Jake’s laugh blossomed and it felt good. “Smart man.”

Kay smiled over at him. “He was about fifteen. I don’t think he had ever seen boobies this close.” She looked down at the shirt. “He said he thought my tattoos were cool.”

“Cool, huh?”

“When you’re semipubescent and staring at a chick’s cans, you have to say something.”

“Smoking,” Jeremy repeated. “Is Mommy burned?”

Jake hugged his son closer. “No, she’s beautiful.”

Kay’s eyes misted over and she said, “Why are you the only man who has ever called me beautiful?”

Jake shrugged, something he felt he had been doing a lot of lately. “Because you are. And because you used to spend your time with assholes.” Kay had come to her first NA meeting with her arm in a cast. Her last boyfriend had smacked her around while she had been asleep. He broke her wrist—her playing wrist.

“Now I got me a shiny happy nice guy!”

“And I got me a delusional woman.”

She punched him in the arm. “I’m hungry.”

“So go make some food.”

Kay’s talent in the kitchen was an old faded joke between them. When Jake wasn’t working, he did the cooking; otherwise a good chunk of their income went toward restaurants. Jeremy was fond of pizza with anchovies, Reuben sandwiches, and sweet-and-sour matzo-ball soup from the Chinese kosher restaurant down the block from their apartment.

Jake stood up with his son and flipped him around to a piggyback position like a chimp handling its baby. “How about pizza, Moriarty?”

Jeremy’s arms went around his neck. “And apple juice?”

Jake remembered the Angelo’s Pizza Palace flyer mixed in with the pile of mail by the front door. “I think we can do apple juice.”

Supper came half an hour later. The first thing that struck Jake was the single box in the delivery kid’s hand.

“What do I owe you?”

The kid seemed about twelve, his half-beard cropped into a chinstrap that looked like it held down his Yankees cap. “That’s twelve thirty, sir.” He added the last word with a little hesitation.

“For three pizzas, two Cokes, and an apple juice?” Jake reached into his pocket, his hand coming out with a few crumpled damp bills.

Chinstrap’s face went from bored to worried and he examined the bill. “Um, no, there’s just a single pizza and a Coke on the bill.”

Jake just felt the end of a bad day get a whole lot worse. “No, man, I ordered three small pizzas, two Cokes, and an apple juice.”

The kid shrugged. “If I had two extra pizzas in the car I’d give them to you. All they gave me was this.” Chinstrap held up the single box and for a second it went dark in the doorframe like one of Jacob Coleridge’s weird little canvases.

Jake stood with the bills in his hands, trying to decide who had fucked up. Then that little light in his head went off. “One pizza, sure. You mind coming in while I call the restaurant?”

The kid shook his head, stepped over the threshold. Jake closed the door and went to the phone as the boy stood in the entryway, taking in the time capsule to the polymer era. “Cool,” he said, nodding in approval as he looked around.

At the phone, Jake wondered if one of his friends had sold Kay the T-shirt. He hit redial and a girl answered. “Angelo’s Pizza.” There was a distant tinny quality to her voice that hadn’t been there when he called earlier.

“Yeah, hi, I’m on Sumter Point and I just got my order.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Everything all right?” Her tone said that she didn’t expect any problems with the meal. After all, how could a place called Angelo’s fuck up a pizza?

“It looks like we’re missing two-thirds of the order.”

“I…don’t…see…how…that’s…possible,” she said as she flipped through some papers at the other end. “Here we go. One small pepperoni pizza with anchovies and a Coke. Twelve dollars thirty. What didn’t you get?”

“No. I ordered three pizzas, two Cokes, and an apple juice.”

“One pizza and one Coke. Thirty-two minutes ago.”

Jake thought about Jeremy, upstairs putting on his PJs, looking forward to pizza before bed. And Kay probably hadn’t eaten all day. Did he want to spend his time arguing with a teenage girl on the phone? He pushed it aside and focused on the single bulb glowing brightly in the middle of his mind. “You keep the addresses of everyone who places orders with you?”

“Yes, sir, we keep copies of all orders. That usually includes phone number and address. I’m telling you, I’m looking at your order, sir.”

But Jake wasn’t thinking about his order. He was thinking about Madame and Little X up the road. Maybe they had ordered a pizza. “Thank you.” He hung up.

He went back to the door, gave the kid twenty dollars, asked for two back, and let him out. On the way back to the table with the pizza box he hollered up to Kay and Jeremy. “You guys will have to share this.”

His wife and son appeared at the top of the stairs. Jake smiled when he saw them and realized that he wasn’t that hungry after the day he had had. “No apple juice, Moriarty. They were out. How about a nice glass of milk?”

Jeremy nodded approvingly as he came down the steps in footed felt pajamas. “I like milk. We got ’chovies on the pizza, Daddy?”

Jake thanked the powers that be for reining in his supper fuck-up. “Yeah, we got ’chovies. Lots of ’em.”

“Then everything is groovy,” the little boy said.

Kay and Jeremy went to the kitchen table to start on the pizza and Jake went to call Hauser. Maybe Madame and Little X had received Angelo’s flyer in the mail. Maybe they had ordered a pizza in the past two weeks. Or cheeseburgers. Steamers. Chinese.

Someone had to know their names.

38

Jake was past tired and well into the static-caked fuzz of exhaustion. The last twenty-four hours had been an emotional shock-treatment session and sleep was the only thing that would regenerate his singed nerve endings. But he had experience with this particular type of combat fatigue and knew that needing sleep wasn’t the same as being able to get it. After supper he had gone back to the Macready woman’s house for another walk-through. But unlike other law-enforcement professionals, Jake did the bulk of his work in his head, not a lab, office, squad car, or crime scene. From the Macready woman’s house he had stopped back at the hospital. Now he stood at the foot of his father’s bed, breathing in the smell of sweat and cleaning fluids.

The room was dark, the only light a thin wedge that the hallway fluorescents grudgingly threw across the floor. The hospital lights were dimmed to half power like an airliner cabin at night and Jake had to fight the temptation to snap on the overheads. He kept glancing back over his shoulder, searching for the blank suction of the painting behind him. No blood-painted eyeless face loomed out of the dark; his father had been moved to a new room.

When he had walked in, one of the nurses—Rachael Macready’s replacement—had pulled out his father’s file, clucking her tongue and nodding over the pages clamped to the dented steel clipboard. She handed him Dr. Sobel’s card with a seven a.m. appointment scrawled across the back in sloppy script. Jake had folded the card into his pocket and resisted the urge to tell her that her perfume smelled like vodka.

Tomorrow Sobel would pose the big question: What do we do with Dad? All they really wanted was the bill paid and a chronic-care patient out so that they could hand the bed over to a person who would actually benefit from a stay in the hospital. In reality, it had a little to do with economics and a lot to do with common sense—after all, Jacob couldn’t stay in the hospital indefinitely.