The Barbed-Wire Kiss (5 page)

A soft breeze blew from the west, riffling the reeds, bringing with it the smells of the river. He started the Mustang, U-turned in the cul-de-sac. As he drove away, he looked back a final time at the house, its windows throwing squares of light onto the dark yard, and wondered why he felt so suddenly and completely alone.

•  •  •

On the way home, he stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of red wine. He opened it in the kitchen, got a glass from the cabinet, and went into the living room. He sat on the couch, poured wine into the glass, set the bottle on the coffee table.

He drank, looked across the room at the empty fireplace and the bookcase beside it, feeling the pull. After the second glass, he got up and took the photo album down from the top shelf.

He carried it back to the couch, filled the glass again. Months since he’d looked at it, but he knew each page by heart.

First were childhood shots, color Polaroids, the hues already faded. Melissa had put these pages together. On the first was a photo of Harry on the day of his first Holy Communion, wearing a jacket and bow tie, standing between his father and mother in the living room of the old house. On the same page, Harry and Bobby at thirteen, wearing shirts and ties, shoulder to shoulder on the steps outside Star of the Sea Church after their Confirmation, squinting in the sun.

He flipped the page. More shots from the old house. In one, Harry’s father stood behind him, hands on Harry’s shoulders. He was smiling, a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth. In the background, almost out of frame, Bobby on the living room floor, opening a gift. “Christmas 1974” was written in ballpoint pen in the white lower margin of the photo. It was his mother’s handwriting.

He stopped, knowing what was next. A few minutes later, when the glass was half empty, he turned the page.

At the top was a photo of Melissa as a little girl, dressed as a witch for Halloween. Then, beneath it, a few years older, in a Girl Scout uniform, hugging a collie. For weeks after her death, he had tortured himself with these photos, touching the pain as if prodding an open wound.

On the next page: Melissa in high school; her graduation portrait. Already a woman at seventeen, already beautiful, her black hair shining. She had looked no older when they met five years later at Rutgers, Harry gathering credits before applying to the state police academy, Melissa a teaching assistant in his social science class.

Next were the wedding photos. Melissa in white, bridesmaids spread out behind her; he in his dress uniform, three weeks out of the academy. He remembered how he’d felt that day, his career stretching before him, the woman he loved at his side. For their first dance together, the song they’d chosen, he’d whispered along with the words as he held her:

He turned pages. Melissa on their honeymoon in Grenada, laughing, perched on the gunwale of a sailboat, holding on to a line while the boat dipped steeply toward the bright blue water. Then on the beach outside the hotel, picking shells from the surf, the sun low behind her.

Almost the end of the album now. An eight-by-ten of Melissa in the yard of their house in Metuchen, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, not smiling, her dark hair catching the light. Then a final photo, taken on the day she came home from the hospital, her head shaved, her arm around the oversized stuffed dog he’d bought her. The last page was her funeral card, centered in the plastic sheet.

He turned back to the shot of her in the yard, touched it, felt the sad and sudden tang of desire that always came to him when he looked at it. He traced her body with a fingertip, thought of her in those last days at home, shrunken and sick, a different person. Not this woman at all.

He thumped the album shut.

Later, he carried the bottle and glass up to the bedroom. He pulled off his boots and stretched out on the sheets. He lay there a long time, drinking wine, waiting for a sleep that didn’t come.

The road up to the Shore Line Country Club was lined with dogwood trees, their bloom already fading in the midsummer heat. White petals covered the ground like snow.

He downshifted as he neared the main building. To the left, the golf course stretched out perfect green to a far line of trees. To the right was a fenced-in pasture and, beyond it, a barn. In the pasture, two figures rode horses side by side at a canter.

He felt tired, irritable. Too much wine and too little sleep had given him a headache that aspirin couldn’t touch.

The road ended in a circular parking area in front of the porticoed entrance. He pulled up under the green-and-white awning, and a teenager wearing a blazer in the same colors got up slowly from a chair beside the front door. Harry waited for him to come up to the car.

“I’ll park it myself,” Harry said. “Just show me where.”

