She lay her palm on his chest, felt his heart beat. She was always drawn to that, the steadiness of it. Like a clock, she liked to say. Then she moved her hand to his left arm, followed it to his forearm, where the tattoo of a star, dark black and the size of a nickel, lay. She’d asked once what it meant—all tattoos, she had always assumed, meant something—but he wouldn’t tell her. By his reaction, though, it was obvious that it meant something. She had even mentioned some time later that she was thinking of getting one herself, a dark star just like his, in the same place on her body as his. A matching set, as it were. He had simply shook his head from side to side, left it at that. She had never mentioned it again—they weren’t ones, as a rule, for talking about their pasts, and she, if for different reasons, wanted to leave hers behind as much as he wanted to leave his. But she went for his tattoo, he noticed, whenever she could, straying to it and touching it in a way that told him she couldn’t really help herself, that she was drawn to the thing as if it were a wound she secretly, maybe even desperately, wanted to tend to, always would.
Finally, as if realizing she had strayed there yet again, she returned her hand to his chest, did so quickly, held it there for a moment before moving it down his hard stomach and reaching between his legs.
“You are cold,” she whispered.
Afterward, she slept beside him, needed to, she’d said, for just a bit more. Maybe she was that tired, after six days of work, or maybe it was something more, a need, perhaps, to get away from the rain. Her life had been changed by rain—more than changed, it had been shattered, and she lived now among all the broken pieces of what used to be, did so without complaint or self-pity. Bechet loved her for that, admired her for her strength and her ability to accept a reduced life, to find, as he did, the comfort in existing. Still, though, this much rain was probably just too much to ask of her—this rain and the sirens, not to mention the fog waiting to descend: reasons enough, all of these, for her to want to indulge herself in the comfort of unconsciousness.
Bechet lay still in the darkness, listened to the downpour. Doing so helped him to not think about the things he didn’t want to think about. So, they had this in common as well. His matched opposite, Gabrielle Marie Olivo. And anyway, what else was there for him to do? They were together, in the same room, and that was all that mattered. If he did fall asleep—willed himself into it, since he wasn’t at all tired—he would probably dream of violence, he had that sense now, and he didn’t want that, not tonight. It was always there, though, that deepest part of his nature, inherited at first, passed down to him from his father, and then in-grained over the years—as a boxer, and then as what he had become after that—into his very being. But that wasn’t his life now, and everything he did was, he believed, a testament to that. A conscious choice to be something other than what he had been made to be. What he was maybe even meant to be. Everything he did—every thought, every gesture—was designed with that very denial, that very resistance of fate’s hand, in mind.
At some point, though, the heavy rain began to ease, eventually coming to a stop altogether, leaving a silence that was nothing short of remarkable. The world was suddenly as quiet as a graveyard, the kind of noiselessness that has its own echo. But it was a false stillness, Bechet knew that; somewhere on the East End, in this dark that surrounded them, roamed two men with blood on their hands. Whenever Bechet closed his eyes he could see them as if they were right there with him, standing quietly in that room. He could see, too, the men who employed them, the father and son who had likely ordered two more killings—at least two, possibly even more, whatever it took to protect what was theirs—orders that were to be carried out certainly before morning, were maybe even being carried out right now, at this very instant, as Bechet lay still.
The South American way.
But, again, there was nothing he could do about that, so there was no point in thinking about it, in doing that particular disservice to himself.
This had nothing to do with him, with the life he had built for himself and the woman asleep beside him, the first and only woman he had ever truly loved.
Safe for now in his lover’s bed, Bechet imagined this brush with his past as a near collision at sea, in the darkest of nights. He had seen his past, had been close enough to reach out and touch it, but maybe it hadn’t seen him, maybe it had been blind to him and was drifting now farther and farther away, blessedly ignorant of him as it receded into the blackness, all possible distances growing between them. There was comfort in all that, seeing tonight’s events in his mind as such—if only he could be certain it was true. He’d gotten used to certainties, the probable outcome of his every day. Predictable, as much as anything can be, as long as he remained cautious, did what needed to be done.
