Cast of Shadows - v4 (23 page)

At a bar called Hounds, Biggie easily found Peg at a square table with four friends. Peg had secured a fifth chair from another part of the bar and made camp on a corner that, due to a pair of lost screws underneath, tilted awkwardly toward her. In the center of the table, downed drinks left their fingerprints in thin pink films on the insides of the glasses, which were grouped together like the small woods that separated property lines in suburban subdivisions. It had been so long since a waitress had cleared the table that the ladies had only its perilous, slanting fringe on which to place their current beverages, although in the waitress’s defense, the women were emptying the glasses so quickly their drinking could have been mistaken for sleight of hand.

The bar was decorated with a half-assed British theme. Store-bought posters of green countryside, ruined castles, and ocean cliffs hung on the walls at angles in cheap black frames. A few kitschy Sherlock Holmes items — ceramics, toys, books — were scattered about on shelves. A reproduction movie poster was tacked next to the door. Displayed randomly were some Irish and Scottish items, as well. They poured Guinness at the tap, which made Big Rob hopeful for a pint of Tennent’s, but he should have known better. He backed away from the bar with his Harp and casually maneuvered through the crowd until his giant torso was only a few feet from their table, like a cruise ship anchored off a port of call. All five women turned.

“Good evening, ladies,” Big Rob said. “Do you mind if I buy the next round?”

When Sam Coyne was fifteen, a hornet stung him during cross-country practice.

An abandoned Milwaukee Northern line ran behind Northwood East High School, and Coach Carne had the team train over the split and rotting sleepers, on their toes, up to three miles out and three miles back for the varsity. The exercise steeled Sam’s will and fattened his calves, and by midseason he held the number-three spot on the roster, after Bruce Miller and Lanny Park, and even finished second at the Oak Park Invitational, which had a famously flat second half.

Lanny and Bruce and another teammate, named Bryan, had turned back at two miles, this being a Friday, with a meet the next day and a party rumored for that night. Sam promised he’d meet them later at Jan Tenowski’s, whose parents were in Lake Geneva. If she wasn’t already planning on taking advantage with a beer-baited get-together, they were sure they could talk her into it.

As the balls of his feet sprung again and again off the timbers, Sam’s legs felt good, which meant he could hardly feel them at all. There was a certain point in the middle of a quality run when they seemed to propel themselves. There was no pain, no effort, the oxygen arrived in sufficient quantities, and the rhythm of the footfalls both propelled and recharged him. At this pace, on this cool evening, he was certain he could run forever, and in the seconds right before the hornet struck, he was convinced that Lanny’s number-two spot could be stolen from him on a regular basis, starting tomorrow.

He had joined the cross-country team in the seventh grade, mostly because of girls. That’s not to say Northwood runners had significant numbers of groupies, although the cheerleading squad scheduled an appearance at one meet every fall in a display of pep they probably counted as charity. For an awkward and easily embarrassed thirteen-year-old, however, a spot on an athletic roster seemed like a minimum standard to meet socially, and Sam had always been blessed with good stamina, if not world-beating speed. Running allowed him to work alone, which he liked, but it didn’t single him out, either. The team shared the credit for success, but the blame for failure was distributed just as equally, and that was all fine with Sam. Most important, he was an athlete, which, in the eyes of girls, was the high school equivalent of having a good job.

There were other benefits, as well, his parents noted. Sam’s grades improved, and he gained confidence. He thought the teachers gave him more respect and, when he needed it, the benefit of the doubt.

The yellow jacket landed on his shin about six inches below the right knee. Sam looked down at it, but didn’t stop or break stride, as doing so suddenly on such a treacherous path would cause him to stumble. He stared down at the hornet, which clung to his skin even as his feet found tie after tie, sending vibrations up and down his legs. He leaned forward and tried to swat it away.

It stung.

Sam pulled up like a wounded horse and he slapped at it, meeting some resistance, as the insect hadn’t yet let go of the stinger. He fell and his left ankle turned painfully against the half-buried right rail.

“Dammit!”

