Fury (25 page)

“You haven’t been sleeping with that cow, have you? She’s had her shots, I hope. You haven’t caught anything dreadful?”

“Maybe you should ask her.”

Corso pointed toward Dougherty in the stern. Stone turned her head.

“Mooooo,” Dougherty said from the darkness.

Cynthia Stone’s mouth dropped so far open her fillings gleamed in the dull light. She spun back toward Corso. Pulled back her right fist and let it fly. Corso caught it in midair. She brought up a left, but Corso caught that one too. When she tried to knee him in the balls, he deflected the blow with his thigh and pinned her against the sink.

“Don’t,” he said evenly. “Way I see it, Cynth, you don’t have a free one coming from me. You hit me and I’m going to knock you on your ass.” He let go of her hands and stepped back.

“You son of a bitch,” she spat out. “You’re a loser…you know that, Frank? A small-time loser. You and your freak there…you two…you deserve each other.”

Cynthia Stone crossed the galley, jerked open the door, and stepped out on deck.

Dougherty walked back into the salon, closing the door behind her.

“That we deserve each other is the best she can do?” she asked.

“She works best from a script,” Corso said.

Cynthia Stone’s high heels pounded a frantic staccato beat on the slip. Then came a sound, like the dull ring of a cracked bell…followed by the rustling of plastic and a sudden sob. Dougherty raised her eyebrows, looked to Corso. His thin lips curled into a smile.

“The anchor,” he said.

Dougherty loped across the boat, pulled open the door on the opposite side of the galley just in time to see Cynthia Stone’s murky silhouette struggle back to its feet. The apparition swayed for a moment and then began crabbing down the dock. Slowly, placing one foot at a time on the concrete, holding her forehead with one hand while using the other to probe the fog for other unseen impediments. A moment before disappearing into the fog, she stopped and wobbled, as if she might lose it and fall in the lake. Dougherty felt Corso tighten against her back. “Shouldn’t we…,” she began.

Then Stone was moving again, moaning slightly with each measured step.

Mewing under her breath as she disappeared from view.

“Nah,” they said in unison and laughed out loud.

They stood close in the doorway, listening to the scrape of her shoes.

“If she’d hit you, you were going to pop her one, weren’t you?”

“Absolutely,” he said without a hint of reservation.

“Some folks wouldn’t think much of that.”

“Some folks don’t know Cynthia Stone.”

“She was really something in those red undies.”

“If you don’t think so, just ask her.”

“You think you’d have been so holy if I wasn’t here?” she asked.

He chuckled. “I’m a slow learner,” he said. “But not that slow.”

“Hmmm.”

They stood in the narrow doorway until they heard the metallic clank of the gate. Dougherty slid the door closed. Corso’s breath tickled the back of her ear. She turned and put her palm on his chest. She watched his eyes fall down the slope of her neck and stop at the top of her breasts. He brought his eyes up. Put his hand on top of hers. She took a breath. Sharp, quick. Tried to pull her hand away, but he held on. She felt the movement of her flesh beneath the dress. How long had it been?

“Don’t screw with me, Corso.”

A slow smile inched its way across his face, sad and lonely. He reached up and touched her hair. “I don’t screw with anybody,” he said.

She searched her mind for a sentence. Something with thorns. About how just because Stone had gotten his dander up didn’t mean she was going to step into the breach. She opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t get past Corso’s eyes or the way his hand felt against her hair. She wanted to move away but instead moved closer. Wanted to hide, without relinquishing his gaze.

“Corso…it’s been…” She felt her lips moving closer to his. His hands moved around the back of her neck and pulled. “Corso…” Her voice was lost in his mouth. In the crush of lips and teeth, she nearly forgot herself. Pulled away. “If you want me to stop the amateur psychoanalysis, all you have to do is ask,” she said. Then his mouth was on hers again. She felt his hands run down the curve of her breasts, felt his fingers at her waist. She tried to call out. To tell him to wait. But her voice faded to a whisper. He looked into her eyes and wrapped his fingers around the top button of her dress. One button. Two buttons.

She gulped a bucket of air. “The lights,” she said. Corso released her. Reached up. Snapped them into total darkness. In the black, she searched for his lips and pressed herself against him. Their hips met, folded into one another. She felt her body move in the slow give and take of passion. Corso grabbed her hips and backed her against the wall.

Without warning, her knees buckled and she began to slide down the wall. He seemed to have too many hands. He moved with her, rolling the dress from her shoulders as they slid to the floor. She felt her arms pulling free of the fabric, felt his hands reading the tattoos like Braille. Felt the pads of his fingers pause over the occasional welts, trying to follow the design. She groaned.

She raised her hips; the dress disappeared and suddenly they were on the floor, with his lips tracing the etchings on her flesh, moving across the arch of her right breast. Somewhere in the gloom a car alarm began to bray. She felt his breath on her belly and his hand along the inside of her thigh. Her pelvis reached up to meet his touch, pressing her warmth against the soft pad of his hand.

