She’d be a good mother, he was confident of that. That hadn’t been on his mind when he married her. He chose her because she’d be a good companion, an attractive and personable partner in social situations. And now they were going to have a baby, and she was going to be a good mother.
“We can live in a trailer,” she’d said, when the hedge fund turned out to be a Ponzi scam, when it was clear that the money was irretrievably gone. “I don’t care where we live, or how we live. We’re two people who love each other. We’ll get by.”
But of course she cared, and of course he cared, and they couldn’t swap this house for a double-wide, surrounded by the kind of neighbors who wound up flunking sobriety tests on Cops. They loved each other, but how long would they go on loving each other in a trailer park?
He said he’d have the casserole for tomorrow’s lunch. He’d had an interview, he told her, and it was promising, with a decent prospect of some case-by-case consulting work. The hours would be irregular and the work off the books, but he’d be well paid. If he got the work.
She said she’d keep her fingers crossed.
He slept late, and when he did get up she’d already left for a doctor’s appointment. He found the casserole in the refrigerator and nuked a helping in the microwave. It was spicy, and not his usual breakfast fare, but he ate it with good appetite. The coffee she’d made was still hot, and he drank two cups.
He’d slept soundly, and any dreams he’d had were gone and forgotten when he opened his eyes. But he’d gone to sleep with a question, and now the answer was miraculously there.
He got in his car, drove for an hour and a half.
The town he’d picked was one he’d been to only a handful of times, and not at all in at least ten years. At first glance it looked the same, but then it hadn’t changed much since before he was born. It had been a mill town, and the industry moved south after the Second World War, and the local economy had settled into a permanent state of depression. There were changes over the years — strip malls thrown up, a drive-in theater torn down — but the town went on, always a decade or two behind the curve.
There was still a Main Street, and there were still shops on it, but it seemed to Colliard that there were more vacant storefronts than he remembered. A sign of the times? Or just the next phase in the continuing decline of the place?
But what did it matter? He wasn’t looking to start a business, and if he did he wouldn’t start it here. He hadn’t been here in years, and in an hour he’d be gone, and it would be more years before he returned. If he ever came back at all.
Oddly, there were places he recognized. The drugstore on the corner of Main and Edward. The sporting goods store diagonally across the street. The little shop halfway up the block — Mulleavy’s, the sign announced. He remembered the name, but had long since forgotten what it was Mulleavy sold, if he’d ever known in the first place.
Two doors down from Mulleavy’s was a hardware store. He noted it, unable to recall it from a previous visit, and he thought of another hardware store, and that made the decision for him. He circled the block, parked right in front of the hardware store. There were plenty of empty parking spaces, right there on Main Street, and that told you pretty much all you needed to know about the town, and what it was like to be in business there.
Be doing the man a favor.
He stood out front for a moment, checked out the fly-specked merchandise in the front window. The shops on either side were vacant, and the For Rent signs in their windows looked as though they’d been there forever. Colliard drew a breath, let it out, opened the door.
No customers, and no one else either, not for the moment. Then a man in his sixties, balding, round-shouldered, emerged from the back in response to the little bell that had announced Colliard’s entrance.
“Hello there,” he said brightly. “We get that rain yet?”
Were they going to talk about the weather? No, the hell with that.
Colliard drew the gun, watched the man’s eyes widen behind his glasses. He shot him three times in the chest and once behind the ear.
Wipe the gun and drop it? What, and then go looking for another one?
He put it in his pocket and left.
The first thing he did was get out of town. There’d been no one around to hear the shots, and it might be an hour before anyone entered the store. The dead man was on the floor behind the counter, where he couldn’t be seen from the street. So there was no rush to quit the scene, but Colliard wanted to be away from there all the same.
He drove well within the speed limit, knowing that a routine traffic stop was more to be feared than that someone would actually come looking for him. He had the murder weapon in his pocket, and a paraffin test would establish that he’d fired a gun recently. But they wouldn’t know that unless he found a way to call attention to himself, and this was something he’d long ago learned to avoid.
He drove for a while, and when he stopped for a cup of coffee he picked a diner quite like the one with the nice waitress and the tasty sandwich and fries. All he had was coffee, and he took his time drinking it, letting himself sink into the reality of the present moment.
He went over it all in his mind. And he tried to take his own emotional temperature, tried to determine how he felt.
As far as he could tell, he didn’t feel a thing.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. There was something he felt, something hovering on the edge of thought, visible only out of the corner of his eyes. And what was it?
Took him a moment, but he figured out what it was. It was relief.
He took out his cell phone, thought for a moment, put it back in his pocket. The diner had a pay phone, and he spent a couple of quarters and placed a call. The girl who answered put Sully on the phone, and Colliard said, “That order you placed the other day, I wanted to tell you I’ll be able to fill it tomorrow.”
“You sure of that, are you?”
“It might take an extra day.”
“A day one way or the other doesn’t matter. The question is do you have the goods for the transaction.”
“I do.”
“It seems to me,” Sully said, “that it’s a hard question to answer ahead of the event, if you take my meaning.”
“I know it for a fact,” Colliard said. “What I did, I went and took inventory.”
“You took inventory.”
“Checked the shelves myself.”
He finished his coffee, and stayed at the table long enough to make another phone call. He used his cell phone for this one, there was no reason not to, and called his own home. The first three rings went unanswered. Then his wife picked up just before the phone went to Voice Mail.
He asked how it went at the doctor’s office, and was pleased to learn that everything went well, that the baby’s heartbeat was strong and distinct, that all systems were go. “He said I’m going to be a perfectly wonderful mother,” she reported.
“Well, I could have told you that.”
“You sound—”
“What?”
“Better,” she said. “Stronger. More upbeat.”
“I’m going to be a perfectly wonderful father.”
“Oh, you are, you are. I’m just happy you’re in such good spirits.”
“It must have been the casserole. I had some for breakfast.”
“Not cold?”
“No, I microwaved it.”
“And it was good?”
“Better than good.”
“Not too spicy? So early in the day?”