Revenge, Tony thought. That was the problem. He would do it only for revenge, a way of getting back at Sara. And because of that it would be without pleasure, and laced with pain, and during every moment of it he would be thinking of Sara.
He took a long draw on the cigarette, then crushed it in the square glass ashtray. “I better be going,” he said.
Carmen looked surprised and offended and seemed to see her face in a mirror and not like what she saw. “Oh, okay,” she said coolly.
He didn’t want to hurt her but knew he had. “Sorry,” he said quietly.
She shrugged dryly. “You gotta go, you gotta go.”
He rose and paid the tab and walked out of the bar and into the dark, dark night. He could hear the muffled sound of the jukebox in the bar, the equally muffled sound of the people inside, little bursts of laughter that seemed aimed at him, at his situation, at how much he’d screwed things up. He turned and walked toward his car, away from the music and the talk and the laughter until he was safely beyond all these things and stood alone in the silence, beneath a canopy of rain-gray sky. Briefly, he peered upward and in his mind painted his wife’s face in the low-slung clouds, the weight of her loss growing ever more immense, crushing him beneath it, grinding him to dust-the tiniest speck, the blindly whirling atom-becoming smaller and smaller with each passing second until at last he felt smaller than the smallest thing that ever was.
He got into the car but couldn’t turn the key or press his foot down on the accelerator. And so he sat, frozen behind the wheel, remembering their first days together, the later wedding with its ecstatic night, the morning after, both of them famished, laughing over toast and orange juice, the long walk along the Bermuda shore, the azure water lapping at their feet, and then the parade of days that followed, all that happiness, her sparkling eyes, the smile, the way she raked her finger along his chest, the sound of her quiet sigh, all of it coming back to him in wave after shuddering wave so that later, when he’d finally turned the key, pressed the pedal, pulled away, he couldn’t recall the actual moment that he’d begun to cry.
STARK
He walked to the unlighted window and parted the curtains. Across the street, he saw him again, a large, awkward man in an old blue jacket, the one he’d noticed as he’d made his evening stroll to the park earlier, then again as he’d returned home, and now, past midnight, this same man sitting on the stone stoop across the street, patting himself against the early-morning chill. He’d disappeared for a while, but had now returned to rest like a crouching gargoyle on the steps, then rise abruptly and pace back and forth along the deserted street.
The man rose suddenly, turned left, walked a few paces, then wheeled around and retraced his steps, a journey repeated several times before he returned to his earlier place on the stoop and resumed his watch.
A rank amateur, Stark thought. He’d never known anyone to blow his cover more thoroughly. Still, there was no doubt that the man had been sent to keep an eye on him. The only questions were why he’d been sent and who had sent him.
Stark had little doubt that the answer to the second question was Mortimer’s friend, the overly discreet husband in search of his vanished wife. In the years since Marisol’s death, he had always expected a husband or lover to attempt the same dark plan, hire him to find a woman he intended to kill. The only surprise was the sudden rage he felt at the prospect of it being done again. It was raw and biting, as if all the passing years had done nothing to quell the fury he’d felt so long ago. He recalled the morning he’d arrived at Marisol’s apartment, the door slightly ajar, the way he’d called her name, waited through the following silence, then eased open the door and stepped inside. The carnage that greeted him still burned in his mind, Marisol’s naked body slumped in a chair, ankles and wrists bound, her hair swept over the top of her head. He’d lifted her head to see a face beaten beyond recognition.
Stark’s dream of vengeance had flared up from that bruised and battered face, the brown eyes swollen shut, the fractured jaw and split lips. And now this rage swept over him again as his eyes bore down upon the figure on the stoop. He imagined the missing wife in the guise of Marisol, tender and forgiving, kind beyond any man’s deserving, full of the leaping energy of life, wanting only to begin again, the man in the blue jacket like Lockridge, hired to follow him until he found her, then deliver her to Henderson, the man who wanted her dead, Mortimer’s shadowy friend.
Of course, he couldn’t know if the two cases were exact parallels. He couldn’t know if the man in the blue jacket was the husband Mortimer had spoken of or whether he’d been hired by the husband. But in the end, it didn’t matter. One way or another, a woman was going to be hurt, and the man who paced sleeplessly on the street below was the instrument of her harm.
Stark’s eyes focused like death rays on the man below, watching as he suddenly stopped and slumped against the leafless tree, then nudged himself away, paced, returned to slump against the rain-slicked trunk again. It was not hard to imagine the source of his restlessness, the rabid impatience that kept him in constant physical agitation. Lockridge, the man who’d followed him to Marisol, had been afflicted with the same frantic movements, and because of that Stark knew precisely what he was thinking, that he was close, very close to the hapless woman whose destruction he sought. They all plotted the same horrors, these men. And only other men, cold, brutal, vengeful men like themselves save for their targets, could stay their hands.
ABE
He sat at the bar, his feet planted on the rail, his fingers knotted around the half-empty pilsner. The room was silent, the piano covered, all the lights out save the few small ones that burned all night even when he wasn’t in the place. He wondered how many nights he’d spent this way, sitting alone after the place had closed, staring at his own face in the mirror across the bar. That was the thing about being alone, it numbed you after a while, so that you really didn’t notice just how alone you were. Then suddenly, someone showed up, and she had a certain look and spoke a certain way, and you realized how much you’d lost.
What he had not imagined was the sheer, heart-stopping excitement he felt in the simple thought of her. The moment she came into his mind, all the old songs made sense again. He felt their tingle and their fever, and the strange exquisite jeopardy they conveyed. He wanted to put his foot down, get a grip, but he knew he couldn’t, not with this one. He wanted to believe that she was just a woman, like others, just a woman passing through his life. But each time he tried to do that, he remembered some little thing about her, and all his will went flying out the window, and he knew that she was not at all like any other woman he’d ever met.
But what made her different?
The answer came so quickly, he knew that it was true.
What made her different?
A courage so raw, he could almost see it bleed.
He didn’t know what was eating at her, whether it was real or something inside her head. He knew only that she was trying desperately to stay ahead of it, and that you had to have guts to run that long and hard, always alert for the sound of footsteps behind you, always glancing over your shoulder. He didn’t know how long she’d have to live this way. He knew only that it was part of the package, something you signed on for if you signed on for her.
And that’s what he’d done, he knew, he’d signed on. But for what exactly? He shook his head at his helplessness. If it were a movie, he’d know what to do. If it were a guy bothering her, he’d be like Gary Cooper or somebody like that. Man of the West, that was the movie he thought of. He’d be like Gary Cooper in Man of the West. The problem was that in the movies it always ended with that final showdown. No cops came around later to investigate. No guys in lab coats examining fibers. No grand jury mulling it over. No fourteen-page indictment, no lengthy trial, no heart-stopping conviction… no consequences at all. In the movies, a bad guy was dead, and, quite rightly, nobody gave a fuck.