Mystic River

Jimmy saw the other kneecap blow up and shifted to the elbows. "You think we could have waited on this conversation?"

"No time like the present." Theo let loose his boom of a laugh, but there was a warning to it.

"Tomorrow, say." Jimmy's gaze left Theo's elbows and rose to his eyes. "I mean, tomorrow would have been all right. Wouldn't it, Theo?"

"What I say about the present, Jimmy?" Theo was getting annoyed. He was a big man with a violent temper and Jimmy knew that scared some people, that Theo could see the fear in faces on the street, that he'd grown accustomed to it and confused it with respect. "Hey, the way I look at it, there's no good time to have this conversation. Am I right? So I figured I'd just get it out of the way. ASAP, as it were."

"Oh, sure," Jimmy said. "Hey, like you said, no time like the present. Right?"

"Right. Good kid." Theo patted Jimmy's knee and stood up. "You'll get through this, Jimmy. You'll move on. You'll carry the pain, but you'll move on. 'Cause you're a man. I said to Annabeth? your wedding night?? I said, 'Honey, you got yourself a real old-school man there. The perfect guy, I said. A champ. A guy who? '"

"Like they put her in a bag," Jimmy said.

"What's that?" Theo looked down at him.

"That's what Katie looked like when I identified her in the morgue last night. Like someone had put her in a bag and beaten the bag with pipes."

"Yeah, well, don't let it? "

"Couldn't even tell what race she was, Theo. Coulda been black, coulda been Puerto Rican like her mother. Coulda been Arab. She didn't look white, though." Jimmy looked at his hands, clasped together between his knees, and noticed stains on the kitchen floor, a brown one by his left foot, mustard by the table leg. "Janey died in her sleep, Theo. All due respect and shit, but there you go. She went to bed, never woke up. Peaceful."

"You don't need to talk about Janey. All right?"

"My daughter, though? She was murdered. There's a bit of a difference."

For a moment, the kitchen was silent? buzzing with silence, really, the way only an empty apartment can when the one below is filled with people? and Jimmy wondered if Theo would be dumb enough to keep talking. Come on, Theo, say something stupid. I'm in that kind of mood, like I need to take this bubbling inside of me and push it on somebody.

Theo said, "Look, I understand," and Jimmy let loose a sigh through his nostrils. "I do. But, Jim, you don't have to get all? "

"What?" Jimmy said. "I don't have to get all what? Someone put a gun to my daughter's flesh and blew the back of her head out, and you want to make sure I got my? my what?? my grief priorities straight? Please, tell me. Do I got that part right? You want to stand here and play fucking grand patriarch?"

Theo looked down at his shoes and breathed heavily through his nostrils, both fists clenched and flexing. "I don't think I deserve that."

Jimmy stood and placed his chair back against the kitchen table. He lifted a cooler off the floor. He looked at the door. He said, "Can we go back down now, Theo?"

"Sure," Theo said. He left his chair where it was and lifted the other cooler off the floor. He said, "Okay, okay. Bad idea, me trying to talk to you this morning of all mornings. You're not ready yet. But? "

"Theo? Just leave it. Just don't talk. How about that? Okay?"

Jimmy hefted the cooler and started back downstairs. He wondered if maybe he'd hurt Theo's feelings, then decided he really didn't give a shit if he had. Fuck him. Right about now they'd be starting the autopsy on Katie. Jimmy could still smell her crib, but down in the medical examiner's office, they were laying out the scalpels and chest spreaders, powering up their bone saws.

* * *

LATER, AFTER it had thinned out a bit, Jimmy went out onto the back porch and sat under the flapping clothes that had been hanging from the lines stretched across the porch since Saturday afternoon. He sat there with the sun warming him and a pair of Nadine's denim overalls swaying back and forth through his hair. Annabeth and the girls had cried all last night, filled the apartment with their weeping, and Jimmy had figured he'd join them any second. But he hadn't. He had screamed on that slope when he saw the look in Sean Devine's eyes that told him his daughter was dead. Screamed himself hoarse. But outside of that, he hadn't been able to feel anything. So he sat on the porch now and willed the tears to come.

He tortured himself with snapshots of Katie as a baby, Katie on the other side of that scarred table at Deer Island, Katie crying herself to sleep in his arms six months after he'd gotten out of jail, asking him when her mommy was coming back. He saw little Katie squealing in the tub and eight-year-old Katie riding her bike back from school. He saw Katie smiling and Katie pouting and Katie scrunching her face up in anger and scrunching it up again in confusion as he helped her with long division at the kitchen table. He saw an older Katie sitting on the swing set out back with Diane and Eve, lazing away a summer day, the three of them gawky with preadolescence and braces and legs growing longer and faster than the rest of them could catch up with. He saw Katie lying on her stomach on her bed with Sara and Nadine crawling all over her. He saw her in her junior prom dress. He saw her sitting beside him in his Grand Marquis, chin trembling, as she pulled away from the curb the first day he'd taught her to drive. He saw her screaming and petulant and in his face through her teen years, and yet those images he often found more endearing than the cute, sunshiny ones.

He saw her and saw her and saw her and yet he couldn't cry.

It'll come, a calm voice whispered inside of him. You're just in shock.

But the shock's wearing off, he answered the voice in his head. Has been since Theo started fucking with me downstairs.

And once it wears off, you'll feel something.

I feel something already.

That's grief, the voice said. That's sorrow.

It's not grief. It's not sorrow. It's rage.

You'll feel some of that, too. But you'll get past it.

I don't want to get past it.

16

GOOD TO SEE YOU, TOO

DAVE WAS WALKING Michael back from school when they turned the corner and saw Sean Devine and another guy leaning against the trunk of a black sedan parked in front of the Boyles' place. The black sedan had state government plates and enough antennae attached to the trunk to shoot transmissions to Venus, and Dave could tell just by looking at Sean's companion from fifteen yards away that, like Sean, the guy was a cop. He had that cop tilt to his chin, jutting up and out a bit, and a cop's way of leaning back on his heels and yet seeming set to lunge forward. And if that didn't give it away, the jarhead haircut on a guy in his mid-forties coupled with gold-rimmed aviator shades was definitely a tip-off.