Lawrence Elgin Coffey
The other phone rings, the private line. It’s 8:15.
“Larry Coffey here,” I say automatically, picking up with my right hand, “would you please—?”
“Larry, tomorrow morning. Nine-thirty, thirty-ninth floor Conference. Any reason you can’t make it?”
It’s the Great White Himself. (On the private line?)
“No. What’s up, Leon? Anything you want me to bring? Hello?”
But he’s hung up already.
“Shit,” I say aloud. Then, into the other phone, “Sorry, babe, I got interrupted. You were saying?”
I’ve got south Jersey on the other line, Gerry Mulcahy, my early-morning schmooze. That’s how I start my days, with coffee on the pull-out of the desk and my Gerry Mulcahys on the horn. I punch the board while we talk, give him some of the overnight numbers—which he could as well get from the Aquarium, but there’s nothing like Big Bear first thing in the morning, is there? When you’ve just stepped out of your shower?
They keep bankers’ hours in south Jersey. Not at The Cross, I like to tell my trainees. We start at eight, sharp. If you think you can’t make it, go sell shoes on Fifth Avenue.
“Sorry, babe,” I say into the phone, “I’ve got to cut you off now. Something’s come up. Corporate shit, you know how it is. I’ll catch you later, at your desk, or you call me. How much? Yeah, we can do something with that. I know, the market sucks, what can I tell you? We’ve been there before, babe. Later.”
I hang up on Mulcahy. My console is lit up, as usual. All incoming too, like Flight Control at JFK, and I could tell you who each and every one is. 8:18? We’re into the Central Time Zone already. Denver and Texas come later, California too, though not by much. Money men get up earlier in California. They’ve got to make the opening.
All of them pissing and moaning too, looking to recoup. Recoup? Hell, looking for a fucking miracle. Looking for Big Bear to produce a fucking miracle, one that’ll keep the regulators off their case.
At least Mulcahy has cash. Mulcahy always has cash. I scribble a note to Howie about Mulcahy’s 180 grand, tell my secretary to deliver it to the Aquarium, tell her to tell all the others I’ll call them back later, and head down the interior staircase to the thirty-ninth floor.
A different atmosphere. Carpeting, hunting prints on the walls. Private johns. You knock first on the thirty-ninth, and nobody’s in his shirtsleeves.
“He’s not in,” Annabelle Morgan says, glancing up at me from her CRT in the outer office of the Great White’s suite.
“I already know that, honey,” I answer. “I just talked to him.” If he’d called from inside the office, he’d never have used my private line and he’d have had Annabelle set the appointment. “But what’s going down? What’s it all about?”
“What’s what all about?” she says.
She’s one beauteous piece of work, Ms. Morgan, and just as well-spoken, just as snooty. Keeper of the Great White’s lair and secrets. The Aquarium pundits like to bitch that she earns more than they do, but hey, this is an “Equal Opportunity Company,” guys, doesn’t it say so under the corporate logo? It also happens to be ninety-nine percent male and lily-white, at least in the jobs that count, which makes Ms. Morgan a double treasure.
The idea that the Great White has done something—anything—without telling her must be tickling the hackles on her long and lovely neck.
“He wants to see me tomorrow morning, nine-thirty,” I say. “How come you don’t know about it?”
“Well, I don’t.” Coolly. “All he told me was to clear his calendar.”
“For the whole day?”
“Morning till night. Do you want me to find out for you when he calls in?”
The message is clear enough: Do I want the Great White to know that, five minutes after he called me, I was nervous enough to snoop?
I tell her not to bother. She turns back to her PC, but when I head out, though still not looking up, she adds a parting barb: “You should know, sugar, you’re not the first one who’s been in here to ask.”
I duck into Schwartzenberg’s office—he’ll know—but he’s not there either.
Upstairs, I finish my duty calls and, out of habit, patrol the Aquarium. It takes up most of the fortieth floor, sellers and traders elbow to elbow. Normally, even in a slow market, it’s bedlam city, where the filtered air takes on its sweet, faintly aquatic smell. Nobody, including building engineers, has ever been able to determine why, but it’s distinctive to The Cross and the fortieth floor. Someone once said it’s what making money smells like. More likely it’s what you get when you put sweat and nerves together with electronic machines and windows that don’t open and the remnants of crullers, sandwiches, mustard, coffee.
Sellers and traders. My old stomping grounds.
