The Roach House was still her final destination, but after the phone call she had a stop to make first. She detoured down a side street on Brighton Cove’s less fashionable south end, flicking her high beams on. The town was curiously low on street lights, and the few that worked seemed about as powerful as her keychain flashlight.
She parked outside a one-story bungalow. The house looked like all the others on the block, except for the ramp that had replaced the front steps.
Bonnie climbed the ramp and rang the doorbell, not worried about waking the occupant. He was a night owl. One of those up-till-two and sleep-till-noon types.
“Who is it?” Desmond called from inside.
“Parker.”
“It’s open.”
Nice. No snooty housekeeper to contend with here.
She stepped into the living room. Moments later he appeared from the side hallway, moving fast, his hands spinning the chair’s wheels. She had once asked him why he didn’t treat himself to a motorized chair. He said he liked the exercise. Rolling himself by hand kept his upper body in shape.
It was no joke. From the waist down Desmond Harris might be a blighted and atrophied version of the man he had been, but above the waist he was a block of marbled muscle. “The Belvedere Torso,” he called himself—an artistic reference that had meant nothing to her until she Googled it.
He was an artist, had been for years, and the car wreck that cut his spine hadn’t changed that. Hadn’t changed much of anything about him, actually. He still drove, using a handicap van. He had family money and ran a gallery in town, selling his own artworks and other people’s. He had lots of friends, but Bonnie didn’t know them. She liked keeping him to herself. They didn’t go out. Their relationship wasn’t exactly a secret; they weren’t hiding it; but it was private. An emotional relationship, not sexual. She wasn’t even sure it could be sexual, what with his injury. Maybe that was why she felt comfortable around him.
“Yo.” Bonnie sketched a wave.
“Yo yourself. Restless legs again?”
“Say what?”
“When your feet start to itch, you come here.”
“It’s the only way I can see you. You never come to my place.”
“That’s because my feet don’t itch.” He shrugged. “Crip humor. So what’s got you feeling antsy tonight?”
“Bunch of stuff. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough. Hey, I just found Wings on streaming video. Want to watch?”
She looked at him blankly.
“You know, Wings? Clara Bow, William Wellman, World War One?”
“I’ve heard of World War One. The rest is just noise.”
“It’s a classic. From the silent era.”
“A silent movie? Snooze.”
“I’ll take that as a no. How about some cocoa?”
“Cocoa would be good. I can make it.”
“No one messes around my kitchen except me. Besides, I’ve tasted your cooking.”
She nodded. “Fair point. Just let me freshen up. I’ll be with you in a jif.”
He headed for the kitchen, and she detoured down the hall. But she wasn’t looking for the bathroom. Halfway along the corridor there was a ventilation duct in the ceiling, covered by a grill. She took a stool from the guest room, stood on it, and undid the screws holding the grill in place.
“What exactly are you doing?”
She glanced down and saw that he’d snuck up on her, the hum of his wheels inaudible. Damn. She was kind of hoping she wouldn’t get caught.
“Only take a second,” she said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
The grill popped free, flapping down on its hinges. She groped in the duct until her fingers closed over a Ziploc bag. She pulled it out and held the bag in her teeth while she pushed the grill back into place and replaced the screws.
“Is that a gun?”
She assumed the question was rhetorical, since the plastic bag was transparent, its contents clearly visible. She climbed down and returned the stool to the guest quarters.
“Parker,” Des said again, “is that a gun?”
“It ain’t a blow dryer.”
She checked the bag without opening it. Inside was a matte black Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .38, five-round capacity. Four +P hollow-point rounds were still loaded in the cylinder. She had needed only one shot to kill Jacob Hart.
The bag was dirty, but the gun sealed in it looked no worse than it had in March, when she’d stowed it here during one of Des’s bathroom breaks.
“You hid a gun in my house?” he said, outrage competing with disbelief. “Without even telling me?”
She bypassed his chair and retraced her route down the hall. “If I’d told you, you would’ve been an accessory after the fact.”
“Accessory to what?”
“Let’s just drop it, okay?”
“It’s the Hart case, isn’t it?”
Sometimes she forgot how small this town was, how much everybody knew. She’d never told Des about her extracurricular activities. How much he’d guessed, she couldn’t say.
She turned. “I said, drop it.”
“Why the hell would you stash it here?”
“Duh. Because nobody would look here.”
She started walking again. When the hallway ended, she veered into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water, stooping because all the sinks and counters had been lowered to wheelchair height. She didn’t think he’d be fixing cocoa for her, after all.
“And if they did?” he asked, pulling into the kitchen behind her. “Wouldn’t I be in a world of trouble if someone found it on the premises?”
“They didn’t find it. No harm, no foul.” She gulped the water, then felt his stare. “What?”
“You never thought about the consequences to me, did you? And you’re not even sorry.”
“What’s there to be sorry about?”
He looked at her for a long moment, his face pale in the fluorescent glow. Slowly he shook his head. “You’re a good person, Parker. I mean that. But damn, you can be cold around the heart.”
