I rolled the window up before he could finish. I had enough problems.
I drove down the block and turned right, looking for the figure I’d seen crossing the street, but of course, she was gone. A few minutes later, cruising up Cypress, I saw a couple of the DiMaggios, bats on their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet in the snow. I slowed, rolled the passenger-side window down, and leaned toward it.
“Hey, Vinnie! Seen anything unusual tonight?”
“Nothing ’cept for Lucinda Miller standing in her window, giving us a good look at her tits.”
His colleague snorted. “That ain’t so unusual.”
I pulled out the three-flame Colibri that Zerilli had given me. I didn’t have anything that needed welding, so I used it to fire up a Cuban and smoked as I prowled the empty streets. I didn’t see anyone skulking about with a can of gasoline. I didn’t see anyone resembling Mr. Rapture. Except for the DiMaggios, I didn’t see anyone at all.
The CD cycled around to “Nasty Habits” twice before I shut it off. Around three in the morning, the Bronco’s heater coughed and surrendered. The eastern sky was lightening when a newspaper delivery truck pulled up in front of Zerilli’s store and heaved out two bundles of city editions. I headed home to catch a couple hours’ sleep, see what my dreams could conjure.
I heard the phone ringing through the apartment door, stepped in, and picked up the receiver.
“You!
fucking!
bastard!”
“Hello, Dorcas.”
“So, who is she?”
“Who?”
“The bitch you’ve been out fucking all night.”
“What makes you think it was only one?”
“I’m still your wife, you evil bastard!”
“Good morning, Dorcas,” I said, and hung up. Just before I set the receiver down, I thought I heard Rewrite bark.
* * *
By the time I dragged myself in to work, the editors were meeting behind closed doors, discussing an issue that required their collective experience and judgment: Should the paper start printing the mayor’s name as “aaaaCarozza” or stick with the more headline-friendly “Carozza”? Judging by the muffled sounds coming through the wall, the debate was heating up.
I snatched a newspaper off the stack beside the city desk and saw that page one was dominated by a four-column picture of Sassy. She had her paws on Ralph’s shoulders, digging at his ear with her tongue while Gladys stood by looking embarrassed. Looking at the page made me feel bad about what I’d done. Not that I gave a damn about Hardcastle, but I cared a whole lot about the paper.
I was just a kid when Dan Rather broke into a Red Sox broadcast with the news that Pope Paul VI had died. “Maybe so,” my dad said, “but we won’t know for sure till we read tomorrow’s paper.” In a state where politicians lie like the rest of us breathe, the newspaper is the only institution people trust to tell the truth. I knew right then that I wanted to be a part of it.
That night, I prowled Mount Hope again in the heatless Bronco, giving it up around three in the morning, when hypothermia set in and even Tommy Castro’s guitar couldn’t heat things up. My apartment was warm only by comparison, the landlord thrifty with his heating oil.
Sleeping alone under a thin blanket, I dreamed of Norwegian brown rats with glowing red eyes and fierce cartoon dogs that wore red baseball caps and wielded Louisville Sluggers. The hair on the backs of their necks stood up as they growled in the dark and swung their bats at a man clutching a gas can in his left hand. He tried to escape the blows by crawling headfirst into an overturned plastic trash barrel, but the dogs clamped their jaws on his ankles and yanked him out. Their snapping teeth tore chunks of flesh from his thighs, and the rats scurried to devour the bloody pieces. A police car, blue lights swirling, roared down the street and screeched to a stop. The cops leaped out, shouted “Good dogs,” tossed them Beggin’ Strips, and stomped the man with their gleaming black jackboots. His mouth opened in a silent scream.
He had my face.
15
On Saturday, my clock radio roused me just before noon, blaring that we were in for a cold snap, which got me wondering what we’d been having.
I dropped Secretariat at the Shell station on Broadway to see what they could do about the heater. The mechanic was a lanky, murmuring dude named Dwayne who had “Butch” embroidered over the pocket of his blue work shirt. Five years after his dad died and left him the station, he was still wearing the old man’s clothes.
“Secretariat off his feed again?” he said. “How ’bout I take him out back and shoot him so you can break in a new nag?” Dwayne had been tending to Secretariat for years, and he never tired of the same horse joke.
“I just can’t bear to let him go,” I said, and told him about the heater.
On the walk back to my place, I called Veronica.
“Mulligan! I was beginning to think you didn’t like me anymore.”
“No chance of that, cutie. What say I take you out on the town tonight?”
“On the town or around the town? We’re not cruising Mount Hope sniffing for smoke, are we?”
She was on to me. “Well,” I said, “that is the part of town I had in mind. I thought maybe you’d like to drive.”
“Secretariat in the shop again?”
“Yup.”
“Pick you up at seven.”
And she did, driving her slate-gray Mitsubishi Eclipse straight to Camille’s on Bradford Street, where we shared a bottle of wine and ate mounds of spaghetti. Veronica treated, tapping into the five-hundred-dollar monthly allowance from Daddy that supplemented her meager paycheck. Good thing, or I’d have had to do some business with the loan shark eating with his aged mother at a table by the windows. Then it was off to the Cineplex in East Providence for the new Jackie Chan movie, he and his comic-relief sidekick doing a better job of catching the bad guys than I was.
This wasn’t the romantic evening of street prowling and rat watching I’d had in mind, but I was having a pretty good time, especially whenever she leaned over to kiss me. Besides, she had the car keys, so there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Afterward, she came up. We sat together on my bed and watched Craig Ferguson on my sixteen-inch Emerson. She sipped Russian River, her favorite kind of chardonnay, straight from the bottle, and I did the same with Maalox. The police radio, turned down low, chirped benignly in the background. Veronica thought Ferguson was the funniest man on television. I didn’t watch enough TV to know if she had a point.
“Mulligan?” Veronica said, sleep lurking at the edges of her voice. “Are you seeing anybody else?”
I flashed on Dorcas asking, “How many bitches are you fucking now?” Same Mulligan, different woman, better vocabulary.
“Do Polecki and Roselli count?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“Well, then it’s no,” I said.
“Hardcastle says you’ve been stepping out with the blonde in the photo lab.”
“Gloria Costa?”
“Yeah, her.”
“Not happening,” I said. “And Hardcastle is an asshole. You shouldn’t be getting your news from him, and that includes what he writes in his lame column. I’ve got a bad feeling he makes some of it up.”
“Maybe. But I do think Gloria’s sweet on you.”
“I think you could be right.”
The police radio chirped again, making me wonder how I was going to get to Mount Hope if something happened after Veronica went home. I was still thinking about that when she stripped down to her bra and panties and slid under the covers. I didn’t put up a fight. I snapped off the light, took off everything but my boxers, and crawled in beside her. It had been a long time since anyone felt that good in my arms. Maybe no one ever had.