And strangest of all in that time and place, I thought of Dean Treadwell and his unshakable faith in everybody’s bastard, Hal Archer.
Dean and Hal…
I thought the unthinkable and I shivered in the wind.
I picked my way back across the ruins to the battery. Erin stood at the museum door, waiting.
“What are you doing? I was just about to come looking for you.”
“Without a light? You’re smarter than that.”
“Never mind the light. What’s going on out there?”
“Nothing. Go to bed.”
She bristled at my abruptness. “Is this how it’s going to be, being your special friend?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got forty days and forty nights to resolve stuff like that.”
“Thirty-eight as of this morning. This doesn’t bode well for us to make it to thirty-seven.”
I felt her come close in the half-light. I saw her in shadow.
“I want to get this thing resolved,” she said. “It’s not in my nature to live like this, worrying about a madman every waking moment.”
“I intend to resolve it.”
“How?”
“How I should’ve done in the first place. A little grit, a little steel, a little help from an old friend.”
“Okay,” she said calmly. “Whatever that means, I want to be in on it all the way.”
“I don’t need an attorney for this kind of work.”
That was a stupid thing to say, I knew it almost before the words were out, and she reacted as if she’d been slapped. She slammed me back against the wall and whirled away down the ramp. “Well, fuck you, Mr. Janeway.”
“Hey, Erin, wait a minute.”
She stopped and looked back.
“That didn’t come out right.”
“It sure didn’t, you barbarian son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry.” I reached out to her.
She gestured wildly with her hands. “Jesus Christ, you are such an idiot sometimes.”
“I am, I am.” I made a helpless shrugging dipshit motion. “I know I am.”
“Goddamn male chauvinist turkey-farmer dickhead. What am I going to do with you?”
“Whatever you want. As long as you don’t—”
“If I don’t what?”
“Leave.”
She seemed to melt and flow back up the ramp. She wrapped her arms around me and I buried my fingers in her thick hair.
“Are we okay now?” I dared ask.
“I don’t like being brushed off. Chisel that on your brain if you can find a tool hard enough. Write Erin hates being patronized, Erin won’t sit still for the little girl treatment.”
“I’m sorry. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record but I really, really am sorry.”
“Okay, where were we?” she said cheerfully.
“I was about to say something practical. How this is a man’s job and a woman never does anything but screw up a mission.”
“And I said something uncalled for. ‘Fuck you, Janeway,’ or something like that.”
“You’ve really got a nasty streak that I never saw before. Your vocabulary is amazing.”
“Actually, I never swear in real life. Bad language is just bad manners, it’s a symptom of a bankrupt mind. Lee taught me that when I was a kid and I still believe it. But you, you pigheaded medieval-godfather cocksman, you bring out the absolute worst in me.”
“Am I not getting through here? I thought I groveled, whined, and said I was sorry. ‘Medieval-godfather cocksman!’ ‘Turkey-farmer dickhead!’ I thought Koko was tough, but I never got past ‘poopy old picklepuss’ with her.”
“Koko is a lady. I, unfortunately, am not. So who is this hit man we’re going to hire?”
I told her in general terms who, what I wanted him to do, and why he’d do it—not for money but to clear a debt that was decades old. “He’s just gonna be my insurance policy,” I said. “If there is such a thing for this kind of stuff.”
Suddenly she realized I was serious. “Does this guy have a name?”
I almost said I’d take care of it but I thought much better of that and I gave her his name.
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh my dear. You do have some bad friends.”
“Yeah. He was like my brother long ago. People were sure I’d end up just like him.”
“No way could you have been like that.”
“You might sing a different tune if you had known me when I was fifteen. It was amazing, really, that I lived all that down. Became a cop.”
“And you literally saved his life?”
“As literal as it gets.”
“Tell me again what we’re going to have him do.”
“He’s gonna help us teach a certain bad-ass some manners, like Lee taught you but with different powers of persuasion. And I hope with better results.”
“Generally speaking, I like the sound of that,” she said without much enthusiasm.
“You’ll like this even better. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now and I’ve finally come to a couple of ugly conclusions. We’ve gone too far to slip into some live-and-let-live detente, like two bully nations in a cold war, even if that option suddenly became possible. Maybe I’d be okay with a standoff if he hadn’t torched Koko’s house, but that’s not an option anymore. Now there’s got to be an evening-up of the score. I can’t just walk away from here and make like none of this ever happened. I’ve thought about it; can’t do it.”
“What would satisfy you, she asked in fear and trembling.”
“If Dante were to build Koko a new house, that might square it. I don’t know, I’d have to think about it.”
When she spoke again it seemed like a long time had passed. “You must be mad.”
“I’m damned mad.”
“I meant mad as in crazy.”
“That too.”
“He’ll never do that.”
“He might.” I put an arm over her shoulder. “A guy like Dante only understands one thing. But he really understands that.”
“He didn’t understand it the first time.”
“He understood it, he just didn’t quite believe it. My fault; something about my performance must’ve been lacking. Maybe because, no matter how big a bad-ass I tried to be, at the bottom line it was still just a performance. Those guys have a way of knowing.”
“It’s got to be real.”
“Oh yeah.”
“So now it’s real. You would kill him.”
“In a Hungarian heartbeat. But don’t tell Koko yet; I don’t want her to get her hopes up in case it doesn’t work out that way.”
Suddenly she seemed to change the subject. “Do you remember the night we met?”
“Are you kidding? That was one of my all-time high spots.”
“Do you remember what I said?”
“How could I forget? Among other things, you called me a wimp.”
“I never said that. I only wondered innocently how you’d have done in Burton’s shoes.”
“I tried to tell you. All I got for my trouble was ridicule and the rolling-eyes routine.”
“Tell me now.”
“I’d have leaped up from my stretcher and shaken off the fever, found the big lake, made a map that even the Royal Geographic Society couldn’t challenge, left Speke dead in the hot sun, raced home and claimed the glory I should have had all along. So what’s your point?”
“There is no point. Except maybe I love you.” She rose on her toes and kissed me fiercely. “I guess that’s my point.”