Текст книги "Blood And Bone"

Автор книги: William Lashner

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“Bobby dear—”

“Shut up,” he shouted as he waved the gun and watched them all pull away in fear. “I’m in control now, and I like it.” His head swam through the emotion that swelled over him in a glorious wave as he reached, he realized, the absolute pinnacle of his life. Everything before had been leading here, to this magnificent moment of freedom and retribution. “A Spangler is in control, and all of you, even you, sweet Aunt Gloria, will bow down in obeisance.”

“Mr. Spangler?”

He spun his head quickly toward the sound, and the sight was so out of place that it took him a while to process it. Two characters of dubious race, standing on either side of the wide doorway to the room. One was the woman who had come for him earlier, the policewoman, Ramirez, with her long neck and pretty face and something sticking out of her ear. He hadn’t noticed before that she was deaf. The other was a much older black man. Another police officer? Yes, of course, Bobby had seen him at the Toth funeral. And both of them, shockingly, had guns in their hands, and the guns were pointing at him. “Mr. Spangler,” said Detective Ramirez, “we need you to put the shotgun down.”

This was not in his plan. Everything had been going so well, but this was not in the plan. “Excuse me, Detective Ramirez,” he said, trying to keep the edge of hysteria that was now slicing through him out of his voice, “but I’m talking here. Can you give me a moment? Or will I have to start shooting?”

“You can have your moment, Mr. Spangler—Bobby,” said Ramirez. “You can take as long as you want to have your say. I guarantee it. But first you need to put down the gun.”

“Don’t worry, Detectives,” said Francis. “He won’t hurt me.” “Oh, yes I will, Francis, you little prick,” said Bobby with a jerk of the gun that aimed it right at Francis’s chest. “With relish. And mustard.” He turned his head to Ramirez and saw the fear crease her features, and that brought a calm. She hadn’t been afraid for herself, or for Byrne, or for the Qing vase in the corner. No, all she cared about, like everyone else, was the smarmy politician standing before him. It was funny how training a gun on a U.S. senator brought a flush of power. Life would be grand if he could only pull a shotgun on a senator every day. The truth of it caused him to smile.

“You don’t want to do this, Bobby,” said Ramirez.

“But I do, Detective, trust me on that. And what about our date? Are we still on?”

“Of course, Bobby,” she said with a false, nervous smile. Bobby liked that finally it was a woman who had the nervous smile instead of him. “Coffee, just as you said.”

“And more?” said Bobby.

“And more. Yes. So much more. But please, first, you need to put down the gun.”

“See, Aunt Gloria, and all this time you were worried that I didn’t get out enough. I guess all I needed was a twelve-gauge.”

“What is it that you want?” said Aunt Gloria.

“All I ever wanted was for you to honor me like you honored him.”

“Well, dear,” she said, her chin dropping, “he is my son. But you, Bobby, have come so much further.”

“Then why is everything always him, him, him?”

“Because he is our shared enterprise, darling. Yours and mine, the entire family’s. Everything he achieves, it’s as if we’ve achieved it, too. And don’t forget, dear, he’s half Spangler.”

“Bobby, listen to me,” said Ramirez. “We want to help you, we really do. Talk to us.”

Aunt Gloria turned to the police and spoke in a tight, angry voice. “If you detectives will . . . calm yourselves for a moment. I’ll take care of this.”

“Bobby, we can’t help you until you put down the gun,” said Ramirez. “I’m afraid of how things might turn out if you don’t put down the gun.”

“Threats won’t be necessary,” said Aunt Gloria. “Come here, dear, come by my side.”

Bobby felt himself pulled in two directions, by Detective Ramirez with her lips and her tawny skin, with her promises of more, much more, even as her gun pointed at his chest. And Aunt Gloria, who had once been his guiding light. And who was finally acknowledging how far he had risen.

“Come, dear,” she said. “I have something to tell you. A secret.”

