Three.
One of Lucy, dressed as a sort of slutty angel for Halloween a million years ago. It’s faded and blurry, but she looks the way I remember when I close my eyes.
One of the room in Cook County Hospital, Luce red-eyed but smiling, Jessica bundled like a burrito in her arms.
One of Jess from Nag’s Head, the summer before I went in. Eleven years old, just beginning to fill out the bikini Lucy and I fought about her having. I’m dragging her into the surf, and she’s fighting me, legs scrabbling at the sand, face framed into the kind of mock fear you only have around someone you trust. You can almost hear her shrieking, almost hear her laughing.
I can, anyway.
I reach out, and he lets the locket slip from his fist, the thin chain coiling in my palm. The filigree is worn, the hinges dark with age. I stare at it, and then I look up at the kid and think about taking that pistol away from him. Cracking his fucking skull with it. Then I say, “I don’t have it.”
“You think I don’t know who you are? What you do?”
“I’m a bartender.”
“Bull-shit. I know all about you. The jobs you’ve pulled. Lucky I’m not asking for twenty.”
“Those jobs were a long time ago.” I gesture down the bar. “You think I had any kind of money, I’d be working here?”
He looks it over, taking in the two geezers staring at their beer, the Cubs sign in the dingy window, the bowls of pretzels the regulars know better than to eat. For a second, his confidence seems to slip. But then he shakes his head, fingers his shirt to make extra sure I get a view of the cheap Chinese pistol. “Ten grand,” he says. “By Friday. Or she fucking dies.”
My fingers go to fists. “Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what?” His mask is back in place, all insolence and swagger.
“Don’t threaten my daughter.”
He curls his lips again. “Friday,” he says. Then he turns and struts out.
I open my hand to look at the locket. I know it’s warm from being in his pocket, but it’s hard not to pretend that it’s because she had it around her neck.
Ten years ago-Jesus, a decade-one of the neighborhood kids came to get me.
It was eleven in the morning, and I had been up all night doing a thing. When I heard the doorbell, I wanted more than anything to bury my head under my pillow. But Lucy was at work, so I staggered out of bed.
The kid was named Jimmy-something, a scraggly little brat that had lately been sniffing around Jessica. She was nine and he was maybe eleven, but things happen earlier these days. I didn’t open the screen door, just glowered down at him. “Yeah?”
And Jimmy-something, he said the scariest words a father can hear. “It’s Jess. She’s hurt.”
I didn’t even change out of my pajama bottoms.
Growing up in the city, it’s a blessing and a curse. Kids are wired to run around shrieking like carefree morons, and that’s exactly the way it should be. But between drug dealers and speeding buses and evil fuckers in raincoats, it’s tough to just let them go. So Lucy and I had set up boundaries; Jess could go to the school playground but not to the city park. She could walk on Augusta but not on Division.
So of course this Jimmy idiot led me straight down Division to the city park.
The first thing I saw was a ring of ten or so kids clustered around someone on the ground, and my heart kicked up to a hundred beats a minute, sweat running down my sides like it never did on a job, ever-not even the time Leo-fucking-Banks shot the security guard because he thought he was reaching for a piece-and I tore ass across the street, shoved through the kids, and there’s my Jess on the ground, clutching at her ankle, which is bent way too far to one side, and her face is squinched up in pain, tears cutting tracks down her cheeks, and then she spots me.
Ever seen your baby girl look at you with relief and terror at the same time? It’ll rip your fucking heart out.
I dropped to my knees beside her. She looked at me and then at one of the other kids, and said, “I fell.” I glanced up at the kid she’d eyeballed. A boy, maybe twelve and already got that scraggly not-quite mustache, pale and shaking and looking like he was about to take off running. It was obvious there was more to the story, but I didn’t really give a damn. I just wanted to take care of her. So I scooped her up and walked out of the park.
Warm and trembling, scrawny little arm clinging to my neck, smelling of dirt and sunshine, she looked at me, and she said, “I’m sorry, Daddy,” and my heart broke all over again.
Everyone talks about how a kid changes you. How there’s this whole sense of wonder, like, I don’t know, like you woke up and could see colors that hadn’t been there yesterday. Everything is still the way it was, but it all looks different.
So you change too. Become a different person. Self-preservation goes out the window. All of a sudden you’d do anything, any- thing for this helpless little creature. That’s what everyone says, and they’re right.
Especially if it’s a girl.
I drive an ’86 LeBaron. My furniture comes from the Brown Elephant resale shop. Towards the middle of every second week, I have to downgrade from Marlboros to Basics.
Ten grand. May as well ask for a ticket to the moon.
After my shift, I go home to pace my shitbox apartment and smoke and think.
I think about going to the police. Telling them there’s a cokehead who says he’s kidnapped the daughter I haven’t seen in seven years, and how I have two days to get him what I make in four months. I think how they will listen to me very intently at first, making notes with silver pens while they wait for my file. I think how when it comes, they will see arrests for assault, bad checks, unlawful entry, plus the conviction, five long years.
The note taking will stop. The pens will vanish.
Truth is, I don’t blame them. I really don’t. First rule is that everybody lies. Why would they bust their ass running around to check out a story like mine?
After all, they don’t know Jess.
I think of the last time she called, when all she did was cry. How each sob was like a spike through me, because I knew every single one was a wound done her. Done to my baby girl, who had once loved and trusted me, and then found me gone when she needed me most. Whose mother had died while I was inside, and who never knew what that did to me, how it emptied me out to lose my wife. My baby girl, who ran away before I was released.
Who had to do the things a sixteen-year-old runaway has to do.
I figure that if I sell my car and my records and empty my joke of a bank account, I can probably scrape up two, three grand.
So I put on a clean shirt and I go to work. I spend the longest afternoon of my life pulling Buds for losers. I greet the dusk rush eagerly, glad for the distraction. I pour shots and light cigarettes and forget orders and knock things over, and a couple of the regulars make jokes about it until they see my eyes, and then they wander away from the bar to the siderail on the back wall.
Finally, at eleven, Lester White comes in.
The place reacts the way it always does, shifting to acknowledge him, like sweeping a magnet above iron filings. Men who work for him nod and raise glasses. Hard kids vie for his attention. Suckers who owe him money stare at their beers and hope to Christ he won’t pick them to make an example of. I pour his Glenlivet rocks as he steps to a suddenly open space at the bar.
“Frank,” he says.
“Lester.”
He turns to lean an elbow, picks up the highball glass, and sips at it. “Heard on the radio, they’re saying snow tonight.”
“Yeah?” I can’t imagine anything I could care less about, what with the words my daughter, my daughter, my daughter going round and round in my head, but I can’t rush into this. Lester is the only option I have. How else am I going to get the money by tomorrow? Rob twenty liquor stores?