The kid looked the Mustang over. He had long blond hair gathered in a neat ponytail.

“Phat wheels. What year?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“What you got under there?”

“Two eighty-nine. Four-speed.”

“Rockin’. You can pull up on the grass over there, under the tree.”

He parked under a spreading oak, alongside a midnight blue BMW convertible. There were only a half dozen cars in the lot, two of them Mercedeses, one a gleaming black Lexus.

The kid was back in his chair by the time Harry got to the door.

“Which way’s the bar?”

“Straight through to the right. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.”

He pulled open the heavy smoked glass door, stepped through into air-conditioning. There was a small fountain tinkling quietly in the center of the lobby, chairs evenly spaced on the marble floor. Beyond the fountain was a reception desk, unmanned, and beyond that two sliding oak doors opened onto an empty dining room.

He took off his sunglasses, slipped them into the pocket of his shirt. To the right of the desk was a glass door with a carved wooden sign above it that read the paddock room. He went through. Inside was a small lounge with a short bar, a half dozen tables, and open double doors that led out onto a roofed porch.

The lounge was empty except for the bartender, a man in his sixties with snow-white hair and a tough Irish face. He was smoking a cigarette and watching a baseball game on the TV above the bar, the sound turned low. From outside, Harry could hear the steady
thwops
of a tennis game in progress.

The bartender looked at him, nodded.

“What’s the score?” Harry asked.

“Five–two, Yanks. Baltimore’s choking. What can I get you?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Fallon.”

The bartender nodded at the double doors. “Out there. I think he’s expecting you.”

He walked out into bright sunshine. The porch stretched the length of the rear of the building, curving around on both sides. There was another door to the left, the outside entrance to the dining room, closed now to keep the air-conditioning in. There were tables out here on the porch as well, wrought-iron with glass tops, chairs with cushioned seats. Steps led down to a flagstone path that ran past a fenced-in pool area and tennis courts. Flowers in stone planters lined the walkway, and on either side of the steps were small, stone-lined ponds, their surfaces choked with water lilies.

“You Rane?”

He turned. At a table behind him sat a big man in his early thirties, his head shaved like a wrestler’s. Acne scars pitted his thick neck and a neatly trimmed goatee surrounded his mouth. He was wearing a too-tight sport jacket over a shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, exposing a thin silver chain. On the table was a newspaper open to the sports page.

“Yeah,” Harry said.

“About time.”

Harry didn’t respond. The big man looked him over, got slowly to his feet.

“Wait here,” he said. As he turned away, Harry saw the telltale bulge on his right hip beneath the jacket. Clip holster, he thought. Likely an automatic. Something small and flat.

The big man went down the steps and out toward the pasture. There was a man leaning against the split-rail fence there, talking to one of the riders, a woman on a white horse. She wore jeans, a denim shirt, and a riding helmet with the bill pulled low. The other rider, a man, had moved his horse away as if to be out of earshot, waiting for the conversation to end.

The man at the fence raised his voice, slapped the rail in anger. Harry couldn’t make out what he was saying. The woman listened without speaking, then wheeled the horse away, started toward the barn. The other rider moved to follow her.

The man at the fence was shaking his head, still talking to her receding back, when the big man came up behind him and spoke. The man turned, looked back at Harry on the porch. After a moment, they started toward him across the lawn.

Eddie Fallon was in his early fifties, with wide shoulders and the beginnings of a paunch. He wore a thin gray jacket that might have been silk over a black linen pullover. His slacks were the same color as the jacket. His hair—an unnatural glossy black—was combed straight back from his forehead, every strand in place.

Harry waited. They came up the porch steps, eyeing him. Harry put out his hand.

Fallon ignored it.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” he said. “I have to take a piss.”

He walked past Harry, went into the bar.

The big man smiled, cocked his head at a table on the far side of the porch, facing the pasture.

“Have a seat,” he said.

Harry went over to the table. On the glass top were a cell phone, a pack of Kools, and small, compact binoculars. The big man took his paper and moved to another table a few feet away.

