It was an odd moment for her, especially given what she'd just gone through. Sitting in this car, those memories still as fresh as the dried sweat on her skin, and thinking of Manuel doing business under a battery of hidden cameras, she felt a lack of definition-half crook and half cop-and couldn't help but link it to her life as a whole. Because for Sam, almost everything about her felt in limbo. She was no longer a kid, but still couldn't compare to an adult like her mentor, Joe Gunther. She was no longer a municipal cop, but part of an elite unit that still had to negotiate its way into almost every investigation. And she wasn't single, in the sense of being alone, but was involved with a maniac and now felt drawn to a criminal.
The whole package made her feel as if where she'd come from was long gone, and where she was headed was out of reach.
In that way, if in no other, she had to envy Greta Novak.
She left the car after seeing the two buyers slip out of the house and disappear into the bushes lining the driveway. She walked up to the front door, rang the bell in the coded tattoo that she and Manuel had agreed upon, and then used her key in the lock.
As she closed the door behind her, she more sensed than saw Manuel standing just around the corner, watchful and waiting.
"Honey, I'm home," she announced to the empty entry-way.
He appeared silently, tucking a pistol away under his shirt, a smile on his face. "Yes, darling. And supper's almost ready." His eyes narrowed as he took her in more fully. "What happened to you? You okay?"
She was struck by the genuine concern in his voice. "Yeah. Long story with no damage. I just fell down and got messed up. Hooked an ally, though. At least I think so. If I play him a little more, it might mean a big jump in business."
But he didn't seem to be listening. He'd approached her and now cupped her chin in his hand, raising her face to the light to better see it. "You been doing more than falling down."
She gently removed his hand. "I had to do some dope with him to prove I wasn't a cop. It was a bit of the bad old days I could've lived without."
"What'd he give you?"
"Said it was Ecstasy, but who knows? Anyhow, it made him happy and I'm okay. Might've been worse with coke-that's where I had a problem. We have any beer?"
They went to the kitchen together, where, to her surprise, dinner was in fact simmering on the stove, something in a pot that smelled very rich and very good. When on her own, Sam subsisted on any variety of boring food, so long as it came in either a can or a box, but she had to admit she'd always been fond of home-cooked meals.
"Wow. That looks delicious," she said, glancing at the stove while removing a beer from the fridge.
"Garbanzos con chorizos," he said. "Nothing fancy. Beans and sausage, with attitude. Should be ready in another half hour."
She opened the bottle and took a deep swallow, enjoying the cold beer washing straight down into her stomach. She wiped her lips with her wrist and sighed. "That and a hot shower and I'll be ready to eat like a horse."
"Take your time," he said, picking up a long spoon with which to stir the pot.
She went upstairs, taking the beer with her, pondering the domesticity of it all. Narcotics and home cooking-American capitalism, alive and well. Was this what advocates of legalized drug dealing saw as the future? And who on which side of the debate was under the biggest delusion? The futility of it all made her happy she was just a line soldier, following orders-and all the more eager for that soul-cleansing shower.
* * *
After dinner, already late in the evening, Sam and Manuel prepared for the high-volume part of the day, a standard in a business that tended toward the nocturnal. While he got ready to sell his assortment, she, refreshed and fed, set out to duplicate her earlier visit to Ralph by tracking down Stuey Nichols, from George Backer's list, someone Ralph clearly considered a competitor.
Nichols lived in a section of Rutland nicknamed the Gut. In the industrial days of seventy-five years earlier, the Gut was an ethnic, working-class neighborhood, initially made up of Italians, Irish, and others, but finally consisting of Italians overall, after the Irish contingent had pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere in town. The handle is actually a misnomer, since it conjures up images of Upton Sinclair's steaming, fetid slaughterhouses of old Chicago. In fact, although the Gut is located on the far side of the railroad tracks, it is a bland residential area of neat, straight avenues, old, expansive trees, and weathered, modest homes so small and so lacking in traditional New England detail that the neighborhood is also known, if less generally, as Nebraska.
It is a poor section-and host to a large affordable housing complex-but again not as crime-infested as the name implies. For that matter, when the hunt was on to find a suitable location for Sam and Manuel, the logic was to go where some of the city's bigger flare-ups with bikers and gangs had already occurred. That turned out to be north of the Gut's upper boundary of West Street, around Baxter and Maple.
That having been said, however, when Sam found out where Stuey lived, it didn't come as a surprise. Hard times had visited Rutland for long enough that only a few neighborhoods remained immune from Stuey's form of self-employment, and the Gut was certainly not among them. In fact, one of the latest of Rutland's heroin overdoses had occurred right here.
She found the house with relative ease off of South Street, surrounded by darkness and quiet. At this time of night, the rest of Rutland, with its traffic and bright lights, seemed very far away.
Stu Nichols was clearly not into home maintenance. By the feeble glow of a distant streetlamp, Sam picked her way carefully through an odd and inexplicable assortment of holes, cinder blocks, and heaved-up chunks of stony earth, along with a scattering of seriously used children's toys.
The house itself looked perfectly suited to its battlefield yard.
Sam made it to the weather-beaten front porch, illuminated by a harsh yellow bulb hanging overhead from a wire, a corona of interested night bugs circling its orbit in tight, continuous flight. The front door was wide open, and she could see through the screen door a living room rigged like a stage set for a war movie. Seeing no buzzer and hearing children crying and adults shouting somewhere in the back, she pounded on the door frame hard enough to break it.
"Who the fuck's that?" an angry male voice demanded.
"Greta Novak," she shouted, figuring the female voice alone would draw him out.
She wasn't wrong. A skinny, balding man in his forties stumbled into the room, squinting to see through the screening. "Who're you?" he asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, no doubt to make himself doubly attractive.
"Are you Stuey Nichols?"
"That any of your business?"
"I'm a friend of Jimmy Hollowell's, picking up where he left off," she said. "I thought we should maybe talk, since Ralph Meiner called you a pissant when I told him that you and I combined could put him out of business."
Nichols straightened. "He called me a pissant? That little prick?"
There was an outburst of renewed crying from inside the house. Nichols swore, turned on his heel, and vanished from view Moments later, Sam heard him screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs, the slamming of a door, and then silence.
Stuey reappeared, showing his yellow teeth in a welcoming smile. "Come on in, lady," he said, swinging open the door on squealing hinges. "What'd you say your name was?"
"Greta Novak."
He stared at her in surprise, studying her face as if she'd sprouted a horn. "No shit," he said after a pause. "You a foreigner?"