“It’s getting dark, Doc,” Chris rasped, shaking with exaggerated palsy. “Smoke? Can I get a last smoke?” He laughed. And instantly stopped the phony seizures. This was my brother’s fucked-up sense of humor, mocking my motherly concern.
“Sure. Laugh it up.” I plopped on my ass and watched the flames dance, bathing the musty old room in a brilliant amber-orange hue. Shadows stretched across the hardwood, up water-stained walls, rendering my brother and me distorted versions of ourselves.
I tossed him the cigarette pack. He bent far forward and lit one directly from the fire.
“How’d you know that guy wasn’t really a cop?” he asked me, hopping up, suddenly spry.
“Fisher. You remember him?”
“Sure. You went to second base with his girlfriend back in high school. Gina something. Said she had a terrific rack.”
“How the fuck do you remember that?”
“Because you told me.”
Guy couldn’t get it together long enough to visit a dentist, but he remembered me copping a feel in the tenth grade.
“Whatever. So Fisher works as an investigator for an insurance company down in Concord, and he recognized the name. Seems a couple weeks ago, this detective turns up dead. Anyways, doesn’t matter now. The important part is, we figured it out as they were handing you over.”
“You tell Turley?”
“I tried to. Wasn’t a lot of time. Anyone pretending to be a cop wasn’t taking you for ice cream.” I looked up at him from the floor. “When did you figure it out?”
He screwed up his face like he had to think about it. “Probably when he said he was going to shoot me in the head and bury me beneath the ice.”
“You could’ve told him I had the disc.”
“For what? So he could cut a hole big enough for two?” Chris turned. “Did you look at it?”
“Yeah. So did Fisher and Charlie.”
“And?”
“And… I can’t say for sure. Could be Mr. Lombardi. There’s not much to go on. Only a couple pics show a face. Grainy as hell.” I reached to get back my cigarettes.
“That’s what I figured. Pretty stupid of me, eh?”
“I don’t know, Chris. Guy has the same hunched posture, and the computer did come from Lombardi. If you’d gotten more evidence, maybe you could’ve-”
“What? Been a hero?” He winced a grin.
“Did that Roger Paul guy say who he worked for?”
“Didn’t have to,” Chris said, drawing deeply on his cigarette. “So what’s the plan, Wyatt Earp? We gonna smoke ’em outta their holes?” He laughed until he coughed a fit.
Despite his “What, me worry?” act, my brother looked more peaked, drained, emaciated than usual. I was hardly an expert on the drug lifestyle and its physical toll, but I knew once you’d been on them long enough, you started needing them to survive, like food. And, boy, did he look hungry.
“Haven’t really thought this through, little brother, have you?”
“Didn’t exactly have the option of planning.” I checked my phone. Again. No bars. No surprise.
“You know they can trace your cell? Tri-ang-u-late,” he said, pronouncing every syllable. “They’re gonna find us eventually, you know that, right?”
I tried to formulate an escape, conceive a plan. Nothing doing. I felt hopeless.
“It was an accident,” Chris said. “Guy wasn’t even a real cop. Maybe they’ll just give you a stern warning this time. Get off with community service. I’m not sure vehicular manslaughter is even a crime anymore.” He chuckled.
“There’s nothing funny about any of this.”
Chris arched his back, stretching until he yawned. “Good call on the fire.” He peeled off my jacket and tossed it to me, shaking off his overcoat, quaking till he busted out a jellied shimmy. “You should just drive back.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?” He smiled. “Don’t you know it’s too late for me, little brother?”
“You don’t have to keep living this way,” I said. “You could get your ass straightened out, get a regular place to live, a job. You’re not even forty yet.”
My brother wrinkled his mouth. “I’ve been at it too long.”
“Bullshit. You could quit if you wanted to.”
“You’re right,” he said. “And I don’t want to.”
“How the hell can you say that? You want your teeth falling out? You want to sleep outside in the freezing cold? Sell your body? For what? Are the drugs really that good?”
“The truth? I don’t even feel them anymore.” My brother reached for the sky, threadbare T-shirt rising. I could count each bony rib in the firelight. “I only feel it when I don’t do them.” He winked, then walked to the window. “No, I’m in too deep this time, and I don’t have the energy to fight my way out.”
“What did you really do?” I said. “You broke into a house, a job site, so what?” I didn’t add that he’d also beaten the shit out of a man and broken his arm, trusting Turley at his word that he’d be able to keep that one off the books.
“I don’t have an alibi for the night Pete died.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
He didn’t respond.
I waited.
“Right?”
Slowly, he shook his head no. “People heard me making threats, though. I was his friend, his partner. I don’t have an alibi. And Adam and Michael know I know, and they won’t take a chance I’ll talk. I don’t have any leverage.”
“We have that disc, right?”
“No one can prove that’s Gerry Lombardi in those pictures. You said so yourself.”
“We could at least turn it over to the cops. The accusation alone-”
“From a junkie like me?”
“I’ll back you up.”
“Now why the hell would you do something like that?”
“I have a son of my own. I can’t let a monster like that run loose. It’s sick. It’s wrong.”
“You’re not even certain it’s Gerry Lombardi.”
“But you are.”
“Yes. I am.”
“Then that’s good enough for me. I’ll back you up. We take the disc, go to the cops. The press. Full-on assault.”
“You want to take on Adam and Michael Lombardi? Then you’ll have them after you too. No, little brother, I can’t let you do that. You’re right. You have a son. And you need to be there for him. This is a losing battle, and only one captain needs to go down with this ship.” He started humming, then singing quietly, swaying gently in waltz timing. I couldn’t make out the tune until I heard the words “Gitche Gumee,” and then I recognized “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
“Will you knock it off?”
“Does anyone know where the love of God goes?” he sang, earnestly. “When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
“Is everything a joke to you?” I said. “I know it wasn’t easy for you when they died. And I know it got you started on whatever this… this thing is you’re on. But regardless of what you think, it’s not too late. It’s never too late. We can check you in somewhere, get you help. I mean it. I’ll vouch for you with this disc, back you up all the way.”
“You’re not really dumb enough to stick your neck out for me, are you?” He sighed. “When will you stop being such a hard case? I saw the way Jenny was looking at you. When I said you still loved her, she blushed, right in the middle of that shit storm. She blushed.” Chris flicked his butt into the fire. “What are you waiting for? You’re wasting your life.”
“I’m wasting my life? Oh, that’s rich. This coming from the guy who hangs out at truck stops…” I caught myself. “You don’t understand. I’m not husband material. I’m not father material. I’m not cut out for it like Dad was. I can’t do that domestic shit. I can’t give Jenny and Aiden what they need. They’re better off-”