In his career he’d saved perhaps a half dozen people through CPR. He worked on his son for fifteen minutes-mouth to mouth, thumping and massaging his chest, pounding at his boy’s heart. He thought he might be crying but wasn’t sure and didn’t want to check.
Every now and then a whine slid deep within him but it wasn’t like any sound he’d heard before. It could be a different kind of death rattling around, hungry and mewling and wanting out, but Clay kept a tight hold. He wasn’t going to go yet, and he continued working at his boy until he couldn’t take the frozen, insane glare in Edward’s eyes anymore.
Clay kneeled with his forehead to his son’s face, the fiery pain in his belly growing and the flames clawing up through him to settle in his brain. Something in his chest throbbed for a moment and then a sob broke. Clay threw his head back and thought he might howl like a dying dog, but all that came out was a guttural snarl.
Taking the towel from the rack, Clay dried his boy carefully. He was beginning to move a little better now-the vicious twinges of pain made him grunt and gnash his teeth, but at least he could stand. He headed back to the living room, stumbling and shouldering his way along the walls, seeing clues everywhere and knowing exactly what had happened.
It was a wicked way to go through the world. Always capable of putting the pieces together quickly, in the correct order. A hell of a talent when he needed it, and something much uglier the rest of the time.
He could picture how it happened, all right, that’d always been the easy part-walking through the crime scene, adding one fact on top of the other. The angle of blood spatter, heaving arc of the knife.
His father had been the same way-the man would wander in and glance into your face, and he’d know everything you’d been doing, everything you might be trying to hide. On the job thirty years until he’d retired to Fort Lauderdale, started planting flowers and tending fruit trees. He was dead six months later with a head full of tumor.
Clay nearly went down. His own brain was stuffed with rot now. He twisted sideways, came to a rest against the edge of the couch, and felt the blackness welling up behind his eyes. His mostly digested breakfast trickled out of his torn guts and between his fingers.
The urge to sit beside Kathy grew overwhelming. Another moment to play house, just fade off into the night and pretend it was all going to work out on the other side of hell. He tugged her feet free from under the cushion, sat, and laid her legs across his stinking lap.
“Just need a minute to rest,” he said. “But I swear, it isn’t over. Trust me. This isn’t how it’s going to end, baby.”
He hadn’t called her that in a while. Things had begun creeping downhill again the past couple of months, and he still wasn’t certain why. His fault probably-a better than fair chance at that. He had fallen into cliché, which was something he’d been hoping to avoid all his life, but failing at most of the time. At thirty-seven, his middle age crisis had sprung out at him from behind a fucking bush and sent him sprawling. He tumbled into the predictably routine dismay of having more of his life behind him now than out in front. Where was the grace and wisdom you were supposed to find as your gray patches started to fill in? He didn’t know.
Kath had been even more fidgety the past few weeks as well-snappish, moody, quickly depressed and really pining for the good life that had somehow eluded them. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he just hadn’t tried hard enough.
Maybe if he’d pushed just one extra inch along the way they could’ve made it over the line to whatever they’d been missing. The slightest brushing against the larger dream.
She’d gone through the same sort of thing a couple of years earlier, after a cervical cancer scare. He’d seen that kind of thing jolt people into becoming wheat germ and Yoga nuts. For others, it swung them around in the other direction. Kathy wound up screwing around with H for a couple of months, but she fooled with it the same way he’d had a brief period of binge drinking. Trying to find other ways to deal with the burden of high school hopes that kept tugging at your ankles after all these years.
Being a drunk and an addict didn’t help either, so they stopped after a while, quick and easy as that. Then the baby came and the world began to have straight angles and clear-cut corners again. A texture, direction, and simplicity that mattered.
With a gentleness he didn’t know he still possessed, Clay touched Kathy’s face, nudged her chin back and forth feeling how the jaw was broken. Rocco had to knock her down first, tear the scrunchie from her hair, tie her arm off while she struggled weakly.
So Chuckie Fariente knew more about them than Clay had figured. That prick put the word on the street until some dealer came forward and gave him details about the dark corners of Clay’s and Kathy’s life. All right, that was fair. Clay had spent the last few years crawling through Chuckie’s garbage bags and listening to the most goddamn boring wiretaps in all of mobster history.
Chuckie sends Rocco out to do the deed, thinks it’s a nice gag to make it look like a drug deal gone bad. Cop’s wife with a needle in her arm. Tends to muddle the situation, brings the past into play, casts doubts on Clay’s character. Makes him look like a dirty cop who’s into Christ knows what. His own department squelches the investigation in case there’s more to be found and it leads to other officers. Nobody needs the bad publicity nowadays. Just goes to show how easy it is to cause total chaos in the NYPD.
Good move, Chuckie.
There it was.
Clay slid Kathy’s feet off of his lap and saw they were now streaked with his blood. He got up with a growl, made his way back to the bathroom, carried Edward to the bedroom and dressed him in a new outfit that Kathy’s mother had bought. Blue shorts, little black suspenders, white collared shirt. Kathy didn’t like it for some reason, but Clay did. It made his boy look a little older, as if there’d been more time for him.
He brought Edward out to the car. It took a few minutes but he got the car-seat working, strapped his son in. Cuddles was still going at it, barking with such a frantic high-pitched whining that Clay was beginning to enjoy the noise. The tiny dog dug feverishly at the chicken-wire fence separating the driveways.
Back in the house, he dressed Kath in something comfortable-a white sweater and jeans, a light blue jacket, so that she looked, somehow, the way she did back on the cheer squad while he watched from the stands. She didn’t feel like dead weight. He could almost believe that she was helping him-because she knew they were all in this together now.
He said, “You finally got the vacation you wanted, baby. We’re going to take a little road trip. A family outing.” He wasn’t quite so far over the edge yet not to realize how crazy he sounded. It was all right though, he didn’t mind much.
Whatever it took.
He grabbed a handful of paper towels and stuffed them against his belly, holding in a shriek. If he let it out he’d never stop. Took the roll and a can of potpourri out to the car, then looked around the place, wondering what else he might need. He slung Kath over his shoulder and hauled her out to the Caprice, feeling her hands swaying back and forth over his ass, the way she used to fool around with him on the dance floor. He went down to one knee twice but finally managed to get her into the passenger seat.
Another wave of pain flared beneath his heart but it was only a sliver of sorrow. Clay forced it back down, checked the rearview mirror and saw Edward’s eyes were still half-open. He wanted to tell his son that he wasn’t missing as much as the boy might think, that life was uglier than wherever he was at now.
Backing out, Clay felt a slight thump under the rear left wheel and knew instantly that Cuddles had dug his way under the fence and gotten loose. The hell was going on? He got out and looked down at the crushed dog. The sudden and intense silence on the block brought Mrs. Fusilli rushing to her front door. She spotted Cuddles lying there, bloody with tire tracks over his snapped back, and started screeching.