I can’t do nothing.
I won’t do nothing.
Dressing in jeans and a black pullover and a pair of steel-toed Red Wings, I grab the gym bag from the closet safe and dump its contents on the bed. Two high-caps loaded with Speer Gold Dot hollow points slip into the spare mag holder, which clips to my belt. The holstered Browning, loaded with another high-cap, tucks inside the waistband behind my right hip, my shirt hanging over the butt. In front of the mirror I check to make sure the rig doesn’t print, then I draw the gun, punching my arm forward, making sure my hand doesn’t shake.
Outside, it’s dark already, the night thick with cicadas and the smell of citronella and steaks grilling on the other side of the neighbor’s fence. In the back of my head, a thumping, cauterizing wail. Maybe from the album or from my roughed-up soul.
I don’t know where to find Bea Kuykendahl now. She won’t be at her office, and I doubt she’ll be at her suburban country biker bar, either. If she’s heard about Lorenz, maybe she’ll be expecting me. Maybe she’ll make herself scarce. I will find her no matter what and I will make her reveal the truth.
A man’s life is at stake, she said.
She’ll eat those words.
I wrench open the car door and drop behind the wheel. The sharp edge of the Browning’s cocked-and-locked hammer digs at my side. The spare mags on my left do likewise, and when I try to adjust them-there it is. The pain I’ve been fighting since the fall. The blade goes in deep and starts twisting. It saws back and forth in my vertebrae, slices down the back of my left thigh. Whatever I do to ease the pain only makes it sharper. I try climbing out of the car only to end up frozen in a crouch, the small of my back hollowed out.
Whimpering, I stagger inside, making it up the stairs on fingers and toes. I unsnap the holster and pull the Browning out of my belt. I strip off the spare mags and leave them on the floor. On the bed, I inch my way up, straining my arm toward Charlotte’s nightstand where her old prescription sleeping pills are kept. I swallow two of them dry, feeling the capsules scrape down my throat.
I roll over onto my back, wincing with every minute adjustment. The overhead fan is still. The room feels close and warm. Somewhere nearby I hear a faint sniffling, a soft wet gasping sound like a kicked and broken dog might make. Somewhere nearby, maybe even in this room. Maybe even on this bed.
The IAD man was right about one thing. People I don’t know, mainly in dress uniforms, go out of their way to clasp my elbow, to pat my back, to whisper encouragement. They do it on the sly, and not just because of the funeral. We live in different times, when even if you reach the end zone, spiking the ball is no longer done. But the consensus is unmistakable. The man with the skull ring got what was coming to him.
“I wish they would stop,” Charlotte whispers.
She’s a vision in black, clinging to my right arm like at any moment she might have to hold me up single-handed. I stare at her until she frowns. She’s only a few hours off the plane and already back on duty. A cop’s wife. Bridger called her in England and she cut her trip short. I never would have asked her to, but I’m not complaining. I’ve been floating, all my ballast poured out on the ground. Now there’s someone here to grab my ankle and pull me back.
I have no role to fulfill here, no casket to carry and no eulogy to give. I prefer it that way, though I was not consulted on the matter. From experience I know that tragedy has a way of marking a person, setting him apart, making others as reluctant to approach him as they would be to enter some awe-filled holy place. I should be invisible in this crowd, unnoticed, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’d riddled Lorenz’s killer with bullets, I would be.
We file down one of the aisles-the anticipated crowd is so vast, the event was moved to the auditorium of one of Houston’s smaller megachurches-and disappear down a long, padded pew. As I stare down at the folded program, Charlotte spots people she knows in the crowd, wondering aloud if we should go and join them.
“There’s Theresa,” she says. “She looks pretty torn up.”
I glance up briefly. Cavallo is half hidden under her husband’s arm, her eyes damp and sparkling, her mouth hidden under her hand. Maybe Lorenz had been right and she did think highly of him. She’d told me once they went to the same Bible study, though he’d never given any evidence of piety in my presence. While I’m watching her, José Aguilar catches my eye. He raises an eyebrow in acknowledgment, then nods. Hang in there. I nod back.
It takes a long time for the mourners to enter, there are so many. All the brass is up front, and so is the new mayor and most of the city council. The shocking death of an HPD detective will not go unheralded, not on their watch. I realize for the first time that there will be speeches. I shift in my seat.
“Are you still in pain?”
“I’m fine.”
“If you can’t sit through it all, we can always slip out.”
“I said I’m fine.”
I’m not going anywhere. I owe him that much at least.
Near the front, weaving between the public officials, I see my old boss, Lt. Wanda Mosser, her white hair radiant. She shakes a few hands, managing to smile and look appropriately sober all at once. Two years ago she presided over the media fiasco that was the Hannah Mayhew task force, and even though it failed to find the girl alive, Wanda managed to use the opportunity to burnish her own reputation. Back in the day, when she’d come through the ranks, a woman couldn’t hold her own and be successful in this man’s world unless she was even tougher than the boys. Wanda had no trouble delivering. When she was angry, she had a way of looking at you like she might just slit your throat. I’ve been on the receiving end of that look, so I should know.
Today, though, she’s just one of the brass. Nothing to prove except that she knows how to lend decorum to a solemn occasion. Which is not such a bad skill to have.
The funeral lasts more than an hour, but it’s a good one. The politicians keep their remarks brief, relinquishing the spotlight to Lorenz’s family. His widow does not speak. Instead, his younger brother reads from a prepared script, mostly recounting how proud Jerry was to be a homicide detective and the only thing he loved more was his wife and their two-year-old son. I manage to get through this stony-faced, though Charlotte doesn’t. Then there’s music, an aria of some kind from a famous requiem I’ve never heard of, performed by a woman from the Houston Masterworks Chorus without even a hint of accompaniment or artifice. Her voice rings through the church, austere and beautiful, the words incomprehensible to me, most likely Latin. When she finishes, I realize for the first time that I’ve been holding my breath.
“I want that at my funeral,” I whisper.
“Don’t even joke about it.”
I feel strangely detached from the spectacle. I shouldn’t, but there it is. No voice, no matter how haunting, can bring me ritual closure. No endearing anecdote, no volume of tears. If I want, I can conjure Jerry in my mind, blood-spattered and choking, whispering his final confession.
My kid.
None of them will ever have that moment. I wish I didn’t. But I do, and because I do, all this does nothing to stir me. I can’t bury him, not yet. I can’t shovel the dirt onto his coffin and move on. For everyone else, this is a great trauma, something that happened and can’t be reversed.
For me, it’s still happening. The guilt trip from the IAD investigator sees to that. It was my gun that killed Lorenz. For me, his death feels utterly reversible, too.
I retrace the moments, following them back, then push play and do it all over, gaining valuable seconds in the process. I can move faster, load quicker. I can get down the stairs in time. When the shots rang out, I was in the vestibule just feet from the building’s entrance. As the pallbearers approach either side of the casket, as they take up the weight of their burden, here I sit, working out how to shave a few seconds off my time. Like I’m back at Shooter’s Paradise, watching the others run the course so I can learn from their mistakes. Only it’s myself I’m watching, my own mistakes, and eliminating just one of them could make the difference.