“To the home of Ralph and Gladys Fleming, right?”
“The new people, I guess that’s their names. Wouldn’t of known where she was, I hadn’t glanced at the papers piled up on the porch and seen her picture. That was some surprise, I’ll tell you.”
Veronica nudged me and started to giggle.
“So, where is Sassy, I mean Sugar, now?” Logan said.
“New people still got her. Won’t give her back.”
Now Gloria and Abbruzzi were giggling, too.
“They really think it’s their dog, don’t they?” Logan said.
“Sure do. Miss their own dog so much they convinced themselves it could have walked all the way across the country to find them. Of course, you gotta be a little nuts to believe that.”
“And a little nuts to print it,” Logan said, gleefully holding up a copy of last week’s paper with the big picture of Sassy/Sugar on the front. “So, what are you going to do now, Martin?”
“Cops promised they’d come by tomorrow, get my dog for me.”
“And Action News will be there! This is Logan Bedford, reporting live from Silver Lake. Back to you, Beverly.”
We were all roaring now, Gloria laughing so hard that tears rolled down her cheeks. This was bad for the paper. It damaged our credibility. It made us look ridiculous. But we were so giddy with drink and wacky newspaper stories that tonight a hockey game would have struck us as hilarious.
We were still giggling five minutes later when Hardcastle slid down from the bar stool where he’d been drinking alone and stomped over to our table. By his expression, it was apparent that at least someone was able to appreciate the gravity of the situation.
“Did you set me up, Mulligan?” he said. Thanks to the evening’s diet of boilermakers, his lazy drawl was even lazier. “Did you?”
That made all of us at the table laugh louder. We laughed so hard that a half dozen firemen sitting three tables away joined in, even though they had no idea what they were laughing at.
I could have saved Hardcastle from himself, but I didn’t because he was such a jerk. I was going to have to live with that for a long time. That’s what I thought. What I said was, “Hardcastle, maybe you should have waited for the doggy DNA.”
“Fuck you,” he said, provoking more peals of laughter.
“Well,” Gloria said as Hardcastle stalked off, “no call for any more newspaper horror stories. We have a winner.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “My turn.”
“No way you can top Sassy,” Veronica said.
“It’s Sugar,” Abbruzzi said, and Gloria laughed so hard that she tipped over her Bud.
“Back in the eighties,” I said as a waitress mopped up the spill with a bar rag, “the paper used to crown a Rhode Island Mother of the Year. Winner got a nice write-up in the ‘Living’ section and a free six-month subscription to the paper. Hundreds of readers would write in to tell us why their mothers were worthy of the honor. The reporter who dreamed up the idea would read each heartfelt letter, choose the best one, interview the letter writer and his mom, and write it up for the Mother’s Day paper. In 1989, I think it was, the city editor got a call the day we announced the winner: ‘Did you know that four of her sons are in prison?’ ”
The table erupted again. This time, it was Abbruzzi’s Amstel Light that went airborne.
“Nice try,” Veronica said, when it quieted down. “But the dog story can’t be beat.”
“You haven’t heard the rest of it,” I said. “Guess who wrote the Mother’s Day story?”
“Hardcastle?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, no, he didn’t!”
“Oh, yes, he did.”
With that, I got up, gave Veronica a good-bye kiss, and headed for Secretariat.
21
I prowled the Mount Hope neighborhood again that night, looking for Mr. Rapture but harboring no hope of actually finding him. Around midnight, with a Cuban between my lips and Tommy Castro’s No Foolin’ album in the CD player, I swung the Bronco onto Doyle Avenue, and there he was. Mr. Rapture, his hands in the pockets of that black leather jacket from the photographs, was striding purposefully down the sidewalk. I rolled to a stop a few yards ahead of him, got out, climbed over the snowbanked curb, and watched him close the distance between us.
“How ya doing?” I said. “Can I talk to you a minute?”
He studied me for a heartbeat. Then his eyes got big. He spun on his heels and took off. I set out to run him down.
He was ten yards ahead as we raced down the sidewalk past Zerilli’s Market, our shoes crunching in the inch of fresh snow covering a month’s worth of bad Rhode Island February. I’d been chasing him for less than a minute, and already I was regretting all those cigars and those missed Saturday mornings at the gym. My right thigh was beginning to cramp, there was a stitch in my side, and my heart was a runaway drum.
“Wait!” I called to him. “I just want to talk!”
At the end of the block he cut right and slipped, his arms flying out for balance, his fingers clawing at the frigid air. I was almost on him now, close enough to reach for the collar of his black leather jacket. Then my right shoe landed where he’d slipped, and I went down hard, cracking my left elbow on jagged ice that a snowplow had thrown up from the street.
Pain shot from elbow to shoulder now as I scrambled to my feet and saw him running hard down the middle of the deserted street. I set out once more to chase him down. He ran well for a small man, but my stride was longer. My thigh was cramping badly in the cold, but I fought through it as the distance between us slowly closed.
Fifteen yards.
Ten yards.
Five.
And when I caught him, I was going to do what? Knock him down? Beat him up? Not the sort of interviewing technique I’d learned in Brother Fry’s journalism class. And what if he was carrying something? A knife, maybe. Or a gun. If I was right about him, he was already a killer several times over.
I thought about that for an instant, then flashed on the bodies of the twins being loaded into the ambulance. I sucked in a breath, lunged for him, and my feet flew out from under me. I landed hard, face-first, and skidded to a stop. As I raised my face from the ice, he threw me a look over his left shoulder, and I thought I heard him laugh.
Mr. Rapture sprinted to the corner, turned right, slowed to a jog, and was gone.
I was surprised how far we’d run; it was an eight-block limp back to the Bronco. Someone had broken into it and yanked out the CD player. I rummaged in the backseat with my one good arm, found an old T-shirt, and used it to sop up the blood flowing from my nose.
* * *
In the morning, my elbow was black and swollen and my nose knew exactly how it felt.
I’d been injured before. I broke my nose three times and my left wrist twice. Errant elbows had opened gashes over both eyes. I cracked bones in three fingers, and one of them was still crooked. A half-moon surgical scar tattooed my right knee. But the damage was all done on the basketball court. Since when was journalism a contact sport?
I spent two hours reading last year’s Time magazines in the waiting room of the Rhode Island Hospital emergency department and another hour waiting for an intern to read my X-rays before learning that the only thing broken this time was my pride.
It was early afternoon before I finally got to work, arriving just in time to see a copyboy deposit the day’s keg of press releases on Hardcastle’s desk. As I walked toward mine, a half dozen people stopped me to ask about my nose.
“Slipped on the ice,” I said, which was more or less the truth.
I jerked open my file drawer, drew out the envelope of spectator pictures, and fanned them across my desk. Mr. Rapture stood transfixed in six of them, mocking me. I stared at the pictures for a long time.