In ’87, when the Great White decided I was making too much money and made me a shark, complete with title, private office (cum windows and secretary), and a bonus in lieu of commissions, I was expected, automatically, to move downstairs. Instead, I opted to stay put on the fortieth. It was the smell, I told people. How could I run other people, teach them the tricks of my trade, without that secret elixir that takes a bunch of harmless guppies—Ivy League for the most part—and turns them into ravenous carnivores of the financial depths?
The Great White, at the time, applauded the decision—the Great White is very hands-on, too, or likes to think he is—but who knows, maybe it was a mistake. Hey, if I’d been on the thirty-ninth all along, maybe I wouldn’t have to deduce what’s coming down, secondhand, from Annabelle Morgan and hints dropped by others, and the great glum, doom-filled quiet that prevails in the Aquarium this Tuesday morning in October.
It’s like a morgue, a deep-sea catacomb. It’s like the middle of the night or a weekend except the phones are blinking, the CRT’s humming, and people are at their desks. But not talking. Human bodies, living, breathing—but barely. I can feel the pall, the droop. Eye contact at a minimum.
Hey, what the fuck’s going on? For Christ’s sake, aren’t I their honcho, their cheerleader, their wet nurse all rolled into one?
Not today. Today I’m Them. I’m a shark.
I get it out of Howie. Another kid from Dartmouth, tall and gangly—they don’t make shirtsleeves long enough for MacFarlane’s arms. I culled him from the surviving trainees last year. I thought he had the makings of a seller. He did. I check him on Mulcahy—yes, he’s already done Mulcahy—then pull him off the line.
“What the fuck’s going on?” I ask him in my office.
“You don’t know?” he challenges back.
“I don’t know squat,” I say. “You tell me.”
He stares at me a minute. I can see the Adam’s apple bobble in his throat.
“Either you don’t,” he says finally, “or you’re a bigger son of a bitch than I thought.”
“I’ve been called worse, babe,” I say. “Let’s have it.”
“It,” at least according to MacFarlane, is going to be a bloodbath. The Aquarium is already calling it Bloody Wednesday. According to MacFarlane, there’s going to be a deep slice right through the whole company, every department, from the mailroom up to and including managing directors. According to MacFarlane, they’re cutting checks in New Jersey even as we speak—New Jersey’s our backroom—and Schwartzenberg is out there, personally overseeing the operation.
I grill him. What does he know firsthand? It turns out he knows shit firsthand. But it’s all around, he protests. So-and-so has heard this, so-and-so that. There’s a hit list, he says. Someone he knows—an anonymous source—claims to have seen it.
I chalk it up to the Aquarium, at least for his benefit. In that frenzied, sealed-in atmosphere, rumors sprout, and die, like fungi. Maybe one or two people are getting canned, maybe more, but by the time the Aquarium is done with it, it’s Bloody Wednesday.
I chalk it up to the Street. It’s been going on all year—ten percent cuts, twenty in one or two places—and you hear the kids getting off on severance packages and personal bankruptcy instead of BMW’s and Rolexes. Probably people MacFarlane went to school with are lining up for unemployment.
Sure it’s enough to make you jump at shadows. Who wouldn’t jump?
But aren’t we insulated? Mr. Average Joe Investor, who got blown out of the market in ’87, has never been our customer. What does The Cross give a shit if he’s still on the sidelines? We still have our S&L’s (those that haven’t gone under), and the commercials, the insurance guys, the pension funds, the credit unions, assorted other heavy hitters.
MacFarlane just said something that didn’t register. Maybe it didn’t register because I’m thinking: Aren’t we insulated in other ways too? But that’s for me to know and Howie to guess at. The way I guessed at it, once upon a time.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “run that by me again?”
“I said: ‘For God’s sake, Bear, you don’t have to recruit me.’”
I stare at him a second. Then burst out laughing. He has me there. What I’ve just laid on him is a version of my recruiting speech, the same one I used earlier in the year. (Yeah, they put me on the committee, what the hell are you going to do?) And Howie should know, shouldn’t he? Didn’t I make him work on the sucker?
“I’m sorry, babe,” I say. “I get carried away. But it’s true, you know? And do you think any of my guys would get canned without my knowing about it? Look, I still say it’s bullcock, but I’ll make some calls. If there’s anything there, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, the meter’s running, and if all we can do is sit here, schmoozing each other, aren’t we stealing our fucking salaries?”
