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“And how lonely.”
He said nothing.
“That is unless you have someone to look into you that way, too,” Deborah said. “That’s the most powerful thing.”
“Being understood?”
She shook her head. “Men want to find someone who understands them. Women know they’ll never be understood.” She took out another cigarette, sniffed it, stuffed it back in the pack. “No. They want to beknown. It’s different. It’s … hmm, intimacy. And when you have a child, the fierceness of feeling …” She shook her head, at a loss before the infinite. “I’m sure you had that from your parents.”
Evan thought of the mother he’d known a few short weeks. Then of Joey’s search for his biological father, a rodeo cowboy whoran up bar tabs in Blessing, Texas. The man had never once laid eyes on Evan.
He resisted the urge to shake his head.
“To love like that, it’s a kind of ache,” she continued. “Because you hate every bad thing the world could ever hold for them. And you hurt for them all the way through even when nothing’s happened yet.” A single tear clung to the tip of her nose, a perfect jewel. “And how many times does it not happen? The fall from the tree house. Choking on undercooked bacon. The not-too-bad car crash. And then? One day it does. And it’s like you’ve been braced for it your whole life.” Her voice lowered with a kind of awe. “But it’s so much worse than anything you could have imagined. It makes you rethink hell. And heaven. You know what heaven would be for me now?”
Evan looked down at the table. In the mound of loose puzzle pieces, he made out a bright blue eye—Johnny’s.
“To see him for one minute more doing something mundane,” Deborah said. “Something I never bothered to pay attention to. Eating an apple. Picking at his dirty fingernails. To watch him watching TV. That’s all heaven is. It was right there, every instant of my life before. And I couldn’t see it.”
Now in the mess of jigsaw strays, Evan spotted the outer edge of one of Ruby’s almond-shaped eyes.
“Mason had that made,” Deborah said of the puzzle. “One of those custom ones. He wanted Ruby to be able to put the family back together again. Thought it would be … hmm, therapeutic. But it just sits there. And sits there.”
She looked back out at the darkness, and it was clear that she was done talking. On the television the holiday tale came to a soft-focus close, the end credits rolling in fast-forward.
As Evan rose silently to leave, Deborah’s name flashed by, there and gone.
He left her with her thoughts.
31
Steve the White Pimp
The hard part was getting the glass straw to stay lodged in the nostril. You’d think it would’ve been the other considerations—immobilizing the subject, duct-taping the head in place, getting the accoutrements there intact and hungry.
But no.
It was embedding the straw in the nostril firmly enough that it wouldn’t blow out with each frenzied exhalation but not so hard that it would clot up with blood.
Rathsberger didn’t mind pimps, but he fucking hatedwhitepimps.
This dickhole was named Steve, the worst pimp name ever. He drove a 1988 Cadillac with a hula dancer suctioned on the dashboard and wore a shiny pleather jacket with pronounced lapels. A scuzzy loudmouth, he pressed pretty, broke neighborhood girls into service in the Back Bay, Cambridge, and Newton, and shipped the ugly ones off to Atlanta and Vegas.
His thick, curly blond hair had made steering easier. They’dcaught him just past the box hedges at the door of his row house, Gordo grabbing him by the mane and propelling him inside. Steve lived in an end unit, the place next door vacant, which provided beneficial privacy.
Mattapan was shady as fuck, which made the whole thing easy-peasy. No need for recon, lookouts, discretion. The next stop would be different, would require finesse.
Once they’d crossed the threshold, they’d learned that Steve the White Pimp had a ratty medium-size dog with wiry gray-black hair. But she didn’t bark or get protective. Her ribs were showing, and she cowered and sniffed at their cuffs even as they tussled with Steve. Rath got the sense that she wasn’t too fond of her owner, and he couldn’t blame her. What self-respecting dog wants to answer to a white pimp named Steve? Rath related to her butt-ugliness—the bitch was like a living bottle brush—and he admired her absence of loyalty.
To ensure that Steve didn’t move around too much, Gordo had sat on him while Rath severed both of his ACLs, an easy Ka-Bar punch through the U at the base of each thighbone.
That eighties rocker hair provided superb adhesion for the duct tape, which Rath had wrapped around Steve’s head and the chipped wooden table of the kitchen more times than he could count. Steve’s arms were trapped on the underside of the table, his shoes stuck to the floor, his right cheek smashed flat to the nicked surface. Loops of tape covered the top of his head and his chin, but his mouth and nose were exposed, as well as the band of his eyes. It was important that he take in what was about to happen.
He was crying, snot threatening to clog the straw.
The place was a shithole, splintered floorboards and drafty windows, mousetraps and Chinese take-out cartons on the kitchen counter. It smelled of mold and dog piss. There was no furniture in the main area except for the rickety table and a sticky couch that would fluoresce under a black light. There were only two chairs, one of which they’d considerately adhered to Steve to support his inoperable legs. Rath sat backward in the other, his arms crossed along the top rail, facing him.
Not wanting to risk an encounter with the couch, Gordo hadsettled on the floor, tumbling the final inches and landing hard enough to creak the foundation. He’d torn a sheet out of his doodle notebook and was busy folding it into something with his sausage fingers. The ratty dog had taken up at Gordo’s side, sitting and watching the proceedings with sad, wet eyes.
