James Hayman - The Cutting

Inside was a single sheet of lined paper, maybe torn from a school notebook. The message was written in pencil in the same block-letter style as the envelope. He supposed the writer was trying to disguise her handwriting. He assumed it was a her. The woman from Exchange Street and the cathedral. McCabe, it said, meet me Tuesday night at nine. It’s about the murder. Drive your red car. Come alone. The word ‘alone’ was underlined twice. Take the turnpike north to the Gray exit. Follow Gray Road about six miles. Take a right turn on Holder’s Farm Road. Go 1.3 miles and pull over onto the side. Flash your lights on and off twice to signal that you have not been followed. People are watching. When you get there, wait. I’ll come to your car.

The note wasn’t signed. He still didn’t know who the mystery woman was or if the note was even from her. Whoever wrote it obviously knew where he lived and what kind of car he drove. He considered the possibilities. One, it could be a legitimate meet with someone who felt threatened being seen with him. Two, it could be a crank sending him on a wild-goose chase. Or three, it could be someone setting him up for an ambush. The third possibility, the most dangerous, seemed the least likely. He wasn’t close enough to finding his quarry for anyone, including Spencer, to feel threatened enough to take him out.

McCabe went to the kitchen and got a plastic ziplock bag out of a kitchen drawer. He slipped the note inside. He’d have it checked for prints. His own would be on it, but so might someone else’s.

He heard footsteps coming up the stairs to their apartment. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He heard the sound of a key probing the lock. With his systems on high alert, McCabe’s hand went to his hip, where his gun should be and wasn’t. Shit. He slipped behind the door, where he wouldn’t be seen when it opened. He held his breath. The door opened. A familiar scent. He let the breath out.

Kyra stood in the front hall, arms loaded down with half a dozen plastic bags of groceries. She smiled. ‘Hello, handsome.’

‘I didn’t know you were coming. I thought you had to be in the studio, quote, half the night, unquote.’

‘You want me to leave? I can always find someone else to make a delicious dinner for. I don’t suppose either of you has eaten.’

McCabe had forgotten about dinner. ‘Oh yeah, food.’

‘McCabe, you’re a parent. You’re supposed to see that your kid gets decent nourishment.’

‘Hey, she has a whole bag of chocolate chip cookies right there on the floor next to her bed.’

‘Well, that takes a load off my mind.’ Kyra tried walking around McCabe to the kitchen. He blocked her path, relieved her of the bags, put them on the floor, put his arms around her, and settled his lips on the back of her neck. He slowly nibbled his way around to the front until he found her lips.

‘I’m starved,’ he murmured.

‘Me, too,’ she said, pulling away, ‘but you’ll have to settle for chicken breasts.’ She picked up the bags and headed for the kitchen. She looked back. ‘You may get a chance at mine later. If you’re lucky.’

McCabe loved watching Kyra cook. A foodie in her natural habitat, she moved around the kitchen with ease and an economy of motion. The simple act of chopping a bunch of scallions became performance art, Kyra’s fingers manipulating both the vegetables and the finely honed blade with astonishing speed. He poured a Macallan single malt for himself and a chilled Pouilly-Fume for her. They clinked glasses and sipped.

‘Tell Casey we’ll be eating in twenty minutes.’ He slid off his stool and went to deliver the message. Then he came back and climbed onto the stool again.

‘Okay?’ Kyra asked.

‘Yeah, fine. She’s in a bit of a sulk right now. Worried about seeing Sandy again.’

‘I don’t blame her. I would be, too, after three years.’

McCabe got up, stood behind Kyra, and began kneading the muscles along her shoulders and nuzzling the back of her neck.

‘Alright, that feels great, but either I cook or you nuzzle. We can’t do both.’

‘Are you sure — ’

‘Yes, I’ll cut my finger off.’

‘What I was going to say was, are you sure what you said about us not getting married being the right answer?’

She put the knife down and turned to face him. ‘Why are you bringing this up again?’

‘Because I love you?’

‘I love you, too — but it strikes me that your timing, bringing it up right now, just might be more about you and Casey and maybe you and Sandy than it is about you and me. That somewhere in your devious mind you think giving Casey a substitute mother will somehow take the pressure off.’

McCabe didn’t know if Kyra was right. She might be. He backed away and went to refill his Scotch. ‘Let’s wait until this visit with Sandy is over,’ said Kyra. ‘We can talk about it again.’

That night, after they made love, he dreamed of TwoTimes.

He dreamed he was climbing the stairs inside the house on Merced Street. Flight after flight of rotting boards wrapped around a central well. His two hands clutching a Glock 17. Pressed against the wall at the side of the stairs. No lights. No backup. Pitch black. Yet somehow he could see through the dark. A stink of decaying flesh growing stronger as he climbed each floor. His foot hit something soft.

‘Hey, kid, watch where you’re walking.’

He looked down. His brother Tommy splayed out on the stairs looking up. Smiling that patented smile no one could resist. Even though Tommy was dead, even though his smile was marred by two large exit wounds where the bullets that entered the back of his head came out the front, carrying with them a spray of brains and bits of Tommy the Narc’s oh-so-blue right eye.

Looking down he saw that the dead, but not dead, Tommy had a girl on each arm. Ellie Pearlman to his right. The Jewish girl who lived on the next block. His father’s voice rang out. ‘Tommy, are you still messing around with that Jew girl?’ On Tommy’s left was Mag O’Connell, her shirt off, her bra unhooked and hanging by one strap. Then Ellie Pearlman was gone and Tommy was standing behind Mag, his arms wrapped around her, one hand cupped under each of Mag’s large, soft white breasts with the big pink nipples. Tommy holding Mag’s breasts out for the ten-year-old McCabe to admire. ‘Hey, Mikey, bet you never saw anything like these before.’ He shook his head. No. No, he hadn’t. ‘Wanna have a feel?’ He hesitated before putting his hand out and stroking Mag’s soft, pliant flesh.

McCabe looked down. Tommy was dead again, Mag O’Connell gone. He climbed over the body and continued up the stairs. At the top, he saw TwoTimes, a black cigarette, the color of a cigar, dangling from his lips. ‘I’m tellin’ you like I told your brother, you may fuck with me once, but there’s none what fucks with me two times.’

By TwoTimes’s side stood a fat white man with a round pasty face, speaking in a white pasty voice. ‘Your Honor, we find the drug pusher, pimp, and cop-killer TwoTimes not guilty.’

‘Not guilty,’ repeated TwoTimes, still on the stairs. ‘I told you, hot shot, nobody fucks with TwoTimes two times.’

Then TwoTimes reached into his waistband and pulled out a small silver metal pistol, a little. 22, shiny like a kid’s cowboy cap gun. TwoTimes fired from the hip; the slug whizzed by McCabe’s left ear and embedded itself in the plaster wall. McCabe aimed and fired before TwoTimes could fire again. The shot from the Glock, so much louder than the. 22, echoed up and down the endless stairwell. McCabe watched the 9 mm slug, visible like a cartoon bullet, traverse the twenty feet between the end of the barrel and TwoTimes’s head. It entered TwoTimes precisely at the tip of his wide flat nose.