MILLER SAT ON THE EDGE OF HIS BED, LEANING OVER BARTON and watching her eyes, only barely visible in the darkness of his bedroom, soften as the effects of the painkiller he had given her for her injuries took hold.
She and Spadaro had arrived around seven, but she hadn’t said much at all, had let Spadaro do all the talking. He was the one who told Miller what had happened at the canal, and how it was Mancini all along, that Roffman was only being set up. Spadaro, too, was the one to first wonder what their next move should be, whether they should come forward with what they knew and what they had done or cover up their presence at the canal and let it all end there. There were, both Miller and Spadaro knew, certain advantages in keeping what they had learned to themselves. And there was the fact that Spadaro and Barton had left the scene of a homicide—a justifiable one, certainly, but a homicide nonetheless. Spadaro was afraid how it would appear if they came forward after having fled like that. But Miller had pointed out that, considering how corrupt the department was, Spadaro’s need to secure crucial evidence first should clear him and Barton of any suspicion of wrongdoing. And anyway, if they came forward, it wouldn’t be to anyone in Roffman’s department, it would be to the FBI.
It was then that Barton spoke, stating flatly, decisively, that there was simply no way they would cover this up, that doing so would make them just like all the others, and that she’d rather face whatever would need to be faced by coming forward than live the rest of her life like some criminal, like someone with something to hide. She was, as she had said to Miller the night before, done with all that.
At that point she didn’t say anything more, and it wasn’t, Miller understood, because she was shaken or in shock. She was in fact lucid, present, composed. The strongest person in the room, easily. She simply didn’t want to dwell on what she had done, what had to be done. She was injured, in pain, wanted now only to rest. Whatever happened from here would happen, there was no avoiding that, no point, then, in worrying about it or talking about it over and over.
While he waited for Spadaro to return with copies of what was on the voice mail system at the station, Miller helped Barton undress and clean up her scrapes. It was as if she had been beaten, her shoulder, despite the painkiller she had taken moments before, aching, growing stiff. Once she was patched up, he helped her into his bed, covered her with blankets and watched over her just as she had no doubt watched over him during the day, before running off to search for his obsession. Barton had done so, Miller knew, for no other reason than to maybe cut him free, once and for all, if she could, from all his various, lingering pasts, give him his new life back. His search for Abby had pulled him back into the world he had worked very hard to put behind him. He was beginning, just as he had done before, to lose himself in it again, in that dark and troubled world. He would never forget, then, what Barton had done for him, and what, in the end, it had cost her. How could he?
Her breathing was growing more shallow when Barton looked up at Miller with soft eyes. They watched each other for a moment, and then Miller whispered, “Thanks, Kay.”
She smiled, a drowsy smile, oddly intimate in its own way. Miller smiled back. He hadn’t sat with a woman as she fell asleep in a long time, since that night Abby, with her grandfather’s suitcase, had left him and waited for the late train, took it when it finally came, heading for God knows where, God knows who.
“I wasn’t about to let anything happen to you,” Barton said.
Miller nodded toward his open bedroom door, and his living room beyond it, where Barton had put to an end to Miller and Spadaro’s confusion over what would be done next. “Thanks, too, for what you said out there.”
“We save ourselves from ourselves,” she said. “It’s what we do, Tommy. Promise me that we’ll keep on doing that.”
Miller promised.
“Try to keep this one, though, okay?” Barton joked.
Miller laughed. “I’ll do my best.” He looked at her for a moment more, brushed a stray strand of hair from her eyes with the tip of his index finger. “You should rest now, Kay.”
She took in a breath, let it out, was moments from unconsciousness. Did she feel the blue flame in her chest? Miller wondered. She would sleep deeply, he knew that much. And when she awoke, he would be there, to talk to or not to talk to, whatever she wanted, whatever she needed.
“I’m sorry I didn’t find her,” she said. “I know how much she means to you.”
Miller shook his head. “No, you did good, Kay. You did great, actually. And anyway, what matters now is you.”
She smiled again. The drowsiness was in her eyes now, which glistened in the weak light like polished stones in a river.
“I do like the sound of that,” she cooed.
“Rest up.”
“You know what, I think I like your pills better than mine.”
“Go to sleep, Kay.”
He watched her drift into unconsciousness, stayed there on the edge of his bed till he was certain that she was out, then took hold of his cane and got up, making his way through the kitchen and into his unlit front room. He limped badly, and his head, for the most part, was still a little awash from the double dose Barton had given him in the morning. But he managed to remain upright and make his way to the front windows.