In just a few seconds, the sting had become swollen and purple and painful. Sam stood panting beside the tracks and watched the wound mutate. It was the first time he’d been stung by an insect, and in the minute or so it took for him to catch his breath, he realized he was allergic.

The next time he was stung — by a bee, while playing in a three-on-three basketball tournament in Chicago — he was much older. That particular night, he called his parents.

“Did you go to the emergency room?” his mother asked.

“No, Mom,” Sam said. “I took a couple of Benadryl.”

“I remember the day you got stung during running practice.”

“Cross-country practice,” he corrected.

“Cross-country
running practice,
” she snapped back, but then she chuckled. “Your ankle was as big as a softball when you got back.”

“It wasn’t my ankle, it was my shin. And that was a lot worse than the one today. I had to walk two miles on it.”

“Well, it was huge.”

They talked about his sister’s family in Milwaukee until they’d exhausted the topic, and both he and his parents — Mom and Dad on separate cordless extensions — sat quietly with the headsets at their ears. It wasn’t uncomfortable silence — each party knew the call hadn’t yet reached maturity — but no one said a word for almost half a minute as they waited for the conversation to start itself again.

“Sam, there’s a little boy here in Northwood who looks exactly like you,” Mrs. Coyne said finally.

“Really?” Sam was paging through
The New York Times Magazine
with the phone wedged between his shoulder and head. There was an article on a jazz guitarist he liked and he didn’t feel like waiting for his parents to hang up before he started reading it.

“Yeah, it’s really something,” his father said. “Are you sure you didn’t get any of those girls pregnant in high school?”

Between another father and son, the remark would have been laughed away as familiar joshing. Between Sam and his father there was subtext.

The period of Sam’s worst battles with his father ran roughly the same duration as World War II: from September of his thirteenth year until the August after his graduation from Northwood East. Sam drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of pot on weekends. He brought girls to the house, girls he knew his mother and father wouldn’t like, and when he slept with one of them he did nothing to conceal the fact from his parents. Freethinkers, Mr. and Mrs. Coyne didn’t mind the sex so much — not after he turned seventeen, anyway — but they were appalled by his lack of discretion. Smart girls, dumb girls, skinny girls, fat girls, rich girls, poor girls: teenaged Sam screwed in the same bored fashion that he flipped channels on the television, with each program being no more or less interesting than the next.

His promiscuity had much to do with the deep supply of willing partners, of course. Sam attributed this to a story that circulated the school concerning his private girth. As it spread, the tale had become exaggerated, of course, but not by much. By the time Sam reached his junior year, he found there was always a curious girl willing to bring him home or follow him home or go for a drive or take in an unpopular movie from the back row. It wasn’t always intercourse — some only wanted a preview — but the attention was all the same to him, frankly.

“So, who is he?” Sam asked.

“The boy? Oh, we don’t know his name,” Mrs. Coyne said. “Dad saw him at the fruit store, and then pointed him out at the butcher.”

“It was uncanny, really. We came home and pulled out the old photo albums. You could be twins — if you were still in second grade,” Mr. Coyne said.

“Did you see the mother?”

“About your age. A few years older maybe. Pretty. Thin,” his mom said.

“You remembering something, son? Did you ever have a rubber go on ‘spring break’?”

“James.” Mrs. Coyne’s frown translated into a sour murmur over the phone.

“There’s nothing to remember, Dad,” Sam said.

“Are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t slip one past that chubby field- hockey goalie? What was her name? Rebecca?”

“He’s kidding, dear.”

“Yeah, Mom. Anyway, that’s funny. This kid. He looked just like me, huh?”

“They say everyone has a twin,” Mrs. Coyne said. “Yours just showed up twenty years late.”

“Weird.”

“So how’s work?”

“Busy.”

“Any good cases?” his father asked. “Have you taken any dirty drug money this week?”

