ETHAN AND HAZARD MET IN A CHURCH, FOR at this hour on a Monday night, the pews were empty, and no chance whatsoever existed that they would be seen here together by politicians, by members of the Officer Involved Shooting team, or by other authorities.
In the otherwise deserted nave, they sat side by side in a pew, near a side aisle where neither the overhead nor the footpath lights were aglow, veiled in shadows. The stale but pleasant spice of long-extinguished incense perfumed air as still as that in a sealed jar.
They spoke less in conspiratorial whispers than in the hushed voices of men humbled by awesome experience.
“So I told the OIS team I went to see Reynerd to ask about his friend Jerry Nemo, who happens to be a suspect in the murder of this coke peddler name of Carter Cook.”
“They believe you?” Ethan asked.
“They seem like they want to. But suppose tomorrow I get a lab report that superglues Blonde in the Pond to that city councilman I told you about.”
“That girl dumped in the sewage plant.”
“Yeah. So the bastard councilman will start looking for a way to [236] get at me. If any guys on the OIS team can be bought or blackmailed, they’ll turn that homey hit man with the coke-spoon earring into a crippled choirboy who got shot in the back, and my mug will be on the front pages under the nine-letter headline.”
Ethan knew what the nine-letter headline would be—KILLER COP—because they had talked about the power of anti-cop prejudice over the years. When a dirty politician and the sensation-hungry press discovered a shared agenda in any case, truth was stretched tighter than the skin of any Hollywood dowager with four face-lifts, and the blindfold over Lady Justice’s eyes was ripped away and shoved into her mouth to shut her up.
Hazard hunched forward, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped almost as if in prayer, staring at the altar. “The media love this councilman. His rep is he’s a reformer, got all the right sympathies and positions on the issues. They ought to love me, too, ’cause I’m so lovable, but that crowd would rather cut off their lips than kiss a cop. If they see a chance to save him by crucifying me, every hardware store in the city will be sold out of nails.”
“I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You couldn’t know some fool would whack Reynerd.” Hazard turned his gaze from the altar, and his eyes met Ethan’s as though searching for the Judas taint: “Could you?”
“Some ways this looks bad for me.”
“Some ways,” Hazard agreed. “But even you aren’t dumb enough to work for some movie-star asshole who settles business like he’s a rap-music mogul.”
“Manheim doesn’t know about Reynerd or the black boxes. And if he did know, he’d figure all Reynerd needed to improve his psychology was a little aromatherapy.”
“But there is something you’re not telling me,” Hazard pressed.
Ethan shook his head, but not in denial. “Oh, man, this has been one long day in a monkey barrel.”
[237] “For one thing, Reynerd was sitting on his sofa between two bags of potato chips. Turns out he kept a loaded piece in each bag.”
“Yet when the shooter rang the bell, Reynerd answered the door unarmed.”
“Maybe ’cause he figured I was the true threat, and already through the door. My point is you were right about the potato chips.”
“Like I told you, a neighbor said he was paranoid, kept a pistol close to him, stashed it in odd places like that.”
“The talky neighbor—that’s bullshit,” Hazard said. “There was no talky neighbor. You knew some other way.”
They were at a crossroads of trust and suspicion. Unless Ethan spilled more than he had revealed thus far, Hazard wasn’t going to follow him one step farther. Their friendship would not be finished, but without greater disclosure, it would never be the same.
“You’re gonna think I’m mental,” Ethan said.
“Already do.”
Ethan inhaled more incense, exhaled inhibition, and told Hazard about being shot in the gut by Reynerd, opening his eyes to discover he wasn’t shot after all, and in the absence of a wound, nevertheless finding blood under his fingernails.
Throughout all this, Hazard’s eyes neither swam out of focus nor shifted toward some far point of the church, as they would have done if he’d decided that Ethan was either jiving or psychotic. Only when Ethan finished did Hazard look down at his folded hands again.
Eventually the big man said, “Well, for sure I’m not sitting here beside a ghost.”
“When you choose an institution for me,” Ethan said, “I’d prefer one with a good arts-and-crafts program.”
“Other than having your blood tested for drugs, you cooked up any theories about this?”
“You mean, besides I’m in the Twilight Zone? Or I really did die from that gut shot, and this is Hell?”
[238] Hazard took the point. “Aren’t a whole lot of theories come to mind, are there?”
“Not the kind you can explore with what the suits at the police academy call ‘conventional investigative techniques.’ ”
“You don’t seem nuts to me,” Hazard said.
“I don’t seem nuts to me, either. But then the nut is always the last to know.”
“Besides, you were right about the pistol in the potato chips. So it was at least like ... a psychic experience.”
“Clairvoyance, yeah. Except that doesn’t explain the blood under my nails.”