He hesitated, looked at the detective once more, and then, with the gun still pointing at Francis’s atrophied heart, he took a step toward his aunt. He felt warmer suddenly, comforted, as if the twisted old woman in that chair were the hearth and home he had pined for over the years. He took another step, felt the heat of her as if she were a toasty fire of aromatic love.

“Come closer still,” she said. “The secret I have is for you alone.”

He couldn’t help himself. No matter how far he had risen, she could always pull him to her with a sweet purr from her lovely throat. He went to her, squatted beside her, all the time keeping his gun steady on Francis and his gaze steady on the pretty detective.

His aunt leaned over to him and put her twitching lips close to his ear. With the palsy, she couldn’t help but brush his flesh with her own.

“You’re going to ruin everything,” she whispered so softly that no one else could hear.

“That’s the point,” he said just as softly.

“No, dear. Don’t forget all we owe each other.”

He pulled back as he exclaimed loudly, “Each other?”

“Bobby,” said Detective Ramirez, “Bobby. This isn’t going to end well. Please, I’m asking, I’m begging. Please put down the gun.”

“Listen to her, son,” said the older, black detective. “She only wants to help you.”

“Oh, why are you two bothering me?” he spit out. “Shouldn’t you be outside arresting the man in the car? Do you know who it is? Do you have any idea?”

“The car in front?” said Ramirez.

“Yes, of course, the car Byrne came in,” he said as he let the gun jerk toward the boy standing stock-still in his stupid gray suit before it rested again in the direction of Cousin Francis. “Do you know who is inside that car, listening to our conversation?”

“Listening?” said Aunt Gloria.

“Don’t be dim-witted, any of you. Byrne is wearing a wire, and the accomplice in the car is listening to every word. And here’s the joke of it all: It’s his father. It’s that lying Irish blackmailer Liam Byrne.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said his aunt.

“Oh, it’s him. Check it out. Back from the grave. He’s the one you should be after. And the son there, who has caused nothing but trouble by following in his father’s footsteps.” Somehow strengthened by his outburst, Bobby turned back to his aunt. “And what the hell do I owe you?”

“You’d still be in Des Moines without me. You’d still be driving a milk truck.”

“You made promises.”

“I know, dear,” she said, again in a soft whisper so that no one else could hear. There was a briefcase beside her chair. She tapped it. “And they are about to come to fruition.”

“It was never about money,” he whispered back.

“I know.”

“Why can’t it be me?”

“It can.”

“Why him?”

“Why not both?”

“I’m tired of waiting.”

“You won’t be waiting anymore.”

“All the promises.”

“Yes, dear.”

He dropped his head as he further dropped his voice. “It’s hard to admit this.”

“Go ahead, dear.”

“I can barely say it.”

“Try.”

“I love you.”

“I know you do.”

“No, it’s not just like . . .”

“I know, dear. I love you, too.”

“No, I love you in the other way.”

“You’re my special boy. Remember I used to tell you that?”

“I watch your movie. I found a copy and watch it in my room. You, with your gloves, your special white gloves.”

“Aren’t you naughty, my special boy?”

“I watch it over and over.”

“I was something when I was younger, wasn’t I? I could turn men to slaves with just a look, a gesture. I was special in every way.” She pulled his head closer and patted the front of his neck. “And you’re my special boy. We are linked, Bobby dear. Forever. You and me. We’re Spanglers.”

“Yes.”

“And with Spanglers the family always comes first.”

“Yes.”

He turned his face to hers, so that their eyes were staring directly each into the other’s and their lips were a hairsbreadth apart.

“Do you love me?” she said in a voice below a whisper, in a voice more breath than anything else.

“More than you know,” he replied in a voice just as soft.

“Then there is one more thing you need to do.”

“I’m tired.”

“I know, dear. But just one thing more, and then you can rest.” “I want to stay here, close to you.”

