The Odds (21 page)

“Family?”

“An aunt. I called. No answer.”

Potocki plunked down a second photo printed on a plain old DeskJet. Colleen took up the piece of paper and looked at a younger Nick Banks.

“Nicholas Kissel,” Potocki said. “He did time for killing a man.”

She whistled. She wouldn’t have guessed it. “He’s not very old. So it wasn’t murder one.” Unless he’d escaped from somewhere, which would make her really wrong about him. “Manslaughter?”

“It went down as murder two, but some lawyer got him off.”

“Sheesh.”

“Must have had a hell of a time in prison. Even I like looking at him. What do we think?”

So Nick Kissel already tended toward big trouble. “Was it a drug killing that got the murder rap?”

“Gambling.”

“Gambling. Sheesh.”

Potocki smiled. “ ‘Sheesh.’ Haven’t heard that in a while.”

“I know. Paucity of words tonight.” She looked at the photo some more. “I’d better know everything I can about the prior conviction, who got him off, all that.”

“There’s more.”

“Hit me.”

“He broke parole. He’s supposed to be in Philly.”

“Yoy.”

“You’re really something with the language tonight.”

She nodded, wondering why her brain was handing her expressions she didn’t generally use. Finally she said, “Did you tell Farber any of this?”

“Are you kidding? Call him up when I don’t have to? He must think he’s going to be governor or something when he makes the bust.”

“Delusions …”

“So we got names.”

“We got names.”

   TUESDAY MORNING, NELLINS walked into the YMCA and took out his notebook. He’d be writing all day, that was for sure. His thick hand simply wasn’t made for pencils and pens, had
never
worked right, even when he was young.

“If you could just get me the list,” he called after the tall woman who was too busy to pay attention to him and was walking into an adjoining room as if on a more important matter.

Nellins had once had violent impulses, but he’d learned to curb them. He sucked in two deep breaths and walked outside. He kicked at some butts on the ground, considered this might be a good time to take up smoking again.

His phone rang, and it was the new babe on Homicide telling him she’d been trying to catch up with him. “Fingerprints, shoe prints,” she was saying.

“Yeah, well, Hrznak is on it. You’ll know when we know.”

“There were
kids
up at that house.”

“I know, I know.” He laughed to himself. “Kee-ripe,” he had said to Hrznak, “the wee ones did it.” But he knew not to say that to Detective Greer, who had no sense of humor.

The tigress receptionist came out the front door for him. “I’m ready now,” she said.

Who’s in charge? he wondered. It ain’t me.

   NICK FEELS THE PANIC RISING again. What he needs more than anything is a drink.

“When you get that panicky feeling, use the pain pills, even the Aleve will help you sleep,” she said.

He fumbles for the water and takes two Aleve. Then two more. With great effort he persuades himself to lie still, for once in his life do nothing reckless.

His first day alone. The television, now on the bedroom dresser, is on, low. On the table beside him is a sandwich, a glass of water, a book, an empty glass jar in case he doesn’t think he can make it to the bathroom—she said not to try when nobody is home. A shallow metal bowl in case he needs a bedpan. Paper towels to cover it. It’s disgusting. And amazing. He could never have thought of all this, could he?

The flesh above the splint looks good, so he tries not to have doubts. They came in again and changed his dressings this morning before school. A little team of doctors. They confound him; he ends up thinking about them when they’re not in the room. The boy looked straight at him like a doctor and said he might limp if he didn’t get the leg set with surgical nails; he said he wanted to make that clear straight off. Joel.

And Meg. Meg is her name.

Laurie. Susannah.

On the television, some good-looking women wearing little suits sit in comfortable chairs talking about some book or other. How stiffly they move their heads. How tightly they squeeze their knees together. Being in front of the camera, what a horrible way to live.

He picks up the book that sits on the bedside table. Tilting the book under the light of the lamp, he attempts the first three pages. It’s dark because even though it’s daytime, the window shades are drawn—safer, the kids said. The window, however, is open and he can hear an occasional car, a voice, a dog barking. He reads the first three pages a second time. Nothing penetrates to his brain. He starts again and by page three he is asleep.

