I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes.
“You sure you don’t want some of this wine?” said Aimee.
“I’m sure. If I start, I may not stop.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll talk to some more people and see if there are any other avenues open to us, but I don’t hold out much hope. And, Charlie?”
I opened my eyes.
“Don’t threaten him again. Just keep your distance. If he approaches you, walk away. Don’t get drawn into confrontations. That goes for your friends too, regardless of their good intentions.”
Which brought us to another problem.
“Yeah, well, that could be an issue,” I said.
“How?”
“Angel and Louis.”
I had told Aimee enough about them for her to be under no illusions.
“If Wallace starts digging, then their names may come up,” I said. “I don’t think they have any good intentions.”
“They don’t sound like the kind of men who leave too many traces.”
“It doesn’t matter. They won’t like it, Louis especially.”
“Then warn them.”
I thought about it. “No,” I said. “Let’s see what happens.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Not really, but Louis believes in preventive measures. If I tell him that Wallace may start asking questions about him, he could decide that it might be better if Wallace didn’t ask any questions at all.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Aimee. She finished her wine in a single gulp, and appeared to be debating whether or not to have more in the hope that it might destroy any memory of what I’d just said. “Jesus, how did you end up with friends like that?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied, “but I don’t think that Jesus had anything to do with it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MICKEY WALLACE LEFT PORTLAND early the next day. He was simmering with resentment and a barely containable anger that was unfamiliar to him, for Mickey rarely got truly angry, but his encounter with Parker, combined with the efforts of Parker’s Neanderthal friend to scare him off, had transformed him utterly. He was used to lawyers trying to intimidate him, and had been pushed up against walls and parked cars, and threatened with more serious damage at least twice, but nobody had punched him the way Parker had in K Pa´[1] ut many years. In fact, the last time Mickey had been in anything approaching a serious fight was when he was still in high school, and on that occasion he had landed a lucky punch that had knocked one of his opponent’s teeth out. He wished now that he had managed to strike a similar blow at Parker, and as he boarded the shuttle at Logan he played out alternative scenarios in his mind, ones in which it was he who had brought Parker to his knees, he who had humiliated the detective and not vice versa. He entertained them for a couple of minutes, and then dispensed with them. There would be other ways to make Parker regret what he had done, principal among them the completion of the book project on which Mickey had set his heart and, he felt, his reputation.
But he was still troubled by his experience at the Parker house on that mist-shrouded night. He had expected the intensity of his responses to it, his fear and confusion, to diminish, but they had not. Instead, he continued to sleep uneasily, and had woken on the first night after the encounter at precisely 4:03 A.M., convinced that he was not alone in his motel room. On that occasion, he had turned on the lamp by his bed, and the eco-friendly bulb had glowed slowly into life, gradually spreading illumination through most of the room but leaving the corners in shadow, which gave Mickey the uncomfortable sensation that the darkness around him had receded reluctantly from the light, taking whatever presence he had sensed with it and hiding it in the places where the lamp could not reach. He remembered the woman crouched behind the kitchen door, and the child moving her small finger across the window of his car. He should have been able to glimpse their faces, but he had not, and something told him that he should be grateful for that small mercy at least. Their faces had been concealed from him for a reason.
Because the Traveling Man had torn them apart, that’s why, because he left nothing there but blood and bone and empty sockets. And you didn’t want to see that, no sir, because that sight would stay with you until your eyes closed for the last time and they pulled the sheet over your own face. Nobody could look upon that degree of hurt, of savagery, and not be damaged by it forever.
And if those were people whom you loved, your wife and your child, well…
A friend and her daughter; two visitors: that was how Parker had described them to Mickey, but Mickey didn’t accept that explanation for one moment. Oh, they were visitors all right, but not the kind who slept in the spare room and played board games on winter evenings. Mickey didn’t understand their nature, not yet, and he hadn’t decided whether or not to include his encounter in the book that he would present to his publishers. He suspected that he would not. After all, who would believe him? By including a ghost story in his narrative, he risked undermining the factual basis of his work. And yet this woman and child, and what they had endured, represented the heart of the book. Mickey had always thought of Parker as a man haunted by what had happened to his wife and child, but not literally so. Was that the answer? Was what Mickey had witnessed evidence of an actual haunting?
And all of these thoughts and reflections he added to his notes.
Mickey checked into a hotel over by Penn Station, a typical tourist trap with a warren of tiny rooms occupied by noisy but polite Asians, and families of rubes trying to see New York on the cheap. By late that afternoon, he was sitting in what was, by his standards, and the standar J A the stands of most other people who weren’t bums, a dive bar, and considering what he could order without endangering his health. He wanted coffee, but this looked like the kind of place where ordering coffee for any reason unconnected with a hangover would be frowned upon at the very least, if not considered actual evidence of homosexual leanings. In fact, thought Mickey, even washing one’s hands after visiting the restroom might be viewed as suspect in a hole like this.
There was a bar menu beside him, and a list of specials chalked on a board that might as well have been written in Sanskrit, they’d been there so long and unchanged, but nobody was eating. Nobody was doing much of anything, because Mickey was the only person in the place, the bartender excepted, and he looked like he’d consumed nothing but human growth hormone for the past decade or so. He bulged in places where no normal person should have bulged. There were even bulges on his bald head, as though the top of his skull had developed muscles so as not to feel excluded from the rest of his body.
“Get you something?” he asked. His voice was pitched higher than Mickey had anticipated. He wondered if it was something to do with the steroids. There were peculiar swellings on the bartender’s chest, as though his breasts had grown secondary breasts of their own. He was so tan that he seemed at times almost to fade into the wood and grime of the bar. To Mickey, he looked like a pair of women’s stockings that had been stuffed with footballs.