"Hey, Handsome."
Byrne took a quick breath, braced himself before turning around. It had been awhile since he had seen her, and he wanted his face to reflect the warmth and affection he truly felt for her, not the shock and surprise most people revealed.
When Victoria Lindstrom arrived in Philadelphia from Meadville, a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania, she had been a vibrant seventeen-year-old beauty. Like a lot of pretty girls who made the journey, at that time her fantasy was to become a model, to live the American dream. Like many of these girls, the dream quickly turned sour, becoming instead the grim nightmare of urban street life. The street was Victoria's introduction to a violent man who would all but destroy her life. A man named Julian Matisse.
For a young woman like Victoria, Matisse had possessed a certain enameled charm. When she refused his repeated advances, he followed her home one night, to the two-room apartment on Market Street she shared with her cousin Irina. Matisse stalked her, on and off, for weeks.
And then one night he attacked.
Julian Matisse had cut Victoria's face with a box cutter, jigsawing her perfect flesh into a rough topography of gaping wounds. Byrne had seen the crime scene photographs. The amount of blood was staggering.
After nearly a month in the hospital, with her face still heavily bandaged, she had bravely testified against Julian Matisse. He received a sentence of ten to fifteen years.
The system being what it was, and still is, Matisse was released after forty months. His grim handiwork lasted much longer.
Byrne had first met her in her late teens, not long before she met Matisse; he had seen her literally stop traffic one day on Broad Street. With her silver eyes and raven hair and lucent skin, Victoria Lindstrom was once a stunningly beautiful young woman. She still was, if you could look past the horror. Kevin Byrne found that he could. Most men could not.
Byrne struggled to get to his feet, reaching for the cane halfway up, the pain shrieking through his body. Victoria put a gentle hand on his shoulder, leaned over, kissed him on the cheek. She eased him back down into the chair. He let her. For a brief moment, Victoria's perfume filled him with a potent mixture of desire and nostalgia. It brought him back to the first time they had met. They had both been so young then, and life had yet to sling its arrows.
Now they were on the second-floor food court of Liberty Place, the office and shopping complex at Fifteenth and Chestnut streets. Byrne's tour had officially ended at six o'clock. He had wanted to follow the Rivercrest Motel blood evidence for a few more hours, but Ike Buchanan had ordered him off duty.
Victoria sat down. She wore tight faded jeans and a fuchsia silk blouse. If time and tide had brought a few small crinkles to the corners of her eyes, they'd done nothing to her figure. She looked as trim and sexy as the first time they'd met.
"I read about you in the papers," she said, opening her coffee. "I was very sorry to hear of your troubles."
"Thank you," Byrne replied. In the past few months, he had heard this many times. He had stopped reacting to it. Everyone he knew-well meaning, all-had a different term for it. Troubles, incident, accident, confrontation. He had been shot in the head. That was the reality. He guessed most people had trouble saying Hey, I heard you were shot in the head. You
"I wanted to… get in touch," she added.
Byrne had heard this many times, too. He understood. Life flowed. "How have you been, Tori?"
She butterflied her hands. Not bad, not good.
Byrne heard giggling nearby, derisive laughter. He turned to see a pair of teenaged boys sitting a few tables away, wannabe bangers, suburban white kids in the standard baggy hip-hop drag. They kept glancing over, mimicking horror-mask faces. Perhaps the presence of Byrne's cane meant they believed he was no threat. They were wrong.
"I'll be right back," Byrne said. He started to rise, but Victoria put a hand on his arm.
"It's okay," she said.
"No it isn't."
"Please," she said. "If I got upset every time…"
Byrne turned fully in his chair, glared at the punks. They held his gaze for a few seconds, but were no match for the cold green fire of his eyes. None but the hardest of the hard cases were. A few seconds later, they seemed to understand the wisdom of leaving. Byrne watched them walk the length of the food court, then get on the escalators. They didn't even have the balls to take one final shot. Byrne turned back to Victoria. He found her smiling at him. "What?"
"You haven't changed," she said. "Not one bit."
"Oh, I've changed." Byrne gestured to the cane. Even that simple movement brought a sword of agony.
"No. You are still gallant."
Byrne laughed. "I've been called many things in my life. Never gallant. Not once."
"It's true. Do you remember how we met?"
Like it was yesterday, Byrne thought. He was working vice out of Central when they got the call to raid a massage parlor in Center City.
When they rounded up the girls that night, Victoria had descended the steps into the front room of the row house wearing a blue silk kimono. She had taken his breath away, along with that of every other man in the room.
A detective-a weasel-faced little shit with bad teeth and worse breath-made a derogatory remark about Victoria. Although he would have been hard-pressed to explain why at the time, or even now, Byrne had braced the man against a wall so hard that the drywall had caved in. Byrne didn't remember the detective's name, but he could easily recall the color of Victoria's eye shadow that day.
Now she counseled runaways. Now she talked to girls who had stood in her shoes fifteen years earlier.
Victoria stared out the window. The sunlight highlighted the bas- relief network of scars on her face. My God, Byrne thought. The pain she must have endured. A deep anger at the brutality of what Julian Matisse did to this woman began to rise within him. Again. He battled it back.
"I wish they could see it," Victoria said. Her tone was distant, now, thick with a familiar melancholy, a sadness she had lived with for many years.
"What do you mean?"
Victoria shrugged, sipped her coffee. "I wish they could see it from the inside."
Byrne had a feeling he knew what she was talking about. It appeared she wanted to tell him. He asked. "See what?"
"Everything." She took out a cigarette, paused, rolling it between her long, slender fingers. There was no smoking here. She needed the prop. "Every day I wake up, I'm in a hole, you know? A deep, black hole. If I have a really good day, I just about break even. Reach the surface. If I have a great day? I might even see a little sliver of sunlight. Smell a flower. Hear a baby's laugh.
"But if I have a bad day-which is most days-well, then. That's what I wish people could see."
Byrne didn't know what to say. He had flirted with bouts of depression in his life, but nothing like what Victoria had just described. He reached out, touched her hand. She looked out the window for a few moments, then continued.
"My mother was beautiful, you know," she said. "She still is to this day."
"So are you," Byrne said.
She looked back, frowned at him. Beneath the grimace, though, was the slightest blush. He could still bring the color to her face. That was good.
"You're full of shit. But I love you for it." I mean it.
She waved a hand at her face. "You don't know what it's like, Kevin."
"Yes, I do."
Victoria looked at him, giving him the floor. She lived in the world of group therapy, and in it everyone told their story.
Byrne tried to organize his thoughts. He really wasn't prepared for this. "After I was shot, all I could think about was one thing. Not about whether I was coming back to the job. Not about whether or not I could go out on the street again. Or even if I wanted to go out on the street again. All I could think about was Colleen."