He raises the .38 in his hand, flips the light switch, and takes aim.
The door to Bernie’s car is standing open on the driver’s side. Someone popped the trunk too. Jay stands staring at it, the bones of his rib cage rising and falling as he struggles to steady his breathing, the gun shaking at the end of his outstretched hand. He has a brief out-of-body feeling, a moment outside time itself, as if the dream he’s been in for the past twelve months has come to an abrupt, heart-shaking stop, and his wife has finally come home, about to step out of the car at any moment, to ask for a hand with the groceries, could Jay bring in the soda and the charcoal. He actually whispers her name. But he’s alone in here. There’s no thief, no intruder, and Jay worries that he’s finally cracked, that he imagined the whole thing. But then he sees the cardboard boxes strewn across the floor of the garage, each opened and overturned, picked over and picked through: boxes of stationery from his old office; some of Bernie’s work papers; a video camera; and duplicates of some videocassettes that Jay recorded for his biggest cases, including the first images he took of the crude oil bubbling up in Erman Ainsley’s backyard, the first interviews with Ainsley and his neighbors, as he prepared for the civil case against Cole Oil. Someone went through it all.
The girl, Lori, is standing in the kitchen when Jay stumbles in, confused by the sight of a child not his own. In a loose T-shirt and plaid boxer shorts, she is studying the contents of his refrigerator. She turns at the sound of his bare feet slapping on the stone tiles and drops the open bottle of apple juice in her hand. It bounces, but doesn’t break, spilling juice in tiny waves across the floor. She is staring at the gun in his hand. “I was just getting something to drink,” she says, eyes darting between Jay, Ellie’s mild-mannered dad, and the .38, unable to put the two together. Lori is half Filipina and half white; her parents were high school sweethearts. She has black hair, stick straight, save for an unexpected and girlish curl at the edges. She backs into the refrigerator’s open door, bumping against a ketchup bottle and a jar of Del-Dixie pickles. Jay sets the pistol on a nearby countertop, raising his hands a little to show he’s harmless. “I thought I heard something outside,” he says, trying to explain. “It’s nothing. You should go back to bed.” He walks to the laundry room, pulling out a string mop and a bucket. Lori leaps on her toes across the spilled juice, skittering out of the kitchen as fast as she can . . . until Jay calls her back. “Lori,” he whispers.
When she turns, he’s holding a fresh bottle of Mott’s apple juice for her. Bernie, he remembers, used to get up in the night, both times she was pregnant with the kids. “You get hungry,” he says, “take anything you want.”
She grabs the juice and then hustles back to Ellie’s room.
At the sink, Jay fills the plastic bucket with warm water.
He actually works up a sweat, mopping every inch of the kitchen, even past the place where the juice spilled, because it’s Saturday, and he’s sure no one’s touched it in at least a week. Later, the bucket put away and the mop drying in the laundry room, he walks down the hall to his bedroom, trying to think what to do next, what calling the police would do at this hour besides frighten his children. To say nothing of the fact that this recent incident, like the one at his office on Tuesday, feels outside the bounds of what HPD is actually good at–solving crimes with the bluntest, basest of motives, lust and greed, hunger and hatred, cases put together as simply as stacking a child’s set of building blocks.
This was no theft, Jay thinks.
Not in any conventional sense, at least.
Someone sent that kid here, he’s sure of it, just as he’s sure that the kid didn’t stumble into his office by accident or opportunity. He was looking for something, something to do with Jay’s old cases. Jay remembers finding the business card of Jon K. Lee in his office, a day after the break-in, and the car bearing Lee’s license plate idling at the curb in front of his house. He remembers Lee’s connection to Cole Oil and curses that family’s name. It just barely crosses the threshold of coincidence, none of it proven. But it’s late and his wife is still dead and so this is where it gets tucked in for the night, his unanchored rage. Somewhere, Thomas Cole is laughing at him. Plotting against him, as he did years ago, the first time he put a dangerous man on Jay’s tail. No, Jay thinks. No cops. He called the police Tuesday night, and what good had it done him? He slides the loaded .38 across his wrinkled sheets, tucking it beneath his pillow. He throws himself across the bed, exhausted. It’s after one in the morning by now. He stares at the ceiling, asking sleep to have mercy on him, trying to push out thoughts of yet another pregnancy under his roof, and all it stirs up for him.