She pushed her hand into Corso’s crotch, worked her fingers through the button fly of his jeans. His breath came faster. Louder. He moved against her hand.

She thought she might have called his name. She couldn’t be sure. Next thing she knew she was unbuckling his belt, raising her mouth again to his, aware of nothing but the tangy burn between her legs and the continuous shiver shooting past her navel.

Stronger, faster, louder than the shock of memory. She squeezed her eyes shut, almost pushed him off. And then, he slipped between her thoughts. Inside her, and suddenly she thought of nothing but the slow swing of his rhythm. Felt nothing but the moment’s pulse and the skin of a man dancing close to hers.

Tuesday, September 25
10:32
A.M.
Day 6 + 3

She put on the big-time pissy face when he say he doan wanna go to no damn whistle-blower ceremony. “What you mean, you doan wanna go?” Like she got a earwax problem or something. Start puttin’ the voice and the brow on him at the same time. “You goin’, Robert. You just get that in your mind right now. You goin’. And you getting up there and acceptin’ that award all nice and polite like. You hear me, boy?”

He doan say nothin’. Doan help. She keeps on wid the voice.

“For once in your life you do the right thing. Do somethin’ make somebody proud of you and you think you ain’t going.” She wave a finger all up in his face. He feel like breaking the goddamn thing off, chewing it up, and swallowing it.

“You goin’,” she say. Like he didn’t hear it the first fifteen times she say it.

She told every damn neighbor on the block. “My Bobby getting an award from the mayor himself. Gonna be on TV and all. Two thousand dollars. In the papers. Hepped ’em catch that Trashman guy. Gonna get him a whistle-blower award. Right down at the courthouse. Wednesday morning at ten. Havin’ them a big ceremony just for him.”

Called Grandma down in Riverside too. Told her the same damn shit. Tell her how that fat Korean, King, Kin, Kim, whatever the hell it is, gonna give her the morning off so’s she can go. Said he gonna pay her for the time too, ’cause of having a hero in the family. She promised she’d take pictures and send them on down south to Grandma soon as she got ’em developed.

Shoulda never told Goth Girl and the tall dude nothin’. Assholes sent all them damn cops over here wantin’ to know every motherfuckin’ thing he saw that night. Askin’ the same shit over and over like a bunch of fuckin’ retards can’t remember what he told ’em five minutes ago. Makin’ him sign a paper full of his own words. Shit.

And now she out shoppin’ for clothes. So’s he’ll look like a gentleman, she say. He say he ain’t going. She say, “Fine, I’ll buy ’em widout your ass.” Shit. Shoulda gone with her. Might maybe could have talked her into some of that Tommy Hilfiger stuff like the downtown brothers always sporting. Shit may be lame, but it at least got some ghetto to it.

Screw that whistle-blowing, stoolie-of-the-year, rat-out-your-damn-friends award. Who needs that goddamn thing anyway. Whistle-blower my ass.

Tuesday, September 25
11:11
A.M.
Day 6 + 3

A husband and a daughter…both dead and gone. Alice Doyle wasn’t planning on losing anything else. Herds of furniture crammed the rooms. Leaving only narrow, plastic-covered trails to navigate as one moved from place to place. In the living room, the furniture and lampshades had likewise been sealed in plastic like leftover stew.

While she’d busied herself in the kitchen, Corso had toured the room. A million knickknacks and trinkets. Half a dozen photos of Kelly. None of which Corso had seen before. Several of which showed her in a different light than the “Little Miss Vivacious” shot the papers had all been using…unsure of herself. Maybe even a bit melancholy.

Two pictures of her late husband, Rodney. One as a young police officer in his dress blues. Another as a middle-aged man in a cardigan, holding a pitchfork, scowling into the lens. The man had changed but the chin remained the same. “Disappointed” was the word that came to mind, as if here was a person who felt slighted because time and circumstance had, for reasons unknown, conspired to grant him less than his allotted share.

His badge lay on the shelf next to the pictures on the wall. Corso had reached to pick it up, but it was stuck to the surface. He’d reached for the glass cat on the shelf above. Same deal. He’d crossed the room and tried elsewhere. Everything was glued to the shelves. Yeah. Alice Doyle was keeping what she had left.

Corso sat back on the couch. He brought the cup to his lips and sipped. Tea. Didn’t taste like much of anything. Like the pipes were rusty, maybe.

“Roddy wasn’t happy,” she was saying. “Not for a long, long time.”

They were on their second pot of tea. He hadn’t had to ask a question in half an hour. Apparently, Alice Doyle didn’t get many visitors.

Corso inhaled just enough tea to wet his teeth. “Not since the war,” she went on. “Never had a happy day in his life since he came back from that godforsaken place.”