But he had no such assurances now. The rain resumed eventually, falling as heavy as before. More than enough racket to conceal all manner of approaches, he thought. But also more than enough to conceal all manner of escapes.
Unable to sleep, still silently adrift, in his mind, on that empty sea, Bechet listened for the first sound he didn’t like, the first hint that he had been wrong all along, that his past had seen him, was not moving away at all but in fact coming nearer, swift and unseen, on the hunt for him like some single-minded predator, like the very thing he had once been made to be.
Three
IN SOUTHAMPTON, TOMMY MILLER WAITED TO TAKE ANOTHER painkiller. He had heard the sirens earlier, about an hour ago by now—cop cars, by the sound of them, moving away from town, to the west, moving fast—but hadn’t really paid all that much attention to them. If the sirens had been coming toward him, then he probably would have taken notice, gotten up and walked to his window for a look. Not that seeing the cops coming would have meant much as far as advantage went, and not that he had any reason to expect that they would be coming for him now, certainly not with sirens wailing. Better, if that were the case, to do something other than just lie there on his unmade bed and wait blind for a hard knock on his apartment door. But sirens moving away was something Miller could quickly forget all about, and so he resumed what it was he’d been doing before the sirens had sounded at all: riding out the hours till he could take another Oxycodone, feeling with every minute that passed the precious effects of the dose he had taken five hours before diminish like the memory of a dream.
Of course, the last thing he needed these days was an addiction. He was playing on the edge of one as it was, he knew that, but his knee was killing him, had been every day for weeks now. This fucking rain. It used to be that his knee bothered him in the cold—whenever the temperature neared freezing, a limp he could pretty much conceal otherwise grew suddenly, decidedly worse. He had undergone surgery a year ago, to replace his torn-up joint with a state-of-the-art mechanical device, but as a result the pain he had always felt in the cold was replaced by one that afflicted him whenever there was even a hint of dampness in the air. Winter rain, summer humidity, it didn’t matter—any rise in moisture meant a pain that reached deep. The past month, then, had been difficult, to say the least—just to get from morning to night and back to morning again required an extra dose, bringing him up to three a day. A dangerous thing, but what else could he do? He had played football in high school, had been a blue-chip athlete with a bright future in front of him, so he was used to pain, to giving it and receiving it. But high school was a long time ago, and anyway, somehow, this was different. Maybe it wasn’t even the pain so much as the monotony of being in pain. There was, he’d come to realize, a subtle but important difference between the two—one a state of body, the other a state of mind, the latter easier to ignore than the former. He was, these days, though, out of work—in fact, at the age of twenty-nine, he was retired, had now, if not a bright future, then at least a comfortable one ahead of him—and this was, he’d be willing to admit if anyone asked, the problem. There was little else for him to do on any given day but pass the time between morning and night, and nothing at all to do on thes
e days in particular—these days of steady rain—but to deal with a pain that reached into the deepest parts of him like clawing fingers.
He had thought repairing his knee would have meant that he was done having his well-being subject to the changes in weather, but no such luck, it seemed, not yet, anyway. Since he was sixteen, when his knee had been ripped to shreds—not in a game or during practice but in a late-night fight, one he in his own arrogance had started—the cold had always been a lonely time for him, a period of days, for the most part, even in the worst of winters, in which he was forced to slow down, if not come to a halt entirely, and, for a change, think. Now it was rain that caused him to stop and face his ache and remember the foolishnesses of his past. So far this month he had endured not just days and nights of this but weeks of it, and having nowhere to go, no job to occupy him and no one in his life to expect a thing from him, there was really no reason at all for him to resist the temptation to take a pill sooner than the eight hours between doses he was otherwise strict about observing, no reason not to let himself be just a little numb. There was, in fact, no reason at all for him to wait the remaining three hours, when he could take his third pill of the day without risking addiction. In the long run, really, what would it matter—to him, to anyone—if he were to lie around his own apartment more than just a little stoned? What would one night’s infraction mean to a man who was otherwise so diligent? And who would blame him at all, what with this fucking rain?
