But I can’t help myself. Even my second therapist said I have bigger fish to fry.
Like the fact that I think nobody loves me. So we talked, Molly and me.
She had this narrow, birdlike intensity, with a look that avoided yours with push-pin concentration, as though you were part of her game world but perpetually fixed just to the right of the cursor. It was a strange tick, one of those little wrinkles that never gets ironed out of a personality, like hiding your teeth when you smile.
I found it intensely erotic.
She was a journalist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or the “PG” as she continually referred to it. Well, she was actually more of a stringer than a real journalist, and she was hoping to break into the biz by writing an in-depth story on-you guessed it-the disappearance of Jennifer Bonjour.
Score. So much meaningless shit happens that coincidences are bound to abound. Sometimes the world is so small it can only be grand.
“Opportunity of a lifetime,” I said.
She made a pained face. “It’s horrible, I know. But I figure it can’t be all that bad if I help… you know, find her…” She trailed as though unconvinced.
“The dead don’t sweat,” I said, grinning. “Neither should you.”
There’s such mystery in meeting a woman for the first time. I knew she had a life, that behind her scenes there were scads of people-friends, family, lovers-and to be honest, I didn’t really give a fuck. I know that sounds bad, like banging her was all I cared about. But the fact of the matter is probably worse.
Remember, I don’t forget. This makes me pretty much impossible to get along with, simply because the longer I know a person, the less they seem a person. Remember, I see all the ways you people repeat.
This makes falling in love pretty much radioactive. The pain is stacked high enough as it is, and with me it never, ever goes away. So the way I see it, this means either I become celibate like a priest or I womanize like a hound dog. What would you choose?
“And you?” Molly asked. “What brings you to the booming metropolis of Ruddick?”
I shot her my best whisky-ad grin: rueful, infinitely assured. The kind that says, Oh, yes, I will be laid tonight. Teeth are a window on our genes, and my pearly-whites positively gleamed.
“An opportunity of a lifetime.”
If my ragged good looks were the hook, then Dead Jennifer was the bait. I knew it the instant I finished describing the Bonjours and their piteous request: I was Molly Modano’s first break. Her initial Oh-no-not-another-one wariness dissolved into avid interest. After about five minutes of relentless questioning I began to wonder who was catching whom. I also realized that I almost certainly wasn’t going to score that night. In Molly’s eyes I had made the miraculous transition from being another asshole to being a possible night of fun in the sack to being a resource, something that required cultivation and rationing. I cursed myself for not lying at the outset, certain that somewhere in some journalism textbook stuffed in the back of her closet there was a rule that said, “Do not, under any circumstances, bang your sources.”
Codes of professional conduct. Fawk.
I felt my eyes glazing. “Woo,” I said, expelling a lungful of specious air. “I. Am. Bagged.”
“What time you think you’ll be up for breakfast?” she asked. Knocks on my motel room door always unnerve me. The great thing about motel versus hotel rooms is the way they open up onto the world-like home. But this also means they’re exposed-like home. Hotels give you a controlled environment within a controlled environment. The really good ones make you feel like you’re in a Faberge egg or something. The world is reduced to soundless motion behind tinted glass.
Just one more gorilla exhibit.
I thought about grabbing my gun from my overnight bag, but decided against it. I knew who it was.
“Hi, Molly,” I said, pulling open the door. The light across the motel frontage was haphazard at best, so that my room light provided her only illumination. Her face stared up at me, bright and warm. My shadow fell across her body. Then I noticed…
There were tears in her eyes.
Fawk.
“Look,” she said hesitantly. “I know… I know how this works…”
“How what works?” The lack of interest in my voice shocked me.
She swallowed and blinked. She wiped the tear that fell from her left eye so fast that it almost seemed like a magic trick. Sean O’May, my old hand-to-hand trainer, among other things, would have been impressed.
“I mean, I know… know what you were… expecting, and um…” Her eyes were bouncing all over the place, but I could tell they had glimpsed my bed.
“What’s wrong, Molly?”
She tilted her head to the weight of her hair, flashed the kind of embarrassed smile that had duped me into thinking I was in love more than once.
“The funny thing is that I probably would have, you know? I mean, you’re…” She swallowed once again. “… handsome enough. And it’s been… well… a long time, you know? And I-”
“Molly,” I said on the edge of forceful and gentle. Kind of like the way I am in the sack.
“So now,” she continued babbling, “now I’m like… like-”
“Molly.”
“What?”
“Would you like to, ah, accompany me tomorrow?”
Any deal you strike with the media is going to be Faustian through and through-something I learned during the war. Good in the short term, disastrous in the long run. You see, if you’re successful, you get the whole circus except the ringmaster, hundreds of very clever and generally unscrupulous (because let’s face it, nothing justifies fucking people over quite so conveniently as the truth) journalists all feverishly working their own manic angles. It’ll tear you apart, even if you don’t give a rat’s ass about things like honour and reputation or have a career that’s remotely political. Media attention incites mobs, and mobs have the bad habit of looking for goats.
And the sad fact is, just about anyone will do.
Molly made a show of scrutinizing me-as if any con man worth fearing had ever been sussed out in a single glance. Finally she gave me one of those phony shrugs and said, “Sure,” in a little sister’s voice.
I began closing the door, leaning forward so that my face remained squarely in the gap. “I’ll meet you for breakfast at ten…”
I never was a morning person. That night I dreamed. Generally I smoke too much dope to dream: though the Lord’s Leaf is in no way neurotoxic, it does change the way blood flows through your bean, and this, apparently, affects a chronic user’s sleep patterns. A welcome side effect, in my case.
What made this dream positively kooky was that I woke up convinced I was as awake and as alert as a goaltender in overtime. I bolted from my pillow and there he was, watching me through a haze of cigarette smoke, my old war buddy, my mentor in all things violent: Sean O’May.
I’ll save his story for another therapy session.
He sat in the chair next to my room’s small table, slumped back, with his snakeskin boots kicked out, one to either side of a black hockey bag. His hair was dyed orange and slicked back like the old days. His eyes were sharp as always, so small they glittered perpetual black. His trademark cigarette hung from his trademark Mickey Rourke grin. For as long as I knew him, he was loath to reveal his teeth-probably because they were so freakishly small, like baby teeth.
“Soooo…” he drawled. “What are you saying, there, Disciple?”
I sat blinking at the sheer impossibility of him.
“You’re dead,” I finally managed to cough.
He snorted through his nose, sucked his cigarette bright. “Yah,” he rasped, raising two fingers to pull his smoke from his mouth. “Well, you know how it is… “
“How what is?”
That was when I noticed his cigarette was glowing from both ends. I watched with a kind of blank wonder as he closed his lips about the burning inner tip. It seemed I could smell his lips sizzle.