He leaves, shaking his head—either I’m the asshole, or he is. Fair enough. If he’s right, then the only thing I can figure out is that, tomorrow morning at nine-thirty, the Great White is going to give me a quota: This many stay, Bear, this many go, you do your own dirty laundry.
But that makes no sense either. Look at the record, Leon, I tell him in my mind. There’s not a swinging dick among them who hasn’t made us a bundle, by any measurement. If you’re really talking about contribution to the bottom line, then my guys are fucking untouchable.
Besides, that’s not the Great White’s style. Leon Gamble is strictly management-by-intimidation. The more I think about it, the more I think that, if there’s going to be a bloodbath, he’ll want it known, inside The Cross and out, that he’s looked every sacrifice in the eyeballs. Even if it takes him from sunrise to sunset.
With Schwartzenberg at his elbow in case someone brings up a legal question?
I make some inside calls. It’s one of those mornings, though. Is half the thirty-ninth floor already out to lunch, at ten-thirty?
Out of a few stray spores does paranoia grow.
I make some outside calls.
I call Penzil.
As well as being my tennis partner and train buddy, he’s as plugged in as anybody I know on the Street. Maybe he’s got to be. A sawed-off runt, ex-Marine, Fordham Law—that’s love-forty, game, set, and match, in Skull & Bones country. Plus he’s older than most associates. But Joe’s going to make partner at Lambert Laughin Spain or bust his gut trying.
“What’s up, Bear?” he says. “You guys already made your nut for the day?”
Old gag.
“You hearing anything about us? The Cross, I mean? Like the great shakeout coming?”
“How would I hear something like that and you not?”
“There’re rumors flying all over the place. Something about a hit list. And Gamble wants to see me tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, c’mon, Bear. You? Either it’s a slow day over there, or somebody’s put something in your coffee.”
I agree with him. Still.
He’s heard nothing, he says, but he promises to make a call or two—discreet ones, he says—and let me know if he finds out anything.
He calls back within the hour.
“I think you’d better talk to your rabbi,” he says.
I stand up in my chair.
“Why?” I say. “You mean something is happening?”
“Just what I said.”
“Come on, Joe! For Christ’s sake, you’re my best friend! What do you hear, who’d you hear it from?”
“I can’t, Bear.”
Then the full import of it hits home.
“You mean it’s me too?” I say, unbelieving.
“Just do what I say. We’ll talk later.”
And he’s gone. Joseph E. Penzil, Esq.
My rabbi.
That’s what Penzil’s always called him. Not even Penzil knows his identity.
I spend the afternoon in a state of shock, trying to raise him. I call at one—out to lunch; at two—not back yet; at three—yes, he’s back, but tied up in a meeting.
Do I really not want to leave a number where he can reach me?
No, it’s okay, I’ll call back later.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Elgin, I’ve given him your message. Are you sure there’s nothing I can help you with?”
Elgin’s my code name, for when I had to call him at work.
“No. Just tell him it’s pretty urgent. I’ll call back.”
I try to raise Penzil again—maybe I can squeeze something more out of him—but he’s out of the office, gone for the day. So is everybody else, it seems. Except me. And my rabbi.
He’s the one who insisted on the code names, all the hush-hush stuff. The way he once put it, Wall Street is networks within networks—that’s how it operates—and the most effective ones are those the fewest people know about. Georgie calls him my CIA crony. Once I asked him if he himself had ever done a turn at the Company. He only laughed, shaking his head, said, “But I knew a number of people who did. Probably I could have, too. In my day, they used to recruit the campuses quite openly, alongside Procter & Gamble, Merrill Lynch, other Fortune Fives.”
Francis Hale Holbrook, Dartmouth ’56.
When you get down to it, how much else do I know about him?
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that, twice during my career at The Cross, at crunch time, I went to him and lightning came out of the bottle.
Finally, near five, I raise him. No, he’s heard nothing about imminent events at Shaw Cross. If I want—but is it really that urgent?—he can arrange to meet me later. He’ll have to do some juggling.
It’s really that urgent, I tell him.
Half an hour later, I call him back. Yes, he’ll meet me for dinner, but not until eight-thirty.
I go uptown to the club, run into a few people I know and back onto the street. They’re all letting it hang out a little, after a day in the trenches, and for once, I’m not up to it. Hey, they’re all employed! For all I know, at nine-thirty tomorrow morning, Big Bear will be kaputski. The more I think about it, the more it makes no sense. The more it makes no sense, the more I need a drink.