“And you know what it is. To protect the Spangler line. You know what you need to do.”

“I don’t think I want to.”

“And I don’t want you to, but we have no choice.”

“Must I?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I love you.”

“I know you do, Bobby. Do it for us. Do it for our love.”

Bobby leaned forward and closed his eyes, saw a thin, nubile figure twisting in his mind’s eye in Super 8 black-and-white, felt his lips brush hers and then press harder. The joy, the sweet joy, rose through him like a wave, flushing out everything before it, leaving just his raw emotions and her desire.

“I love you,” he murmured into her mouth.

“Show it.”

He kissed her again, felt her lips and something else, sweet and slippery. He sucked on it as if it were a lifeline, sucked on it until it pulled away.

“Now,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“For our love.”

“Yes,” he said, pulling back and nodding, knowing exactly what he must do, how it would end, why it was necessary. Seeing the whole of his life unspool in that perfect kiss.

Slowly he stood, nodding all the while. Slowly he caressed her withered cheek with the back of his hand. Slowly he turned and aimed the shotgun straight at the Byrne boy standing there with his mouth agape. Slowly he squeezed the trigger.

CHAPTER 57

LATER DETECTIVE RAMIREZ would squat beside the bloodied body and feel the emotions rise to choke her throat. She’d seen scores of dead, it was the currency of her new post, but this one bit into her in a way that none had before. The sight of the blood, his blood, the sickly sweet smell of the iron and rot released by a body split open by the gunfire, the sick, dead eyes that were full of intense life just a moment before. She was dry-eyed, and her chest wasn’t racked by sobs, but in the storm that raged beneath her brow, she was weeping nonetheless.

A hand fell onto her shoulder, solid and warm. She didn’t need to look up to know to whom it belonged.

“You okay?” said Henderson.

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “When you ever get okay with any of this, then it’s time to hang up your hat.”

“Is that why you’re retiring, old man?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I been thinking about sticking around a little longer.”

“I thought you wanted to get yourself a puppy.”

“Maybe I already found myself one.”

Ramirez shrugged his hand off her shoulder, took a final look at the corpse, her corpse, and then rubbed her face with her hands, hard, as if rubbing out her very features, before standing and turning away. Henderson was looking at her, not the dead body, but his eyes were staring at a casualty.

“They find him yet?” she said.

“Not yet,” said Henderson.

“They won’t.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t expect they will.”

The car outside the house was empty when they checked it right after the shooting, but someone had been there all right. There was a set of headphones, a receiver, and a tape deck, just as Spangler had said. But the tape was gone, and so was the person who had been listening in with the headphones. A host of uniforms were now going door-to-door, and four black-and-whites were cruising the neighborhood, trying to grab whoever had been in that car.

“You think it was him?” she said. “You think it was Liam Byrne?”

“Seems a bit far-fetched. But after what you learned about the guy who signed the death certificate, I’d certainly want to go up to Rahway and ask him what he knows. And we’ll see if this Liam Byrne had any fingerprints on file to match what they already peeled off the car.”

She turned and gave the corpse a quick glance. “You want to know something that makes me believe it, Henderson? Spangler had a bizarre integrity about him. I don’t think he would have lied about it.”

“He was certifiable. Who the hell knows what he was thinking?”

“And we’ll never know now.”

“He had taken at least two lives already, and he would have taken two more if things worked out tonight the way he wanted. Maybe even three. You did the right thing.”

“Okay.”

“And even with all that he was, you tried to save him. I heard you trying.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve tried and failed before,” she said, “but never like this.”

She had been trying, pleading with Bobby Spangler to put down his gun. She had made no threatening moves, beyond, of course, keeping her gun aimed at his heart, and had promised whatever she could think of promising to avoid having happen what actually happened. But whatever she was saying was obviously counteracted by the witch, who was whispering incessantly in his ear and who gave him that nauseating kiss of death.

“What did you say to him?” she screamed at the old lady when it was over. “What did you say?”

