The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “No,” she said. “They run twenty-four-seven. You never know who might walk by.”

  It was the old photos that infuriated me. Our history slid past, one image at a time. A worm to hook customers with. I don’t know why it bothered me so much.

  “Bye, Treenie,” I said as she got into her car.

  I didn’t recognize any of the faces I saw on Warren Street. But they were still there, all the people I had known back then. All the people I had hated. Maybe one or two got out. A couple more were locked up, and probably an abnormally high number of them were dead. But mostly they were still there. Somewhere.

  They never liked me. None of them. Because I was gay—because I didn’t care about any of the things they cared about—because I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of that shitty town.

  Because you were an asshole all the time, prompted an unwelcome voice in my head.

  I was an asshole all the time because they were assholes to me first. And because I was just generally miserable.

  Because of your mother.

  I flinched away from the topic, but that would not do. If I was going to be ruthless with them, I had to be ruthless with myself.

  Yeah, because of my mother. Because she killed herself when I was sixteen. Because I didn’t handle it well. Because who fucking could. Because my dad didn’t, either, and who can fucking blame him . . . but I had blamed him, of course. I’d needed his help and he couldn’t provide it, and so I hated him, and so I did stupid things and burned a lot of bridges and then as soon as I graduated I got the hell out of Hudson and didn’t look back and didn’t talk to him for a year, even though he called me once a month, and when we did resume communication it was a weird, desultory thing where we never really said anything of substance—and I could tell I hurt him—and I knew I could help him so much with a simple fucking visit—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it—and I told myself there’d be time, there’d be so much time for us—

  And now: there wasn’t time. He was almost all the way gone.

  I stopped myself short of the edge of that abyss. There was no time for self-pity or regret. I had work to do.

  Hate had taken me this far. It was the blade between my ribs. It was the pain I grabbed hold of, to make my art.

  I owed it everything.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Attalah!”

  Rick Edgley is mostly naked when he opens his door, wearing only cut-off jeans, and he’s clearly mortified to have been discovered in such a state by someone he actually respects. Luckily for him, and for her, he still has the lean muscled body he’d had back when he had a serious shot at making it as a professional fighter. “Thought you were the Jehovah’s Witnesses again. Was gonna just curse you out and slam the door in your face.”

  “It’s fine, Edge,” Attalah says, laughing. “Can I come in? Wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “Sure,” he says, nodding nervously, now that his initial embarrassment has died down and he has time to wonder what this visit is all about. “Let me go get decent?”

  “I’m plenty indecent,” she says. “Don’t put yourself out on my account. Looks like you were working on something.”

  “Basement’s flooded,” he says. “Again. Can’t fucking figure it out.”

  She follows him down the hall, to an open door. He pulls a flannel shirt off the knob and puts it on, then descends. “You okay to come down with that cane?”

  “I can do anything,” she says, descending after him.

  Her own home’s basement floods sometimes. It means a slightly wet floor. This is serious—water comes up at least one step, maybe two.

  “Cleaned it out, so there’s nothing to be damaged, and I put the washer and dryer up on risers, but it’s still fucking weird.”

  “You had someone look at it?”

  Edgley takes the last couple of steps down. Water comes up to mid-calf. “Couple of plumbers. Nobody can figure it out. Or at least, they say they’d need to do a whole lot of work to figure out the problem—let alone fix it—and I just don’t have that kind of money. The weirdest thing?” He sticks his finger in the water, and then sticks it in his mouth. “It’s salt water.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Beats me. I thought maybe limestone in the foundation? Or natural sodium deposits in the ground? But I don’t think that’s actually a thing.”

  Now that he mentions it, the basement does have the very definite smell of the sea.

  As nonchalantly as she can, she says, “Are you still the only locksmith in Hudson?”

  “Pretty much,” he says. “Gotten so busy in the last couple years that sometimes my wait time is too long, and guys from Kinderhook or Catskill come in instead. But mostly it’s all me.”

  “Do you have the contract with the county to change locks after evictions?”

  “Ah,” he says, smiling. “There it is.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Why?”

  “I just want information,” she says. “That’s all. I promise. County won’t give us numbers on how many evictions happen. But you could, couldn’t you?”

  “I guess I could, actually.” He nods, relieved, thinking that this is all she wanted. “Offhand, approximately, I’d say about ten to twenty a month, depending. More so in spring and summer.”

  “But you could get me more detailed numbers, right? Look through old invoices, that kind of thing?”

  “Yeah, but that’d take me a shit ton of time. What’s this for, anyway?”

  With great effort, letting the pain show in her face, she lowers herself to sit on the steps. “We’ve been talking behind the scenes about trying to get a bill introduced in the Common Council, to make Hudson a zero-eviction city.”

  Edgley frowns. “Zero evictions? How would that even work?”

  “There’s precedents for it working in other towns. Look,” she says, her face all candor and vulnerability. So far she hasn’t said anything untrue. “I’m not trying to take money out of your pocket. But these are your friends, your neighbors, right? How many times have you had to help throw somebody you care about out of their home?”

  He just watches where the water laps against the wall and then nods.

