He sipped the last of his wine and toyed with the glass, causing candle-cast patterns to flicker upon the walls. There was still a half bottle left beside the sink. A week ago, he would have finished it off and maybe opened another one for good measure, but not now. Some of the urge to drink more than he should had fallen away. He understood that it was to do with the clearing of his conscience. He had told Charlie Parker all that he knew, and now he was absolved.
And yet he also felt that, in confessing, some connection between them had been severed. It was not a bond of trust, exactly, for he and Charlie had never been close, and never would be. He had sensed that, from an early age, the boy had been uneasy around him. But then Jimmy had never really figured out how to relate to kids. His sister was more than fifteen years older than he was, and he had grown up feeling like an only child. Then too his parents had been old when he was born. Old. He chuckled. What had they been: thirty-eight, thirty-nine? Still, there had always been a lack of understanding between his parents and their son, even though he had loved them both dearly, and the chasm between them had only widened as he had grown older. They had never discussed his sexuality, although he had always understood that his mother, and perhaps his father too, realized that their son was never going to marry any of the girls who occasionally accompanied him to dance halls or to the movies.
And while he himself recognized his urges, he had never acted upon them. It was partly out of fear, he thought. He did not want his fellow officers to know that he was gay. They were his family, his true family. He did not want to do anything to alienate them. Now, in retirement, he remained a virgin. Funny, but he found it hard to equate that word with a man who was now in his late sixties. It was a description that should be applied to young men and women on the brink of new experiences, not older ones. Oh, he was still energetic, and he still sometimes thought that it might be-nice? interesting?-to start a relationship, but that was the problem: he wasn’t sure where to start. He wasn’t some blushing bride waiting to be deflowered. He was a man with a certain knowledge of life, both good and bad. It was too late, he thought, to surrender himself now to someone with a greater degree of experience in matters of sex and love.
He carefully vacuum-sealed the bottle of red wine and placed it in the refrigerator. It was a hint that he’d picked up from the local liquor store, and it worked fine as long as he remembered to let the wine warm up for a time before he began drinking it again the next day. He turned off the lights, double-locked the front and back doors, a Zhtswornd went to bed.
He managed to incorporate the noise into his dream at first, the way he sometimes did when the alarm went off and he was so deep in sleep that bells began ringing in his dreams in turn. In the dream, a wineglass fell from the table and shattered on the floor. It wasn’t his wineglass, though, and it wasn’t quite his kitchen, although it resembled it in ways. It was now bigger, the dark corners stretching away into infinity. The tiles on the floor were the tiles from the house in which he had grown up, and his mother was nearby. He could hear her singing, even though he could not see her.
He woke. There was silence for a time, then the faintest disturbance: a sliver of glass caught underfoot, scraping against a tile. He climbed silently from his bed and opened his bedside cabinet. The.38 lay on the shelf, cleaned and loaded. He padded across the room in his underwear, and the boards did not creak beneath his feet. He knew this place intimately, every crack and join of it. Even though it was an old house, he could move through it without making a sound.
He stood at the top of the stairs and waited. All was silent again, but still he sensed the presence of another. The darkness became oppressive to him, and suddenly he was frightened. He debated calling out a warning, and by doing so cause whoever was below to flee, but he knew that if he did so his voice would tremble and he would reveal his fear. Better to keep going. He had a gun. He was an ex-cop. If he was forced to shoot, then his own people would look after him. Screw the other guy.
He made his way down the stairs. The kitchen door was open. A single shard of glass shone in the moonlight. Jimmy’s hand was shaking, and he tried to still it by assuming a double-handed grip on the gun. There were only two rooms on the lower leveclass="underline" the living room and the kitchen, linked by a pair of interconnecting doors. He could see that those doors were still closed. He swallowed, and thought that he could taste some of that evening’s wine in his mouth. It had gone sour, like vinegar.
His bare feet felt cold, and he realized that the basement door was open. That was how the intruder had entered, and maybe that was how he had left after the wineglass broke. Jimmy winced. He knew that was wishful thinking. Someone was there. He could feel him. The living room was closest. He should search it first, so that whoever was there could not come from behind him when he searched the kitchen.
He glanced through the crack in the door. The drapes were not drawn, but the streetlight outside was broken and only a thin stream of moonlight filtered through the drapes, so it was hard to make out anything at all. He stepped inside quickly, and immediately knew that he had made a mistake. The shadows altered, and then the door struck him hard, knocking him off balance. As he tried to adjust the position of his gun and fire, there was a burning at his wrists. Skin was opened, tendons severed. The gun fell to the floor, blood from his wound sprinkling it. Something hit him once on the crown of the head, then again, and as he lost consciousness he thought that he glimpsed a long, flat blade.
When he came to he was lying on his belly in the kitchen, his hands tied behind his back, his feet bound and drawn up to his buttocks, then linked to the ropes on his hands so that he could not move. He felt cold air on his bare skin, but not as badly as before. The basement door had been closed again, and now only a slight draft came from the gap between the kitchen d Z drcouoor and the floor. The tiles were freezing, though. He felt weak. His hands and face were slick with blood, and his head ached. He tried to cry for help until a blade touched his cheek. The figure beside him had been so quiet and still that he had not even sensed its presence until it moved.
“No,” said a man’s voice, one that he did not recognize.
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“Talk about what?”
“Charlie Parker. His father. His mother.”
Jimmy’s movement had caused the blood to flow once again from the wound on his head. It trickled into his eyes, stinging them.
“Talk to him yourself, you want to know anything. I haven’t seen Charlie Parker in years, not since-”
An apple was forced into his mouth, pushed in so hard and so far that he could not expel it or even sever it by biting down on it. He stared at his attacker’s face, and thought that he had never seen eyes so dark and so merciless. A piece of broken wineglass was held before his eyes. Jimmy’s gaze drifted from it to the symbol that seemed to be burned into the skin of the man’s forearm, then back to the glass again. He had seen that mark before, and he knew now what he was facing.