“I told him to stop all this nonsense,” said Mrs. Truscott with her hands suddenly becalmed and her lips tight. “I told him to put down the gun and surrender to the nice police officers. I told him that was the only way.”

She was lying, Ramirez knew she was lying, but all she had to go on was what actually happened. Spangler slowly rising, Spangler gently caressing the old woman’s cheek, Spangler slowly turning as the gun swiveled from the senator to Kyle Byrne, Spangler slowly squeezing the trigger.

Ramirez shot him three times in the chest. Henderson fired at the same time, hitting his shoulder and spinning him around, but it was Ramirez’s shots that killed him. Spangler, already dead, fell back as his shotgun spurted upward along with the blood from his chest. When the shotgun fired, finally, the blast took out not Kyle Byrne or Senator Truscott but the imposing portrait above the fireplace.

It played out as quickly as that, so quickly that Kyle and the senator didn’t have time to throw themselves onto the floor until all the danger had passed. And when it was over, Lucia Ramirez, God forgive her, had her first kill.

“Why did you try so hard to help him?” said Henderson. “Most cops, seeing a killer with a weapon pointed at a politician, would have shot first chance they had. And there were chances, moments when his attention wandered, when the gun was pointed nowhere specific. Why didn’t you take him out when you could?”

“I don’t know, Henderson. What are you, my therapist? What do I get, forty-five minutes to pour out my soul before you tell me my time’s up?”

“I’m just asking.”

“I felt sorry for him, all right? I saw his apartment, I saw his desperation. He was living a twisted little life, and I know the witch who was doing the twisting. I had my choice, I’d have shot her.”

“You’ll be thinking about this man next year, and ten years from now, and ten years after that when you’re in my position, standing on the lip of things, looking over the edge. And when you do, knowing that you cared, even a little bit, and did your best to save him . . . well, knowing that is the only thing that’s going to keep you from tearing out your heart, or drowning it in alcohol. Trust me, I know.”

“What do you know?”

“I know what it feels like when you do it on the other side of caring, and let me tell you, it leaves you haunted.”

“Old man.”

“You got that right, but my hair turned gray a long time ago.”

Ramirez looked at Henderson and for the first time saw the hurt in his eyes. Something had happened to him, something had damaged him badly. And all this time he’d been trying to protect her from the same fate. Someday she’d get the story, she was a detective, after all, someday she’d wring it out from him, but not this day. This day she was just glad he was by her side.

“Detectives,” came a voice from the hallway, “can I get the hell out of here? I’ve been here way too long already, and this shirt is getting ripe.”

It was Byrne. Ramirez offered a quick and uneasy smile to Henderson in thanks, and then she stepped away from the man she had killed and out of the room where she had killed him.

“Didn’t we tell all of you just to stay put?” said Ramirez as she and Henderson approached Byrne. Byrne’s jacket was off, his tie loose, but he looked calm, as if he’d already gotten over the violence that had burst about him just an hour ago.

“Yes, you did,” said Kyle Byrne. “But the senator was whisked out with his lawyer before the news trucks showed up, and Mrs. Truscott did that little fainting thing that got her a quick trip to the hospital, which leaves just me.”

“And you’re lonely, is that it?”

Kyle smiled. “Actually, yes. So I wanted to know if I can get out of here, too.”

“Do we have anything we can hold this boy on?” she said to Henderson.

“Extortion?” said Henderson.

“I don’t know,” said Ramirez, staring at Kyle with a critical eye, as if he were a painting, or a horse. “From what we heard over the radio frequency he gave us, he wasn’t trying to trade the file for money.” “A rson?”

“Based on the burns on Spangler’s skin, I’d put the arson on him.” “How about theft of a valuable file?”

“Taking his dead father’s file from his own former home? That won’t stick.”

“Obstruction of justice?”

“Maybe,” said Ramirez. “But we wouldn’t have found Spangler without him.”

