As he drove, he considered praying silently that the corpse would be the chemical blonde, but he feared there was something a little despicable about praying for one of the two girls to be alive at the expense of the other. Also, he didn’t really pray. He was a Christmas and Easter Christian only. It seemed disingenuous to start praying now, especially about something like this. But he knew what he wanted; he knew what he hoped. That was, alas, undeniable.
He was grateful for yesterday and tried to focus on that. Never in his life had he been so relieved as when his head had hit the pillow beside Kristin yesterday afternoon during lunch. He had her back. It might take years to fully regain her trust, but no longer did he fear for the future of his marriage. Now if he could make the right choices, do the right things, he might be able to win back his daughter. Melissa, he could tell, was somewhere between embarrassed by him and mad at him. As she should be. There was a bridge he had yet to rebuild, he thought with a pang. But how was he to replace the fallen span? How do you explain what he did, what he had desired, to a nine-year-old girl? To his nine-year-old girl? Clearly, it was going to take time to regain her trust, too. But maybe eventually she would figure out how to forgive him—and the simple joy that is normalcy might return.
A yellow cab honked as it passed him on the right, the driver giving him the finger for being distracted and driving too slowly, but when Richard glanced down at the speedometer he saw that he was motoring along at fifty-five. Not awful. Not geriatric. Still, he tried to focus more on the crowded, tortuous highway. But it was difficult. He kept seeing the faces of people he loathed: Spencer. Hugh Kirn. A couple of Russians who called themselves Pavel and Kirill, though none of the detectives he had met believed for one second that those were their real names.
But the person whose face infuriated him the most was Spencer.
And so he made a decision. He was not going to pay the bastard a penny. Paying a bribe only suggested that he had something to hide—and, the fact was, he didn’t. He was already a public spectacle. He was going to tell Kristin that there was a video and it might be painful for her to see it—that is, if she chose to watch it. But she already knew the tawdry outlines; the video was mere lineament. He would devote his life to making amends for that one moment, if he had to.
The same went for his daughter. Someday he would tell her about the video, too. He didn’t know how, but he would.
And as for those bastards at Franklin McCoy, well, they could go fuck themselves. They were self-righteous and smug, and they were far from the only game in town. They weren’t even the only game on Water Street. He knew how good he was at what he did. And if he did leave, he had a feeling that Dina Renzi would make sure that his exit package was substantial.
The traffic slowed, and abruptly he came up behind the cabbie who had given him the finger a few minutes ago. Briefly he considered slamming his car into the back of the bastard’s taxi. He knew he wouldn’t really do such a thing; his life was enough of a mess as it was. And while he would readily admit that he had issues, road rage wasn’t among them. But the idea of rear-ending the cabbie had indeed crossed his mind. How dare that moron give him the finger? How dare he? Was he on his way to the Brooklyn morgue? Nope. Was he on a forced leave of absence from a job he really liked and desperately missed? Nope. Did he have a couch in his living room that looked like a prop from The Walking Dead? Nope.
He braked and inched forward along with the rest of the traffic. He turned on the radio, steering clear of News Radio 88 and 1010 Wins. The last thing he wanted was a reminder of what a disaster the rest of the world was. He found a station with sports talk, and tried to lose himself in the debate about how to rebuild the Giants’ offensive line. But he failed. Try as he might to think of anything else, his mind would always roam back to the mess he had made of his life and, saddest of all, to the corpse at the hospital where he was headed. And so he finally allowed himself a small prayer. He succumbed. He prayed that the girl with the coal-colored hair was alive.
…