The amber-colored bottle and glass of water were on the windowsill near his bed, within easy reach. He lay still on his back, looked at the bottle for a long enough moment, then finally reached for it. Unscrewing the cap, he tossed a pill into his mouth, downed it with what was left of his stale water. There, then, done. Nothing left now to debate. Lying back down, his two-hundred-plus pounds compressing the springs of his mattress, he told himself as he waited for the effects of this pill to begin that rain like this wouldn’t last forever. It couldn’t, right? Spring was coming, wasn’t it? When this patch of late-winter weather was finally done, he wouldn’t need this shit anymore, these pills, not like this, maybe not till summer even, when that first stretch of humidity came, as it always does. And who knows, maybe by then he wouldn’t need these pills at all; maybe by then he would have finally healed. Once this long patch of rain passed, then he’d deal with whatever problems may have arisen from his current overreliance. Till then, though, not much else that he could do except lie back, feel the pain drift away, and enjoy the ride.
It wasn’t long after he took the pill that he felt a blue flame in his chest. The advantage of waiting eight hours between doses—two hours longer than the label suggested—was that his body didn’t develop a tolerance and so the effects didn’t diminish all that much. Maybe that was all in his mind, but maybe that was all it took. Whatever the case, the sensation of a flame flickering in his chest was where it always started for him—a soft, glowing warmth that was not unlike, though he’d only known it once, falling in love. After that he felt a numbness in his lips and a tingling in his fingertips, a kind of lazy busyness, a buzz of activity inside him and no outward signs of motion to show for it. Soon after that came the first hints of lightness of being, the feeling that he was about to float up and out of his body. A little like death, maybe, like that very moment when the brain floods itself with doping chemicals, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Here it was now, painlessness, and that rush moving through him that was both giddy and melancholy.
Turning onto his side, waiting now for unconsciousness, he looked toward the window next to his bed, saw through it the very end of the long train platform that stood across the street from his place. A picture-postcard, this train station, a quaint place, sometimes bustling but mostly dead still, like now. It was the place he had last seen her, or rather the place where he had watched her stand and wait for a cab the night she had finally left him. The night she finally had enough of being alone. Of course his mind, unwinding the way it was, went there now, to that very memory, the one pain that no amount of prescribed medication could dull. “What are you trying to prove, Tommy? It’s like you care more about strangers than you do me. I need you, too.” There wasn’t a day, clear minded or otherwise, when Miller didn’t think of her, didn’t look at that station and remember. There wasn’t a night when he didn’t stand in any one of his empty rooms and be reminded of something. She had left four years ago, back when his work had meant much too much to him. Not just a job but salvation. He cringed now just at the thought of that, the choice he made, night after night, to leave her at the mercy of her own fears while he went out to help others—strangers, most of them, just like she’d said—deal with theirs. A private investigator, but more than just that, if only in his mind. They had been together for a little more than two years, a one-night stand that just took. For him, there had been no one else in the two years since, not a soul, not even close. It was a long time to be alone, maybe, but there were, of course, worse things for a man to endure, Tommy Miller knew, than self-imposed exile.
He lived above a restaurant called L’Orange Bleu, a French-Moroccan place run by a Frenchman named Oberti. Miller owned the two-story building, the last one on the north end of Elm Street, had bought it as an investment after selling the house his parents had left him. The apartment above was all he and Abby would have needed, now it was all he had, the limits, more or less, of his world. Being Monday, L’Orange Bleu was closed, so there would be nothing for Miller to listen to—no murmured voices coming up from below to occupy him, no happy chatter and occasional bursts of laughter, no cars now and then on the street beneath his front windows, people coming and going. Soothing sounds, for the most part. Humanity, not all that far away. Tonight, though, it was just him—the parts of him that he could still feel—and the rain and the view of the train station outside his window and the hours between now and morning.
