Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)
16
It was snowing on a bright summer day when Kara Rider stopped me to ask how the Jason Warren case was going.
She’d changed her hair back to its original blond and she was sitting in a lawn chair outside The Black Emerald wearing only a pink bikini bottom and the snow fell to either side of her and piled up by the chair, but only sun fell on her skin. Her small breasts were hard, and beaded with perspiration, and I had to keep reminding myself that I’d known her since she was a little kid, and I shouldn’t be noticing them in a sexual context.
Grace and Mae were half a block up, Grace placing a black rose in Mae’s hair. Across the avenue a pack of white dogs, small and gnarled like fists, watched them and drooled, thick streams pouring from the sides of their mouths.
“I got to go,” I said to Kara, but when I looked back, Grace and Mae were gone.
“Sit,” Kara said. “Just for a sec.”
So I sat and the snow fell down the back of my collar and chilled my spine. My teeth chattered as I said, “I thought you were dead.”
“No,” she said. “I just went away for a while.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Brookline. Shit.”
“What?”
“This place looks just the fucking same.”
Grace stuck her head out of The Black Emerald. “You ready, Patrick?”
“Got to go,” I said and patted Kara’s shoulder.
She took my hand and laid it against her bare breast.
I looked at Grace, but she didn’t seem to mind. Angie stood beside her and they both smiled.
Kara stroked her nipple with my palm. “Don’t forget about me.”
Snow was pouring on her body now, burying it.
“I won’t. I gotta go.”
“Bye.”
The legs of her lawn chair collapsed under the weight of the snow, and when I looked back I could just make out her form under drifts of soft white.
Mae came out of the bar and took my hand and fed it to her dog.
I watched my blood foam in the dog’s mouth, and it didn’t hurt—it was almost sweet.
“See,” Mae said, “he likes you, Patrick.”
The last week of October, we bailed out of the Jason Warren case by mutual agreement with Diandra and Eric. I know guys who would’ve milked it, played up to the fears of a worried mother, but I don’t milk cases. Not because I’m particularly moral, but because it’s bad business when half your living comes from repeat clients. We had files on all of Jason’s teachers since he’d come to Bryce (eleven) and all his known acquaintances (Jade, Gabrielle, Lauren, and his roommate) except the guy with the goatee, and nothing about any of them suggested they were a threat to Jason. We had write-ups of our daily observation work, as well as synopses of our meeting with Fat Freddy, Jack Rouse, and Kevin Hurlihy, and my own telephone discussion with Stan Timpson.
Diandra had received no more threats, phone calls, or pictures in the mail. She’d spoken with Jason in New Hampshire, mentioned that a friend of hers had seen him with a guy in the Sunset Grill the previous week, and Jason had described him as “just a friend” and offered no more information.
We spent another week tailing him, and it was more of the same—explosions of sexual activity, solitude, studying.
Diandra agreed that we were all getting nowhere, that there was nothing outside of her having received that photograph to suggest Jason was in any danger whatsoever, and we finally came to the conclusion that maybe our original perception—that Diandra had inadvertently angered Kevin Hurlihy—had been correct after all. Once we’d met with Fat Freddy, every hint of threat had disappeared; maybe Freddy, Kevin, Jack and the whole mob had decided to back off, but hadn’t wished to lose face to a couple of PIs.
Whatever the situation, it was over now, and Diandra paid us for our time and thanked us, and we left our cards and home numbers in case anything sprang back up and went back to our lives during our business’s dullest season.
A few days later, at his behest, we met Devin in The Black Emerald at two o’clock in the afternoon. There was a “Closed” sign in the doorway, but we knocked and Devin opened the door, locked it behind us after we came in.
Gerry Glynn was behind the bar, sitting on the cooler, not looking very happy, and Oscar sat by a plate of food at the bar, and Devin took his seat beside him and bit into the bloodiest cheeseburger this side of an open flame.
I took the seat beside Devin, and Angie took the one beside Oscar and stole one of his fries.
I looked at Devin’s cheeseburger. “They just lean the cow against a radiator?”
He growled and stuffed some more in his mouth.
“Devin, you know what red meat does to your heart, never mind your bowels?”
He wiped his mouth with a cocktail napkin. “You turn into one of those holistic, health PC douchebags while I wasn’t looking, Kenzie?”
“Nope. But I saw one picketing out front.”
He reached for his hip. “Here. Take my gun and shoot the prick. See if you can pop a mime while you’re at it. I’ll see it gets written up right.”
A throat cleared behind me and I looked into the bar mirror. A man sat in a shadowed booth just over my right shoulder.
He wore a dark suit and dark tie, a crisp white shirt and a matching scarf. His dark hair was the color of polished mahogany. He sat stiffly in the booth, as if his spine had been replaced with pipe.
Devin jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Patrick Kenzie, Angela Gennaro, meet FBI Special Agent Barton Bolton.”
I turned on my barstool and Angie turned on hers and we both said, “Hi.”
Special Agent Barton Bolton said nothing. He looked each of us up and down like a concentration camp commandant trying to decide if we were best fit for work or extermination, then shifted his gaze to a point somewhere over Oscar’s shoulder.
“We have a problem,” Oscar said.
“Could be a small problem,” Devin said, “could be a big one.”
“And it is?” Angie said.
“Let’s all sit together.” Oscar pushed his plate away.
Devin did the same and we all joined Special Agent Barton Bolton in the booth.
“What about Gerry?” I said, watching him clear the plates off the bar.
“Mr. Glynn’s already been questioned,” Bolton said.
“Ah.”
“Patrick,” Devin said, “your card was found in Kara Rider’s hand.”
“I told you how it got there.”