I pulled into the Thatcher driveway and shut down my motorcycle. I dropped the sidestand, but I didn’t climb off — not yet. When Jane called a half-hour earlier, she told me Charlie was worse and he wanted to see me. She asked me to come right away. I had rushed to their place, but now that I was there, instead of going in, I sat astride my bike taking in deep lungfuls of air. It had just stopped raining, and the night was heavy with the smell of jasmine. Charlie Thatcher took great pride in his yard, and I told myself I just wanted to steal a moment to enjoy the fragrance of his night-blooming jasmine. That was what I told myself, but even before the thought could form, I knew it was a lie.
The porch light came on, but I was parked beyond the reach of its yellow glow. The front door opened, and Jane stepped outside. “Pry?” she called. “Is that you out there?”
“Yeah,” I said as I stood and swung my leg over the bike, “it’s me.”
She came down the steps and met me. “I can’t believe you rode a motorcycle,” she said. She held her hand palm up. “Didn’t you notice it was raining?” She tried to smile, but there was a puffy thickness to her face, and the smile couldn’t quite materialize.
“Yeah, I know, but I felt like riding.” The truth was that when I got depressed, I liked to ride, and depression that night was as pervasive as the smell of Charlie’s jasmine. I gave a little shrug. “Sometimes it makes me feel better.”
When I said that, Jane’s features came all unscrewed and fell apart. “Oh, Pry,” she said, and she rushed to me and threw her arms around my waist. She dropped her head to my chest, and deep, horrible gusts of sound came out of her. She was getting soaked from the water that clung to my oilskin coat, but that didn’t seem to matter. “It’s happening,” she said. “It’s happening so fast.”
I put my arms around her and pulled her close without saying anything. Charlie had been diagnosed a month earlier with liver cancer. A week ago, he had been admitted to the hospital. Two days ago, against his doctors’ advice, he had insisted we bring him home.
“He asked me to call you,” Jane said. She lifted her head and looked up at me. “He said it’s important that he talk to you right away. He’s in terrible pain, but he won’t take anything because he wants to have it together when he talks to you.”
I gave her a squeeze, and with my hands still on her shoulders, I pushed her back a step and looked down. “It’s okay. I’m here now. How are you doing?” I asked.
She wiped her tears away with both hands and said, “I’m not doing so good. I cry constantly, except when I’m around Charlie. I haven’t cried in front of him yet. He doesn’t need to see my hysteria on top of everything else.” She punctuated her comment with another of those not-quite-right smiles.
We walked to the house, and once we were on the porch, I took off my coat, shook the rain from it, and draped it over the railing. “Did he say what’s on his mind?” I asked.
“No, he’s being secretive as hell, but I could tell that it’s important to him.” She opened the front door and led me inside. “He said he would explain everything to me and the boys once he’s had a chance to talk to you.” She nodded toward the staircase and told me to go on up. There was the glint of a scolding mother in her eye. “I’d offer to bring you a beer,” she said, “but since you’re riding that motorcycle, I won’t.” Jane never missed an opportunity to let me know she thought motorcycles were dangerous.
I grabbed hold of the thick oak banister and pulled myself up the stairs. The Thatcher home was on Fifth Street, one block from Balboa Park. It was a large, drafty place built in the early 1930s. Charlie had been my number-two man for years, and when I sold my security business, the new owners promoted him to general manager. I assumed when that happened, he and Jane would then sell this place in San Diego and move up to North County, where the main offices were located. When I suggested that, though, Charlie wouldn’t consider it. “This is where we raised our two boys,” he told me, “and this is where we’ll stay.”
Once I was at the landing outside Charlie’s room, I hesitated again about going inside. I could no longer smell the jasmine, so I was forced to admit the truth. Charlie Thatcher was as close to me as an uncle, and I was not taking this well.
When a hoarse voice called, “Come on in, Father Delaney,” I swallowed, gave the door a shove, and stepped inside.
“I’ve never been mistaken for a priest before,” I said. Charlie was in a hospital bed, and it had been adjusted so that he was more or less in a sitting position.
“Oh, Jeez, lookie who’s here. It’s the biker trash.” Charlie was originally from Queens, New York, and to my West Coast ears he sounded exactly like Archie Bunker from that old television series. Except for his size, he even looked like Archie. Charlie was much bigger, though — six-three and well over two hundred pounds. At least before he’d gotten sick he’d been over two hundred pounds. Now he was losing weight fast. It had been only two days since I had seen him, and in that short time, Charlie looked to have taken off twenty pounds and put on twenty years.
I took my best shot at a smile and said, “Good God, Charlie, you look like hell.”
“Thanks a lot. I was feeling kinda blue until now, but you really perk a fella up.”
I patted his hand. “It’s the least I can do.”
He growled. “Lately, doin’ the least is what you do the most.” Charlie liked to give me a hard time about what he considered my life of leisure. I had spent my twenties and early thirties building my business. By the time I sold out, we were doing it alclass="underline" uniformed security guards, night watchmen, the installation of burglar alarms, private investigations. It had been an all-consuming process for a lot of years. Now I could afford to spend my time doing what I wanted to do, which usually involved riding the motorcycles I had customized myself at my home up the coast. It was not the sort of activity the hard-working Charlie Thatcher considered productive.
We had gotten past our obligatory insults-at-first-sight, and now there was a moment thick with silence. It was Charlie who broke it. “The doc figures less than a week.” When he said that, I felt very heavy and allowed myself to drop into the straight-backed chair beside his bed. “Maybe a lot less,” he added. “I didn’t believe it at first, but I know it’s true. It’s strange, you know? It’s like I can feel myself draining away.”
I started to tell him how sorry I was, but he knew that without my saying it. Charlie could always read my mind. We had known each other for eighteen years. Right after he retired from the navy, I hired him as a security guard for a strip mall in National City. It was a tough area, but Big Charlie was perfect for the job. Providing security for that place had been my first contract, so Charlie had been with me since the beginning.
With what looked like a lot of pain, he lifted a hand toward the door. “Close that thing all the way, would you, John?” My name’s John Pryor, but most people call me Pry; Charlie always called me John. I shut the door, and as I came back he said, “I thought you might be Father Delaney because I asked Janey to give both of you a call. Since the rectory’s only a few blocks away, I expected him to show up first.”
“You must have forgotten my disregard for speed limits.”
He gave my little joke a quick smile — more than it deserved, really — but I could tell the niceties were over. Charlie had something on his mind. “This is better,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you first, anyway.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
He stared for a long moment at his frail, blotchy hands. Finally he shook his head and said in a weak voice, “I’m not a good man, John.”