“I can’t leave his truck here; is it okay if I meet you there?”

The cop hesitated a second, then put the cruiser in reverse. “I’ll see you there. No malarkey.” He backed all the way down the hill in the rain and the siren came on as he hit the river road and headed for the bridge.

The thing is, Allie looked like her old self when Leo rushed into Beatrice’s wetter than water itself. She was ringing up a check for two older women who wore those see-through plastic scarves over their hairdos, and she was smiling as she handed them their change, chatting about a waterfall she’d read about, and so Leo was the party-wrecker and he knew it, and when she saw him and smiled even more, he knew he was taking joy in being about to smash what’s been missing between them through no fault of his own, and as soon as he knew all this he felt immediately worse because all this hinged on Chick, who wasn’t playing any kind of hand here at all, who was hurt so bad he was maybe beyond help.

Something along these serious lines Allie had to have seen because her face changed, and even though the place was busy, Leo took her hand and led her to the door.

“You’ve got to come with me right now, Allie; your dad’s messed up.”

On the way to Holyoke, the flatbed’s wipers going top speed, the road water sluicing out and away from the truck, Leo described the whole fight right up to him going back in the cruiser to find Chick laid out on the ground. Allie sat still and looked straight out the windshield as Leo talked. When he told her about Chick’s blue face, her mouth became a flat line, her eyes shallow.

This was a reaction Leo hadn’t figured on. He was hoping for more softness, some tears maybe, something he could put his arm around. He should’ve pictured this, but he hadn’t, not Allie looking like she could kill someone.

“The shit bastards.” She put both hands on the dash and clenched her fists. For reasons he couldn’t begin to explain to himself, he had an erection.

“They did it because of his pamphlets, didn’t they?”

Leo shrugged. He reached over to put his hand on her leg, to squeeze it once as some kind of answer, but she was right up against the door and he didn’t want to lean to do it. “I think it was Floyd’s revenge, that’s all.”

“With a bat?”

They were climbing a rise, and down and off to the right Leo could see the wide and rain-dimpled Connecticut River. He pictured a funeral procession going along that river, a black hearse followed by Chick’s wife’s black Star Chief, her inside it with little Chris and some relatives. Tailgating them would be Leo and Allie in Jim’s Valiant, Leo dressed in clothes he wore once or twice a year up to Katie Faye’s grave, a gray tweed jacket that didn’t fit anymore, white shirt, black pants, and a maroon silk tie with little half-moons embroidered into it that you couldn’t see unless you looked real close. He pictured Allie in some black dress, a red flower in her hair.