His fault he’d lost it, sure. But it was their fault too, goddamn them. The laws, the lawyers, the judges, the system. No convictions on half of all the arrests he’d ever made – half! Turning the ones like Mannlicher and Brandt and D’Allesandro loose, putting them right back on the street, letting them make their deals and their hits, letting them screw up innocent lives. Sheila’s kids, his grandkids – lives like that. How could they blame him for being bitter? How could they blame him for taking too many drinks now and then?
He sat down on the couch, drank some of his beer, lit a cigarette. Ah Christ, he thought, it’s not them. You know it wasn’t them. It was you, you dumb bastard. They warned you twice about drinking on duty. And you kept on doing it, you were hog-drunk the night you plowed the departmental sedan into that vanload of teenagers. What if one of those kids had died? You were lucky, by God. You got off easy.
Sure, he thought. Sure. But he’d been a good cop, damn it, a cop inside and out; it was all he knew how to be. What was he supposed to do after they threw him off the force? Live on his half-pension? Get a job as a part-time security guard? Forty-four years old, no skills, no friends outside the department – what the hell was he supposed to do?
He’d invented Bob Prince, that was what he’d done. He’d gone into business for himself.
Fran didn’t understand. “You’ll get killed one of these days,” she’d said in the beginning. “It’s vigilante justice,” she’d said. “You think you’re Rambo, is that it?” she’d said. She just didn’t understand. To him it was the same job he’d always done, the only one he was any good at, only now he made up some of the rules. He was no Rambo, one man up against thousands, a mindless killing machine; he hated that kind of phony flag-waving crap. It wasn’t real. What he was doing, that was real. It meant something. But a hero? No. Hell, no. He was a sniper, that was all, picking off a weak or vulnerable enemy here and there, now and then. Snipers weren’t heroes, for Christ’s sake. Snipers were snipers, just like cops were cops.
He finished his beer and his cigarette, got up, went into Fran’s sewing room. The five thousand he’d held out of the poker-game take was in his pocket – money he felt he was entitled to because his expenses ran high sometimes, and they had to eat, they had to live. He put the roll into her sewing cabinet, where he always put whatever money he made as Bob Prince. She’d spend it when she had to, parcel it out, but she’d never mention it to him or anyone else. She’d told Sheila once that he had a sales job, he got paid in cash a lot, that was why he was away from home for such long periods of time.
When he walked back into the kitchen she was at the sink, peeling potatoes. He went over and touched her shoulder, kissed the top of her head. She didn’t look at him; stood there stiffly until he moved away from her. But she’d be all right in a day or two. She’d be fine until the next time Bob Prince made the right kind of connection.
He wished it didn’t have to be this way. He wished he could roll back the clock three years, do things differently, take the gray out of her hair and the pain out of her eyes. But he couldn’t. It was just too late.
You had to play the cards you were dealt, no matter how lousy they were. The only thing that made it tolerable was that sometimes, on certain hands, you could find ways to stack the damn deck.
SO YOUNG, SO FAIR, SO DEAD
John Lutz
You can live your life through and try hard to be a decent sort, but trouble might still come to you. That’s the way it seems to have been with me. My trouble was never the direct result of what I did, but the product of others. Neighbours especially. My advice is, don’t ever get too friendly with your neighbors. I had to learn that the hard way.
Adelaide and I finished moving into our new house on a Sunday. That Monday I managed to stay away from the office and helped her sort the contents of cardboard boxes and move furniture about. We were both very happy that day, for we’d worked and saved for a long time to be able to afford our own home built here in the beautiful rolling hills south of the smoke-palled city. Here the air was clear as crystal and the view was the best nature had to offer.
And the house itself was what we’d always wanted. Though not large, it was well built with excellent materials and designed with a tasteful touch of miniature elegance. Adelaide and I took a walk around our green property before dark that evening and admired the way the wood-shingled house seemed to blend so well with the forest-like setting.
Of course the best thing about the house and the property was that it was ours. I’d worked hard to build up my own mail order business, Smathers Enterprises, and Mr and Mrs Will Smathers were comparatively well heeled for a couple in their early thirties who’d started married life on practically nothing.
Adelaide stopped strolling and gazed down the narrow blacktop road that fronted our property. I stood off and admired her delicate features and shining blonde hair, the weight of her lithe, graceful body resting on one slender leg. Adelaide, too, blended well with the natural surroundings. She was a natural beauty, the type makeup couldn’t improve.
“I wonder about our neighbor,” she said.
I moved next to her, slipping my arm about her waist. From where we stood we could see the nearest home through a break in the heavy green of the trees. A large brick home with a swimming pool behind it, it was the only house within a mile of us in either direction. I could just see the top of a small beach house near the pool. Within plain view near the attached two-car garage was a long, expensive blue convertible.
“Whoever our neighbor is,” I said, “he has money.”
“It certainly looks that way.”
“On the other hand, he may be mortgaged up to his neck.”
We stood for a moment longer looking down at the big house before going back inside. I say looking down because our home was situated high on one of the hills, and the blacktop road snaked sharply downward for the next two or three miles as it meandered like a still tributary to the Red Fox River.
I suppose I had no business saying anything about how our neighbor might have his property mortgaged. We’d gone into debt heavily to buy our own home. But the business was going well, and promised to continue to do so, and there was no reason we shouldn’t be happy now and pay as we went along.
And in a way owing on the house could be a good thing. Once we were in it I knew we’d never give it up unless we absolutely had to, and it might serve as a spur to help make me work even harder.
But all the house motivated me to do that day was leave the office early so I could get home to enjoy living there with Adelaide. As I drove up the winding driveway I wondered when I’d get over the feeling that this was someone else’s charming home I was approaching and not my own.
Adelaide knew I was coming home early and had dinner in the oven. She fixed us each a drink while we were waiting and we sat in the disarranged living room.
“I don’t know when we’ll ever get things the way we want them,” Adelaide said, glancing around at the mess.
I grinned at her and took a sip of my Scotch and water, admiring her fresh good looks in the plain housedress she did so much for. “There’s plenty of time.”
“I suppose so.” She sighed with contentment and settled back in her chair. “I saw our neighbor today,” she said.