“For his other half to join him. He must believe that she is close, otherwise he wouldn’t have revealed himself. She, in turn, is leaving traces fo Z qng tracesr him, perhaps even without realizing it. When she comes, they’ll make their move. It won’t be long, not if Anmael was prepared to kill Wallace and mark the wall with his name. He senses her approach, and it will not be long before they are drawn together. We could hide you away, I suppose, but that would be merely to delay the inevitable. To amuse themselves, and to draw you out, they might hurt those close to you.”
“So what would you do in my shoes?”
“I would choose the ground upon which to fight. You have your allies: Angel and the one who is, presumably, still lurking outside. I can spare a couple of young men who will maintain a discreet distance from you yet keep you in sight. Tether yourself lightly in the place of your choosing, and we will trap them when they come.”
Epstein stood. Our meeting was over.
“I have one more question,” I said.
What might have been irritation flitted across Epstein’s face, but he crushed it and assumed once more his habitual expression of benign amusement.
“Ask it.”
“Elaine Parker’s child, the one who died: was it a boy or a girl?”
“It was a girl. I believe she named it Sarah. It was taken from her and buried secretly. I do not know where. It was best that nobody knew.”
Sarah: my half sister, buried anonymously in an infants’ cemetery in order to protect me.
“But I may have a final problem for you to consider in turn,” said Epstein. “How did they find Caroline Carr? On two occasions, your father and Jimmy Gallagher hid her well: once uptown, before Ackerman died beneath the wheels of a truck, and then during her pregnancy. Still, the man and the woman managed to track her down. Then someone found out that Will Parker had lied about the circumstances of his son’s birth, and they came back to try again.”
“It could have been one of your people,” I said. “Jimmy told me about the meeting at the clinic. One of them could have let it slip, either deliberately or inadvertently.”
“No, they did not,” said Epstein, and he spoke with such conviction that I did not contradict him. “And even were I to doubt them, which I do not, none of them was made aware of the nature of the threat to Caroline Carr until she died. All they knew was that she was a young woman in trouble, and in need of protection. It is possible that the secret of your parentage might have leaked out. We excised the details of Elaine Parker’s dead child from her medical records, and she severed all contact with the hospital and the obstetrician concerned with monitoring the early stages of her pregnancy. Their files were subsequently purged. Your blood group was a problem, but that should have been a confidential matter between your family and their doctor, and he appears to have been above reproach in all respects. And then we warned your father to always be vigilant, and he rarely failed to heed our warnings.”
“Right up to the night that he fired his gun at Pearl River,” I said.
“Yes, until then.”
“You shouldn’t have let him go back there alone.”
“I didn’t Z qidnrsquoknow what he was going to do,” said Epstein. “I wanted them taken alive. That way, we could have contained them, and ended this thing.”
He put on his hat and coat and prepared to slip by me.
“Remember what I said. I believe that someone who knew your father betrayed him. It may be that you are at risk of betrayal too. I commit you to the care of your colleague.”
And he and his bodyguards departed, leaving me with the dark-haired mute who smiled sadly at me before she began to extinguish the lights.
A bell rang somewhere in the back of the diner, causing a red bulb to flash above the counter for the woman to see. She put a finger to her lips, telling me that I should remain quiet, then disappeared behind a curtain. Seconds later, she gestured with a finger, asking me to join her.
A small video screen revealed a figure standing in the bay behind the store. It was Louis. I indicated to her that I knew him, and it was okay to let him in. She opened the door.
“There’s a car out front,” said Louis. “Looks like it followed Epstein here. Two men inside wearing suits. Figure feds more than cops.”
“They could have taken me while I was talking to Epstein.”
“Maybe they don’t want to take you. Maybe they just want to find out where you’re staying.”
“My landlord wouldn’t like that.”
“Which is why your landlord is standing here, freezing his ass off.”
I thanked the woman and joined Louis. She closed the door behind us.
“Doesn’t say much,” said Louis.
“She’s a deaf mute.”
“That would explain it. Good-looking woman, though, if you like the quiet type.”
“You ever think of taking sensitivity training?” I said.
“You think it would help?”
“Probably not.”
“Well, there you go.”
At the end of the street, Louis paused and glanced back at the next corner. A cab appeared. He hailed it, and we pulled away with no signs of pursuit. The cabdriver seemed more concerned with his Bluetooth conversation than with us, but to be certain, we switched cabs before we returned to the safety of the apartment.
CHAPTER THIRTY
WRONGLY, JIMMY GALLAGHER HAD never believed himself to be good at keeping secrets. He was garrulous. He liked to drink, to tell stories. When he drank, his tongue ran away with itself and his filters disintegrated. He would say things and wonder where they came from, as though he were standing outside himself and watching a stranger speak. But he knew the importance of keeping quiet about the origins of Will Parkerrsq [ill??uo;s son, and even in his cups parts of his own life had remained concealed. Still, he had kept his distance from the boy and his mother after Will killed himself. Better to stay away from them, he felt, than risk saying something in front of the boy that might cause him to suspect, or offend his mother by speaking of things that were better left hidden in cluttered, careworn hearts. And despite his many flaws, in all the years since Elaine Parker had left for Maine with her son he had never once spoken of what he knew.