This joke, on the other hand, was not as caustic as it sounded. James Coyne was proud of his son’s work as an attorney, and he boasted to his friends about Sam’s big-moneyed clients. Mr. Coyne often used the phrase “dirty drug money” as an ironic and not-too-subtle reference to his own activist college days. He wasn’t ashamed of them, exactly. He wasn’t embarrassed about his objection to the war, or the editorial pipe bombs he tossed on the back pages of campus newspapers in the direction of the White House. In middle age, however, he had become a pious capitalist, starting his own business, building it large enough and quickly enough to sell it by the time he was fifty, and in retirement he considered the demonstrations of his early adulthood as another stage of growing up. He saw his son’s teenage promiscuity the same way in retrospect, but he couldn’t resist the sharp needling over it, then or now.

Regardless, Sam was happy to talk about something other than his tiny, chocolate-smudged look-alike. He was certain he didn’t have a son wandering around Northwood, but he did have secrets, and this conversation had his parents poking around in the dirt under which they were buried.

That night, however, after he’d hung up the phone, the name of Anna Kat Moore haunted him for only a minute or two. He exorcised it from his mind with a cold shiver, played for an hour on the computer — a new multiplayer game called Shadow World that one of his clients insisted would be the next big thing (the client was so sure, in fact, he’d bought five thousand shares of stock in the company that created it) — then fell asleep watching a basketball game from the West Coast.

Lying in Ricky Weiss’s bed, an arm under Ricky Weiss’s sleeping wife, Big Rob didn’t struggle too much with whether or not it had been ethical. He wondered if it had been ironic — that this began with an investigation of an alleged cheating husband, and ended with him between a married woman’s sheets — but then decided he was confusing “irony” with another word, one that wouldn’t come to him just now. It didn’t matter what you called it. It was what it was: inevitable. Hell, that wasn’t the right word, either.

It made him ill to be in such an intimate array with a woman he now knew to be complicit in Philly’s death. Complicit? Was that right? Did he even know what really happened to Phil Canella? The drink and the dark and the postejaculatory haze dulled his ability to sum up.

The girls had consumed three rounds of juice and alcohol in various combinations before the six of them moved to a just-liberated and more comfortable round table. Big Rob delivered the promised charm in the form of compliments and jokes and reciprocal laughter. He told adventure stories from years back starring his formerly svelte self on high school lacrosse fields and in the navy and on the police force.

Late in the night, Big Rob was telling how he’d almost invested in the stock of some biotech company — human cloning, gene treatment for cancer, that sort of thing. He spent his money on a boat instead, and all of his friends got rich. “And I don’t even have the boat anymore,” Big Rob said to hearty, high-pitched laughter.

“Ricky and I are gonna be rich,” Peg blurted out, bringing a cranberry-colored drink to her lips almost as if she hoped the glass would act as a muzzle to keep her from blabbing.

“Tell us,” the blonde one named Linda said, demonstrating her faithfulness by a lack of skepticism.

“I can’t tell you all the details,” Peg giggled. “It’s a secret.” She made a not-so-discreet nod toward Big Rob, but when her eyes caught his, they stuck there, and she parted her thin lips in a way that Big Rob found incidentally sexy.

“I’m just passing through town,” he said. “Your secrets can stay here, as far as I’m concerned. What happens in Brixton, stays in Brixton, if you know what I mean.” He winked at no one in particular.

Peg brought them all together in a woozy huddle around the table. “Ricky and I have the goods on this rich doctor from Chicago. And when the time is right, he and me are gonna cash in.” She burped. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Big Rob waved at the waitress for another round and she warned him with a painted nail pointed toward the clock that this was last call. “So, this doctor, what? Has he done something bad?”

Peg’s burp had apparently been a hiccup, and it repeated. “Not yet. He hasn’t done it yet, and that’s all I’m saying.” Big Rob patted her gently on the back, as if that were a folksy cure.

“Well, if he’s going to do something bad, shouldn’t you go to the police before it happens?” asked Jo.

“Shhhh!” Peg said. She reconvened the huddle. “We don’t know for sure he’s going to do
anything
.” She paused to take control of her rib cage as Big Rob continued to rub her back with his left hand. “But if he does, we’re not gonna let him get away with it.”

“What’s this doctor going to do?” Big Rob asked when he was afraid no one else would.

Peg grabbed a random glass from the waitress’s tray. “I can’t tell you
that
.” She fought her hiccups with big gulps. “ ’S all I’m saying.”