Hazard had absorbed this bizarre revelation with quiet trust and remarkable equanimity.
Nevertheless, Ethan had no intention of telling him about being run down by the PT Cruiser and the truck. Or about dying in the ambulance.
If you reported having seen a ghost, you were a regular guy who’d had an uncanny experience. If you reported seeing another ghost at another place and time, you were at best an eccentric whose every statement would thereafter be taken with enough salt to crust the rims of a million margarita glasses.
“The shooter who killed Reynerd,” Hazard said, “was a gangbanger called himself Hector X. Real name was Calvin Roosevelt. He’s a high cuzz in the Crips, so you figure his accomplice must’ve been driving a set of wheels they boosted right before the hit.”
“Standard,” Ethan agreed.
“But there’s no stolen-car report on the Benz they used. I got the number on the tags, and you won’t believe who it belongs to.”
Hazard looked up from his folded hands. He met Ethan’s eyes.
Although Ethan didn’t know what was coming, he knew it couldn’t be good. “Who?”
“Your boyhood pal. The notorious Dunny Whistler.”
[239] Ethan didn’t look away. He didn’t dare. “You know what happened to him a few months ago.”
“Some guys drowned him in a toilet, but he didn’t quite die.”
“Few days after that, his lawyer contacted me, told me Dunny’s will named me executor, and his living will gives me the right to make medical decisions for him.”
“You never mentioned this.”
“Didn’t see any reason. You know what he was. You understand why I didn’t want him in my life. But I accepted the situation out of ... I don’t know ... because of what he meant to me when we were kids.”
Hazard nodded. He withdrew a roll of hard caramels from a coat pocket, peeled back the wrapping, and offered to share.
Ethan shook his head. “Dunny died this morning at Our Lady of Angels.”
Hazard pried a caramel from the roll, popped it in his mouth.
“They can’t find his body,” Ethan said, for suddenly he sensed that Hazard already knew all this.
Carefully folding the loose end of the wrapper over the exposed candy, Hazard said nothing.
“They swear he was dead,” Ethan continued, “but considering how things work at the hospital morgue, he couldn’t have gotten out of there any way but on his own two feet.”
Hazard returned the roll to his coat pocket. He sucked on the caramel, moving it around his mouth.
“I’m sure he’s alive,” Ethan said.
Finally Hazard looked at him again. “All this happened before we had lunch.”
“Yeah. Listen, man, I didn’t mention it because I didn’t see how Dunny could be connected to Reynerd. I still don’t see how. Do you?”
“You were one self-possessed dude at lunch, considering all this was churning through your head.”
[240] “I thought I was going crazy, but I didn’t see how you’d be more likely to help me if I virtually told you I was losing my mind.”
“So what happened after lunch?”
Ethan recounted his visit to Dunny’s apartment, leaving nothing out except the strange elusive shape in the steam-clouded mirror.
“Why’d he keep a photo of Hannah on his desk?” Hazard asked.
“He’d never gotten over her. Still hasn’t. I guess that’s why he ripped it out of the frame today and took it with him.”
“So he drives out of the garage in his Mercedes—”
“I assumed it was him. I couldn’t get a look at the driver.”
“And then what?”
“I had to think about it. Then I visited Hannah’s grave.”
“Why?”
“Gut feeling. Thought I might find something there.”
“And what did you find?”
“Roses.” He told Hazard about the two dozen Broadways and his subsequent visit to Forever Roses. “The florist described Dunny as good as I could’ve. That’s when I was sure he was alive.”
“What’d he mean when he told her that you thought he was dead—and you were right?”
“I don’t know.”
Hazard crunched the half-finished caramel.
“You can break a tooth that way,” Ethan warned.
“Like that’s my biggest problem.”
“Just friendly advice.”
“Whistler wakes up in a morgue, realizes he’s been mistaken for dead, so then he puts his clothes on, goes home without saying boo to anyone, takes a shower. That make sense to you?”
“No. But I thought he might be brain-damaged.”
“He drives to a florist, buys some roses, visits a grave, hires a hit man. ... For a guy who comes out of a coma with brain damage, he seems to get around pretty well.”
“I’ve given up the brain-damage theory.”
[241] “Good for you. So what happened after you left the florist?”
Operating on the two-ghost theory of credibility, Ethan didn’t tell him about the PT Cruiser, but said, “I went to a bar.”
“You’re not a guy who looks for answers in a glass of gin.”
“This was Scotch. Didn’t find any answers there either. Might try vodka next.”
“So that’s everything? You’ve come clean with me now?”
With all the conviction that he could muster, Ethan said, “What—this whole mess isn’t X-Files enough already? You want there should be some aliens in it, vampires, werewolves?”
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