Билл Пронзини - In an Evil Time

Pierce met his eyes for a ten count before he turned and walked slowly to the pickup.

Damn him! Hollis thought. After eighteen months and at the worst possible time. Maybe Pierce had changed, grown up some and learned a sense of responsibility; those brown eyes hadn’t been as soft as they once were. But he was still a sorry-ass loser. Incredible how a sweet-natured, levelheaded girl like Angela could have such rotten taste in men.

He left the car where it was, went up onto the porch. And what he found next to the door pushed Ryan Pierce out of his mind. More flowers. A big flashy arrangement, yellow and red roses, half a dozen other varieties, including orchids, all done up in an open vase that must have weighed four or five pounds — a hundred dollars’ worth, at least. And that wasn’t all. A white rectangular box was propped there, too, with the same local florist’s name printed on it.

He plucked an envelope bearing Angela’s name off a long plastic fork stuck into the arrangement. Almost didn’t open it, thinking that what he would do was take all this sweet-smelling crap into the garage before Angela or Cassie got home, bag it, and hide it in the garbage can where it belonged. He could predict what the message said anyway. But then, on impulse to see if he was right, he yanked the card out of the envelope. With greater love hath no man . Not the exact wording he’d had in mind, but close enough.

Crumpling the card, he bent to lift the white box. Might as well open that, too. It was in his hands before he realized that the address label on it did not carry Angela’s name. Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Hollis.

He tore the lid off. And stood staring, his rage burning high, at what lay within — at the silk-ribboned funeral wreath and the card that read in small, neat script: With deepest condolences on the loss of your loved ones .

He was sitting in the living room, slumped down in his big leather armchair, when Angela and Kenny came home. He had been there for some time, unmoving and so inwardly focused that he was no longer aware of his surroundings. Lost and alone inside his own head, wandering in and out of the shadows. No, not quite alone. Rakubian was there, and Pierce, and the old man with his censorious eyes and critical mouth and the disappointment leaking out of him like a rancid oil. And Ma — the one recurring image of her that he could never drive away, that was as sharply detailed after thirty-six years as if it had happened yesterday.

He’d been ten that summer, inside a hospital for the first time, the medicine smells, sick smells, death smells making his head swim — peering down at Ma in her white bed in the white room and thinking: She looks so small lying there. She looks like they put her in a pot and boiled her up and shrunk her . Her voice had been shrunken, too, a weak pygmy voice saying, “Don’t you worry now, honey, I’m going to be fine. Good as new in a few weeks, you’ll see.” And him so scared, seeing her that way, that he blurted out, “Do they have to cut you open, Ma?” And the old man looming there big as a house, blinking his censorious eyes and saying with his critical mouth, “It’s the only way they can get the cancer out. Quit that sniveling now, boy. Nothing’s gonna happen to your mother except she won’t be sick anymore when it’s over.”

She died on the operating table.

They killed her on the operating table.

They wheeled her into a scrubbed white room full of lights and tubes and gleaming instruments and they cut her open and she hemorrhaged, she had some kind of virulent reaction to the anesthetic, and she died and he never saw her again because he wouldn’t look at her at the funeral, he closed his eyes when he walked past the coffin — he could not bear to see her dead, it was bad enough remembering her boiled up and shrunken in that other white room with the smells of medicine and sickness and death.

It was not going to happen to him like that. He was not going to die on a goddamn operating table with his body sliced open, or in a hospital at all if he could help it. Surgery was not an option for him. There’d be no prostatectomy; no brachytherapy, the implantation of radioactive seeds; no transurethral resection, that swell-sounding little procedure where they shoved a tool with a tiny wire loop through your pecker and down into your prostate to scrape up the cancerous cells. External beam radiation... yes, all right, he could stand that even though it might eventually make his impotence permanent. Hormone therapy was okay, too. But he would not permit Stan Otaki or any other doctor to cut into the center of him. There were no guarantees with surgery anyway. Even if he survived an operation, the cancer could still spread and kill him sooner or later...

He didn’t hear the Geo pull into the drive, didn’t realize they were home until they came in through the front door. Kenny bounded in first, saw him, shouted “Granpa!” and came running. He launched himself from a couple of feet away, and if Hollis hadn’t caught him, hunching and turning his body as he did, he’d have taken a knee where it would have done his prostate the least good. Six weeks ago, after being under Rakubian’s thumb for so long, the boy had been quiet, skittish, clingy to his mother; now he was the child he’d been before the marriage, a bundle of energy, a nonstop chatterbox. Amazing how quickly kids his age could recover from a bad experience, if they were gotten out of it before there was any permanent scarring.

“Hey, tiger. What’s got you so excited?”

“Me and Jimmy Eilers played video games all day on his iMac,” Kenny said. “He’s got a brand-new iMac, well, his mom does. Tangerine, yuck, I like blueberry. Blueberry’s cool.”

“Is that so. Who’s Jimmy Eilers?”

“Joyce Eilers’s son,” Angela said from the doorway. “She’s in the group.”

“The one with the relatives in Utah?”

“Oh, Mom told you about that. No, that’s April Sayers.”

“I won him every game,” Kenny said. “I mean I beat him every game. Well, most games. Hey, neat. Cool. ’Way, man. Dag! Far out, dude.”

“Where’d all that come from?” Hollis asked. “Jimmy?”

“His sister taught him. She’s ten and wears glasses and she’s got a big butt.”

Angela said, “Kenny, that’s not a nice thing to say about Tina.”

“Well, she does. Humongous, man. Awesome buns.”

Hollis set him on his feet. “Go get yourself a Coke. You look like you can use one.”

“Nah, I’m not thirsty. I had six Cokes with Jimmy.”

“Upstairs and play, then. I want to talk to your mom.”

“Grown-up stuff?”

“Grown-up stuff.”

“Okay. Mom, why don’t we have an iMac?”

“We can’t afford one right now. Someday.”

“Can I go boot up our crappy old computer?”

“Boot up.” Angela rolled her eyes. “Yes, go ahead. And it’s not crappy, it’s a perfectly good—”

Kenny wasn’t listening; he was already running for the hall. He let out a whoop and went racing up the stairs. The way he did it reminded Hollis of Teddy, the addled brother in Arsenic and Old Lace, and his “Charge!” up “San Juan Hill.”

Angela sat in Cassie’s chair, tucked her feet under her. “What is it, Dad?” Warily.

“I talked to Eric this morning. The Boston apartment fell through.”

“Oh, damn!”

“Don’t look at me like that — I didn’t have anything to do with it. His friend’s folks changed their minds when they found out why you wanted to stay there.”

She sighed, pressed thumbs against the edges of her eyes. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It sounded too good to work out.”

“Utah might be better. It’s a lot closer than Boston.”