Tom Piccirilli: The Fever Kill

No wonder Rebecca cut loose like a wildcat. Her parents were gone but she was living in the vault full of their memories. She'd have nowhere else to go but she'd still never want to go home. She'd stay out all night long with anybody, just so long as she could stay away from the place. The sex and stealing and late-night slap-arounds would just make life a bit more fun and bearable.

He noticed she was awake and watching him. She stirred beside him on the couch and groaned.

"Are you going to jump me?" she asked.

"Would you want me to?"

"You said that before."

"It's the same answer to the same question."

She thought about it. "I don't know. I don't think so. Not tonight anyway."

"Just as well."

A woman who'd spent years throwing only one thing around didn't like to have it thrown back. A red shadow crossed her face. "What do you mean by that?"

"It means I don't feel like jumping you, Reb. Not tonight anyway."

"Why not?"

"It's been a long day."

She shook her head at him like he was crazy.

They all judged you and found you wanting. The pervs and the misfits, the dealers and the addicts. A guy who'd just raped a grandmother would still give you the stink-eye.

Now here Crease was, with a beaten girl living in a rotted home, and she was staring at him like he was nuts. Where did it come from? This complex they all had, thinking they were better than the next person even when they were down in the sewer. Sometimes it made him laugh. Sometimes it didn't.

He lit a cigarette and sat there smoking in silence. It was weird, but he only smoked in front of other people, never when he was alone. What the hell did that say about him? He shifted so the sheathed knife wouldn't dig into his thigh.

She stared into his face and said, "Why are you back? Why in God's name would anybody come back?"

"I've got unfinished business."

"It's been, what, ten years?"

"Yeah."

"Any business you can let go for ten years is finished."

It wasn't true, not quite anyway, but he didn't blame her for thinking so. He'd performed CPR on dying men who lived long enough to confess to sins from forty, fifty years ago. Talking about crimes that were so old they weren't even on the books anymore. Begging forgiveness from their long-dead wives, friends who wouldn't even remember their names. Some of it never got finished.

"You could've killed him," she said. "Jimmy. The way you took his blade away from him. You handled him like he was nothing."

He thought she'd ask why he hadn't. Why he hadn't killed a guy he had nothing against anymore except the vestiges of an adolescent venom, as if it was the normal thing to do. You meet a guy in a parking lot and you get a little steamed so you take him out of the game. The modern world was an impatient place. It wanted you to run to extremes.

But she didn't ask. She stretched her legs out over his lap and he began rubbing her calves, the way he used to do with Joan back when they were first married. She'd coo and moan with pleasure and eventually sit up and slide into his lap and they'd make love. He'd hold her tight like he was sinking into a well while she panted in his ear.

"You got a wife?" Reb asked.

"Divorced."

She nodded, as if it were the only answer she ever heard. "Kids?"

"Yeah."

"How many?"

"I don't know," he told her. "Six or seven, I think."

She smirked at him. "You a strutting tomcat now? How the hell can you not know how many kids you have?"

It was another good question. He said, "I legally adopted my sister-in-law's kids. My wife asked me to. It seemed like the right thing to do. I was trying to be everything my father wasn't. I have an eight-year-old son named Stevie. He's very smart and extremely mature. He hates me."

"Why's that?"

"I walked out on them, more or less, a few years back."

"Why?"

"It was part of the job."

"Which job?"

No reason to tell her anything but the truth. "I'm a cop."

It got her nodding again. "Like your father," she said. "

"Yes, like my father."

Thinking that, except for the man's one big mistake, he'd always been pretty clean. The weight of the world had broken him down a piece at a time. Crease's mother's death had been the final crush.

Crease thought, Me, I get to party and deal drugs and double-tap bastards to the back of the head, and I get paid for it from both sides. I have medals that I can never wear, not that I'd want to.

"Why did a cop have to walk out on his family?" she asked.

"I was undercover. I had to build a whole new life."

"I didn't think they gave cops with families that kind of job."

"They don't," Crease told her. "I ran into a dealer named Tucco one night in a bar. I made up a name on the spot. We got to be friends. Pretty soon he was inviting me back to his penthouse to meet his posse. Most of them were low-level traffickers, but a couple were the real thing. Guys moving two hundred keys a year. Big scores. Without even trying I was hanging out in his inner circle. The department had been trying to place a man undercover in there for a couple years but Tucco always sniffed them out."

"So why didn't he sniff you out?"

"I don't know. Maybe because I was never much interested in busting him. I liked him, we had some good times."

"How old was your son then?"

The question took him back. He stopped rubbing her legs and lit another cigarette. "Almost six."

"You didn't give them up for the job. You liked your new life. The drugs and money and women, right?"

There was no way to explain it to her. She had small-town reasoning. She thought it was all about cash and getting laid because that's all there was to reach for in a place like Hangtree. She'd never understand what real action was. How your nerve endings were always on fire. How, no matter who you were with, you had to look over your shoulder, had to always be ready for the double-cross, the knife in the neck. Had to stay sharp. Crease never did any drugs and Tucco liked that about him, that he could be just as crazy without getting high as the other guys were when they got wasted. It was all part of being out on the rim. He couldn't trust his captain or the commissioner any more than he could trust Tucco. Maybe less.

Reb let out a throaty laugh full of base assumptions. "You traded in your old lady and eight or nine kids for the chance to roll around in the big life. To take a pop in the vein, drive the best cars, wear diamond pinky rings. Strippers and whores all the time." She stared through him, not seeing him at all. Seeing somebody else completely. Is that what she thought the long green got you? Pinky rings? "You like the dirty life."

"Mostly," he admitted. "They're better off without me anyway. Joan needs a different kind of man, someone who can give her a stable life. Someone who comes home at a decent hour, who puts in his time around the house. Makes sure she's not alone too often. I was never very responsible. She's a very good mother, to Stevie and to me too, when you get down to it. She deserves somebody better."

"You're getting maudlin."

"Yeah. Being back in Hangtree is doing it to me."

She groaned as she struggled to sit up. He helped her get to her feet. She took more aspirin and downed the rest of the coffee. "You got any bags? Clothes?"

"No, nothing."

"You didn't plan on coming back here, did you?"

"It just sort of happened."

She gave him the eye, led him upstairs and said, "You can take my parents' room, right here. Has its own bathroom and shower. Not much of my father's will fit you, but anything that does you can have. I'm down the hall."

"I remember," he said.

~*~

He dreamed of Mary Burke, the girl his father had killed.

She was four or five years younger than him, but he vaguely remembered her from grammar school recess, when all the grades came out to play together. Burnished copper hair and large, almond eyes. A girl who usually sat alone watching the others without jealousy or interest, who preferred her own company. She usually carried a doll or a teddy bear. He was ten when he heard the news his old man had accidentally iced her.