I head for a friendly Third Avenue saloon.
The thing is, there are no jobs on Wall Street. The traffic is all one way.
By the time I remember to call Georgie, from Third Avenue, probably I’ve had one or two too many.
“How can you do this to me?” in her most plaintive voice, when I tell her I’m still in the city. “I’m seven months pregnant, and all by myself, and stuck with a kid who won’t go to sleep, and you know how I hate the house alone at night.”
We’ve only lived there six years. We’ve got the whole place wired by a system that cost a sweet ten grand. If a mouse so much as farts in the house when the system’s on, the St. George cops’ll be at the front door inside of five minutes.
But Georgie is Georgie.
I suggest she ask the sitter to stay on.
“Harriet?” she says. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” It’s almost seven. “She’s out of here like a shot at six. Her damned stepfather. You know she won’t work at night!”
Do I? Maybe I do. I’ve never even met the girl. I’m gone when she shows up in the morning; she’s gone by the time I get home.
“Look, Georgie,” I say, “I can’t help myself. Something’s come up.”
“Something always comes up. Do you realize how many nights you’ve been home on time this month?”
I don’t. She reminds me. I remind her that a big part of my job is schmoozing the customers. When they come to New York, they don’t want their Aquarium man, they want Big Bear—and dinner, a Broadway show, the watering holes afterward.
But this is different.
“I’ve got to see Holbrook,” I say.
“Holbrook! For God’s sake, why can’t you talk to him on the phone?”
I decide, on the spur, not to get into it. As far as Georgie’s concerned, the money’s my problem, always has been. As long as the bills get paid—and that includes her gardener, her pool man, her trainer, her housekeeper, her baby-sitter, and all her other assorted cooks and bottle-washers—she doesn’t care where it comes from.
I want it that way too, she’d tell you.
“It’s okay, honey,” I said. “It’s just dinner, and I don’t have the car. Not to worry, I’ll make the eleven-thirty at the outside. I’ll call you when I know.”
“Okay,” she says, her voice small and tight, “you do that.”
She hangs up first.
Later, I walk east—way east, almost to the edge of Sutton Place. I have to get my act together—for the restaurant as well as Holbrook. He doesn’t like disarray. As for the restaurant, it’s the kind of joint almost guaranteed to put guys like me ill at ease—with the menu all in French, and the stuff on trolleys you don’t recognize, and maître d’s and assistant maître d’s hovering, talking rapid-fire French to each other over your head.
When I get there, Holbrook’s already at the table and deep in consultation with the chef, a blue-eyed young Frog in a white hat and apron. They’re organizing our meal together—I’ve never known Holbrook to order off the menu, although he always reads it—and after introductions and handshakes, the chef wiping his hand on his apron first, I sit, order a Scotch from the hovering maître d’, and wait for them to finish.
Francis Hale Holbrook, Dartmouth ’56.
Beyond that, there’s a wife I’ve never met, two children in college (only the younger one—a girl—is up at Hanover), a house in Pound Ridge, another on the Vineyard, a third in Palm Beach.
He likes to sail. Obviously, he’s something of an epicure. He’s also a—what’s the word?
Oenophile.
Physically, he’s hardly changed. When I first met him—it was the winter of ’77, when he tried to recruit me for his company—he reminded me of a diplomat more than a Wall Street buccaneer. He still does. It’s not just the elegance—never a hair out of place, the foulard tie impeccably knotted, the handkerchief in his lapel pocket—but the set of his head, the way he talks. He has one of those narrow, fine-featured, New England faces that never seem to grow old and this clipped, sometimes ironic manner of speaking. On the Street, although his name’s familiar, and his firm’s certainly is—small, specialized, immensely profitable—what you get is, “Holbrook? Oh yeah, they say he’s one smart son of a bitch,” or, closer to the point, “Even the guys who work there don’t know him very well.”
My rabbi.
Although I turned him down in ’77, we stayed in touch. I see him maybe a couple of times a year, phone calls in between. Old school tie aside, I’ve sometimes wondered what’s in it for him, but all he’s ever said is that he needs to keep tabs on the young Turks in the business.
Dinner is served. I eat because it’s there. I lay it out for him, trying to keep the paranoia out of my voice. I have a few more Scotches. He sips claret, carves his meat.
He’s heard something too. Without the specifics, the word is around that Shaw Cross is cutting back.
“In fact,” he says, “if you hadn’t called this afternoon, I was going to call you.”
