The ironic thing was, the INS had had only sketchy information on the ring until I came along and until Vega supplied the details. Their investigation, which had only just begun, would have taken months; and even then they might not have come up with enough hard evidence to convict the Lujacks. Coleman and Thomas had panicked prematurely. Done all that they’d done without any real justification.
The INS hadn’t broken them down, nor had anybody else including me. They had simply self-destructed.
* * * *
I did not go back to the Hideaway. I would no longer have been welcome. In my own way I had betrayed and deceived the regulars too, and such sins could never be forgiven. But the main reason was that I didn’t want to see it or its denizens again-the same reason a man might not want to walk through the rubble of a quake-collapsed building he had once frequented. Some places, some states of mind, can’t be reconstructed once they’ve been battered down. The Hideaway would never be the same for the regulars, so how could it be anything at all for me?
But I kept thinking about the ones who had been there that Sunday evening, Kate and Bob Johnson and Douglas Mikan in particular. I kept wondering if they would ever feel safe again.
* * * *
The night before Kerry’s birthday in early February, she and I had dinner together at my flat-our own private celebration. Her birthday, like Christmas, would be spent with her mother.
While we were eating Kerry said, “Cybil finally read the literature from Children of Grieving Parents. I talked her into it last night.”
“Well,” I said, pleased. “How did she react to it?”
“Skeptically. She’s still afraid. But she’ll think about it, if I know Cybil, and then she’ll want to talk about it some more. If I can just get her to see one of the volunteer parents …” Kerry sighed. “Nothing’s going to change before late spring at the earliest, I’m afraid.”
“But it will change. That’s the important thing.”
“Everything changes,” she said. “Including my building.”
“Your building?”
“It’s going condo.”
“… Are you sure?”
“Yep. On June first, unless I decide to make the other tenants hate me by trying to block it. They think it’s a great idea. I love my apartment but I don’t know if I love it enough to buy it, or even if I can afford the probable asking price. What if I can’t, and Cybil won’t go to a care facility after all? I’d have to find a new place and then move her and me both-”
“Hey,” I said, “don’t start fretting prematurely. It’ll all work out. Even if there are problems, we’ll get through them.”
“We?”
“You and me together. Look at what we’ve been through in the past. One crisis after another, and we’ve weathered them all. Care facilities and condos are a piece of cake.”
“Since when did you become such an optimist?”
“I’ve been an optimist,” I said, “ever since I fell in love with you.”
She fixed me with a long silent look. Then her face scrunched up and she burst into tears. Then, bawling and snuffling, she hurried off to the bathroom.
I’m damned if I know what I said to upset her.