I slipped the punch, dropped the paper, and closed my right hand around his throat. I backed him into his desk and pushed him onto his back.
Tony stepped out of the bathroom and said, “Like, shit. Wow.”
“Which drawer?” I asked Mo.
His eyes bulged in a frantic question.
“Which drawer is my money in, Mo?”
I eased my grip on his throat.
“Middle drawer.”
“It better not be a check.”
“No, no. Cash.”
I let him go and he lay there wheezing as I went around the desk, opened the drawer, and found my money wrapped in a rubber band.
Tony sat back in the chair and recuffed his own wrist.
Mo sat up and his bulk dropped his feet to the floor. He rubbed his throat, gacked like a cat spitting up a hair ball.
I came back around the desk and picked the newspaper up off the floor.
Mo’s tiny eyes darkened into bitterness.
I straightened the pages of the paper, folded it neatly, and tucked it under my arm.
“Mo,” I said, “you have a pimp’s piece in the holster on your left ankle, and a lead sap in your back pocket.”
Mo’s eyes hardened some more.
“Reach for either of them, I’ll show you exactly how bad my mood is today.”
Mo coughed. He dropped his eyes from mine. He rasped, “Your name is shit now in this business.”
“Gosh,” I said. “More’s the pity, huh?”
Mo said, “You’ll see. You’ll see. Without Gennaro, I hear you need every penny you can get. You’ll be begging me for work come winter. Begging.”
I looked down at Tony. “You be okay?”
He gave me a thumbs-up.
“ At Nashua Street,” I told him, “there’s a guard named Bill Kuzmich. Tell him you’re a friend of mine, he’ll watch out for you.”
“Cool,” Tony said. “Think he’d bring me a keg every now and then?”
“Oh, sure, Tony. That’ll happen.”
I read the paper sitting in my car outside Mo Bags Bail Bonds on Ocean Street in Chinatown. There wasn’t much in the article I hadn’t heard off the radio, but there was a picture of Karen Nichols taken from her driver’s license.
It was the same Karen Nichols who’d hired me six months before. In the picture she looked as bright and innocent as she had the day I met her, smiling into the camera as if the photographer had just told her what a pretty dress she had on, and what nice shoes, too.
She’d entered the Custom House during the afternoon, taken a tour of the observation deck, even talked to someone in the Realtor’s office about the new time-sharing opportunities available since the state had decided to pick up some extra cash by selling a historical landmark to the Marriott Corporation. The Realtor, Mary Hughes, recalled her as being vague about her employment, easily distracted.
At five, when they closed the observation deck to anyone but time-sharers with codes for the keyless entry system, Karen had hidden somewhere on the deck, and then at nine, she’d jumped.
For four hours, she’d sat up there, twenty-six stories above blue cement, and considered whether she’d go through with it or not. I wondered if she’d huddled in a corner, or walked around, or looked out at the city, up at the sky, around at the lights. How much of her life and its pivots and dips and hard, sudden L-turns had replayed in her head? At what moment had it all crystallized to the point where she’d hoisted her legs over that four-foot balcony wall and stepped into black space?
I placed the paper on the passenger seat, closed my eyes for a bit.
Behind my lids, she fell. She was pale and thin against a night sky and she dropped, with the off-white limestone of the Custom House rushing behind her like a waterfall.
I opened my eyes, watched a pair of med students from Tufts puff cigarettes desperately as they hurried along Ocean in their white lab coats.
I looked up at the MO BAGS BAIL BONDS sign, and wondered where my Johnny Tough Guy act had come from. My entire life, I’d done a good job staying away from macho histrionics. I was pretty secure that I could handle myself in a violent confrontation, and that was enough, because I was just as certain, having grown up where I did, that there were always people crazier and tougher and meaner and faster than I was. And they were only too happy to prove it. So many guys I’d known from childhood had died or been jailed or, in one case, met with quadriplegia because they’d needed to show the world how bad-ass they were. But the world, in my experience, is like Vegas: You may walk away a winner once or twice, but if you go to the table too often, roll the dice too much, the world will swat you into place and take your wallet, your future, or both.
Karen Nichols’s death bugged me, that was part of it. But more than simply that, I think, was the dawning realization over the last year that I’d lost my taste for my profession. I was tired of skip-tracing and shutterbugging insurance frauds and men playing house with bony trophy mistresses and women playing more than match point with their Argentinian tennis instructors. I was tired, I think, of people-their predictable vices, their predictable needs and wants and dormant desires. The pathetic silliness of the whole damn species. And without Angie to roll her eyes along with my own, to add sardonic running commentary to the whole tattered pageant, it just wasn’t fun anymore.
Karen Nichols’s hopeful, homecoming-queen smile stared up from the passenger seat, all white teeth and good health and beatific ignorance.
She’d come to me for help. I’d thought I’d provided it, and maybe I had. But during the six months that followed, she’d unraveled so completely from the person I’d met that it might as well have been a stranger in the body that dropped from the Custom House last night.
And, yes, the worst of it-she’d called me. Six weeks after I’d dealt with Cody Falk. Four months before she died. Somewhere in the middle of all that fatal unraveling.
And I hadn’t returned the call.
I’d been busy.
She’d been drowning, and I’d been busy.
I glanced down at her face again, resisted the urge to turn away from the hope in her eyes.
“Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay, Karen. I’ll see what I can turn up. I’ll see what I can do.”
A Chinese woman passing in front of the Jeep caught me talking to myself. She stared at me. I waved. She shook her head and walked away.
She was still shaking her head as I started the Jeep and pulled out of my parking spot.
Crazy, she seemed to be thinking. The whole damn planet of us. We’re all so crazy.