“Abject stupidity?”

“Well, there you go,” said Ramirez. “We’re just going to have to hold him over on the grounds of abject stupidity. Because who else but an idiot would put himself in the middle of this craziness for no apparent purpose?”

“If stupidity was a crime,” said Kyle, “I’d have been locked up long ago.”

“Answer one question and we’ll let you go,” said Ramirez. “Who was in the car?”

“What car? The rental thing?”

“Yeah, the rental thing.”

“Nobody.”

“Did you hear that, Henderson?”

“I heard,” said Henderson. “Now we got him for lying to a police officer.”

“It’s a shame,” said Ramirez. “He was almost in the clear. Have you seen your father lately, Byrne?”

“My father?” said Kyle. “Are you kidding me? You didn’t believe that maniac, did you?”

“He seemed to know what he was talking about.”

“He also drew his eyebrows in with a Sharpie.”

“Someone was taping the whole scene,” said Henderson. “That someone took the tape. To clean things up, we’ll need it back.”

“Let me get out of here and I’ll see what I can do about getting you that tape.”

Ramirez looked at Henderson, Henderson blew out a cheek and then shrugged.

“Okay,” said Ramirez. “If the techs are done with your car, you can get the hell out of here. But tomorrow you’re going to have to go on up and talk to an inspector named Demerit with the Haverford Police Department about the fire at your house.”

“Deal,” said Kyle. He stepped toward Ramirez and lowered his voice. “Now that this is over, can you see me?”

“I can see you fine.”

He glanced at Henderson and then gently took hold of her arm and pulled her into a corner. Henderson turned his back and pretended to read something.

“You know what I mean,” said Byrne. “Look, let’s say tomorrow night at eight, at the same bar where you found me this afternoon. We’ll have a few beers, have some laughs, talk about something that has nothing to do with any of this.”

“I might be busy.”

He leaned forward, scratched his lower lip. Instinctively she licked her own lip with her tongue. He leaned farther forward, and she was surprised that this soon after the death and the blood something inside her was able to open up so quickly and urgently. She was surprised even more at the disappointment she felt when he pulled away without kissing her.

“Tomorrow,” he said with a smile before he turned and headed out of the house.

“And tomorrow and tomorrow,” said Henderson.

“What the hell is that?”

“Shakespeare,” said Henderson.

“Don’t give me that Shakespeare crap, like you’re some student of fine literature. We got reports to write, a case to close, an IAD shooting investigation to deal with. We’ve got ourselves a mess to clean up.”

“Yes, we do,” said Henderson.

“So let’s keep our eyes on the ball,” she said.

“Absolutely. But he’s a pretty interesting kid, isn’t he?”

“Don’t even,” said Ramirez.

“Pretty damn interesting,” said Henderson, laughing.

And Ramirez couldn’t help but laugh with him.

CHAPTER 58

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, lying awake in the sagging bed in that fetid motel room, still waiting for his father to reappear, Kyle Byrne gradually grew more and more certain that his father had never returned, that his father’s body had fully and truly been rendered unto ash fourteen years ago, that the whole renewed relationship was a piece of wishful thinking hatched in the fevered recesses of Kyle’s own deranged brain.

The evidence of Liam Byrne’s phoenix-like rise was less than scant. When Kyle quickly searched the rental car outside the Truscott mansion, his father’s luggage was gone, along with the cassette tape that he was recording off Kyle’s wire. When Kyle drove rings around the Truscott neighborhood shortly thereafter, he saw nothing on the dark streets but police cars. When he returned to the New Jersey motel room, there was no hard evidence that his father had ever been there, no toothbrush or strange pair of socks or discarded bottle of aftershave, only a few empty bottles of scotch and the light, lingering scent of cigarettes and Aqua Velva. But maybe he had drunk the scotch himself, and maybe the scents emanated from the guy in the room next door.