He’d heard it all before. More times than he could count. Something about Vietnam had poisoned half a generation. Taken their visions of heroic charges across open ground and mutated them into long-drawn-out, duck-and-cover jungle skirmishes, around bends in the road and across the rivers, up the sides of slippery hills, which they were ordered to “take” in the face of snipers and mines and machine guns. As if the ground really mattered and they weren’t just going to walk back down later, fewer than before.

“You could see…as soon as he got back. He was different. Angry. Like somebody I’d never seen before.” She set the cup in the saucer in her lap and stared off into space. “I remember once…right after he got back. We went to a dance in Volunteer Park and this man said something—maybe to me, maybe to Roddy, I don’t remember—and Roddy just went off on him. I can still see the man covering his head and trying to crawl under a car while Roddy kicked him and spit on him and called him a son of a bitch. I can still see the blood on the man’s yellow shirt and his pocket change spilled out on the pavement where he lay.” She sighed. “Just like it was yesterday.”

“How old was he when he…” Corso let it hang.

“He was thirty-nine. Kelly was fourteen.” Her eyes clouded over. “He took his revolver, went out by the compost heap, and shot himself in the head. No note. No good-bye of any kind. No anything. We got half his pension. The station house took up a collection. Paid off the house for us.”

“How did Kelly take it?”

She set her cup and saucer on the table. Sighed. “Like girls that age take things like that, Mr. Corso. They blame themselves. She grew up too fast. Got a lot wilder. For about five years there, I hardly knew my own daughter. It was the only time in our lives we weren’t close.”

“So…at the end…you and Kelly were close again?”

“Like sisters,” she said.

“She’d never been married?”

She shook her head and smiled. Started reciting the lines she’d said so many times before. “She was so demanding. She knew just what she wanted and wasn’t going to settle for anything less. My Kelly was a girl who knew where she was going.”

Corso took another sip. “At the time of her death, was Kelly involved with anyone?”

She shook her head. “She’d been between boyfriends for months. She said she was fed up with relationships that weren’t going anywhere.”

“You sure?” he asked gently. “You know, sometimes…” He waggled a hand. “Sometimes people don’t always share everything with their parents.”

She cast Corso a pitying glance and began to clean up. “There was no reason for Kelly to keep anything from me. I didn’t try to run her life for her. She was a grown woman.” She put Corso’s cup and saucer on the tray and got to her feet. “I didn’t care who she dated, as long as she was happy.” She headed for the kitchen. “She always knew she could have brought home a doctor, a lawyer, or an Indian chief and I’d be happy as long as she was.” She turned around to back through the swinging door. She cocked an amused eyebrow at Corso. “As long as it wasn’t a cop. There’s nothing but sorrow being married to a cop. Ask me. I know.”

She came back through the door wiping her hands on a black-and-white dish towel.

“You’ve let me prattle on for over an hour. You’re quite a listener.”

Corso smiled.

“In your business, that must be quite an asset. So tell me, Mr. Corso, do you mind if I ask a question?” He said he didn’t. “So why…at this late date…what interest is any of this to you now? The story’s over, isn’t it?”

“I thought I might write a book about it,” Corso lied.

She brought a hand to her throat. “Lord knows it had enough twists and turns.”

“It sure did,” he agreed. “A few more than anybody needed,” he added.

She had a faraway look in her eyes. “A book would be good,” she said. “When it’s written down, people don’t forget so easily.”

“Did she have a best girlfriend? Somebody her own age she was close to?”

Alice Doyle took a deep breath. “Paula Ziller…I suppose. They’d known each other since middle school.”

“You know where I might be able to find her?”

“She’s moved away,” she answered absently. “Down to Portland somewhere.”

“That’s Ziller.” He spelled it. She nodded.

“Ah,” she said softly and left the room.

When she returned, she carried a Ziplock freezer bag full of greeting cards. Lots of snowflakes and mangers. Alice Doyle sat in the chair opposite Corso, the bag in her lap. “She sent me a card last year,” she said, pawing through the bag. “Paula’s a nice girl. The kind who remembers to send cards,” she mused.

She pulled an oversize red card from the bag and handed it to Corso. The return address sticker had been snipped from the envelope and scotch-taped to the front of the card. Paula Ziller—1840 Harrison Street, Portland, Oregon. Noel.

“You used to be a journalist,” Alice Doyle said suddenly.

“At one time, yes.”

“Did you ever cover a war?”

“Yes, ma’am. The Gulf War.”

She paused to collect herself. “What was it about that Vietnam War that sent them all home so damaged?” she asked finally. “So damaged.”

“I think all wars are like that,” Corso said. He looked up into the woman’s liquid brown eyes. “My family talks about how whatever was kind or decent about my father must have gotten lost in some Korean foxhole. About how the only thing the army shipped home was his whiskey thirst and his mean streak.”

“I’m sorry,” Alice Doyle said.

“Don’t be,” Corso said. “He wasn’t worth it.”