THE BOWL WAS A SUNKEN CIRCLE IN THE MIDDLE OF CAZENOVIA PARK, BETWEEN Seneca and Potters Road, where three baseball diamonds faced toward the center, one diamond tucked into each corner. The park itself was a huge, wild tangle of creeks, running trails, secret haunts for Abbott Road kids desperate to escape the eyes of their parents.
When she got to the Bowl, she couldn’t see Billy. Plows had piled up mounds of snow and ice, scraped off the streets and dumped on the lip of the circle. And the dusk was coming down fast, sharp shadows stretching out across the snow from the line of trees that ringed the park, the light beginning to turn blue-black.
But once she walked around them, she saw Billy. He was slumped on one of the bleachers, back to her, humped over, his arms folded across his knees and his head lying on his arms.
“Billy,” she called.
No movement. There was no steam from his breath rising above. The air in the Bowl was strangely motionless, the breeze passing above the sunken circle.
“Billy!” she called, snapping back the edge of her jacket and pulling out her Glock. She swept the perimeter of the Bowl. But there was nothing, just an unbroken crust of white snow and shadows coming on fast.
She dropped down the incline into the Bowl and began running. Billy still hadn’t moved. When she was ten feet away, he turned his head.
“Christ, Billy,” she said, exhaling a cloud of steam into the cold air.
He nodded but said nothing.
Abbie climbed up on the cold plastic bleachers and sat next to him, holstering her gun before he could see it. Billy looked terrible. His hair was greasy and frozen into place. He looked like he’d slept in his jeans and the tan Carhartt jacket he was wearing. His boots were unlaced.
“I still have the trophy,” he said.
“The tro—? Oh.” Her brown eyes softened. “State championship.”
“Yep. I pitched a three-hitter. That must have been the game that got me all the scholarship offers.”
Abbie frowned sympathetically.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Billy said. “I didn’t get any of those.”
“Bad grades.”
“Yep.” He looked out onto the field, the pitcher’s mound a hump under the snow, and nodded.
“Tell me about the phone calls,” she said.
“Just breathing, like I said. In the background, I could her music playing and once I thought I recognized the song. And then, the last one, a voice said, ‘Shut your mouth, Carney.’ ”
“Did you say anything?”
“I said, ‘Tell me who you are and I’ll shut yours, permanently.’ ”
He turned to look at her.
“Nice, right?”
It was good to see he had recovered some of his fighting spirit. The Billy on the phone had sounded pretty far gone, a paranoid wreck. Then she saw the bottle of Molson Golden in his hands and realized that he’d been drinking to keep down the jitters.
“I’m going to have someone check your cell phone records. I’m guessing a name didn’t come up?”
He shook his head, took a sip from the Molson. Then he turned to her, and his face was ashen.
“Why’d you turn me in, Ab?”
“I didn’t turn you in, Billy. This has nothing to do with the feds or the Rez or anything like that.”
“Sure it doesn’t.”
“Billy, look at me.”
He stared off at the row of trees, their trunks going from dark green to black as dusk settled over the Bowl.
“Look at me, Billy.”
He turned.
“If there are people watching you, it’s because of what you told me in the Gaelic Club the other day.”
Billy’s forehead creased and his eyes opened wide. He crouched over and his face came close to Abbie’s. His breath was sharp with alcohol and Abbie turned away.
“That shit about Jimmy Ryan?”
She nodded. “Yes. But it’s more than just Ryan now. We found another body and it’s the same killer.”
“Who?”
“Gerald Decatur.”
“Never heard of him.”
“It’s the same killer. Believe me, okay?”
Billy’s eyes wobbled. “It couldn’t be,” he said.
Coiled and tense, he began to look around the wide circle, at the mounds of snow enclosing them.
“What else do you know, Billy?”
“What?!” he said, stopping his scan of the horizon long enough to stare at her. “Like I haven’t told you enough already!”
“There’s no one else here. I did a circuit around the Bowl before I came down and found you.”
He looked at her, and nodded. “That’s good. That’s good. But they have all kinds of surveillance equipment. They can trace you by … what are those things called, up in the sky?”
“This isn’t about satellites! Or men in trench coats or black helicopters or whatever else you have in your brain right now.”
“Yes, it is.”
It was growing colder. Abbie shifted to look him straight in the eye.
“Whoever killed Jimmy Ryan and whoever is tracking you is probably someone you went to high school with. They grew up right here in the County. They’ve been to the bar, they’ve bought you drinks, they know the nickname you got when you were eight. And that’s how they’re going to get to you, Jimmy. Because you think they’re your friends.”
He shook his head and took a long pull on the bottle.
“It’s impossible, Ab.”
“If you want them to stop tailing you, tell me what you know about what happened in that back room at the Gaelic Club.”
Billy’s head dropped and he was still for a moment.
“If this really is about them—”
He stopped and stared at Abbie. His eyes looked exhausted, sick.
“About who?” said Abbie.
Billy closed his eyes.
“The Clan.”
“The Klan?”
He smiled for the first time, but his eyes looked spooked when he opened them.
“Not the one you’re thinking of,” he said quietly.
“You’re telling me there’s another one?”
“I gotta go, Ab,” he said.
Abbie grabbed his arm. “Don’t make me shoot you, Billy.”
He looked at her bare hand, small against the rough sleeve of his XXL Carhartt, then into her eyes. Then, gently, he pulled her hand away.
The sun had gone down and the shadows were creeping out from the treeline. Billy shivered, and then slid down to the ground, his boots making a loud noise as they broke through the crust of ice.
He turned to look at her. His face, she thought, had gone from fearful and defiant to haunted.
“I have somewhere I can take you.”
He smiled thinly. “No, you don’t, Ab. There’s nowhere you can take me. You should know that.”
“Just get in my car and I’ll make sure you’re safe.”
He turned and began to walk away. He stuck his hands in the Carhartt jacket and leaned forward as he climbed the incline back to the street.
“What is the Clan, Billy?”
The wind caught his hair and blew it back straight. He didn’t turn back.
“Goddamn it all to hell,” Abbie said, pounding the bleacher. The hollow sound echoed dully through the Bowl.