   JOEL READS AHEAD TO THE next chapter in world studies. Everybody hates this class, so all the kids are doing something or other, reading magazines, trading gum.

He has a secret. Yesterday he took Nick’s key and walked past his apartment. There was food, money, clothing inside, Nick had admitted to him, but also told him it wasn’t worth it, not safe. He had to try. His sisters were the wage earners and he wanted to do his part. But he studied the street the whole time he walked. He noticed a man in a car, just sitting, head back, radio playing. He kept walking, went around the block, and didn’t come back until two hours later. The man was still there. Then he knew he couldn’t go inside. He slipped the key back among Nick’s things and didn’t tell anybody, not even Meg.

   LAURIE SITS IN HER CLASSROOM looking out the window, again, looking for the mother who plays with her baby in the park.

Mothers. She doesn’t know much about them. She sees only other kids’ mothers. And substitutes like Alison. Her
teacher
is a mother. Ms. Hines. She always talks about her baby to the class. “My little Carson just loves the color blue,” she’ll say. Things like that. Carson Hines. It isn’t a name Laurie would have chosen.

Meg got cleaning work yesterday, even though it was a holiday. She made ten dollars. So they had hot dogs cooked in a frying pan, and after school today Meg has cleaning again, and Laurie has babysitting. So, all is well. What Laurie doesn’t understand is why Nick doesn’t manage to find some money somewhere, somehow. He ought to pay his way. Meg is too much of a softie.

Outside the window, she can see the school guards standing, watching the park workers drive their tractors over the lawn. People are awful, dropping all kinds of dirt on the park lawn, like it’s one big garbage can.

She tries to drag herself back to her workbook to look ahead to the next lesson. Other kids smile at her when they look up. She is popular. Popular is good. Clean, good. Polite, good. Polite she doesn’t always manage.

“Everybody done with your workbook?”

Noooo, they all cry out.

The teacher goes back to the book she is reading. Laurie, who is finished with her workbook, studies the scene out the window.

   SUSANNAH CAN STILL FEEL HIS hand on her hair. He touched her hair last night a little bit when she brought him water. First he said, “Come here. Just a minute. You’re Susannah, right?”

She said yes.

He said, “Thank you for bringing me things.”

She said, “You’re welcome.”

He said, “I hope to do better by you.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant. So she didn’t answer him, just smiled. When she has time later, she is going to draw him, the way he looked when he leaned forward and wasn’t angry or sleepy, just looking at her as if he wanted to know her.

“I can’t move around much now,” he said. “But I know how to cook. I’m a good cook.”

She wasn’t sure why he told her that, about cooking. She’s not supposed to talk to anyone about him, ever. Meg whispered it ten times last night. She hasn’t told her friends or her teacher.

Was he trying to say, when he smiled and leaned forward to touch her hair, that he wanted to live with them and cook and do some of the cleaning?

   MEG STUDIES THE SHELVES IN the library, looking for something good to read next. Hardy? The teacher thinks she will like Hardy. She chooses
The Mayor of Casterbridge
.

“What kind of a thing do you want to read?” she asked Nick yesterday. If
she
had to stay in bed, she would read the whole time.

He said, “I don’t read. I’m not much of a reader.”

“I do. All the time.”

He seemed to find that interesting, repeating, “All the time, huh?” She had lent him her copy of
A Tale of Two Cities
.

“You study this in school?”

“Special project.”

“You’re smart, huh,” he said, “knowing all kinds of things.”

“We do well in school,” she said. “All of us do.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You know anything about Belize?”

“A little.”

“You do?”

“I guess. Like what?”

“More like, how do I get there?”

A stab of feeling, like butterflies, hit her. People taking leave, departing—always hit her that way.

Now she sits down and begins to read the Hardy, noting the time. Lunch hour is coming soon. She will eat fast and run home to check on him and help him to the bathroom.

   NELLINS IS STANDING OUTSIDE the Y at noon, watching the street, when Hrznak calls and says, “Want to meet for lunch? Heard the pizza shop is good.”

“I’m ready to take a load off.”