It took Spadaro close to an hour to return. Miller began to worry that maybe something had gone wrong. As he waited, he looked out his window, watched as a black town car with a broken taillight pulled up to the station and waited, Miller assumed, for the 9:10 train. He watched, too, a young couple walk onto the platform and stand face-to-face, embracing, kissing, laughing. As the westbound train pulled up—they were running on time tonight—the driver of the black town car got out and walked his passenger—a tall Latin-looking man in expensive clothes—to the station. They waited, along with the couple, for the train to stop, and then the tall man boarded it as the driver returned to the town car and got back behind the wheel and waited. This didn’t make much sense to Miller, but there was no reason that it should, no reason at all for him to even try to make sense of it.
He was relieved when the old Bronco turned onto Railroad Plaza from North Main and headed his way. The restaurant below was busy for a Tuesday night—the familiar and comforting murmur of voices rising up through the old floorboards, friends and loved ones gathered for something to eat and something to drink, time spent together. Blessedly oblivious, all of them, Miller thought, to the things he and Barton and Spadaro knew, the things they had done for the sake of this small part of the world they all shared. Oblivious, at least, for now, but soon enough everyone would know.
With both sides of Elm Street lined with cars, Spadaro drove down Powell Avenue and parked somewhere out of sight, then made his way back on foot. Miller heard him enter through the street door, then climb the steep stairs. Still at his front window and leaning on his cane when Spadaro entered the apartment, Miller took one last look at the train station, gave one last thought to what had been for so long his only consistent thought:Abby. There was no hope of finding her now, he knew this. Maybe another lead would present itself, but he didn’t count on that. Too many maybes last night, so few now. If she didn’t want to be found, by him or by anyone else, then there would be no finding her, of that much Miller was certain. He didn’t realize till now that he had been harboring a kind of wild hope that she had in fact planted his business card in Michaels’s wallet so that it would be found, that this was some grand plan of hers to orchestrate the opportunity for him to rush in and save her, as though she would know that was what he would want, even after all this time, and knowing this, she would want to give this to him. Strange how a hope is sometimes recognized only when it is at last put aside. Strange, too, that he thought of Abby as someone who would be concerned with his salvation enough to go out of her way to gift him with a second chance. What did that, then, in his mind, make her exactly? Just like him? His two years of sitting still and playing landlord, caring nothing about the affairs of others—none of this apparently had changed his obsessive nature that much, had only, it seemed, quelled it for the time being. He had once been driven to prove to those around him that he had become at last a worthy man, had seen helping as many as possible as his way of doing so. A scattershot approach at redemption, at best. Now, yes, his target was more precise, his aim more focused—instead of others, it was one he wanted to help, instead of strangers, it was the last woman he had loved, touched, slept beside—but it was still obsession nonetheless. Maybe this was the last of it, he thought, the final hurrah of who he used to be. He could see this as being that—the final spiking of a fever at last about to break. What would it be like, he wondered, to wake one morning and find it gone, his mind free of it, free of her.
Still, wild hope or not, Miller would have liked to have at least laid his eyes upon Abby once more, if only to see her off to some place no one would ever find her and know once and for all that she had gotten away clean and was going to be okay. He would have liked that, would have liked, too, to have been able to tell her that he was, more than anything, sorry for having given her reason to leave him in the first place, to have played his part in sending her on such a dark journey as the one she had been on.
Spadaro closed the door behind him, and Miller reached down and switched on the lamp standing on a table by the window. His view of the train station was replaced suddenly by his own reflection in the dark and distorting glass.
Nothing left to chance.
Bechet left Scarcella’s salvage yard at seven and headed in his own sedan toward Southampton. No registration, no insurance, all the serial numbers filed down, the out-of-state plates, taken from some abandoned car, provided by Scarcella. A car for leaving town in, a drive and drop, but nothing more than that. Because it was in every way possible an illegal vehicle, Bechet drove as cautiously as he had on his way to the yard in LeCur’s sedan, the dead body of his old friend wrapped up in a blanket and clear plastic in the trunk. It wasn’t an easy meeting with Scarcella, considering the news the man had received earlier in the day, and considering, too, what Bechet needed Scarcella to do—right now, with LeCur’s sedan and the body in it, and later on as well, if all went right and Castello took the bait. But Scarcella was the kind of man who did what needed to be done, had always been that way, was the man who made Bechet want to be like that as well. Bechet knew that he could count on him. It had helped that Scarcella’s own brother was there; Bechet didn’t have to leave his friend alone with his mourning, and the plan Bechet had proposed would go better with two than it would with just one.