From Shaw Cross’s point of view, he’s not surprised. The nature of the beast, he says. The beast, meaning Wall Street, grew fat during the seventies and eighties, not just in the form of salaries, but in office space, information systems and so on. The bloated giants of the industry, he says, were the worst offenders—prodigious waste—and now they’ve panicked. But even comparatively well-run firms like Shaw Cross face it too: a tired economy, a depleted customer base, and cutthroat competition for the remaining investment dollar.
At some point, I say, “All this may be true, Frank, and I’m not disagreeing, but where does it leave me? As far as I know, at nine-thirty tomorrow morning, Leon Gamble’s going to bite my legs off at the knees!”
“Are you sure?” he asks, unperturbed.
“Reasonably sure.”
“How can you be, if you haven’t talked to him yet?”
“I have my sources.”
“Good ones?”
“I think so. I hear there’s a list, a long one, and I’m on it.”
He thinks about it a moment.
“Putting aside the question of whether or not that would make sense from Shaw Cross’s point of view, can they do that?”
“What, fire me? Sure they can.”
“Really? I thought you had an employment agreement.”
“I do. It terminates in January.”
“So that at the very least, they’ve got to pay you from now till then?”
“That’s right. Ninety days, give or take.” With taxes coming up, I think, and a house that’s worth less now than its mortgage, and a wad of bills to choke a fucking horse.
“What’s the renewal clause in your agreement? I assume it has one.”
“Yeah. Ninety days. Their option to renew. They’ve got to let me know ninety days before termination.”
“I see. And they’ve said nothing to you before now?”
“Not in so many words,” I answer. “The truth is, I never thought about it.” And for Christ’s sake, why should I have? I’m a fucking fixture, like the furniture. There’s something else on the tip of my tongue too: that if it ever comes to hardball, I can give them a very hairy time. But Holbrook is Holbrook; down and dirty’s not his style. Instead I say, “You’re right, Frank. I won’t know anything for sure till nine-thirty tomorrow morning. But haven’t you always told me: anticipate? Try to see what’s coming and be ready for it?”
He nods, smiles his tight New England smile.
“Touché,” he says. Then: “And so? What do you see coming?”
He’s waiting for me, fork raised, still smiling faintly. Maybe it’s been too long a day, but I’m missing his point.
“I think I’m about to be fired,” I blurt out. “Tomorrow morning. That’s about as far as I can see right now.”
His eyebrows go up, the fork lowers.
“I was thinking a little longer term,” he says. “Let me phrase it differently. What do you see Larry Coffey doing with the rest of his life? Is he going to stay a hired hand, if a highly paid one? At Shaw Cross? Elsewhere?”
For just a second, I think he’s about to offer me a job.
No. On the contrary, he says that, as far as he’s concerned, he’d jump at early retirement, if he could only find someone to offer it to him. I take this as a joke—isn’t he CEO of Holbrook & Company?—but he means it too. For antediluvians like himself, he says, the game is about played out anyway. But for me?
“All I’m suggesting, Larry, is that you raise your sights a little. Nobody can say what the investment business of tomorrow is going to look like, but for young people with brains, experience, connections, times of crisis are also times of incredible opportunity. Maybe in your current state of mind, all you can see—understandably enough—is your head on the block and the sword in the air and a bunch of bills to be paid. By the way, when’s your new baby due?”
“December,” I say.
“And all’s well? With your wife?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Good. Then as far as tomorrow’s concerned, I think you should go with an open mind. Gamble, from what I know of him, is no fool. Maybe the panic has touched him too, I couldn’t say. But what’s interesting in your situation isn’t Gamble. Gamble’s going to do what he’s going to do, and from what you say, you have no control over it.” He pauses, as though giving me room to disagree. Then: “The interesting thing is you. You’ve been in the business how long? A decade?” I correct him. “God, is it that long already? Thirteen years. Thirteen years, in any case, of superb experience, and the rest of your working life in front of you? All I’m suggesting is that maybe the best thing that could happen to you right now is for Shaw Cross to cut the umbilical.”
It’s the wrong message, for tonight anyway. I’m a doer, for Christ’s sake, not a crystal-ball gazer.
Hey, I can’t afford to be!