  “And the chances are good that this would never be introduced, let alone pass. And even if it does, we’re talking three years at the soonest before it takes effect. It’s really just an organizing tool, something to get folks riled up behind. See who’s willing to stand on our side, who’s against us. That kind of thing.”

  All of this is true. But it isn’t why she is there. What she wants to do with that information.

  Edgley kicks at the water. She respects him, for the pain he feels. The conflict between his money and his people. Access to his records is so close to being hers. The numbers will indeed be useful, facts and figures to show for sure what everyone already knows but pretends not to: that hundreds of people who have lived in Hudson for generations are losing their homes. And a disproportionate number of them are people of color.

  But the numbers are just the beginning. If her hunch is right, the invoices will come with copies of the eviction notice, which will identify both the tenant and the landlord. She’ll know exactly who has lost their homes, even the ones who are so ashamed that they never talk about it.

  And she’ll have the names and addresses of the people who threw them out onto the street.

  “It’s funny,” Edgley says at last. “I love the beach. Dream about the ocean all the time. Haven’t been able to make it there in a couple years now. Not enough time or money. Now the ocean came to me.”

  “I have that dream, too,” Attalah says. “We both must be water signs.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ll do the work,” she says. “I’ll come to your office, look through the invoices, figure out the numbers. Whatever it takes. And I promise no one but me will ever know you helped us. I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize your liveliho
od.”

  “Fine,” he says. “Come by my office Thursday morning. Cool?”

  “Cool.” She reaches up for the banister and winces. “Is it okay if I just sit here for a second?”

  “Of course.”

  In the beginning, the cane had been a prop. Or at least that’s what she told herself. A way to make people underestimate her. It still serves that purpose, but now she also needs it for its actual purpose.

  “What are you even doing down here?” she asks, watching him slosh around. “I wouldn’t know what to do about it.”

  “Neither do I, really. Just . . . I don’t know, looking for a leak or something.”

  They chat easily now. Favors do that. They bond you together. An old organizing trick—get someone to do something for you, and they’re in your debt. Who knew why, what quirk of human psychology, when it should have been the other way around.

  But favors that break the rules are even better. Because they give you leverage. What won’t Edgley do, to keep his contract, if she threatens to reveal that he’d supplied them with information? And a man like Edgley, who had been a hell of a fighter once upon a time—he has a lot of potential uses.

  * * *

  PASTORAL CARE, PROBABLY. That’s all it was. Ossie was on the edge of dying, desperate for help.

  Even hardened atheist Ossie had picked up the phone and called a church, when the push came to the shove. Despair was a hell of a thing.

  Dom’s gut doesn’t buy it. Not 100 percent. There is still that little voice remembering Lettie’s words: she kept saying they were trying to silence her.

  Grace Abounding is a small wooden building in a town full of big brick-and-stone churches. St. Mary’s Catholic, Shiloh Baptist, St. Michael’s Ukrainian Orthodox. Grace Abounding has low ceilings, no stained glass, nothing fancy anywhere to be seen. A meeting is just ending when he walks in. Dom sits down at the back of the church and watches. Men and women move pews, clean up the coffee table. The mood in the room is tense, uncomfortable. None of the nervous chatty relief that follows an AA session or the happy, pleased hugging after a prayer meeting. Lights click off one by one, until the only illumination is on the pulpit. Pastor Thirza is a small woman, short-haired, bespectacled. Deep dark brown skin. Mid-forties, maybe early fifties.

  “Officer,” the pastor says, approaching him, once she’s walked her last two congregants down the center aisle. She sees the name tag on Dom’s chest and then says, “Officer Morrison,” extending a hand and a smile. “Any relation to Earl Morrison?”

  “My father.”

  “A good man. That laugh of his—you couldn’t hear that without laughing yourself, no matter who you were or what you were going through.”

  “Thank you for saying so, Pastor,” he says, smiling, hurting. “Any chance we can talk in private?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “Sorry to bother you so late in the evening,” Dom says, once they are in the pastor’s very small, very messy office. “Seemed like a difficult meeting just now.”

  “It’s fine,” the pastor says, and rubs her temples, and Dom sees it at once. This woman is exhausted. And stressed. And she has been for a very long time. “Several of my congregants are . . . unhappy with me. And they asked for a meeting about it. And it lasted four hours.”

  “Unhappy about what?”

  The pastor winces. “Unhappy is the wrong word. I’m sorry. But the church has been planning an ambitious expansion for several years now, and they’re frustrated at the slow rate of progress.” She waves her hand.

  Officially, there is no investigation into Ossie’s death. A suicide, complete with note: case closed. No reason at all for him to be here. But Pastor Thirza doesn’t need to know that. “A woman took her own life,” he says. “Pretty open and shut. But there’s evidence she was connected to some other things we’re looking at, so I’m just asking some routine questions.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you know a young woman named Ossie Travers?”

  Pastor Thirza blinks and nods and does not answer right away. Instantly, Dom’s antennae are up. Not for dishonesty, but for fear. Evasion. “Ossie. Yes. Of course. Is she the one who . . . passed away?”

  “She was,” Dom says.