He picked up the binoculars, looked out at the pasture. The two riders had dismounted, were walking their horses back to the barn, the woman looking at the ground. The other rider had a hand on her shoulder as if consoling her. From their body language, he read teacher and student. At the entrance to the barn, the woman swept off her helmet, and he caught a flash of red hair and the glimpse of a profile. But she turned before he could focus on her, entered the dimness of the barn.

“My wife,” Fallon said behind him.

He put down the binoculars. Fallon was looking beyond him to the barn.

“All the money I’m spending for private lessons, and she just never learns,” he said. “Did you see what she was doing out there?”

“I don’t know much about horses.”

“You don’t need to know when someone’s not paying attention. She’s scattered. Can’t keep her mind on what she’s doing.” He pointed at a chair. “Go on, sit down.”

Fallon sat across from him. His leathery skin had the nut-brownness of the year-round tan, and his upper body showed the definition of regular workouts. Fifties and fighting it, Harry thought. He wore gold on both wrists, a Rolex on the left, a thick-braided ID bracelet on the right. Harry caught a waft of musky cologne.

“I appreciate your seeing me like this,” Harry said. “I know you’re busy.”

Fallon took a cigarette from the pack, tapped it against the tabletop.

“So talk.”

He fished a silver lighter from his pants pocket, got the cigarette going, clicked the lighter shut.

Harry said, “First of all …”

The phone trilled on the table between them. Fallon picked it up, unfolded it. “Yeah?”

Harry looked off toward the pasture. There was the faintest scent of manure in the air, mixed with the smell of freshly cut grass. He could hear the whirring of sprinklers on the lawn, the buzz of insects, and the sounds from the tennis game.

Fallon had the phone to his ear, listening.

“Tell him no,” he said finally. “How complicated is that? What the fuck do I pay you for?” He listened some more, then looked at Harry as if seeing him for the first time. He covered the mouthpiece.

“Give me a minute here,” he said. “I need to deal with something. Wait over there.” He pointed at another table. “Lester, see if he wants a drink.”

Harry turned. The big man looked up, smiled, and went back to his paper.

“How many times are we going to go over this?” Fallon was saying into the phone. “Twenty-two, tops. No higher.”

Harry pushed back his chair, got up. He walked past the table Fallon had pointed to.

“Yo,” Wiley said.

Harry ignored him, went into the coolness of the bar.

“Find him?” the bartender said.

“Yeah. I found him.”

He slid onto a stool.

“What can I do you?”

“Corona if you have it. Amstel if you don’t.”

“Amstel it is.”

The bartender made his cigarette disappear, got a glass from the overhead rack and a bottle from the cooler behind the bar. Harry took out his wallet, found a ten. The bartender opened the bottle, poured beer carefully into the tilted glass, keeping the head thin.

“Thanks,” Harry said.

The bartender took his ten, rang it up, and put a five in front of him. Harry sipped beer. In the mirror behind the bar he saw Wiley come through the porch doors. He slid forward on the stool so that his boots were flat on the hardwood floor.

“Maybe you didn’t hear him clearly,” Wiley said. “He meant for you to wait.”

The bartender looked at Harry, raised an eyebrow.

“You deaf or something?” Wiley said. Harry felt him come up close behind him. “I’m talking to you.”

A hand closed lightly on his right arm, just above the elbow. He shook it off, half turned, raised his hand.

“Don’t.”

He turned back to the bar.

“Tough guy, huh?” Wiley said. He caught the arm again and Harry waited until he felt the tug, then went with it, swiveled, slipped free and off the stool. Wiley fell back a step, then came in fast, reaching for Harry with his left hand, the right already balled into a fist.

Harry drove a boot heel into Wiley’s right knee. It stopped him, bent him in pain, and Harry stepped in close, caught the lapels of his jacket and twisted his torso to break his balance. His right leg swung out and back, caught Wiley behind the knees, and knocked both feet out from under him. Still holding on to the lapels, he turned him in midair, heard cloth rip, then brought him down hard onto the floor with a crash that shook the bottles behind the bar.