Maybe he had made the whole thing up. Maybe his dead-father mania had grown like a spider to spread its hairy legs into his brain and drive him, finally, insane. Other than that lawyer at Ponzio’s, whom Kyle would never be able to find, or Robert Spangler, who now was dead, no one besides Kyle had seen him clearly. And without any physical evidence, to even broach the story to someone, anyone, even that Detective Ramirez, would be a no-win proposition. If he was telling the truth, she would mistakenly think him crazy; if he was relaying the cracked fantasies of a schizophrenic personality, she would correctly think him crazy. No, he’d keep it to himself, tell no one, except maybe Kat, only because he told everything to Kat.
But he wondered if the truth or falsity of his father’s reappearance even mattered. As he sat there, in the cool of the early dawn, watching the horizon lighten above the hard landscape of the asphalt parking lot and the cornucopia of crap beyond, waiting for his father to return and prove him sane, the years suddenly contracted like a clap of hands. And here he was, sitting on the porch of his mother’s house, waiting for his father. Or on the mound, waiting for his father. Or in a bar or at a softball game or in the heat of the night, waiting for his father. A lifetime spent waiting for his father.
Sitting there now, facing the coming of a new day, Kyle realized, whether the old man was a figment of Kyle’s own feverish imagination or a brutal and disappointing reality, that Liam Byrne wasn’t coming back. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever. And Kyle was okay with that. Surprisingly. Astonishingly. Okay.
Whatever had happened in these past few days had burned the need right out of him. It was as if the filial relationship he had craved for so long had happened in a matter of hours, moving swiftly from childish love to adolescent rebellion to a sort of blind adult mimicry to a declaration of independence. And he no longer felt deprived, he no longer felt gypped out of some grand paternal presence, he no longer harbored any illusions about how terrific his life might have turned out if his father had only been a father and not some detached presence that died way too soon for Kyle to cope. No, as the bright top of the sun rose above the cement boxes of New Jersey, he felt lucky. Lucky to have had his mother to himself for as long as he had. Lucky to be young and strong, with opportunities to seize and a future to mold. Lucky to be free.
He was certain that would be the end of the father sightings that had plagued him since the funeral fourteen years before, but he was wrong.
CHAPTER 59
SHE WASN’T DETECTIVE RAMIREZ on this night, she was Lucia,
her badge and gun worn not on the hip but stashed inside her bag, her hair up, her lips freshly glossed. She was wearing a silk blouse, a pleated skirt, spiky red high heels, and she didn’t need any leering Neanderthal to tell her she looked damn good, she knew it already.
Even as she had passed through the administrative and media whirlwind that accompanied the closing of the Laszlo Toth murder case, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking of this night with a visceral anticipation. She had imagined something romantic and intimate, something candlelit and soft, something leading to something, leading most definitely to something. And so she was keenly disappointed to find herself vastly overdressed while sitting at a Formica table at Bubba’s with Kyle and his motley crew, drinking from pitchers of Rolling Rock and just hanging.
“So is it heavy?” said Kyle’s squat friend with all the tattoos, who was named Skitch.
“I’m used to it,” said Ramirez.
“Can I see it?”
“No.”
“Dude, lighten up,” said Kyle.
“I’m just asking to see it. It’s not like I want to take out a window or anything.”
It was a laid-back gabfest, going nowhere quite slowly, and she was frankly bored. Add to that the way Kyle was back to dressing in his black Chuck Taylors, cargo shorts, and a ringer T-shirt, looking very young and very aimless and very much without the dangerous edge she had found so attractive during the Toth affair, and the whole thing left her wondering what she’d been so hopped up about in the first place. She began checking her watch, wondering when would be a polite time simply to leave.
“Don’t mind Skitch,” said the bar’s owner, that skinny Bubba Jr. “It’s not often we have a celebrity with us,” he said, hoisting a beer in Ramirez’s honor.
Ramirez forced a smile and raised her beer in return. She and Henderson had become briefly famous on the local and national news shows for neutralizing the now-infamous Toth murderer as he’d tried to add a U.S. senator to his list of victims.
“You seemed to like being in front of the camera,” said Kyle.
“Just part of the job,” she said. But she had liked it, and was good at it, and realized during her fourth television interview that the center of attention was exactly where she wanted to be. But hanging at a bar with these losers wasn’t helping her get there, that was for sure.
“You know where they make this now?” said the old toothless man, staring sadly at his beer. “New Jersey. It makes me want to puke.”
“I feel the same way,” said another older man, with a bulbous nose, whom Kyle had introduced as his Uncle Max. “But it’s from them pills I take for my back. So what’s going to happen to that senator?”
“My guess is not a damn thing,” said Ramirez.
Senator Truscott had held a press conference to announce his horror at what his cousin had done. Truscott had promised full cooperation with the ongoing police investigation even as he vowed to continue to vigorously represent the interests of Pennsylvanians in the United States Senate.
“But it’s the end of his presidential ambitions at least,” said Bubba Jr.
“Don’t bet on that,” said Ramirez. “He’s getting coverage in the national press, he’s gaining a celebrity beyond politics. That stuff can be intoxicating.”
“And it’s not really his decision to run or not, is it?” said Kyle. “His mother has been calling all the shots for him since he was a baby. That’s a hard habit to kick.”
“It’s going to be tough for her to keep doing it from where she is now,” said Ramirez. “They put her in an asylum in North Carolina. We’ve been trying to speak to her, but they claim she’s suffering from shock and dementia.”
“The only dementia she’s suffering from is her own overblown sense of entitlement,” said Kyle. “She married a Truscott, her offspring is entitled to the presidency, and there’s nothing she won’t do to make it happen.”
“What a fun gal,” said Kat.
“Maybe sometime I’ll show the movie we found in Spangler’s apartment,” said Ramirez. “Puts the old lady in a whole new light.”
Kyle raised his beer. “Dudes, I have, like, a toast.”