As he drove away from the yard—his Alice pack, along with the evidence he had collected against Castello’s family, both years ago and recently, on the seat beside him—Bechet told himself that now wasn’t the time for recklessness. He’d told himself that before, not all that long ago, actually, but it was even more so now. To accomplish what he needed to accomplish—for himself and Gabrielle, for Eddie and his wife, for Miller and Barton, and, maybe most of all, Scarcella—he would need all the skills that he possessed.
He reached his storage unit on Hampton Road, opened the garage door and pulled the sedan inside. Closing and bolting the garage door, he made his way on foot across the village, staying off the main streets as much as possible. It was seven fifteen, he should have called Castello by now, but first things first. In less than ten minutes he reached the motel in which LeCur had been staying, and after hanging back in a shadow and studying the window of room number nine, getting the sense of the place, Bechet used the key he had taken from LeCur and quickly slipped inside. The room was dark and still, no one there. Bechet looked around, found a leather duffel bag and searched through it. Some clothes and toiletries, nothing that would be useful to him. He opened the drawer of the nightstand by the bed. In it were two ice picks and several packs of French cigarettes. Bechet left them there. The bureau drawers were empty, and there was nothing under the bed. All that was left was the bathroom.
He found a toothbrush and toothpaste, nothing more. He looked at the toilet tank then, went to it and lifted up its lid.
There was nothing in the tank, but something was taped to the bottom of the lid. Bechet turned the lid over, rested it on the seat. He had found exactly what he had expected to find—a dark garbage bag, folded over several times and sealed with silver duct tape, the same kind of tape that secured it to the lid. Bechet pulled the bag free, knew by the feel of its contents—bulky but not heavy—exactly what was inside. He didn’t bother to confirm that, just stuffed the bag into his Alice pack and left the key on the desk and got the hell out of there. He headed back toward Hampton Road via the same back streets and empty parking lots, his heart beating a little as he walked. On the edge of the village, from a pay phone outside Sip ’n’ Soda, Bechet dialed Castello’s number.
“You’re pushing it,” Castello said when he answered. “I was beginning to think you took off, left all your friends high and dry.”
“I’ve been a little busy,” Bechet said.
“I hope so.”
“I have the information you want.”
“Good work. How shall I get it?”
“Have your driver drop you off at the Southampton station. Get on the nine ten westbound. A car will pick you up in Hampton Bays. The driver will give you what I have and take you back to the station.”
“Why the runaround?”
“Because you taught me well. And because I don’t trust you. It’s this way or it’s nothing.”
“All right, Pay Day, whatever you need. I’d like to talk to you, though.”
“I’ll be on the train. We’ll talk on the way to Hampton Bays.”
“I’ll see you then.”
Bechet hung up, walked the two blocks down Hampton Road to his storage unit. Inside, the lights low, he removed the garbage bag from his Alice pack and tore it open. It contained another bag, this one a clear, heavy plastic, the same kind of material Bechet had used to wrap up Falcetti’s body. It was sealed tight with duct tape, and though he could already see what was inside, Bechet opened it anyway, doing so carefully and spilling its contents onto the workbench.
Twenties and fifties and hundreds, not neat bills wrapped with paper bands, not bank money but used money, dirty bills folded together into wads and secured by thick rubber bands. Laundered money, then, untraceable. LeCur’s share, no doubt, of the cash-out from the Ecstasy the couriers had stolen. Bechet made a quick count of the wads, keeping his mind focused even as the amount grew and grew. When he was done he had to take a step back; he simply couldn’t believe what was there.
Just over three hundred thousand dollars.
He stood there, shaking his head. What else could he do? Then he counted the money a second time, getting the same figure. Just over three hundred thousand dollars. He set aside two wads, one worth ten thousand, the other worth twenty, then packed the rest back into the plastic pouch, sealing it tight again. From a storage container in the back of his unit he removed three large manila envelopes, put one wad in one and the second in another. In the third envelope he stashed the flash drive containing Falcetti’s confession and the cassette tapes and photographs from his days with Castello, along with the notebook he had taken from LeCur and the cell phones he had collected. From a drawer beneath his workbench Bechet removed a watch, checked the time as he put it on, then stuffed the plastic pouch containing the wads of bills into his Alice pack. He put the three manila envelopes in after that, then closed it tight and turned off the light. Locking up, he left.