The thing is, though, I’ve been there before with Holbrook—twice. The same kind of airy conversation—what did I want? what were my objectives?—but both times, although he denied he’d had anything to do with it, lightning struck, in the form of job offers from Salomon, the second time from Merrill Lynch. The first got me a full commission out of The Cross—unprecedented—even though the sharks kicked and screamed. Then, after Gamble became Great White and pulled the plug on commissions—this was ’87, just when the bottom fell out of the market—I had Merrill Lynch in the wings and, from Shaw Cross, the managing directorship, the employment contract, the guaranteed minimum bonus.
Somehow, though, it’s different this time. Hey, I’m thirty-five now! That’s old for a high-roller on the Street! All I really want to say is: I’m sorry, Frank, but I can’t see past the end of my nose tonight, I’m too goddamn shook. I need a bailout, a comfort zone.
But that would be very wrong.
Tough night.
It gets worse.
We finish up. I realize it’s almost eleven, that I’m going to have to fly to make the last train. Plus I haven’t called Georgie.
He signs the check on the back. Then we have to shake hands with the chef, exchange comments. Great dinner, I say. Holbrook goes into more detail. Something, I gather from my prep-school French, about the sauce on the gigot. Finally, we’re outside, under the awning, where they have his Jag already parked and ready to go.
No chauffeur tonight, I notice.
“Are you okay?” he says. One of the maître d’s is holding the driver’s door open for him. “I wish I could drop you off, but we go in different directions, don’t we?”
Yeah, St. George and Pound Ridge. Apples and oranges.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve just got to run.”
“Of course.” But still he holds me back. “I want you to think seriously about what we’ve said. Keep your eyes and ears open. Look for the opportunities. And, of course, keep me informed.”
“I will, Frank. And thanks.”
But again: “Call me in the afternoon. I’ll be at my desk.”
“Fine, Frank.”
I find a taxi. I tell him Thirty-second and Sixth—the PATH station. Then I realize I’ll never make it that way. I ask what he’ll charge to drive me to St. George. That way I’ll even beat the train, be home at eleven forty-five at the outside.
St. George, where’s that? New Jersey, I say. He’s some Israeli or Arab, I can’t tell which. No New Jersey, he says.
I bitch, plead with the bastard. Lots of luck. Finally we settle on the Hoboken station—just through the tunnel and back. I agree to double his meter.
We rocket downtown, through the Holland Tunnel, across the dark back streets of Jersey City, Hoboken, to the terminal. I throw money at the driver and sprint for it. I miss the fucking train by inches, seconds. I can see the last car pulling out past the platform.
Son of a gun. There’s another guy like me, suit and briefcase, no tie. We grin at each other in commiseration across the station. Better call Georgie, I think. I hesitate. Better see if there’s a taxi first.
By the time I get back outside, there’s one lone taxi—some scavenger, waiting for a poor bastard like me—and the other guy who missed the train has beaten me to it. He’s just climbing in.
“Hey, wait a minute!” I shout after him. “Where you going?”
“The Fells,” he says.
Not too bad. We make a deal—it’s fine with him, as long as we take him home first—and another deal with the driver. Those are the only deals I’ve made all day.
It’s long after midnight when I get home. First I have to go to the St. George station to pick up my car. I’m sober as a judge. There’ll be hell to pay with Georgie, but when was I supposed to have called?
I turn into our driveway. The house above me is lit up like a beacon, all three floors. From the outside, it looks like a ship at night on the crest of a wave.
Georgie, I think. Scaring off the bogeymen.
But then—what the fuck? The colored lights, slowly twirling?
There are two cop cars under the portico. And shadow figures moving around on the porch, also inside the house. For Christ’s sake, the front door’s wide open!
I get out of the car, almost fall, run. My heart fucking pounding.
Up the front steps. A uniformed cop is just coming out through the front door, sticking his gun back in its holster.
Georgie is in the angle of the front porch, only her nightgown over her belly. Bare feet, face white as a ghost, mouth ajar. Clutching Justie in her arms, and Justie is squawling his head off.
I damn near lose it when I see them.
“The house is secure,” the cop announces, the one in the doorway.
It turns out to be nothing. Something, maybe an animal, set the alarm off, and that brought the cops. Even so, I spend one horrendous night dealing with my wife, fielding her accusations. The next morning, in the kitchen, I’m hanging on to the coffee mug with both hands when there’s Harriet at the front door, Justie’s baby-sitter, introducing herself to me—holy shit!—but then Georgie’s coming downstairs, ready to bite my head off all over again.
It’s Bloody Wednesday.
The sharks in a frenzy. The Aquarium roils, goes red.
And it’s my turn.