The skin on my arms and scalp was throbbing from where the sun had burned the raw patches. There are a couple of big fountains in the park, slabs of glass where water falls from the top and children dance and slide in it as it hits the ground. I held my burning arms and head under the water, not minding that my clothes were getting wet, keeping myself just turned away enough that the water didn’t hit my back hip and my gun sitting in its tuck holster.

I don’t know how long I stood, soothed by the water, oblivious to the exuberant children around me. I finally trudged on leaden feet to the garage entrance. A man was selling Streetwise.

“Come on, beautiful, let’s have a smile on that gorgeous face of yours. Nothing is this bad. Not if you have a roof over your head and a family that loves you.”

“I don’t.” I walked past him into the garage.

In Morrell’s Honda, I leaned back in the seat, my wet clothes squelching against the vinyl upholstery. I could picture Morrell’s expression—annoyance quickly suppressed—at my dripping in his car. Suppressed, because he’d see how distraught I was, my confidence in my father’s essential rightness undermined. Morrell was so kind—and, well, moral—he would always put his need for order behind another person’s need for compassion.

“This for your brother.” That’s what Steve Sawyer-Kimathi said Dornick and Alito had told Tony. We’re torturing Kimathi for your brother’s sake. And Tony had turned around and left them to it.

“Nothing is this bad. Not if you have a roof over your head and a family that loves you.” What kind of love had Tony given me—all that wise, patient advice—what had it been grounded in? And my mother: how much had she known about Steve Sawyer and her husband’s brother and her husband?

I thought of some of the men I’d known over the years: my ex-husband, Murray, Conrad. My ex-husband and Murray Ryerson were ordinary, ambitious men, but Morrell at least was decent, even heroic. Maybe I carried some taint I’d never been aware of, something I’d been unwilling to face. Melodrama. The trouble was, I’d never imagined any taint could be attached to my father.

I was unexpectedly wracked again by sobs, so violent that they banged me against the steering wheel. I tried not to howl out loud, the last vestige of reason warning me not to attract attention.

43 - DEATH OF NOT SUCH A GOOD GUY

43

DEATH OF NOT SUCH A GOOD GUY