I WAS NEVER SOMEONE I LIKED, NOT FOR A LONG TIME, NOT NOW. I made too many mistakes. I didn’t have time enough to figure out who I was or what I wanted. I was a father before I was a man, not sure what I was doing or what I could do. Then I had to go to work, do what my father said, what Froehmer said. If I had known earlier, maybe things would have been different, but then I never would have met Frank. You can make a lot of mistakes and still wind up all right. For a while anyway. I walk through the world with my faults alone. I’m not making excuses. I know who I am and what I’ve done. I don’t recognize any judgment over me but I know all the same that I will be judged. This is less a confession than a declaration, I suppose, not even an explanation really. I’m not trying to justify myself, but a chance to tell my story, before it gets told for me. I wonder if I’m where I am because of who I was, the son of a crook. Maybe I had no chance, not from the beginning, since that’s when my father, and Froehmer, started on me. It had already begun, long before I came along, and I got caught up in a machine that had already been running, had already figured out what to do with someone like me. I’m not blaming anyone, but maybe it wasn’t all me; maybe it was my father and then Froehmer who made me the way they wanted, acted on me and shaped me, programmed me exactly the way they wanted. They wanted me to think I was making my own decisions, but I was always going to be working for Froehmer. It’s a dodge to say it’s not my fault, but it’s a lie to say I wasn’t going to wind up like this one way or the other.

25

THE PINCH

“DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MURDER?” Casey asked.

“No,” I said.

“Somebody killed a kid, right around the corner from where Frank was found.”

“What? When was that?” My mind was racing. Maybe he wasn’t all right when I left him. Maybe was hurt a lot worse than I thought and now he was dead and I’d killed him.

“Just the other night,” she said. “Somebody shot him. Just around the corner from where Frank was killed. You think they’re connected?”

Shot him. What was that about? It was worse than me killing him, I thought. Now it meant that somebody had gone into the house after I had and murdered the kid.

“Where did you hear all this?”

“It was on the news,” Casey said. “You didn’t know about it?”

“No. I don’t know anything.”