She set down the glass. “Can I?”
He rolled forward, still watching her. He was no longer angry. He looked puzzled, pensive. “I think about you sometimes, you know. You’re an interesting puzzle. An enigma wrapped in a mystery, locked away inside a hard shell.”
“A shell, huh? You make me sound like a turtle.” She considered it. “Or a bullet.”
“I like turtles. Bullets, not so much.”
“You should have better things to do than think about me.”
“I have better things to do, but I think about you while I’m doing them. I multitask.”
“And where has all this deep thinking gotten you?”
“You’re angry.”
“No, I’m just asking.”
He shook his head. “That’s my answer to your question. My thinking has led me to the conclusion that you’re angry.”
“At what?”
“I don’t know. Some injustice, maybe. Or ... something you lost.”
“Everybody loses things.”
“What you lost mattered.”
“Care to take a stab at what it was?”
“I have a working hypothesis.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Your folks died when you were young, didn’t they?”
She was surprised. “Did I tell you that?”
“You let it slip once. A rare moment of self-disclosure.”
“So you think I’m pissed off at the world for taking my mommy and daddy away?” She laughed. “Yeah, Des, I’m all torn up inside.”
“You must have felt something for them.”
“No more than what they felt for me.”
“Were they so awful?”
“Not awful. Just not—not parents. I mean, they raised me, sort of, but I was basically just an inconvenience.” She stepped away from the counter. “Forget it. I’m not having this conversation.”
He didn’t move. His chair blocked the kitchen doorway. “You never open up, do you? Never let anybody in.”
“Works for me.”
“Does it? You’re self-sufficient, I know. But you’re also hard.”
“Like a turtle. I got that.”
“I’m serious.”
She shrugged. “It’s a hard world. As you ought to know.”
“Why me? Because of this thing?” His fist smacked the armrest. “That’s no big deal.”
“It’s all what you make of it, huh? Life gives you lemons ... Sorry, I don’t buy that happy crap.”
She moved decisively toward him, and he yielded, rotating the chair so she could get by.
“You’ll tell me someday,” he said, “when you feel you can.”
She understood he was using psychology, offering her a challenge, and the really irritating part was that it worked. He knew she wouldn’t back down from a fight.
“You want me to talk about my childhood? Okay, it won’t take long. I didn’t have a childhood. How’s that?”
“Everybody has a childhood.”
“Yeah? Well, I spent mine moving from one fleabag motel to another. My parents never raised me, never gave a shit about me. I was just one more item they had to remember to pack.”
“Why’d they move around so much?”
“Because my dad was a crook. Not a very successful one. Strictly smalltime. He operated all over the Northeast, never stayed long in one place. He was always on the run from gambling debts and bad choices.”
She had memories of her father, but not good ones. He stayed out all night drinking and playing cards, and sometimes he was gone for days, only to return with wads of cash that he doled out sparingly to her mom, keeping most of the money for himself. Bonnie didn’t know where he got it, though she could guess it was nowhere good, and she didn’t know what he did with it, but it never seemed to last.
“How about school?” Desmond asked.
“I went to a bunch of different schools, wherever we happened to land. There were long stretches when I didn’t go at all.”
“Friends?”
“Making friends is hard when you’re always the new kid and you wear thrift-shop clothes. And when you cop an attitude, which I did.”
“You had your reasons.”
“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, when I was fourteen, I quit that life. I left a good-bye note for mom and dad, and went off on my own.”
“And did what?”
“Bummed around the country, got a lot of mileage out of my thumb. Occasionally did some things that weren’t strictly legal. Learned a healthy disrespect for authority.”
“And you never saw your folks again?”
She shrugged. “My dad must’ve finally messed with the wrong people. Him and my mom turned up dead in a motel room in Pennsylvania. Shot execution-style. It was on the news. Pretty big story. Imagine that—my dad had finally made it big.”
“How did you feel when you heard about it?”
“I felt—they’re dead, and I’m not. Sucks for them, good for me.”
“That’s all?”
“A couple of outlaws on the run get whacked. Happens every day.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm, what?”
“Outlaws on the run. Does that remind you of anybody in particular?”
She knew what he was saying. She didn’t want to go there. “Give it a rest. Seriously, I don’t have any depths.”
“Maybe they’re just unexplored.”
“Let’s leave them that way.”
“You don’t think it’s significant that your parents—”
“Christ, Des. Just drop it. I don’t give a shit about my mom and dad. You think I’d shed a tear over a couple of losers who never gave a damn about anybody but themselves?”
“I think losing them hurt you more than you’re willing to admit.”
“Well, I think you were right the first time. I’m hard and cold, like you said. And I like it that way. Okay?”
His eyes lowered. His voice was very soft. “Okay, Parker.”
“Don’t say it like you feel sorry for me.” She brushed past him, flaunting her mobility, her legs. “You’re a goddamn cripple, for Christ’s sake. Feel sorry for yourself.”
She left the house, pulling the front door shut behind her, not looking back.