Mystic River

Once the place got so jammed folks were standing three deep at the bar and it started taking twenty minutes to get a drink, they moved on toward Curley's Folly in the Point, smoking another joint in the car, Katie feeling the jagged shards of paranoia scrape the edges of her skull.

"That car's following us."

Eve looked at the lights in the rearview. "It ain't."

"It's been behind us since we left the bar."

"Friggin' Katie, man, that was, like, thirty seconds ago."

"Oh."

"Oh," Diane mimicked, then hiccuped a laugh, passed the joint back to Katie.

Eve deepened her voice. "It's quiet."

Katie saw where this was going. "Shut up."

"Too quiet," Diane agreed, and burst out laughing.

"Bitches," Katie said, trying for an edge of annoyance but catching the crest of a giggle-fit wave instead. She fell onto the backseat, losing it, the back of her head landing between the armrest and the seat, cheeks getting that pins-and-needles sensation they always got those rare times she smoked pot. The giggles subsided and she felt herself go all dreamy as she fixated on the pale dome light, thinking this was it, this was what you lived for, to giggle like a fool with your giggling-fool best friends on the night before you'd marry the man you loved. (In Vegas, okay. With a hangover, okay.) Still, this was the point. This was the dream.

* * *

FOUR BARS, three shots, and a couple of phone numbers on napkins later, Katie and Diane were so trashed they hopped up on the bar at McGills and danced to "Brown Eyed Girl" even though the jukebox was silent. Eve sang, "Slipping and a sliding," and Katie and Diane slipped and slid all along the waterfall with you, getting their hips into it, shaking their hair until it covered their faces. At McGills, the guys had thought it was a riot, but twenty minutes later at the Brown, they couldn't even get through the door.

Diane and Katie had Eve propped up between them at this point, and she was still singing (Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" by this time), which was half the problem, and swaying like a metronome, which was the other half.

So they got the boot even before they could enter the Brown, which meant the only option left in terms of serving three legless East Bucky girls was the Last Drop, a clammy dump in the worst section of the Flats, a horror-show three-block stretch where the scaggiest hookers and johns did their mating dance and any car without an alarm lasted about a minute and a half.

Which is where they were when Roman Fallow showed up with his latest guppy of a girlfriend, Roman liking his women small and blond and big-eyed. Roman's appearance was good news for the bartenders because Roman tipped somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 percent. Bad news for Katie, though, because Roman was friends with Bobby O'Donnell.

Roman said, "You a tad hammered there, Katie?"

Katie smiled because Roman scared her. Roman scared just about everyone. A good-looking guy, and smart, he could be funny as hell when he felt like it, but man there was a hole in Roman, a complete lack of anything resembling real feeling that hung in his eyes like a vacancy sign.

"I'm a bit buzzed," she admitted.

That amused Roman. He gave her a short laugh, flashed his perfect teeth, and took a sip of Tanqueray. "A bit buzzed, huh? Yeah, okay, Katie. Let me ask you something," he said gently. "You think Bobby would like hearing you were making a fucking ass of yourself at McGills tonight? You think he'd like hearing that?"

"No."

"'Cause I didn't like hearing it, Katie. You see what I'm saying?"

"Right."

Roman cupped a hand behind his ear. "What's that?"

"Right."

Roman left his hand where it was, leaned into her. "I'm sorry. What?"

"I'll go home right now," Katie said.

Roman smiled. "You sure? I don't want to make you do anything you don't feel like."

"No, no. I've had enough."

"Sure, sure. Hey, can I settle your tab?"

"No, no. Thanks, Roman, we already paid cash."

Roman slung his arm around his bimbo. "Call you a cab?"

Katie almost slipped up and said she'd driven here, but she caught herself. "No, no. This time of night? We'll flag one down no problem."

"Yeah, you will. All right then, Katie, we'll be seeing you."

Eve and Diane were already at the door, had been, in fact, since they'd first seen Roman.

Out on the sidewalk, Diane said, "Jesus. You think he'll call Bobby?"

Katie shook her head, though she wasn't positive. "No. Roman doesn't deliver bad news. He just takes care of it." She put her hand over her face for a moment and in the darkness, she felt the alcohol turn to an itchy sludge in her blood and the weight of her aloneness. She'd always felt alone, ever since her mother had died, and her mother had died a long, long time ago.

In the parking lot, Eve threw up, some of it splashing against one of the rear tires of Katie's blue Toyota. When she was finished, Katie fished some mouthwash from her purse, handed the small bottle to Eve. Eve said, "You going to be okay to drive?"

Katie nodded. "What's it, fourteen blocks from here? I'll be fine."

As they pulled out of the parking lot, Katie said, "Just one more reason to leave. One more reason to get the hell out of this whole shitty neighborhood."

Diane piped up with a halfhearted "Yeah."

They rolled cautiously through the Flats, Katie keeping the needle at twenty-five, staying in the right lane, concentrating. They stayed on Dunboy for twelve blocks, then cut down Crescent, the streets darker, quieter. At the base of the Flats, they drove along Sydney Street, heading for Eve's house. During the drive, Diane had decided to crash on Eve's couch rather than go over to her boyfriend Matt's house and eat a ration of shit for showing up hammered, so she and Eve got out under the broken streetlight on Sydney Street. It had begun to rain, spitting against Katie's windshield, but Diane and Eve didn't seem to notice.

They both bent at the waist and looked back in through the open passenger window at Katie. The bitter drop the evening had taken in its last hour caused their faces to sag, their shoulders to droop, and Katie could feel their sadness on the side of her face as she looked through the windshield at the spitting drops. She could feel the rest of their lives weighing stilted and unhappy on top of them. Her best friends since kindergarten, and she might never see them again.

"You going to be okay?" Diane's voice had a high, bubbling pitch to it.

Katie turned her face toward them and smiled, giving it all she had even though the effort felt like it would rip her jaw in half. "Yeah. 'Course. I'll call you from Vegas. You'll come visit."