CHAPTER 26

It was full dark when R.J. left the apartment.

What he had read, and what he thought about what he had read, had battered him.

He thought about his mother, dead before he could really know her. He thought about his life, and what a total fucking mess he’d made of it.

And he thought about Casey. She was right to think he was a—what had she called him?—a “brainless, amoral orangutan.” Well, he was that.

He’d walled off everything inside himself and slid into a dirty business because he had to keep himself from feeling anything or he couldn’t even do his job.

And now he was feeling things, and it was tearing him up, because he didn’t know how to do it. And because of that, when he needed more than ever before just to do his job, to find his mother’s killer, he was screwing that up too.

R.J. started walking. He had no idea where he was going.

He supposed he should check with Casey, to make sure she was all right. After all, he was supposed to be guarding her.

But he wasn’t sure he could face her without bursting into tears and making a complete jerk of himself. So he just let his feet call the shots and wandered downtown along the edge of Central Park.

He was so busy with the turmoil inside his head that he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. And so when the man spoke to him, he snapped alert with astonishment.

“Can I help you?” the man said politely.

The guy was wearing a bow tie and a white apron.

R.J. looked around him, totally floored. He was in a bar.

Somehow he’d walked into the place without realizing where he was and bellied right up to the bar, still oblivious.

But his feet were giving him a message. He wanted a drink. He looked at his hands and saw they were shaking just a little.

He looked past the bartender to the cool, clean line of bottles, like a platoon of crack soldiers standing at attention on the parade ground.

His mouth was watering. His head was buzzing, and he could feel all the cells in his body calling out to the gleaming parade of bottles.

He wanted a drink.

Oh, God, how he wanted a drink.

“Hey, you want a drink, or what?” the bartender said, tapping one hand on the bar.

R.J. took a deep breath. His head whirled.

“Yes. I want a drink,” he said and swallowed.

The bartender nodded.

“What’ll it be?”

“Nothing.” R.J. turned and walked on unsteady legs for the door. He could hear the bartender mutter, “Well, fuck you.” But he made it out the door anyway, without screaming, without collapsing into a puddle on the floor, without diving back toward the bar and begging for a shot of oblivion.

On the sidewalk he stood still for a few minutes, just breathing. The air was cold and felt half clean, as if rain was coming behind the breeze.

He’d almost started drinking again. Not that he couldn’t handle it. He’d always handled it before.

But this time felt different. Could he really handle it this time, the same as he’d done in the past, if he had a few? R.J. didn’t know the answer to that, but he didn’t feel like pushing his luck. He suspected the answer was no.

When he had stopped shaking and no longer felt dizzy, R.J. turned his steps crosstown. He was hungry as hell by the time he got back to his apartment.

“Where have you been?” Casey greeted him. “Your dinner’s cold.”

“I’ll eat it anyway,” R.J. said. “What is it?”

“Meat,” she said.

He sat at the table in the kitchen and wolfed down a small steak, a stone-cold potato, and a salad with a lot of strange things in it.

“Jicama,” Casey said, leaning in the doorway and watching him pull out a strip of some weird, crunchy vegetable.

“What’s that?”

“Just eat it, it’s good.”

He ate it. It was good—crisp, clean, and sweet-tasting. He ate all of it, and every scrap of steak, including the fat, and the cold potato. He was surprised at how hungry he was.

When he was done he got up to make coffee. Casey was still leaning in the doorway.

“That was very good,” he told her. “Thanks.”

“Your friend Hookshot called,” she said.

He stopped dead. “He called? Hookshot called? On the telephone?”

“Is that unusual?”

“Yes. Hookshot hates telephones. He never uses them if he can avoid it.”

Casey shook her head. “You have odd friends.”

“When did he call? What did he say?”

“He’s got something for you. He wouldn’t say what.”

“He’s found something,” R.J. said. “Something to do with the killer. He wouldn’t use the phone if it wasn’t important.”

He could feel the adrenaline throbbing through him. It gave him a half-sick edge. He wanted to hit somebody, and the meal that had been sitting so pleasantly in his stomach a minute before felt like it had turned to lead. He hurried for the door, grabbing at a coat.

“Hey,” said Casey. “Why don’t you just call him?”

“He won’t answer. I told you, Hookshot hates telephones.”

He made it to midtown in fifteen minutes. Hookshot called out from behind his screen of hanging papers and magazines. “Damn, R.J., where you been?”

“I came as soon as I heard, Hookshot. What’ve you got?”

Hookshot shook his head. “Make me use the goddamned TEL-o-phone, man, and you know I hate that shit.”

“I’m sorry, all right?”

Hookshot leaned out to his left. A twelve-year-old kid was sitting on a skateboard with his back to the kiosk. He wore baggy sweats and a helmet.

“Benny!” Hookshot yelled, and the kid looked up.

“Yeah?”

“Get your raggedy ass over here, man.”

Benny stood up, clutching his skateboard with one hand and pulling at the seat of his pants with the other.

“I’m here, all right?”

Hookshot nodded at R.J. “Tell this dude what you saw.”

“What for?”

Hookshot sighed and raised an eyebrow at R.J.

“Yeah, I get it,” R.J. said, and he pulled out a five-dollar bill. He smoothed it so the kid could see it. “What’d you see, kid?”

Benny eyed the fiver, then looked at Hookshot, who shrugged. Benny shrugged and turned back to R.J. with an expression of pathetic patience.

“You know St. Mark’s?”

“The church?”

Benny stared at R.J. with disbelief. “No, the synagogue. Course it’s a fucking church.”

Hookshot leaned out and cuffed Benny—not hard, but the kid got the message.

“All right, shit, so St. Mark’s the church, okay?”

“Okay. What about it?”

Benny shrugged. “So I’m going by there—this is last night you unnerstan. It’s like nine o’clock. And I see the guy coming out, okay?”

He held out his hand for the five-dollar bill. R.J. pulled it away. “Not so fast, kid. You saw what guy?”

Benny sighed again and gave him the look that asked, Who is this dope? “The guy in the picture, who’d you think, it was Donald Fucking Trump?”

R.J. looked at Hookshot. “Does he mean the composite picture?”

“That’s right.”

R.J. turned back to the kid. “Are you sure it was him?”

Sigh. “Course I’m sure. What, I look stupid?”

“Benny’s a wiseass,” Hookshot said. “But if he says he saw him, you best believe he saw him.”

R.J. put the five-dollar bill back in his pocket.

“Hey!” said Benny.

But R.J. pulled his hand out again, this time with a ten-dollar bill.

“More like it,” said Benny.