Oh, things had happened in the last few nights, he knew that. His house had burned down, his car had burned with it, he had recovered one of his father’s old files, and that file had led him to the bloody events at the Truscott house. And that it had all turned out pretty well for him in the end maybe meant that the spirit of his father had been looking out for him, just as it might have been the spirit of his father that had frightened Tiny Tony Sorrentino off his case. In a way it was a comforting thought, because it was considerably less crazy than what had passed for reality the last few days.

Kyle sat up in bed and took a deep breath. He wanted proof, he needed proof, and he knew where he might get it. The door to the motel’s office was locked, the lights off, but that didn’t stop Kyle from banging on the door like an escaped lunatic.

A pimply-faced kid, whose hair was sticking out wildly, as if he’d just been dosed with static electricity, straggled out of the back room and flicked on the light. He scratched the top of his head, scrunched up his face, opened the door.

“Yeah?” he said, eyes bleary and drool slipping down his slack mouth. “Did an old man come by and leave a message for room 207?” said Kyle.

The kid looked at Kyle with an uncomprehending stare, as if he weren’t sure which of the two of them was the idiot here. “No,” he said, having finally decided it was Kyle before starting to close the door.

Kyle stuck his foot in the gap and pushed the door open, shoving the kid back into the office at the same time.

“Do me a favor,” said Kyle, “and let me see the registration card for room 207.”

“I’m not really allowed,” said the clerk with a yawn.

“Dude, it’s my room. I’ve got the key, and I’m staying the night. Let me see the damn card.”

“There are rules.”

BLOOD AND BONE 379

“But if I happened to slip you a twenty?”

The clerk’s eyes brightened. “Well, you know, there are always exceptions.”

“Good, so here’s the way it’s going to work. I’m not going to slip you a twenty. But if you show me the card, I also won’t grab your nose in my fist and kick you in the head either.”

“Just a second, sir,” the clerk said as he made his way behind the desk with surprising alacrity.

The room was registered to a Byrne, all right, but to a Kyle Byrne, with the signature suspiciously like Kyle’s own, and paid for in cash. The son of a bitch hadn’t used his real name. If indeed the son of a bitch had signed the card, as opposed to Kyle himself in a fit of psychotic self-identity theft.

Back in the room, Kyle grabbed the little chair from the desk, put it on the cement walkway outside the door, and sat down facing the parking lot and the Target beyond that and the McDonald’s beyond that. He leaned back, propped his feet on the railing, tried to make sense of things.

Maybe he had made the whole thing up. Maybe his dead-father mania had grown like a spider to spread its hairy legs into his brain and drive him, finally, insane. Other than that lawyer at Ponzio’s, whom Kyle would never be able to find, or Robert Spangler, who now was dead, no one besides Kyle had seen him clearly. And without any physical evidence, to even broach the story to someone, anyone, even that Detective Ramirez, would be a no-win proposition. If he was telling the truth, she would mistakenly think him crazy; if he was relaying the cracked fantasies of a schizophrenic personality, she would correctly think him crazy. No, he’d keep it to himself, tell no one, except maybe Kat, only because he told everything to Kat.

But he wondered if the truth or falsity of his father’s reappearance even mattered. As he sat there, in the cool of the early dawn, watching the horizon lighten above the hard landscape of the asphalt parking lot and the cornucopia of crap beyond, waiting for his father to return and prove him sane, the years suddenly contracted like a clap of hands. And here he was, sitting on the porch of his mother’s house, waiting for his father. Or on the mound, waiting for his father. Or in a bar or at a softball game or in the heat of the night, waiting for his father. A lifetime spent waiting for his father.

Sitting there now, facing the coming of a new day, Kyle realized, whether the old man was a figment of Kyle’s own feverish imagination or a brutal and disappointing reality, that Liam Byrne wasn’t coming back. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever. And Kyle was okay with that. Surprisingly. Astonishingly. Okay.

