“Oh,” she said, not quite sure why that was funny. “There’s some more home fries in the pan, if you want some.”
Charley had come in in the wee hours, and slept until, probably, he smelled the coffee and the bacon, and then come down. It was now quarter after nine.
“No, thanks, Mom,” Charley said. “I got to get on my horse.”
“You goin’ somewhere?” Agnes McFadden asked when Charley stood up and carried his plate to the sink. “Here, give me that. Neither you or your father can be trusted around a sink with dishes.”
“I got to change the oil in the car,” Kevin McFadden said. “And I bought some stuff that’s supposed to clean out the carburetor. Afterward, I thought maybe you and me could go to Flo and Danny’s and hoist one.”
“I can’t, Pop,” Charley said. “I got to go to work.”
“You didn’t get in until four this morning—” Agnes McFadden said.
“Three, Mom,” Charley interrupted. “It was ten after three when I walked in the door.”
“Three then,” she granted. “And you got to go back? Your father has the day off, and it would be good for you to spend some time together. And fun, too. You go down to Flo and Danny’s and when I finish cleaning up around here, I’ll come down and have a glass of beer with the two of you.”
“Mom, I got to go to work.”
“Why?” Agnes McFadden flared. “What I would like to know is what’s so important that it can’t wait for a couple of hours, so that you can spend a little time with your family.”
She was more hurt, Charley saw, than angry.
“Mom, you see on the TV where the police officer, Captain Moffitt, got shot?”
“Sure. Of course I did. What’s that got to do with you?”
“There was two of them,” Charley said. “Captain Moffitt shot one of them, and the other got away.”
“I asked, so what’s that got to do with you?”
“I think I know where I can catch him,” Charley said.
“Mr. Big Shot,” his mother said, heavily sarcastic. “There’s eight thousand cops—I know ‘cause I seen it in the newspaper—there’s eight thousand cops, and you, you been on the force two years, and all you are is a patrolman, though you’d never know it to look at you, and you ‘re going to catch him!”
Charley’s face colored.
“Well, let me just tell you something, Mom, if you don’t mind,” he said, angrily. “I’m the officer who made the identification of the girl who shot Captain Moffitt, and those eight thousand cops you’re talking about are all looking for a guy named Gerald Vincent Gallagher, because I was able to identify him as a known associate of the girl.”
“No shit?” Kevin McFadden asked, impressed.
“Watch your tongue,” Agnes McFadden snapped. “Just because you work in a sewer doesn’t mean you have to sound like one!”
“You bet your ass,” Charley said to his father. “And I got a pretty good idea where the slimy little bastard’s liable to be!”
“I won’t tolerate that kind of dirty talk from either one of you, I just won’t put up with it,” Agnes said.
“Agnes, shut up!” Kevin McFadden said. “Charley, you’re not going to do anything dumb, are you? I mean, what the hell, why take a chance on anythin
g if you don’t have to?”
“What I’m going to do, Pop, is find him. If I can. Hang around where I think he might be, or will show up. If I see him, or if he shows up there, I’ll get Hay-zus to go with me.”
Officer Jesus Martinez, a twenty-three-year-old Puerto Rican, was Officer Charley McFadden’s partner. He pronounced his Christian name as it was pronounced in Spanish, and Charley McFadden had taken to using that pronounciation when discussing him with his mother. Agnes McFadden had made it plain that she was uncomfortable with Jesus as somebody’s first name. Hay-zus was all right. It was like Juan or Alberto or some other strange spic name.
“I wish you wore a uniform,” Agnes McFadden said.
“Yeah, sure,” Charley said. “Maybe be a traffic cop, right? So I can stand in the middle of the street downtown somewhere, and freeze to death in winter and boil my brains in the summer? Breathing diesel exhaust all the time?”