  “That’s so, so sad. She came to me, sometimes. For pastoral care. Troubled, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  “Of course,” Dom says, his suspicion increasing. “It’s interesting to me that she was a member of your congregation. According to people who knew her” (including myself because I was carrying on an extramarital affair with her even though she was a drug dealer and I am a police officer and what does the good Lord have to say about that) “she was not a religious person. An atheist, in fact.”

  Pastor Thirza smiles tolerantly. “You’d be surprised, the changes that come over people when they reach their lowest place.”

  “Of course. Did she ever mention to you that she felt . . . threatened?”

  Again the tolerant smile—and again the evasion. “She never did. Although I did get the sense that she had . . . contact . . . with some unsavory characters. So many of us do; I’m certainly not one to judge.”

  “Indeed,” Dom says, standing. “Thank you so much for your time.”

  And what are you hiding, Pastor?

  She stands up and walks Dom out of her office. The nave is fully dark.

  It doesn’t play, no matter how many times Dom runs it through in his head. No way in hell Ossie had been a parishioner here. No way she found religion in her final days.

  Are you sure about that, Dom? You don’t know the first thing about despair like that. What it feels like; what it does to you. If it’d make her do something like kill herself, couldn’t it also make her go to fucking church? Call a fucking priest, just to have someone to talk to?

  And are you still so sure she killed herself at all?

  The salt water still naggles at him. The brackish smell of it in her mouth hasn’t fully left his nose. The eerie, shivery feeling down his spine, the one he only ever got reading ghost stories or watching horror movies.

  If somebody had killed her, trying to make it look like a suicide, the salt water was an inexplicable (impossible) addition—the kind of thing that would rouse suspicions in cops who wouldn’t otherwise be suspicious.

  Unless the message wasn’t for you. If she was in something over her head, the conspiracy Lettie suspected, there might be more to this story you’re not seeing.

  Maybe Ossie was just a pawn in someone else’s war.

  Pastor Thirza flips a switch, so Dom can find his way out. A door slams, somewhere.

  “My son, probably,” the pastor says. “He’s sixteen, and therefore has made it his mission to make everyone in Hudson as miserable as he is.”

  Dom laughs. They shake hands one more time. Now that the nervousness is gone, Dom can see the sadness on her face again. The stress. Probably the same stress half of Hudson feels. Panic over what the future holds. Of course the church’s expansion plans had been put on hold. No one local can afford to do anything big, not in a city where everything has suddenly gotten six times more expensive.

  The cold startles Dom. He hurries to his car.

  “Mister!” someone calls, whispering as loudly as they can. Dom turns around to see a young man running toward him—the pastor’s son; he can see it at once.

  “Hi,” Dom says, extending a hand. “I’m Officer Morrison.”

  “Wick,” the boy says. He has striking eyes. Because they are so big, and because they are so sad. “I was eavesdropping on you and my mom. I’m sorry,” and he grinned like he wasn’t. “I knew her. We were friends.”

  “Ossie?”

  Wick nods. His stance is proud, unintimidated by the man in uniform. It makes Dom feel a rush of fondness for him. So many young people see the uniform and feel fear, hatred. If Wick feels any of those things, he hides them well.

  “Was she just your friend, or was she your friend and your drug de
aler? Mind you, I don’t give a shit either way.”

  Wick grins. “Just my friend.”

  “Mine, too,” Dom says, smiling. “You have any idea why your mom might be lying to me? Or at least, not telling me the whole truth?” Then he winces—most people don’t want to hear their mom’s a liar. “I could be wrong here. Just a cop’s gut.”

  Wick says, “You’re not wrong.” Then he turns to look at the church behind them, as if it might be able to hear what he says, snitch to his mother.

  “What’s going on, Wick?”

  Wick doesn’t answer.

  Dom says, “Can we talk tomorrow, maybe? Someplace else?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” the boy says, smiling gratefully. Something else Dom sees, at once—the kid is probably gay. Does his mother know? Is she okay with it? Where’s his dad? The woman Dom just met with was kind, gentle, understanding, but one thing police work in a small town teaches you is that even the nicest people are capable of the foulest shit. Was Wick abused? Had he turned to Ossie for help? Dom hands Wick his business card, tells him to call him in the morning.

  “She mentioned you,” Wick says, shaking his hand again. “She said you were nice.”

  “Call me tomorrow,” Dom says, and watches the kid run off. Nice. Nice is what I am.

  Nice is all I am.

  Chapter Fourteen

  RONAN

  “We can’t beat him,” Attalah said. “Mabie Brabender is only running because the mayor asked her to—he wants Jark to win, but he needed an actual opponent to make it look good—she’s polling at ten percent.”

  “Of course we can. A big-enough scandal, people will turn on him.”

  “I’m not so sure. Maybe that shit is true in the big leagues, but we’re still Tammany Hall up here. Political machine in full effect. You could hand them Jark Trowse covered in blood standing over a dead grandma and people would cluck their tongues and step into the booth and vote for him.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go crazy, be bold, be ambitious, even if it seems impossible. We can make this happen.”

  I grinned. She grinned. Conspiracy is a very special kind of crazy, a manic contagious acid buzz that can eat away any obstacle.