But he had always suspected that Charlie Parker would come looking for him. It was in his nature to question, to seek out truths. He was a hunter, and there was a tenacity to him that would ultimately, Jimmy believed, cost him his life. Sometime in the future, he would overstep the mark and look into matters that were best left unexamined, and something would reach out and destroy him. Jimmy was certain of it. Perhaps the nature of his own identity, and the secret of his parentage, might well prove to be that mistake.
He sipped the last of his wine and toyed with the glass, causing candle-cast patterns to flicker upon the walls. There was still a half bottle left beside the sink. A week ago, he would have finished it off and maybe opened another one for good measure, but not now. Some of the urge to drink more than he should had fallen away. He understood that it was to do with the clearing of his conscience. He had told Charlie Parker all that he knew, and now he was absolved.
And yet he also felt that, in confessing, some connection between them had been severed. It was not a bond of trust, exactly, for he and Charlie had never been close, and never would be. He had sensed that, from an early age, the boy had been uneasy around him. But then Jimmy had never really figured out how to relate to kids. His sister was more than fifteen years older than he was, and he had grown up feeling like an only child. Then too his parents had been old when he was born. Old. He chuckled. What had they been: thirty-eight, thirty-nine? Still, there had always been a lack of understanding between his parents and their son, even though he had loved them both dearly, and the chasm between them had only widened as he had grown older. They had never discussed his sexuality, although he had always understood that his mother, and perhaps his father too, realized that their son was never going to marry any of the girls who occasionally accompanied him to dance halls or to the movies.
And while he himself recognized his urges, he had never acted upon them. It was partly out of fear, he thought. He did not want his fellow officers to know that he was gay. They were his family, his true family. He did not want to do anything to alienate them. Now, in retirement, he remained a virgin. Funny, but he found it hard to equate that word with a man who was now in his late sixties. It was a description that should be applied to young men and women on the brink of new experiences, not older ones. Oh, he was still energetic, and he still sometimes thought that it might be—nice? interesting?—to start a relationship, but that was the problem: he wasn’t sure where to start. He wasn’t some blushing bride waiting to be deflowered. He was a man with a certain knowledge of life, both good and bad. It was too late, he thought, to surrender himself now to someone with a greater degree of experience in matters of sex and love.
He carefully vacuum-sealed the bottle of red wine and placed it in the refrigerator. It was a hint that he’d picked up from the local liquor store, and it worked fine as long as he remembered to let the wine warm up for a time before he began drinking it again the next day. He turned off the lights, double-locked the front and back doors, a Zhtswornd went to bed.
He managed to incorporate the noise into his dream at first, the way he sometimes did when the alarm went off and he was so deep in sleep that bells began ringing in his dreams in turn. In the dream, a wineglass fell from the table and shattered on the floor. It wasn’t his wineglass, though, and it wasn’t quite his kitchen, although it resembled it in ways. It was now bigger, the dark corners stretching away into infinity. The tiles on the floor were the tiles from the house in which he had grown up, and his mother was nearby. He could hear her singing, even though he could not see her.
He woke. There was silence for a time, then the faintest disturbance: a sliver of glass caught underfoot, scraping against a tile. He climbed silently from his bed and opened his bedside cabinet. The .38 lay on the shelf, cleaned and loaded. He padded across the room in his underwear, and the boards did not creak beneath his feet. He knew this place intimately, every crack and join of it. Even though it was an old house, he could move through it without making a sound.
He stood at the top of the stairs and waited. All was silent again, but still he sensed the presence of another. The darkness became oppressive to him, and suddenly he was frightened. He debated calling out a warning, and by doing so cause whoever was below to flee, but he knew that if he did so his voice would tremble and he would reveal his fear. Better to keep going. He had a gun. He was an ex-cop. If he was forced to shoot, then his own people would look after him. Screw the other guy.
He made his way down the stairs. The kitchen door was open. A single shard of glass shone in the moonlight. Jimmy’s hand was shaking, and he tried to still it by assuming a double-handed grip on the gun. There were only two rooms on the lower level: the living room and the kitchen, linked by a pair of interconnecting doors. He could see that those doors were still closed. He swallowed, and thought that he could taste some of that evening’s wine in his mouth. It had gone sour, like vinegar.
His bare feet felt cold, and he realized that the basement door was open. That was how the intruder had entered, and maybe that was how he had left after the wineglass broke. Jimmy winced. He knew that was wishful thinking. Someone was there. He could feel him. The living room was closest. He should search it first, so that whoever was there could not come from behind him when he searched the kitchen.
He glanced through the crack in the door. The drapes were not drawn, but the streetlight outside was broken and only a thin stream of moonlight filtered through the drapes, so it was hard to make out anything at all. He stepped inside quickly, and immediately knew that he had made a mistake. The shadows altered, and then the door struck him hard, knocking him off balance. As he tried to adjust the position of his gun and fire, there was a burning at his wrists. Skin was opened, tendons severed. The gun fell to the floor, blood from his wound sprinkling it. Something hit him once on the crown of the head, then again, and as he lost consciousness he thought that he glimpsed a long, flat blade.