Limping now, he walked under the pier. Concrete piling crusted with barnacles. Cigarette butts floating on the water. Voices from the pier echoed around him. Vietnamese fishermen trying for dinner, casting their lines with easy flicks of their wrists. Skaters and skateboarders rolling. Music, music, music... Keep walking. The Queen Mary closer now, the railings edged with silver. Three smokestacks stark against the sunset.
Everything would be different if the girl hadn’t walked out of the bathroom back at the house on Pomona. She hummed as she closed the door behind her, clutching a baby. Must have been changing it when the killing went down. It... he, she, whatever. Yancy didn’t know from babies. What he knew was taking down dopers and getting away clean.
Yancy tried to make her disappear, make her go back into the bathroom, pretend she hadn’t seen anything. Mason knew better. He had his faults, but he knew what he had to do.
The girl stood there, mouth moving like a fish, no sound coming out. Eyes shifting from the bodies on the floor to Mason. She half-turned her body as Mason raised his pistol. Half-turned her body, as though that would protect the baby.
Maybe that’s why Yancy had done what he did. Stupid thing. No explaining it really. Just as Mason tightened on the trigger, Yancy shot him in the head. He shot PJ too, but not before PJ shot him four times. Kid was quick, you had to give him that. Three of PJ’s rounds hit Yancy in the vest, but the impact of the rounds twisted him, and the fourth bullet slipped under his arm, bounced around inside him, tumbling like a load of laundry in a dryer. Good thing PJ liked a 9mm Glock. All the young guys did. That’s what they saw in the movies. Yancy preferred a .45. He felt the comforting heft of the .45 in his jacket with every step. Mean gun, no grace to it, but one shot in a vital area and you were dead. Case closed. 9mm had no stopping power. Man could walk forever with a 9mm slug in him. Yancy was proof of that.
The girl was unhurt. Hysterical, of course. She found her voice after he killed Mason and PJ, the girl screaming so loud he could hardly wait to leave.
Funny... he had made such rapid progress toward the Queen Mary at the beginning, but now he seemed to be moving slower and slower. He walked along the edge of the water, where the sand was hard-packed. He kept walking but didn’t seem to be getting any closer. It was like... he was being allowed to approach his goal, get it in sight, but there were limitations. Like the Queen Mary was off limits. Going to be dark soon. At this rate... he was never going to get there.
He just wished he could figure out why he did what he had done at the house on Pomona. Killing Mason... how could he explain that? Mason was making the right move. The girl had seen them. Could ID them. Rules were rules. Mason followed the rules... it was Yancy who had broken them. PJ was a hothead and Yancy knew he wouldn’t work with the kid again, but Mason and he had partnered for three years. Mason had thrown him a party when Yancy killed his twelfth man. His first dozen. Mason made a big deal about it, rented a suite at the Four Seasons and hired a couple of hookers for each of them. Top-quality ladies too. Mason talked too much and stank up the car with fish tacos and jalapeño burritos, but Mason was dependable. Yancy was the one who’d had a change of heart, and that bothered him. It was like his whole life up until now was wrong somehow.
The girl didn’t remind him of anybody. She wasn’t particularly pretty or gentle or sad or any of that other crap that always made the movie bad guy spare her life. And that bit about her trying to protect the baby... he didn’t even like babies, and besides, that was just a reaction on her part. No courage or nobility to it. She probably didn’t even know what she was doing. Yancy coughed, spit blood into the water. He was too tired to convince himself, but what he had done in that split second at the house gnawed at him. Throwing away his life, that’s what he had done. Nothing wrong with his life... nothing... and yet he had tossed it aside with the squeeze of a trigger. Blowing away Mason and PJ... Now what was he supposed to do? Ask James to get him a job at the port?
Yancy stumbled up onto the dunes. Soft sand with not a speck of oil on it. Sand like sugar, heaps of it... and he had a perfect view of the big boat. He sat down. Just a little break. A little rest before starting back up again. He lay back on that pure white sand. Stretched out his arms, scooped them back and forth. Made sand angels. He and James used to do that when they were kids. Spreading their arms wide, the two of them making flapping sounds. Wings big enough to carry them to heaven. Now, though, his sand angel was sloppy and uneven... broken somehow. Yancy lay still, arms poked out at a crooked angle. Just a little rest, that’s all he needed. He watched the Queen Mary floating there in the blazing sunset. Every seam and rivet in sharp focus. Ship of gold. Close enough to touch.
From Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
Milky got home about nine that night, sweating and shivering like he had the flu. Which he did. He had the street flu; he was in a bad way. He opened the door to the house on O Street (Best thing about living on O Street? You only have to walk a block to P.) trudged up the stairs to the third-floor apartment, and watched his shaky hand try to fit the key inside the lock.
Ma was at the table. In her housecoat. Her close-set eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and Milky knew instantly.
“Why, Eddie?” she said. Grief tuned her voice up a notch. “Why?”
Edward Francis Milk felt his gut drop, like a sack of garbage hitting the floor.
He said, “What, Ma?”
“You know.” Her hands, worn like old dish towels, gripped her crossed arms tightly in hopeless self-consolation. “I know it when I see it.”
“Ma.”
“Eddie, you promised me. You always promised. My little boy...”
The guilt. Milky was thirty-one years old, still living with his mother. Then the anger. Milky was thirty-one years old, still living with his mother. “What were you doing in my room, Ma?”
“You been away two days. No phone call, no nothing. I’m scared, I’m all alone. What’m I supposed to do? Sit here and wait?”
“Not go through my things.”
“I was going to call the police. Report you missing. You should thank the man above I didn’t.”
“I was... I was working.”
“You used to want to be a cop.” She wept for him now. “You’d put on Dad’s shirt and hat and pretend you was him...”
This memory had lost all traction with him, the number of times she retold it. “Ma.”
“Jimmy’s passing killed him. Not the grief of it. The shame. Having it in our house? In his house? He told me, your father did, he said, ‘Eddie ever does it, Eddie ever follow in Jimmy’s footsteps, out of my house he goes. Put him right the hell out.’ You know I got to honor that, Eddie.” She looked at Eddie’s father’s picture, framed and standing on top of the stove. Him in his transit-cop uniform. A smaller photo of Jimmy laughing on the front steps was next to it. “This is still his house.”