Whatever had happened in these past few days had burned the need right out of him. It was as if the filial relationship he had craved for so long had happened in a matter of hours, moving swiftly from childish love to adolescent rebellion to a sort of blind adult mimicry to a declaration of independence. And he no longer felt deprived, he no longer felt gypped out of some grand paternal presence, he no longer harbored any illusions about how terrific his life might have turned out if his father had only been a father and not some detached presence that died way too soon for Kyle to cope. No, as the bright top of the sun rose above the cement boxes of New Jersey, he felt lucky. Lucky to have had his mother to himself for as long as he had. Lucky to be young and strong, with opportunities to seize and a future to mold. Lucky to be free.

He was certain that would be the end of the father sightings that had plagued him since the funeral fourteen years before, but he was wrong.

CHAPTER 59

SHE WASN’T DETECTIVE RAMIREZ on this night, she was Lucia,

her badge and gun worn not on the hip but stashed inside her bag, her hair up, her lips freshly glossed. She was wearing a silk blouse, a pleated skirt, spiky red high heels, and she didn’t need any leering Neanderthal to tell her she looked damn good, she knew it already.

Even as she had passed through the administrative and media whirlwind that accompanied the closing of the Laszlo Toth murder case, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking of this night with a visceral anticipation. She had imagined something romantic and intimate, something candlelit and soft, something leading to something, leading most definitely to something. And so she was keenly disappointed to find herself vastly overdressed while sitting at a Formica table at Bubba’s with Kyle and his motley crew, drinking from pitchers of Rolling Rock and just hanging.

“So is it heavy?” said Kyle’s squat friend with all the tattoos, who was named Skitch.

“I’m used to it,” said Ramirez.

“Can I see it?”

“No.”

“Dude, lighten up,” said Kyle.

“I’m just asking to see it. It’s not like I want to take out a window or anything.”

It was a laid-back gabfest, going nowhere quite slowly, and she was frankly bored. Add to that the way Kyle was back to dressing in his black Chuck Taylors, cargo shorts, and a ringer T-shirt, looking very young and very aimless and very much without the dangerous edge she had found so attractive during the Toth affair, and the whole thing left her wondering what she’d been so hopped up about in the first place. She began checking her watch, wondering when would be a polite time simply to leave.

“Don’t mind Skitch,” said the bar’s owner, that skinny Bubba Jr. “It’s not often we have a celebrity with us,” he said, hoisting a beer in Ramirez’s honor.

Ramirez forced a smile and raised her beer in return. She and Henderson had become briefly famous on the local and national news shows for neutralizing the now-infamous Toth murderer as he’d tried to add a U.S. senator to his list of victims.

“You seemed to like being in front of the camera,” said Kyle.

“Just part of the job,” she said. But she had liked it, and was good at it, and realized during her fourth television interview that the center of attention was exactly where she wanted to be. But hanging at a bar with these losers wasn’t helping her get there, that was for sure.

“You know where they make this now?” said the old toothless man, staring sadly at his beer. “New Jersey. It makes me want to puke.”

“I feel the same way,” said another older man, with a bulbous nose, whom Kyle had introduced as his Uncle Max. “But it’s from them pills I take for my back. So what’s going to happen to that senator?”

“My guess is not a damn thing,” said Ramirez.

Senator Truscott had held a press conference to announce his horror at what his cousin had done. Truscott had promised full cooperation with the ongoing police investigation even as he vowed to continue to vigorously represent the interests of Pennsylvanians in the United States Senate.

“But it’s the end of his presidential ambitions at least,” said Bubba Jr.

“Don’t bet on that,” said Ramirez. “He’s getting coverage in the national press, he’s gaining a celebrity beyond politics. That stuff can be intoxicating.”

“And it’s not really his decision to run or not, is it?” said Kyle. “His mother has been calling all the shots for him since he was a baby. That’s a hard habit to kick.”