“Oh,” I said, “I know. Exactly.”
“Nothing works.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing works,” he said. “Don’t you get it? The cars, the washing machines, the refrigerators and ‘starter’ houses, the fucking shoes and clothes and…nothing works. Schools don’t work.”
“Not public ones,” I said.
“Public? Look at the morons coming out of private schools these days. You ever talked to one of those disaffected prep-school fucks? You ask ’em what morality is, they say a concept. You ask ’em what decency is, they say a word. Look at these rich kids whacking winos in Central Park over drug deals or just because. Schools don’t work because parents don’t work because their parents didn’t work because nothing works, so why invest energy or love or anything into it if it’s just going to let you down? Jesus, Patrick, we don’t work. That kid was out there for two weeks; no one could find him. He was in that house, we suspected it hours before he was killed, we’re sitting in a doughnut shop talking about it. That kid got his throat cut when we should have been kicking in the door.”
“We’re the richest, most advanced society in the history of civilization,” I said, “and we can’t keep a kid from getting carved up in a bathtub by three freaks? Why?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head and kicked at the sand by his feet. “I just don’t know. Every time you come up with a solution, there’s a faction ready to tell you you’re wrong. You believe in the death penalty?”
I held out my cup. “No.”
He stopped pouring. “Excuse me?”
I shrugged. “I don’t. Sorry. Keep pouring, will you?”
He filled my cup and sucked back on the bottle for a moment. “You capped Corwin Earle in the back of the head, you’re telling me you don’t believe in capital punishment?”
“I don’t think society has the right or the intelligence. Let society prove to me they can pave roads efficiently; then I’ll let them decide life and death.”
“Yet, again: you executed someone yesterday.”
“Technically he had his hand on a weapon. And besides, I’m not society.”
“What the fuck’s that mean?”
I shrugged. “I trust myself. I can live with my actions. I don’t trust society.”
“That why you’re a PI, Patrick? The lone knight and all that?”
I shook my head. “Piss on that.”
Another laugh.
“I’m a PI, because—I dunno, maybe I’m addicted to the great What Comes Next. Maybe I like tearing down facades. That doesn’t make me a good guy. It just makes me a guy who hates people who hide, pretend to be what they’re not.”
He raised the bottle, and I tapped my plastic glass into the side.
“What if someone pretends to be one thing because society deems he must, but in reality he’s something else because he deems he must?”
I shook my head against the booze. “Run that one by me again.” I stood up, and my feet felt unsteady in the sand. I crossed to the jungle gym opposite the swings and perched myself on a rung.
“If society doesn’t work, how do we, as allegedly honorable men, live?”
“On the fringes,” I said.
He nodded. “Exactly. Yet we must coexist within society or otherwise we’re—what, we’re fucking militia, guys who wear camouflage pants and bitch about taxes while they drive on roads paved by the government. Right?”
“I guess.”
He stood and wavered, grasped the swing chain, and tilted back into the pools of dark behind the swing-set arch. “I planted evidence on a guy once.”
“You what?”
He tilted back into the light. “True. Scumbag named Carlton Volk. He was raping hookers for months. Months. A couple pimps tried to stop him, he fucked them up. Carlton was a psycho, black-belt, prison-weight-room kind of guy. Couldn’t be reasoned with. And our buddy Ray Likanski gives me a phone call, lets me in on all the details. Skinny Ray, I guess, had a soft spot for one of the hookers. Whatever. Anyway, I know Carlton Volk is raping hookers, but who’s going to convict him? Even if the girls had wanted to testify—which they didn’t—who would believe them? A hooker saying she was raped is a joke to most people. Like killing a corpse; supposedly it ain’t possible. So I know Carlton’s a two-time loser, out on probation; I plant an ounce of heroin and two unlicensed firearms in his trunk, way back under the spare where he’ll never find ’em. Then I put an expired inspection sticker over the up-to-date one on his license plate. Who looks at their own plate until it’s near renewal time?” He floated back into the dark again for a moment. “Two weeks later, Carlton gets stopped on the inspection sticker, cops an attitude, et cetera, et cetera. Long story short, he gets dropped as a three-time felon for twenty years hard, no parole possibility.”
I waited until he’d swung back into the light again before I spoke.
“You think you did the right thing?”
He shrugged. “For those hookers, yes.”
“But—”
“Always a ‘but’ when you tell a story like that, ain’t there?” He sighed. “But a guy like Carlton, he thrives in prison. Probably goes through more young kids sent up for burglary and minor dope-dealing than he ever would have raped in hookers. So did I do right for the general population? Probably not. Did I do right for some hookers no one else gave a shit about? Maybe.”
“If you had to do it again?”
“Patrick, lemme ask you: What would you do with a guy like Carlton?”
“We’re back to the death penalty again, aren’t we?”
“The personal one,” he said, “not the societal one. If I’d had the balls to whack Volk, no one gets raped by him anymore. That’s not relative. That’s black and white.”
“But those kids in prison, they’ll still get raped by someone else.”
He nodded. “For every solution, a problem.”
I took another swig of rum, noticed a lone star floating above the thin night clouds and city smog.
I said, “I stood over that kid’s body and something snapped. I didn’t care what happened to me, to my life, to anything. I just wanted…” I held out my hands.
“Balance.”
I nodded.
“So you popped a cap in the back of a guy’s head while he was on his knees.”