He let himself drift in and out of consciousness as the effects of the painkillers deepened, moving, he imagined, like roots steadily reaching downward into dark, cool soil. Finally he slipped into sleep. Motionless, dead to all of the world, he had begun to dream of the touch of a woman whose face he could not see, only to be torn away by the sound of someone pounding three times on his downstairs door.
He lifted his head, listened, but did little more till he heard the pounding a second time. Three bangs in a row, fast, just like the ones that had awakened him. Boom, boom, boom. He sat up, waited a moment more, then stood. His knee felt fine now, which meant he was feeling nothing, or close enough to it, so he moved less with a limp and more with a stagger across his bedroom. The entire world, as far as he was concerned, was the rolling deck of a ship caught in a storm.
He paused in the doorway to regain his balance—standing up was always the worst part, took at first pretty much everything he had—and then entered his living room, heading toward the row of tall windows on the other end of the room. His apartment spanned the entire top floor of the building, the living room a wide-open space that was easily several times the size of his small bedroom. From any of his front windows he would be able to see if a car was parked at the curb below and, more than likely, determine who it was that had come knocking. He went to the window that was directly above his street door, saw no car below, looked across the wide street and saw one was parked at that curb. It was an old Ford Bronco, well maintained and rigged for beach riding. He didn’t recognize it, heard as he studied it a third round of banging on his street door. Fast, like before, heavy. Authoritative? He’d grown up among cops, was the son of the former chief of police, had a long time ago learned to distinguish the difference between the knock of a friend and the knock of a man carrying a badge. He knew all the cops in town, officers as well as detectives, some since he was a kid, knew, too, what each one of them drove when off-duty—or at least he used to know this, back when it was his business to know such things. So, then, maybe it wasn’t a cop at his door now, maybe not the commanding knock
of an authority figure but something else, the urgent knock of someone in trouble. Whatever the emotion of whoever it was down there, Miller simply wasn’t in the frame of mind to deal with anything, least of all someone in trouble enough to keep pounding on a door like that.
He moved away from the window, in case whoever was below decided to take a step back from the door and look up, search his row of windows for some sign that he was home, some reason to keep at it. Waiting for another round—or, better, the sound of the person below crossing the wet street, returning to the waiting Bronco—Miller heard neither of these things. What he heard instead was the downstairs door opening and then closing. An old door, rotting, hanging loose on its hinges, it had no working lock. The building was a fixer-upper when Miller had found it, still was, for the most part. After the sound of the door closing came the sound of footsteps on the wobbly stairs. Moving slowly, evenly. After a half-minute or so the footsteps reached the top landing, stopped. Nothing for a moment more, and then, finally, knocking.
Not pounding this time, though, nowhere near it, in fact. Knocking. Civilized.
Miller stayed where he was, had no clue now what was going on, who this could be. This door, of course, had a lock, and all his lights were off, so sooner or later, if he didn’t make a sound, the person in his hallway would assume no one was home and go away. That he could do, stand there and say nothing and wait—well, barely. The Oxycodone was in him now, numbing some parts of him, causing others to tingle as if caressed by fingertips. It was then, of course, at that very thought, that Miller wondered if this might be her. A wild, irrational thought, but that didn’t matter. She knew, though, that the downstairs lock didn’t work, wouldn’t have bothered knocking on it, even after all these years. Still, what if ? He took a step toward the door, then stopped himself, pushed away any hope that it was her, that it was Abby needing him, suddenly, for whatever reason. He stood paralyzed now, as much by the thought of her as the drug surging through his system, shutting him down from the center out. He was standing there, dumb and wavering just a little, no thought of doing anything other than that for as long as it took, when from behind the door a voice said, “Miller, you there?”
The Water's Edge Page 5
