“Yeah. I might’ve had a sip or two. I raised a glass to you, my brother. I am so glad you’re alive and she’s dead and not the other way around. I want to put my arms around you, man. If she killed you, it would’ve killed me, you know?”
Kellaway was unaccustomed to strong emotion, and the prickling in his own eyes took him by surprise. “I wish I was worth half what you think I’m worth.” He shut his eyes, but only for a moment. When he shut his eyes, he saw the woman, Yasmin Haswar, rising up from behind the glass counter, her eyes wide and frightened, and he turned and shot her all over again. Straight through the baby strapped to her chest.
“Don’t get down on yourself. Don’t you do it. You fucking saved a whole mess of lives today. And you made me proud. You made me glad, for once, that I survived and came home. I’ll tell you what, man. It was never my childhood dream to live for fifty or sixty years as a useless drain on society. Today, though, I’ve been thinking, I guess I’m not a complete waste. When my best friend, Rand Kellaway, needed a gun . . . well. You weren’t empty-handed today, and that’s my piece of this. That’s my little taste of glory.”
“That’s right. You had my back this afternoon. Even if no one will ever know it.”
“Even if no one will ever know it,” Jim repeated.
“Are you okay? You sound sick.”
“Ah. It’s the fucking smoke. It’s right on top of the house tonight. It’s burning my eyes, man. They say the fire is still two miles off, but I can’t hardly see to the end of the hall.”
“You should go to bed.”
“Soon, man. Soon. I wanna stay up and watch the news loop around one more time. That way I can toast you again.”
“Put Mary on. I’m going to make her send you to bed. I don’t need another toast. I need you to take care of yourself. Get Mary.”
And Jim’s voice changed, became suddenly morose and querulous. “I can’t, man. She’s not here.”
“Well, where is she?”
“Beats the fuck out of me,” Jim Hirst said. “I’m sure I’ll see her again sooner or later. All her stuff’s here!” And he laughed—until it turned into the broken, hacking, rattling cough of a man choking on blood in his deathbed.
July 8, 8:51 A.M.
LANTERNGLASS REACHED OUT TO THE Lutz family first. When you had a bad job to do, it was best to do it first thing and get it out of the way. She hated calling the family of the deceased. It made her feel like a crow, pulling strands of gut out of roadkill.
The Lutz family was unlisted, but Bob Lutz, who’d died at just twenty-three, had offered one-on-one piano lessons to kids at Bush Elementary, according to the school Web site. As it happened, the vice principal at Bush was a Brian Lutz. Lanternglass called his office number and got a recording saying that he would be checking messages throughout the summer session, but if it was urgent, he could be reached at his cell, followed by the number.
She made the call on the sidewalk in front of a Starbucks, just down the street from Possenti Pride Playground, where Dorothy had tennis camp. Lanternglass had an iced coffee that was so cold she broke out in goose bumps when she had her first sip. She was almost too nervous to drink it, didn’t need the caffeine to amp her up. There was no reason to think Brian Lutz would answer his cell, but he did, on the second ring, as somehow she had known he would.
Lanternglass introduced herself in a quiet, gentle voice, said she was with the St. Possenti Digest, and asked how he was doing.
He had a deep baritone with a very slight crack running through it. “My little brother got shot in the face two days ago, so I guess not so hot. How are you?”
She didn’t reply to that. Instead she told him she was so sorry, that she hated to intrude when he was struggling with his grief.
“But here you are, intruding anyway,” he said, and laughed.
Lanternglass wanted to tell him about Colson. She wanted to tell him she understood, that she had been on the other end of this herself. In the days after Colson died, journalists parked in front of the two-family house Aisha lived in with her mother and waited for them to come out. When Aisha’s mother, Grace, walked her to school in the morning, the reporters would flock around them, waving tape recorders. Grace gripped Aisha’s hand and stared straight ahead, and the only reply she ever made was a sound: Nmm-nm! That noise seemed to mean, I don’t see you, and I don’t hear you, and my daughter doesn’t either. Lanternglass knew now that her mother had been sick with fright, was afraid of the attention, afraid to be looked at too closely. Grace had been to jail three times—had in fact been pregnant with Aisha on her second stint in county—and was scared the reporters would publish something that would get her sent back. Aisha herself wanted everyone to know what had really happened. She thought they should tell all the reporters how Colson was shot to death and he DIDN’T EVEN DO ANYTHING except take a stupid CD. She wanted to explain how Colson was supposed to go to London and meet Jane Seymour and be in Hamlet. She wanted everyone in the world to know.
Ain’t it enough you lost him? Grace had told her. You want to lose me, too? You want me to get locked up again? You think the police won’t come down on us, we try to make them look bad?
In the end Aisha Lanternglass did get to tell the world all about it. She just had to wait fifteen years. The St. Possenti Digest had published Colson’s story in five parts over a single week. Those stories had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting, which was why Lanternglass still had a job when almost all the other full-time reporters with the Digest had been laid off in the recession.
But she didn’t tell Brian Lutz about Colson, because she had promised herself a long time ago that she’d never use his death as a way to get a story. Even after you lost someone, it turned out you still had a relationship with that person, one you needed to tend to as you would tend to a relationship with any living friend or relative. Colson was, even now, someone she cared about and was at pains not to misuse.