimmy didn’t know what the hell she meant, and Katie couldn’t explain it. She just said she’d felt it “transport” her, and for the next six months she kept talking about moving to Italy after graduation.

Jimmy, looking out at the edge of the East Bucky Flats from the church steps, thought: Italy. You bet.