“Easy come, easy go,” he said.
A few weeks earlier Bouck shot somebody who was trying to get into the shop. It was Puppy that first heard the noise.
Then Camille heard it. Nights were sometimes good for her and Bouck let her move around. That night she was free.
“Bouck.”
“Huh.” He jerked awake as if lightning had struck him.
She stood outside his door because she didn’t like to go into his room at night no matter what.
“Somebody’s downstairs.”
He was up before the light was on, the .38 already palmed. He was down the two flights of stairs and in the basement within a few seconds, with Camille not far behind.
It turned out to be a kid trying to jimmy the window in the basement. He didn’t even get inside. Before the window was all the way open, Bouck shot him. The bullet knocked him flat even though it didn’t kill him. Bouck would probably have shot him again, but the guy got up.
Together Bouck and Camille ran up the stairs and watched out the window of the shop as the thief staggered down Second Avenue, bleeding all over the place. Bouck told her later the kid must have lived. There was nothing about it in the paper. He had Jamal wash down the sidewalk the next day, but no one ever came to ask any questions. Camille thought about the way Bouck had shot the boy. Even with Jamal around, Bouck always made Camille feel safe. Bouck could make war.
She listened for him.
Today wasn’t such a very bad day. The animal she called anguish was only a tightness in her chest, a weight holding her down, just above the level of hell. Today the animal was an almost manageable pain. She could think a little. By sundown the weight might lift enough to allow her to go upstairs. But then again, it might not lift for days. It all depended.
On good days it got better in the evenings. By six or seven her mind drifted back into focus and she started thinking she might be all right until the next day. Then it would start again with the dawn.
Madness seemed to come in the mornings, hitting her like a hurricane of wailing furies so loud and so ferociously violent, sometimes she shook all over. Sometimes she screamed and clawed at the wall. Bouck didn’t like her to do that.
When it was very bad like that she knew she would have to die to make it stop. Dying seemed like a good idea about eighty percent of the time. But Bouck kept pushing death back for her. She thought about dying every day. More than once she tried to get there. She just couldn’t find her way to the peace of death, though, where her parents were waiting to take her back. Whatever she did to end herself, Bouck kept pushing her back. Sometimes she knew death would come to her only if Bouck went first.
Camille knew where two of Bouck’s guns were. One was in his belt, and one was in his boot. On good days he let her play with his guns. The third gun, the automatic with the kind of bullets that exploded inside and could blow a man’s head off, was hidden somewhere else. She was pretty sure someday she’d find it.
The puppy lay across her lap, its head hanging over her knee. It could stay like that for hours, sprawled and boneless, just like Camille, almost as if the puppy, too, could die inside with the soul death of its mistress.
Then when Camille was finally able to stir herself after hours of inertia, the puppy would get up and race around. Round and round, up and down the stairs faster than any human could run. Camille knew if Puppy got away, no one could catch it. It was fast, very fast. She loved Puppy. More than Bouck. More than anything. She couldn’t live without Puppy. Upstairs the shop bell tinkled. The day was taking a long time to end.
10
Eight of them were squeezed into Sergeant Joyce’s office, which was about the size of a walk-in closet. The window was on an air shaft. From time to time Sergeant Joyce tried to brighten the place up with a few pots of English ivy. There were two such plants on the windowsill now, dwarfed and brown-edged with neglect. April counted three crunched-out cigarette butts in the potted dirt and knew there were likely to be more below the surface. The tiny room with its three chairs was as close as the detective squad got to a conference room. Sometimes they sat in the locker room, where there was a refrigerator and a table. Sometimes, when it was quiet, the detectives gathered in a questioning room and questioned each other. Now, hours before the crime-scene photos were available, before the autopsy report told them exactly when and how Maggie Wheeler died, they assembled to get organized.
There were two women in the room. Only one got a chair. Sergeant Joyce sat behind her desk. April leaned against the windowsill near the dying plants. Healy and Aspirante, always the self-appointed honchos, sat in the two visitors’ chairs in front of Joyce’s desk. Aspirante’s beady eyes and large nose were moist with ambition and a lot more heat than the room’s air conditioner could handle. He was skinny, not a centimeter taller than April, and pugnacious to compensate. Now he was holding forth about psycho-killers he had known, not saying anything because he hadn’t ever known one, but pushing noise out his mouth all the same.
“It’s the guy on the tape,” Aspirante said. “All we gotta do is find him.”
Healy, at twice Aspirante’s height and girth and possibly half his intelligence, nodded his agreement.
Joyce put her hand over the receiver. “Shut up,” she said.
April glanced over at Mike. He was nonchalantly holding up the back wall as if nothing about anybody’s behavior bothered him in the least. It was their case. Theirs. They were the first men in, the ones who answered the call and found the girl. And Mike had to know there wasn’t a detective in the room who wouldn’t do anything in his power to upstage them and complicate the process as much as possible.
Mike nodded at her, a small smile teasing the corners of his mustache. Clearly he was thinking the same thing and coming up with a different take on it. She knew how he thought. Life is short, take a chill. Hah, some philosophy.
But April felt a sudden shock at the eye contact and the way he raised his chin at her. The jolt was unfamiliar and a little unnerving. All the time Sanchez was away experiencing his roots yet again, April hadn’t just missed him. She actually felt anxious, as if a part of her were missing. She didn’t like the sensation a bit and was pretty sure she wouldn’t feel that way if they hadn’t almost gotten blown up together last May.
Now she had to worry about the effects of gratitude on this relationship that Sanchez called “close supervision.” She didn’t like it. She had always felt safer just a little isolated and separate from everybody. “Watch your back” was not a sufficiently cautious approach to either life or work for her.
Maybe it was the effect of all those years hearing her mother’s litany of every possible danger of being alive in Queens, America, as well as constant replays of the violence and chaos, starvation, and family separations in China when she was young. In the fifties, in the Cultural Revolution, Tienanmen Square, now.
“Never forget best friends, even Chinese best friends, stab in front easy as back.”
April went to bed with those words in her ears the way she knew American children did the prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
She and Mike hadn’t talked yet. Maybe they wouldn’t have a chance today. She couldn’t help noticing how tan he was, must have spent his whole ten days in Mexico out in the sun with some Maria or other. Suddenly April was aware that Sergeant Joyce had hung up the phone and was frowning at her, as if already she had done something wrong. She hadn’t done anything wrong. All she did was take a call, cross the street to a fancy boutique—where neither of them could even think of shopping—and find a dead salesgirl in the storeroom. April wasn’t responsible for killing her, or hanging her up on the chandelier.