He walked down Hampton Road, past Red Bar on his right and then the motel in which he had stayed briefly last night on the left. At the diner where Hampton Road became Montauk Highway, Bechet spotted Eddie waiting in the parking lot, just as planned.
Nothing left to chance.
On the way to the Bridgehampton train station, Bechet dropped the envelops one at a time over the seat. Eddie watched him in the rearview mirror, saying nothing.
The first one contained the ten grand. “This is for Scarcella,” Bechet said. The next envelope contained the evidence against Castello. “This is for Miller.” And the third contained the twenty grand. “And this one’s for you.”
Eddie glanced down at it. “What is it?”
“Just open it later, okay.” Bechet leaned back, took a long breath. There was just one thing left to do now.
“Is everything okay?” Eddie said.
“It’s about to be. We probably aren’t going to see each other for a while.”
Bechet removed a notebook and pen from one of the outer pockets of his Alice pack, tore out a piece of paper and wrote down the number to his emergency cell phone, handed the paper to Eddie.
“If you need me, call me from a Southampton pay phone. Otherwise I won’t pick up. If anyone asks, I didn’t tell you where I was going.”
Eddie read the number, then folded the paper and put it into the pocket of his shirt. He looked back at Bechet, chewing on his unlit cigar, his yellow teeth, in the dashboard light, as dull as old bones.
“Bobby’s dead,” Bechet said finally.
“How?”
Bechet looked out the window. They were passing through Water Mill. “He got mixed up with the wrong guys.”
“Was he murdered?”
“Yeah.”
“He wasn’t long for this world, was he?” Eddie said. “I’ll have Angel pray for him.”
Bechet nodded. “That’d be nice.”
They didn’t speak again till the cab was pulling up to the Bridge-hampton train station. Bechet was so close he was beginning to feel tired, beginning almost to relax. Not yet, not yet. When the cab stopped in front of the station, Bechet grabbed his Alice pack and got out, stood by the driver’s door. Eddie lowered the window, and he and Bechet shook hands.
“You’ve got my number,” Eddie said.
“Take care of yourself. Angel, too.”
“Be good, my friend.”
The cab drove away, and when it was out of sight, Bechet walked to the edge of the tracks, waited there for the train. It didn’t take long, though; everything was planned pretty much down to the minute now.
When the train came, Bechet boarded it, easily found an empty car, just as he knew he would, took a seat. Sitting back, closing his eyes for now, he felt the tug in his gut as the train began to move and this final journey of his was, at last, in motion.
The black town car with the broken taillight was visible in the station parking lot as the train pulled into Southampton. Bechet saw four people waiting on the platform—Castello and his driver, and a young couple standing face-to-face. Castello and the couple boarded the same car, two ahead from where Bechet was seated. As the train pulled away, Bechet glanced out the window at Miller’s building. His windows were dark, but Bechet thought he saw the shape of someone standing in one.
When he looked forward again, Castello was entering the empty car. He made his way toward the middle of it, where Bechet was seated on the aisle. Bechet stood, and, without speaking, he and Castello embraced, not out of fondness, though, simply so they could search each other for weapons and wires. When they were done, Castello sat across the aisle from Bechet. He crossed his legs and settled back in his seat, leaning his right elbow just a little on the armrest.
Two old friends—family, once—about to have a friendly chat.
“You don’t look too worse for the wear,” Castello said.
“No thanks to you.”
“Not that I owe you an explanation or anything, but I didn’t want the Scarcella kid hurt.”
“No, but you sent a killer to kidnap him. You didn’t order his death, but you still caused it.”
Castello shrugged. “A technicality.”
“He was a friend of mine.”
“It looks to me like you’ve made new friends, though. Miller, that friend of his.”
“Why?” Bechet said. “Why drag Scarcella into this?”
“You did that.”
“How?”
“I suspected that he was the one holding your precious evidence. Of your friends, he’d be the one I’d go to for something like that. I couldn’t be sure, though. But you went straight to him after our conversation this morning, and that confirmed it.”
“I thought you weren’t afraid of the FBI.”
