Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“No, he doesn’t.” I watched Patton’s rib cage rise and fall.

“He likes you, Patrick. Go ahead.”

I felt like Mae for a moment as I reached out a tentative hand toward that gorgeous coat of black and amber. I felt coiled muscle hard as a pool ball under the coat, and then Patton raised his head and mewed and flicked his tongue over my free hand, nuzzled it gratefully with a chilly nose.

“Just a big softy, huh?” I said.

“Unfortunately,” Gerry said. “Don’t let the secret get around, though.”

“Gerry,” I said, as Patton’s rich coat undulated and curled around my hand, “this Alec Hardiman could have killed—?”

“Kara Rider?” He shook his head. “No, no. That would be pretty hard to do even for Alec. Alec Hardiman’s been in prison since nineteen seventy-five, and he won’t be getting out during my lifetime. Probably not during yours, either.”

I finished my Lite and Gerry, ever the bartender, had his hand in the ice before I set it down on the bar. This time he came up with a Harpoon IPA, spun it in his meaty palm and popped the cap off in the opener mounted on the cooler wall. I took it from him and some foam spilled down the side onto my hand and Patton licked it up.

Gerry leaned his head back against the edge of the shelf above it. “Did you know a kid name of Cal Morrison?”

“Not real well,” I said, swallowing against a shudder that threatened to rise every time I heard Cal Morrison’s name. “He was a few years older than me.”

Gerry nodded. “But you know what happened to him.”

“He was stabbed to death in the Blake Yard.”

Gerry stared at me for a moment, and then he sighed. “How old were you at the time?”

“Nine or ten.”

He reached for another shot glass, poured a finger of Stoli in it and set it on the bar in front of me. “Drink.”

I was reminded of Bubba’s vodka and its ragged chewing on my spinal column. Unlike my father and his brothers, I must have missed some crucial Kenzie gene, because I never could drink hard liquor for shit.

I gave Gerry a weak smile. “Dosvidanya.”

He raised his and we drank and I blinked away tears.

“Cal Morrison,” he said, “wasn’t stabbed to death, Patrick.” He sighed again and it was a low, melancholy sound. “Cal Morrison was crucified.”

15

“Cal Morrison wasn’t crucified,” I said.

“No?” Gerry said. “You saw the body, did you?”

“No.”

He sipped from the shot glass. “I did. I caught the squeal. Me and Brett Hardiman.”

“Alec Hardiman’s father.”

He nodded. “My partner.” He leaned forward and poured some vodka into my shot glass. “Brett died in eighty.”

I looked at my shot glass, nudged it six inches away from me as Gerry refilled his own.

Gerry caught me at it, smiled. “You’re not like your father, Patrick.”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

He chuckled softly. “You look like him, though. A dead ringer. You must know that.”

I shrugged.

He turned his wrists upward, looked down at them for a moment. “Blood’s a strange thing.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s passed into a woman’s womb, creates a life. Could be near identical to the parent who created it, could be so different the father starts suspecting the mailman delivered more than the mail. You got your father’s blood, I got my father’s, Alec Hardiman had his father’s in him.”

“And his father was…?”

“A good man.” He nodded more to himself than to me and took a sip from his glass. “A fine, fine man actually.

Moral. Decent. So, so, so smart. If no one told you, you’d have never guessed he was a cop. You’d have taken him for a minister or a banker. He dressed impeccably, spoke impeccably, did everything…impeccably. He had a simple white colonial house in Melrose and a sweet, kind wife and a beautiful, blond son, and you’d swear you could eat lunch off the seat of his car.”

I sipped my beer as the second TV gave way to Old Glory followed by a blue screen and noticed that it was now The Chieftains’ “Coast of Malabar” on the jukebox.

“So he’s this perfect guy with this perfect life. Perfect wife, perfect car, perfect house, perfect son.” He peered at his thumbnail. Then he looked at me and his soft eyes were slightly unhinged, as if they’d stared too long at the sun and were just regaining a sense of the shapes and colors before them. “Then Alec, I dunno, something went in him. It just…went. No psychiatrist could ever explain it. One day he was this normal, regular kid, and the next…” He held up his hands. “The next, I don’t know.”

“And he killed Cal Morrison?”

“We don’t know that,” he said and his voice was thick.

He couldn’t look at me for some reason. His face had grown ruddy and the veins in his neck stuck out like cables and he looked at the floor and kicked his heel into the wall of the cooler. “We don’t know that,” he said again.

“Gerry,” I said, “let me in here. Last I knew, Cal Morrison was stabbed in the Blakey by some drifter.”

“Black guy,” he said, the soft grin again playing on his lips. “That was the rumor at the time, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Can’t find someone to blame, blame a jig. Right?”

I shrugged. “That was the story back then.”

“Well, he wasn’t stabbed. That was just what we told the media. He was crucified. And it wasn’t a black guy did it. We found red hair and blond hair and brown hair in Cal Morrison’s clothing, but no black. And Alec Hardiman and a friend of his, Charles Rugglestone, had been seen in the neighborhood earlier that night, and we were already on edge about the other killings, so until we busted someone, we didn’t mind the black guy story circulating

for a while.” He shrugged. “Not like too many black guys were going to stumble into this neighborhood back then, so it seemed a safe cover for a while.”

“Gerry,” I said, “what other killings?”

The bar door opened, the heavy wood banging against the brick exterior and we both looked at a man with spiky hair and a nose ring and a torn T-shirt hanging untucked over fashionably eviscerated jeans.

“Closed,” Gerry said.