But when they get to the pizza shop, it turns out there is no place to sit. Behind the counter, a man is training a woman to do the work. The man training the woman is thirty or so, lean and impatient. The woman is a bit older and harried-looking, lots of eye makeup and super-clean clothes and shoes. Hrznak and Nellins put in their orders and stand outside for a while.

“That Greer called me about the shoe prints up at the house being kids’ shoes.”

“Tell her I’ve been shot at by little kids.”

Nellins knows that. Hrznak often tells that story.

When their food is ready, they take it down a block to the park, where they find a bench and sit. People tend to feed the ducks, and so there is duck shit all over the sidewalk.

“Bird flu,” Hrznak says.

“I know. But there’s going to be a vaccine.”

“But who gets it first?”

“Police probably get first dibs.”

“You think?”

A kid runs past them, a girl. Nellins watches her hurry up the street he’s been working. “Hooky,” he says.

Hrznak grunts.

Halfway through his calzone, though, the girl goes racing back the other way. “Maybe not playing hooky,” he says.

“Forgot something.”

“Probably.”

   MEG HAD COME HOME FOR A few minutes to help him, but she was gone again. Now he looked at the glass jar beside the bed. No, he thought. He had to learn to do it alone.

Meg had put out a towel and razor and shampoo in the bathroom. If he cleaned up, he could do some of it sitting, some of it standing. He slowly, carefully, lifted his right leg out of bed using the strap, pivoted, and took up the crutches. He was up. Good, he congratulated himself. Then he thumped awkwardly down the hall to the bathroom. Stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. Sickly looking, he thought, but alive. In the medicine cabinet, he found a half-full bottle of cough syrup, two ounces of mouthwash. He took a swig of cough syrup, then finished the bottle. He sat on the closed toilet seat for a few minutes, catching his breath, letting the alcohol catch up with him.

Then he got up and moved around the small spaces upstairs, spying. Only one other room. That’s what he’d thought. Small place. In the kids’ room, he saw two bunk beds, all of the mattresses made up, two matching spreads, two not. One radio, one alarm clock, one bureau with six drawers. Picture of a man on the bureau top. Must be the father. Didn’t look like he was ready to kick it over yet, but he had.

Nick opened the drawers to find T-shirts, polo shirts, underwear. But it wasn’t much for four kids. Ditto the closet, the shallow sort, with a couple of hooks. All told, it didn’t amount to much. Jeans, jumpers, shoes.

He realized he’d been standing and moving on crutches for five minutes. Good, good.

Nick limped back to the bedroom he was using. The closet was bare. Funny. One bureau. He opened the top bureau drawer and found more photos. Mostly of the kids, a few framed. Nick studied the photos, figuring out the sequence—the stepmother and backwards to the mother, before Susannah, with three children at that point, one of them a baby.

Interesting. The new wife didn’t look that different from the old wife. If he had to bet on crazy, he would have thought number two had eyes that gave away an unstable personality. But you never could tell. Or he never could.

The kids in one picture after another—what was it he was looking for? Something that helped him understand them.

These kids went to school. They
liked
school. One time when he was a little kid, he’d run out the door of his school and hid under a bush.

He rested, using the bureau for support. Where would important papers be kept? With enormous effort, he leaned down to open the lower drawers. Empty. Nothing.

And where had the girl hid Earl’s gun? She said he couldn’t have it back. She said it was evidence and it might free him. She was a brainy one, but she didn’t have street smarts. He tried to put the photos back the way he’d found them. Nick let himself drift into the idea that had been scratching at him for a day—he had to find out what the father’s name was.

Suddenly he heard a big knocking at the door. Somebody must have been using the heel of the fist and pounding, pounding. He couldn’t see out the window, was afraid to get too close to it, and went dizzy thinking it might be Marko.

The bathroom struck him as the best place to hide. He started toward it, shaking. One of the crutches almost slipped from his grip because he had the shakes so bad. He held on, frozen.

“Anybody home?” The knocking repeated. Nick’s heart pounded so hard, he almost couldn’t hear. He stood in the upstairs hallway, unable to move. His good leg went weak on him. He thought he was going to fall before he could figure out how to grab for a wall and then the bathroom door. Suddenly, he heard a repeat of the knocking, but fainter. He listened, holding his breath. The person was knocking next door.