“I’m not, but business is just too good to be interrupted by such nonsense. It is as if we struck a gold mine.”
“How did you know I went to Scarcella’s after we talked?”
“LeCur told me.”
Bechet nodded. “He was the traitor, by the way. LeCur, Jr. He and some partner.”
“Who?”
“That I don’t know.”
Castello thought for a moment, then said, “What about Roffman?”
“It looks like he had nothing to do with this.”
“He was being set up?”
“It looks that way.”
“You will provide me with the proof of that, right?”
“It’s all in an envelope,” Bechet said. He looked out the window, at the wilderness rushing by.
“The police found LeCur’s father early this morning,” Castello said. “Dead, in the trunk of his car. It seems they found his son a few hours later. Dead, too, but in the middle of a road.”
“Bad day for your workforce, I guess.”
“Did you kill them both?”
Bechet didn’t answer.
Castello shrugged again. “It does not matter, I suppose. Anyway, I still have you.”
“I did what you wanted, Jorge.”
“There’s still the matter of LeCur’s unknown partner.”
“Find him yourself.”
“I seem to be a little shorthanded at the moment. And there’s also the matter of what was stolen from me. I must get that back, you know that.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Bechet said. “It’s long gone.”
“That is bad news.”
“Maybe you should imagine it going to some good cause. School for some orphans or something.”
“Your Gabrielle, she is an orphan, is she not?”
Bechet looked at him.
“I thought I made myself understood, Pay Day. You work for me, do what I want you to do when I want you to do it, no questions asked. That was the deal.”
“Things have changed.”
“Not as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, it’s not about you and me anymore, now, is it?”
“What does that mean?”
The train sped past the Peconic Road crossing then, where Bechet had left LeCur, Sr.’s vehicle, his body in the trunk. Seconds later, on the other side of the train, in the dark woods just feet from the tracks, they passed Gabrielle’s cottage, too fast to even try to find it in the dark. Ahead of them, seconds down the line, was the Shinnecock Canal.
“What does that mean, it’s not about you and me anymore?” Castello said.
“You brought Scarcella into this.”
“That was unavoidable.”
The blur of woods outside the windows gave way then to open sky. They had crossed onto the canal bridge. Visible through intricate trestles, a dark hulk in the bright, watery lights, stood the Water’s Edge. Bechet’s glimpse of the place lasted less than five seconds, and then it was gone, the view once again a blur of scrub pines and broken patches of night sky.
“Scarcella isn’t a man to take lightly,” Bechet said.
“Maybe, but I’m not all that worried.”
“Why not?”
“A man like that is easy to see coming,” Castello said. “He’s a brute. He’s not smart, not like us.”
Bechet looked ahead. “You shouldn’t have threatened Gabrielle,” he said after a moment. “This might have gone better for a lot of people if you had done things differently.”
“I only know the one way of doing things, Pay Day. But as long as you work for me, she’s safe. Everyone you know is safe. I promise you that. And, for that matter, as long as you work for me, your new friend never finds out that . . . uncomfortable connection you two share. How long would the peace you two have made last if he knew the truth?”
“We’re not our fathers,” Bechet said.
“Maybe not. Still, if I were you, I’d rather a guy like Miller didn’t know something like that.”
“Well, you’re not me,” Bechet said.
The Hampton Bays station was only a minute or so away now. Close, so very close. Bechet took a breath, let it out.
“It was a good life you had, Pay Day, wasn’t it? Your life with us, I mean. Good money, whatever distraction you needed, women when you wanted them. You could do a lot worse.”
The train began to slow for the station. Bechet sat still, saying nothing. He would rather die than go back to that life, that utterly meaningless existence of pleasure and violence, of things he would give anything to forget.
“We’ll set you up good,” Castello said. “We’re a lot bigger than we were six years ago. International. We’ll bring in some men for you to train. If you do well, I probably won’t ever need you to do a ‘job.’ I know how difficult that was for you. I am not without feeling.”
“Feeling is not compassion,” Bechet said. “Animals feel.”
The train came to a stop, the doors opened. Castello and Bechet stood, paused to see who’d go first. Castello, as if it were an act of grace, led the way. Bechet followed him up the aisle. Castello stepped down to the door and onto the platform. Bechet, however, remained aboard.
Turning, Castello looked up at him. “Well?” he said.
Bechet didn’t move. Castello realized that something was up but too late. A man was standing beside him.
