“What?” she said.

“It hurts all over. Samuel Pietro. I can’t get my head around it. When Bubba and I went to that house, he was still alive. He was upstairs and he was…we-”

“You were in a house with three heavily armed, very paranoid felons. You couldn’t have-”

“His body,” I said, “it…”

“They confirmed it was his body?”

I nodded. “It was so small. It was so small,” I whispered. “It was naked and cut into and…Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” I wiped at acidic tears, leaned my head back.

“Who’d you talk to?” Angie said gently.

“Broussard.”

“How’s he doing?”

“’Bout the same as me.”

“Any word on Poole?” She leaned forward a bit.

“He’s bad, Ange. They don’t expect him to pull through.”

She nodded and kept her head down for a bit, her good leg swaying back and forth lightly off the rail.

“What did you see in that bathroom, Patrick? I mean, exactly?”

I shook my head.

“Come on,” she said softly. “This is me. I can take it.”

“I can’t,” I said. “Not again. Not again. I think about it for a second-I see that room flash through my head-and I want to die. I don’t want to carry it around with me. I want to die and make it go away.”

She slid gingerly off the rail and used the front of the pew to pull herself around to the seat. I moved over and she sat beside me. She took my face in her hands, but I couldn’t meet her eyes, was sure that seeing the warmth and the love in them would make me feel more soiled, for some reason, more unhinged.

She kissed my forehead and then my eyelids, the tears drying on my face, brought my head down to her shoulder, and kissed the back of my neck.

“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.

“Nothing to say.” I cleared my throat, wrapped my arms around her abdomen and lower back. I could hear her heart beating. She felt so good, so beautiful, so everything that was right in the world. And I still felt like dying.

That night we tried to make love, and at first it was fine, fun actually, trying to work around the heavy cast, Angie giggling from the painkillers, but then once we were both naked in the light of the moon shining through my bedroom window, I’d see a flash of her flesh and it would meld with a snapshot image of Samuel Pietro’s. I touched her breast and saw Corwin Earle’s flabby stomach splattered with blood, ran my tongue over her rib cage and saw blood splashed on the bathroom wall as if hurled from a bucket.

Standing over that bathtub, I’d gone into shock. I saw everything and it was enough to make me weep, but some part of my brain shut down as a protective impulse, so that the true horror of everything I was looking at didn’t fully compute. It had been bad, bloody and unconscionable-I’d known that much-but the images had remained random, floating in a sea of white porcelain and black-and-white tile.

In the thirty hours since, my brain had collated everything, and I was alone and in that tub with Samuel Pietro’s naked, ravaged, debased body. The door to the bathroom was locked, and I couldn’t get out.

“What’s wrong?” Angie said.

I rolled away from her, looked out the window at the moon.

Her warm hand stroked my back. “Patrick?”

A scream died in my throat.

“Patrick, come on. Talk to me.”

The phone rang and I picked it up.

It was Broussard. “How you doing?”

I felt a flush of relief at the sound of his voice, a sense that I wasn’t alone.

“Pretty bad. You?”

“Pretty real fucking bad, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” I said.

“Can’t even talk to my wife about it, and I tell her everything.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Look…Patrick, I’m still in the city. With a bottle. You want to drink some of it with me?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be at the Ryan. That all right with you?”

“Sure.”

“See you when you get here.”

He hung up, and I turned to Angie.

She had pulled the sheet up over her body and was reaching across to her nightstand for her cigarettes. She placed the ashtray on her lap and lit the cigarette, stared through the smoke at me.

“That was Broussard,” I said.

She nodded, took another drag on the cigarette.

“He wants to meet.”

“Both of us?” She looked down at the ashtray.

“Just me.”

She nodded. “Best get going, then.”

I leaned in toward her. “Ange-”

She held up a hand. “No apology necessary. Off you go.” She appraised my naked body and smiled. “Put some clothes on first.”

I picked my clothes up off the floor and put them on as Angie watched from behind her cigarette smoke.

As I left the bedroom, she stubbed out her cigarette and said, “Patrick.”

I stuck my head back in the door.

“When you’re ready to talk, I’m all ears. Anything you need to say.”

I nodded.

“And if you don’t talk, that’s up to you. You understand?”

Again, I nodded.

She placed the ashtray back on the nightstand and the sheet fell away from her upper body.

For a long time, neither of us said anything.

“Just so we’re clear,” Angie said eventually. “I won’t be like one of those cop wives in the movies.”

“How do you mean?”

“Nagging and begging you to talk.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

“They never know when to leave, those women.”

I leaned back into the room, peered at her.

She shifted the pillows behind her head. “Could you hit the light on your way out?”

I turned off the light, but I stood there for a few moments more, feeling Angie’s eyes on me.

27

It was one very drunk cop I met in the Ryan playground. Only when I saw him wavering on a swing as I entered, no tie, wrinkled suit jacket scrunched under a topcoat stained by playground sand, one shoe untied, did I realize that it was the first time I’d ever seen him with so much as a hair out of place. Even after the quarries and a jump onto the leg of a helicopter, he’d looked impeccable.

“You’re Bond,” I said.

“Huh?”

“James Bond,” I said. “You’re James Bond, Broussard. Mister Perfect.”

He smiled and drained what remained of a bottle of Mount Gay. He tossed the dead soldier into the sand, pulled a full one from his topcoat, and cracked the seal. He spun the cap off and into the sand with a flick of his thumb. “It’s a burden, being this good-looking. Heh-heh.”

“How’s Poole?”

Broussard shook his head several times. “Nothing’s changed. He’s alive, but barely. He hasn’t regained consciousness.”

I sat on the swing beside his. “And the prognosis?”

“Not good. Even if he lives, he’s had several strokes in the last thirty hours, lost a ton of oxygen to the brain. He’d be partially paralyzed, the doctors figure, mute most likely. He’ll never get out of bed again.”

I thought of that first afternoon I’d met Poole, the first time I’d seen his odd ritual of sniffing a cigarette before snapping it in half, the way he’d looked up into my confused face with his elfin grin and said, “I beg your pardon. I quit.” Then, when Angie’d asked if he’d mind if she smoked, he’d said, “Oh, God, would you?”

Shit. I hadn’t even realized until now how much I liked him.

No more Poole. No more arch remarks, delivered with a knowing, bemused glint in his eye.

“I’m sorry, Broussard.”

“Remy,” Broussard said, and handed me a plastic cocktail cup. “You never know. He’s the toughest bastard I ever met. Has a hell of a will to live. Maybe he’ll pull through. How about you?”

“Huh?”

“How’s your will to live?”

I waited while he filled half the cup with rum.

“It’s been stronger,” I said.

“Mine, too. I don’t get it.”

“What?”

He held the bottle aloft and we toasted silently, then drank.

“I don’t get,” Broussard said, “why what happened in that house has got me so turned around. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of horrible shit.” He leaned forward in his swing, looked back over his shoulder at me. “Horrible shit, Patrick. Babies fed Drano in their bottles, kids suffocated and shaken to death, beat so bad you can’t tell what color their skin really is.” He shook his head slowly. “Lotta shit. But something about that house…”