T. Parker: Red Light

She felt the blood rise to her face, the quiet acceleration of her heartbeat. “What’s to leave out?”

Brighton sighed, held Tim up for a face-to-face. “Tim, your grandfather paid for the storage of the Bailey evidence for ten years. Twenty-eight dollars a month, cash. He helped me, Tim. He helped an old friend stay above the bullshit that we all have to live with every day. That’s what we cops do. Anyway, Tim, you can figure your old grandpa into the conspiracy, if that’s what you want to do. He’s part of it. It would come out and he’d suffer. But he did the right thing. He understood the difference between being a child, like you, and being a man.”

Brighton looked at Merci, his eyes sharp and cold. “Jim killed that girl to protect himself and his friends. We covered it up for the good of the department, Sergeant. We covered it up to help get me where I needed to go. To help Frank Stills onto the Board of Supervisors. To keep the county clean. To make it a good place to live. To bring up kids like this one.”

“Don’t blame my son for your crimes, Brighton. That sickens me. It’s all disposable with you, isn’t it? Disposable law. Disposable friends. Disposable women. Who did Meeks and Owen get to beat up Jesse Acuna?”

“Some young L.A. cops. We learned of the arrangement through the tapes, used it to get a substation we needed badly. That was part of the deal when Stills stepped up and Meeks stepped down. What’s it matter now?”

Brighton stood, Tim still between his hands. He held out the infant and Merci took him.

“Do the right thing for this little guy. He’ll never thank you. He’ll never know. But you will. Welcome to the world, Rayborn. Rough place. Every once in a while, you get a chance to do something good. Take it.”

He touched Tim’s cheek, looked at Merci without expression, then walked out.

Merci walked the little cottage with her heart pounding hard and a dark sleepiness hanging over her. She called Zamorra for the third time that day — just his message machine at home. She managed to get a home phone number for Janine’s parents. They talked a while. They said Paul had spoken highly of her. They hadn’t heard from or seen him since they buried their daughter. That was over a week ago. He’d looked terrible that day, eyes looking past everybody and everything for something they couldn’t find. He said something about getting away for a while.

She got to Mike’s place just before seven, sat in the car until she saw him open the front door. The dogs barked and bayed. The night moonless and cold and the stars looked too far away to matter.

Mike stood in the doorway. The house light behind him seemed the only light in Modjeska Canyon, the only light left in the world. Tim was in his car seat, head to the side and a little forward, shoulder straps secure, like a tiny parachutist on his way down.

She climbed out of the Impala, pain biting her side as she stood walked up the stepping-stones toward the door. She stopped halfway.

“Hello, Mike,” she said. It was cold enough that her breath condensed in the night air. She could see the faint clouds as she breathed.

“Hi, Merci.”

She had already decided not to go in, but it hurt and angered her he didn’t ask her.

“I’m sorry for what I did. I made a bad call, a real bad one. I never made a worse one. Well, maybe that’s not true.”

She heard her voice catch and she felt the hot tears running down cheeks but she wouldn’t crack. It was crucial that she not, for reasons she could not have explained.

“But I’m sorry Mike. I just... I just can’t tell you how sorry I am to have put you through all that. I wish so bad there was a way to take it back, not do what I did.”

His features were hard to make out with the light behind him. Maybe he wanted it that way.

“I accept your apology,” he said quietly.

“And I... you know I really cared about you, Mike. I cared about you more than anybody but Tim, Jr., and Dad, but I was always just... so... shitty at it. I couldn’t get over Hess and I took it out on you and nothing made sense after a while. But you were a good friend and a lover and I... I didn’t ever intend to hurt you like I did.”

“I know.”

She wanted to tell him she loved him, but she knew she did not love him and had never loved him in the way that she had wanted to. They were the wrong words. They were words for a time that hadn’t happened yet, and maybe would never happen.

“Forgive me.”

Mike said nothing for a long minute. “All right.”

“I mean genuinely forgive me? If I kneel down in front of you and look up and ask you to forgive me will you touch my head and forgive me?”

He seemed about to speak but didn’t. She walked the rest of the way to the door and knelt down on the cold hard porch in front of him. The wound in her side jumped with pain and her leg felt hot and stiff. When she looked up she still couldn’t see the expression on his face.

“Forgive me.”

She watched the vapor come from his nose.

“You sold me cheap, Merci. The worst of it all is that after everything I am and everything I tried to be, you believed the worst about me. You believed I’d kill that girl.”

“Forgive me for that, too.”

He shut the door and locked it.

Then she heard the car pull in behind her, saw the face of the house bathed by headlights. She struggled up slowly, got her balance, turned and squinted. The lights went out and a door opened.

A moment later Lynda Coiner walked toward her.

“I’m sorry,” Coiner said. Then she hustled past Merci like someone trying to get out of the rain. The door opened up to receive her, then shut again. Merci heard the dead bolt slide into place.

Later that night she sat by the fire with her father, up close to get warmth into her aching bones. Another storm front had swung down from the north and the rain came fast and hard against the roof.

Clark was stretched into his favorite recliner, his long body not quite comfortable in its contours, his hands folded across his lap and flames flickering in his glasses.

It seemed like she had seen him in this position for as long as she could remember:: sitting calmly by a fire while his wife fluttered around and made conversation that Clark only took a partial interest in, Answering quietly. Trying to dodge an argument. And if his black hair had thinned and grayed, and if his straight frame had bent and softened, he was still the same man entranced by the fire, intent upon it, as if the flames could offer him answers his life could not.

“Dad, did you know what the twenty-eight bucks a month was for?”

His attention turned from the fireplace to her, but he said nothing. Merci thought: Here I am, replacing my mother, trying to draw him something he’d rather not talk about. Tough.

She continued. “I read Jim O’Brien’s suicide letter to his son. He pretty much spelled it out. As an emissary of Bill Owen and Ralph Meeks, Brighton suggested that O’Brien shut up Patti Bailey for good. When that didn’t work Brighton got Big Pat to threaten him, to say they’d rat out Jim to his wife if he wouldn’t kill the girl. And that did work. But Brighton and Big Pat didn’t destroy the crime-scene evidence to protect Jim, like they promised. They kept it and used it to make him threaten Owen and Meeks. Brighton had both of them on tape with her, talking about arranging the Acuna beating. That was probably enough. But O’Brien threatening to point a finger at them clinched the deal, sent them both into early retirement. Good for Brighton. Part of the deal was that he got Owen’s nod as successor. Vance Putnam, the interim sheriff, was never a player.”