It was Scarcella. He put one hand on Castello’s shoulder, the gesture, seemingly, of an old friend. With his other hand he pressed the muzzle of a .45 into Castello’s right kidney. Scarcella standing so close to Castello made the gun all but invisible.
Castello glanced back at Scarcella, stared at him for a moment, at the face of man whose only son had been murdered hours ago. Then Castello looked up at Bechet.
“So much for seeing him coming,” Bechet said.
Castello smiled, an awkward smile meant to conceal his fear but not accomplishing that. Before he could say anything, the doors closed and the train began to move. Bechet stepped to the first seat, sat by the window, watched, as the train pulled away, Scarcella leading Castello toward a black van and the man, not unlike Scarcella—not unlike Scarcella’s son, not unlike Bechet, even—waiting by the open door. Scarcella’s brother, there in his brother’s time of need.
In the empty car, the Alice pack on his lap, Bechet opened his emergency cell phone and hit redial.
Gabrielle answered at the end of the second ring.
“Hey, Elle,” Bechet said, “it’s me.”
She told him what hotel she was at, then asked if whatever was going on was finally over. Bechet said it was, and that he’d be there in two hours, then hung up.
The train brought him to Penn Station, and then he ran the five blocks to the hotel. Her room was on the top floor. He knocked, just a little out of breath, and waited for her to open the door.
At midnight Miller awoke to the sound of a dog barking in the distance. A neighbor’s dog, he heard it once in a while. He had been pulled from a dream but could not remember what the dream was about, only that in it he was happier than he had ever been. He would, he knew almost right away, be unable to get back to sleep, so he got up, careful not to disturb Barton, and grabbed his cane hanging on the headboard, then walked to his bedroom window. Old habit, and nothing else, really, for him to do at this time of night. His view was of the well-lit train station, and looking down at it, he didn’t at first understand what he was seeing. Finally, though, it became obvious to him that what he was looking at was, in fact, what was there and not just some memory or fragment of a vague dream.
Just as she had the night she left him, Abby was standing on the platform, waiting alone for the last train, her grandfather’s suitcase standing beside her.
Miller hurried on his cane to his front room, found his boots and pulled them on, made his way to his door and then down the stairs. It was slow-going because of his knee, because of the cane, terribly slow, just one step and then another, and when he reached the landing and pulled open the street door, he saw that the last train to New York had pulled to a stop at the station. From where he stood, Miller could see Abby climbing on board. He crossed Elm Street at a diagonal—didn’t even looked for traffic when he stepped off the curb—then started across Railroad Plaza, half-walking, half-hopping, moving as fast as he possibly could. He reached the platform stairs and climbed to the top of them—one at a time, the knuckles of the hand grasping the cane bone-white—as Abby took her seat and the doors closed. She was looking down at her lap as the train began to pull away, looking intently, as if reading something, and Miller raised his hand to get her attention, but in the end he didn’t wave, didn’t bother, just let his hand linger in the air a moment before falling again to his side. There was no way she was going to see him, he sensed that, but as her window passed him, as he got a clear view of her profile, she lifted her head, doing so casually, it seemed, just by chance, then glanced out her window and caught sight of him. Surprised, she stared for an instant, then smiled once, the smile of an old friend, fond and intimate. Raising her right hand, still a little stunned, she offered Miller the peace sign, then opened her hand all the way and touched the glass with her palm. She said good-bye, or maybe she had simply mouthed the word, Miller didn’t know. Raising his hand again, Miller waved and mouthed, “Good-bye, Abby,” back to her.
A few seconds later the train was gone, Miller left behind in the lingering silence. L’Orange Bleu was closed now, everyone long since headed home, so he was the only being in this part of town, would be till morning. Well, not the only being, he remembered. Barton was there with him now.
Back in his apartment he took off his boots and wandered around his living room for a time. The table on which all the evidence he had collected had been laid out was empty again. Nothing now for him to do but reclaim his old life, the quiet existence of a landlord. Without the rain beating down on the roof and windows, the silence around him was nothing less than consuming. Not a bad thing, really, by which to be consumed.
Later, he climbed into bed next to Barton. She had uncovered herself during her sleep, her breasts exposed to the cool air of his dark bedroom. He drew the blankets up to her shoulders, covering her, then lay beneath them himself, in the warmth she generated, got as close to her as he could and made himself as comfortable as his aching knee would allow.