Роберт Паркер - All Our Yesterdays

“Bedraggled?” Gus said.

“Think drowned rat,” Laura said.

Gus took off his suit jacket and Laura draped it over her head and shoulders. He nodded toward the bandstand.

“We could take cover,” he said.

“Are we allowed up there?”

“I’m a cop,” Gus said. “I’m the one does the allowing.”

“Yes,” Laura said. “I forget.”

The rain was coming hard enough to have wet Gus’s shirt by the time they reached the bandstand. They could smell the steamy scent of the rain hitting the still hot pavement of the walkways.

Laura handed Gus’s coat to him.

“No,” he-said, and draped it around her shoulders. “It’s getting cold.”

“Your shirt is wet,” she said. “Won’t you be freezing?”

“You ever see a cold whale?” Gus said.

“You’re not fat. You’re a big man, and you are always pretending to be fat, but you’re not.”

“Fatter than I used to be,” Gus said.

With his coat off, Laura could see the gun on Gus’s hip. How strange to be Laura Winslow and to stand here sheltered from a downpour with a man who carried a gun. She shrugged the coat closer around her and held it in place with her folded arms. Gus was more than big, as she stood beside him. It wasn’t that he was tall. Tom was taller, in fact, but Gus was so wide. The sheer bulk of him was compelling. He seemed to loom beside her, his shirtsleeves tight over his upper arms. She shivered, as much from strangeness as from cold, and moved closer to him so that they touched at the shoulder.

The top of the bandstand was rounded and it caused the rain to come straight down off it all around like a translucent curtain. She had the feeling of being inside a waterfall. There was a soundless shimmer of lightning, as there so often was in summer storms, and several seconds later the distant thunder.

“Grace says that both she and Chris are seeing other people,” Laura said.

“Un-huh.”

“I guess that’s good for them?”

“It would be bad for them not to,” Gus said.

“Why?”

“This way they’ll know,” Gus said.

“An informed choice, so to speak,” Laura said.

Gus nodded, watching the rain.

“Tom is the only man I ever have slept with,” Laura said.

Gus turned his head to look at her.

“Not an informed choice,” he said.

“No. Were you... had you any experience when you married Peggy?”

Gus smiled. The lightning came soundlessly again, and Gus listened for the subsequent thunder before he answered.

“In Tokyo, on R and R from Korea.”

“Prostitutes.”

Gus nodded.

“So Peggy was the first, ah...”

“American,” Gus said.

“Amateur,” Laura said simultaneously.

They laughed.

“She was that, all right,” Gus said.

They were quiet. The rain was hard. The thunder when it came was now hard on the heels of the lightning. Laura leaned her head against Gus’s shoulder. He put his arm around her.

“Still is,” Gus said.

Around them, through the rain, the trees on the Common glistened murkily. They were alone in a green-gray silence made more quiet by the downrush of the rain.

Tom Winslow was sitting stiffly on a bench on the Mall on Commonwealth Avenue, near Berkeley Street, when Gus strolled four blocks down from Headquarters and sat beside him. Gus had some roasted peanuts he had bought in a brown paper bag and almost at once there were half a dozen pigeons around them. Gus offered the bag to Tom. Tom shook his head. Gus took a peanut from the bag and cracked it open. He dropped the shells on the ground and popped the nuts into his mouth. The pigeons ignored the shells.

“Gus, I’m scared,” Tom said.

“Things kind of closing in, Tom?”

“Yes. On you too. Aren’t you scared?”

Gus ate another peanut. He paid no attention to the pigeons that strutted anxiously around his feet.

“I haven’t thought about it, Tommy. I don’t guess I am.”

“Well, you’re a cop, you’re used to this kind of thing.”

“That’s not really it, Tommy,” Gus said. “Cops get scared. It’s just that I don’t give a shit.”

“They are talking about killing us,” Tom said. “You don’t give a shit about that?”

Gus shrugged. “Who’s ‘they’?” he said.

“Barry Levine, representing Butchie. He said I better control you.”

“You can’t control me, Tommy. You explain that to him?”

“Yes, but he said I had to. He said Pat Malloy might kill me, and he implied Butchie would too if he had to.”

Gus nodded thoughtfully.

“Well, what do you have to say about that?”

“Yeah. They might kill you. Butchie will do it when he thinks it will be better for business to kill you than to let you live. Patrick will kill you when he gets mad enough.”

“Jesus, Gus. You got me into this. He said you threatened Butchie with a gun.”

“Got his attention,” Gus said.

“Even if they don’t kill me. What if it all comes out? You put me in bed with these people, Gus. What if it breaks open and everything comes out? You go down too.”

“I told you before, Tommy, I don’t give a shit. And you are one of the things I don’t give a shit about most.”

Tom’s face got red and he started to cry.

“Gus, Jesus. For God sakes, if you don’t care about me. I got a wife. I got two kids. My daughter and your son are still close. I mean, I know they broke up. But they still see each other. They may get together again. Gus, I haven’t done you any harm. I’ve done what you said. You’ve got to get me out of this. Gus, please.”

Gus looked at Tommy with the same absent stare with which he had ignored the pigeons. He ate another peanut. Then he crumpled the bag, stood, walked to a trash container, and deposited the bag.

“Gus,” Tommy said.

“You’re on your own, Tommy.”

The tears were wet on Tom’s face.

“Gus,” he said again.

“Might be a smart thing for you to go tell everything to Chris. Then everyone goes down, and nobody’s got hold of your balls anymore.”

“You too, Gus,” Tom said. His voice was thick with crying. “You’d go down too.”

Gus shrugged.

“So fucking what?”

Gus turned away and started back up Berkeley Street. “You’re the Sheridan version of original sin, Tommy.”

Behind him the pigeons, deprived of peanuts, flew up briefly and settled on undulating wings to forage near the trash barrel.

This time as he came up the hidden path toward the secret house he felt as if he were swollen from the inside and the pressure would make him burst.

She wasn’t at the door when he arrived and he let himself in. The house was a mess. Where was she? Christ, of all times for her not to be here. He felt the inner self pressing harder on him. It made the blood pound behind his eyes. He called to her. She didn’t answer. He went to the bedroom and found her. She was naked, lying flat on the bed, smiling. Her small new breasts pointed straight up.

“She should have been waiting,” he said.

“I thought I’d give Tommy a surprise,” she said, and giggled. Waiting.

He stared at her nakedness. His throat felt closed, as if the air could barely force its way through the dwindling passage. She put her thumb in her mouth and turned it slowly, sucking it in imitation of something she had seen on television.

“Roll over onto your stomach,” he said.

His voice rasped as if he were speaking through an imperfect mechanical device. In their time together she had learned to do what he told her. She lay perfectly still facedown on the bed, her arms by her sides. over her for a moment looking at her little girl’s back, and then he took his father’s old Walther P38 automatic pistol from a drawer in the bedside table, and thumbed back the hammer, and put the muzzle just behind her right ear without touching her and closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.