After he left, Bob went to his basement. He avoided it whenever he could, though the floor was white, as white as he’d been able to make it, whiter than it had ever been through most of its existence. He unlocked a cupboard over the old wash sink his father had often used after one of his adventures in paneling, and removed a yellow and brown Chock full o’Nuts can from the shelf. He pulled fifteen thousand from it. He put ten in his pocket and five back in the can. He looked around again at the white floor, at the black oil tank against the wall, at the bare bulbs.
Upstairs he gave Cassius a bunch of treats. He rubbed his ears and his belly. He assured the animal that he was worth ten thousand dollars.
Bob, three deep at the bar for a solid hour between 11 and midnight, looked through a sudden gap in the crowd and saw Eric sitting at the wobbly table under the Narragansett mirror. The Super Bowl was an hour over, but the crowd, drunk as shit, hung around. Eric had one arm stretched across the table and Bob followed it, saw that it connected to something. An arm. Nadia’s arm. Nadia’s face stared back at Eric, unreadable. Was she terrified? Or something else?
Bob, filling a glass with ice, felt like he was shoveling the cubes into his own chest, pouring them into his stomach and against the base of his spine. What did he know about Nadia, after all? He knew that he’d found a near-dead dog in the trash outside her house. He knew that Eric Deeds only came into his life after Bob had met her. He knew that her middle name, thus far, could be Lies of Omission.
When he was twenty-eight, Bob had come into his mother’s bedroom to wake her for Sunday Mass. He’d given her a shake and she hadn’t batted at his hand as she normally did. So he rolled her toward him and her face was scrunched tight, her eyes too, and her skin was curbstone-gray. Sometime in the night, after Matlock and the 10 o’clock news, she’d gone to bed and woke to God’s fist clenched around her heart. Probably hadn’t been enough air left in her lungs to cry out. Alone in the dark, clutching the sheets, that fist clenching, her face clenching, her eyes scrunching, the terrible knowledge dawning that, even for you, it all ends. And right now.
Standing over her that morning, imagining the last tick of her heart, the last lonely wish her brain had been able to form, Bob felt a loss unlike any he’d ever known or expected to know again.
Until tonight. Until now. Until he learned what that look on Nadia’s face meant.
By 1:50, the crowd was gone, just Eric and Nadia and an old, stringent, functioning alcoholic named Millie who’d amble off to the assisted living place up on Pearl Street at 1:55 on the dot.
Eric, who had been coming to the bar for shots of Powers for the last hour, pushed back from the table and pulled Nadia across the floor with him. He sat her on a stool and Bob got a good look in her face finally, saw something he still couldn’t fully identify-but it definitely wasn’t excitement or smugness or the bitter smile of a victor. Maybe something worse than all of that-despair.
Eric gave him an all-teeth smile and spoke through it, softly. “When’s the old biddie pack it in?”
“A couple minutes.”
“Where’s Marv?”
“I didn’t call him in.”
“Why not?”
“Someone’s gonna take the blame for this, I figured it might as well be me.”
“How noble of-”
“How do you know her?”
Eric looked over at Nadia hunched on the stool beside him. He leaned into the bar. “We grew up on the same block.”
“He give you that scar?”
Nadia stared at him.
“Did he?”
“She gave herself the scar,” Eric Deeds said.
“You did?” Bob asked her.
Nadia looked at the bar top. “I was pretty high.”
“Bob,” Eric said, “if you fuck with me-even in the slightest-it doesn’t matter how long it takes me, I’ll come back for her. And if you got any plans, like Eric-doesn’t-walk-back-out-of-here plans? Not that you’re that type of guy, but Marv might be? You got any ideas in that vein, Bob, my partner on the Richie Whalen hit, he’ll take care of you both.”
Eric sat back as mean old Millie left the same tip she’d been leaving since Sputnik-a quarter-and slid off her stool. She gave Bob a rasp that was ten percent vocal chords and ninety percent Virginia Slims Ultra Light 100s. “Yeah, I’m off.”
“You take care, Millie.”
She waved it away with a, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and pushed open the door.
Bob locked it behind her and came back behind the bar. He wiped down the bar top. When he reached Eric’s elbows, he said, “Excuse me.”
“Go around.”
Bob wiped the rag in a half-circle around Eric’s elbows.
“Who’s your partner?” Bob said.
“Wouldn’t be much of a threat if you knew who he was, would he, Bob?”
“But he helped you kill Richie Whalen?”
Eric said, “That’s the rumor, Bob.”
“More than a rumor.” Bob wiped in front of Nadia, saw red marks on her wrists where Eric had yanked them. He wondered if there were other marks he couldn’t see.
“Well then it’s more than a rumor, Bob. So there you go.”
“There you go what?”
“There you go,” Eric scowled. “What time is it, Bob?”
Bob placed ten thousand dollars on the bar. “You don’t have to call me by my name all the time.”
“I will see what I can do about that, Bob.” Eric thumbed the bills. “What’s this?”
“It’s the ten grand you wanted for Cash.”
Eric pursed his lips. “All the same, let’s look in the safe.”
“You sure?” Bob said. “I’m happy to buy him from you for ten grand.”
“How much for Nadia, though?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
Bob thought about that new wrinkle for a bit and poured himself a closing-time shot of vodka. He raised it to Eric Deeds and then drank it down. “You know, Marv used to have a problem with blow about ten years ago?”
“I did not know that, Bob.”
Bob shrugged, poured them all a shot of vodka. “Yeah, Marv liked the coke too much but it didn’t like him back.”
Eric drank Nadia’s shot. “Getting close to 2 here, Bob.”
“He was more of a loan shark then. I mean, he did some fence, but mostly he was a shark. There was this kid? Into Marv for a shitload of money. Real hopeless case when it came to the dogs and basketball. Kinda kid could never pay back all he owed.”
Eric drank his own shot. “One fifty-seven, Bob.”
“The thing, though? This kid, he actually hit on a slot at Mohegan. Hit for twenty-two grand. Which is just a little more than he owed Marv.”
“And he didn’t pay Marv back, so you and Marv got all hard on him and I’m supposed to learn-”
“No, no. He paid Marv. Paid him every cent. What the kid didn’t know, though, was that Marv had been skimming. Because of the coke habit? And this kid’s money was like manna from heaven as long as no one knew it was from this kid. See what I’m saying?”
“Bob, it’s fucking one minute to 2.” Sweat on Eric’s lip.
“Do you see what I’m saying?” Bob asked. “Do you understand the story?”
Eric looked to the door to make sure it was locked. “Fine, yeah. This kid, he had to be ripped off.”
“He had to be killed.”
Out of the side of his eye, a quick glance. “Okay, killed.”
Bob could feel Nadia’s eyes lock on him suddenly, her head cock a bit. “That way, he couldn’t ever say he paid off Marv and no one else could either. Marv uses the money to cover all the holes, he cleans up his act, it’s like it never happened. So that’s what we did.”