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Inside the house Father Jimmie tore the wrapper off his hangered dry cleaning and discovered his black suit was missing. He would have sworn it had been with his other things when he had brought them from the laundry three days ago. He searched the rack, then checked the top drawer where he kept his Roman collar and rabat, the backless garment that serves as a priest's vest. Both collar and rabat were gone.
Chapter 14.
I drove to the bar Theodosha had called from and parked on the street. The bar was a gray, dismal place, ensconced like a broken matchbox under a dying oak tree, its only indication of gaiety a neon beer sign that flickered in one window. She was at a table in back, the glow of the jukebox lighting her face and the deep blackness of her hair. She tipped a collins glass to her mouth, her eyes locked on mine.
"Let me take you home," I said.
"No, thanks," she replied.
"Getting swacked?"
"Merchie and I had another fight. He says he can't take my pretensions anymore. I love the word 'pretensions.""
"That doesn't mean you have to get drunk," I said.
"You're right. I can get drunk for any reason I choose," she replied, and took another hit from the glass. Then she added incongruously, "You once asked Merchie what he was doing in Afghanistan. The answer is he wasn't in Afghanistan. He was in one of those other Godforsaken Stone Age countries to the north, helping build American air bases to protect American oil interests. Merchie says they're going to make a fortune. All for the red, white, and blue."
"Who is they}"
But her eyes were empty now, her concentration and anger temporarily spent.
I glanced at the surroundings, the dour men sitting at the bar, a black woman sleeping with her head on a table, a parolee putting moves on a twenty-year-old junkie and mother of two children who was waiting for her connection. These were the people we cycled in and out of the system for decades, without beneficial influence or purpose of any kind that was detectable.
"Let's clear up one thing. Your old man came looking for trouble at the club today. I didn't start it," I said.
"Go to a meeting, Dave. You're a drag," she said.
"Give your guff to Merchie," I said, and got up to leave.
"I would. Except he's probably banging his newest flop in the hay. And the saddest thing is I can't blame him." .
"I think I'm going to ease on out of this. Take care of yourself, kiddo," I said.
"Fuck that 'kiddo' stuff. I loved you and you were too stupid to know it."
I walked back outside into a misting rain and the clean smell of the night. I walked past a house where people were fighting behind the shades. I heard doors slamming, the sound of either a car backfiring or gunshots on another street, a siren wailing in the distance. On the corner I saw an expensive automobile pull to the curb and a black kid emerge from the darkness, wearing a skintight bandanna on his head. The driver of the car, a white man, exchanged money for something in the black kid's hand.
Welcome to the twenty-first century, I thought.
I opened my truck door, then noticed the sag on the frame and glanced at the right rear tire. It was totally flat, the steel rim buried deep in the folds of collapsed rubber. I dropped the tailgate pulled the jack and lug wrench out of the toolbox that was arc-welded to the bed of the truck, and fitted the jack under the frame. Just as I had pumped the flat tire clear of the puddle it rested in, I heard footsteps crunch on the gravel behind me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a short, thick billy club whip through the air. Just before it exploded across the side of my head, my eyes seemed to close like a camera lens on a haystack that smelled of damp-rot and unwashed hair and old shoes. I was sure as I slipped into unconsciousness that I was inside an ephemeral dream from which I would soon awake.
I knew it was sunlight when I awoke. I could feel its warmth on my skin, see its red-edged radiance at the corners of the tape that covered my eyes. Along with the chemical odor, perhaps ether or chloroform, that still clung to my face I could smell dead fish and ponded water that had gone stagnant inside shade and blackened leaves freshly broken by someone's shoes. I was seated in a chair, my wrists cuffed behind me with a plastic band. I turned my head into a breeze blowing from a window or door, like a blind man entering his first day without sight, vainly hoping the world around him was not filled with adversaries.
A motorboat passed a short distance away. When the sound of the wake sliding through flooded trees died, I heard two men talking about a football game in another room. I tried to rise from the chair, then realized both my ankles were strapped to the legs. "Asshole is awake," I heard one of the men say.
A door opened and I felt the planks under my feet become depressed by the weight of the men entering the room. "How you feel?" one of them said.
"You're kidnapping a police officer," I said.
"I asked you how you felt."
"All right. I feel all right," I replied.
"Hear that? He's all right," the second man said. "Frank Della-croce is not all right. Somebody blew most of his head off."
"It wasn't me," I said.
