Work Text:
I'll meet you there when
the evening writhes
I will know the location
by the look in your eyes
The void and the vista
The fugitives gone
I'll see you there
at the Hotel Vast Horizon
—Chris Whitley, “Hotel Vast Horizon”
A pair of sharp raps on the office door rattle the glass inside its frame. Hanna’s bowed over his desk, steeped in cracked-open manila folders, forehead braced in the cradle of his thumb and forefinger.
“Yeah,” he calls.
He doesn’t look up until a thud sends a small quake through the paper shingles strewn under his face. Rausch, with the mail delivery. It’s quite the payload. From the look on her face, he suspects this batch is not addressed to MCU.
“Fiona came by yesterday,” Rausch explains.
Hanna stares blankly over the rims of his reading glasses. “She didn’t call?”
“No. She said to tell you she’s done doing you the courtesy every week, and if you can’t be bothered to fill out a form at the post office, from now on she’ll be forwarding your mail to the landfill.”
“Nice of her,” says Hanna, without rancor. “OK.”
He hasn’t worked with Rausch a fraction as long as Drucker, but they get along just as well. It’s funny. Already she’s adopted the same way of looking at him, that combination of judgment and sympathy.
“Sansara and I are swinging by the diner in a few. You hungry, you want us to bring you back something?”
Hanna starts to shake his head, then reconsiders. “Coffee.”
“Just coffee? No hash browns, side order of bacon?”
“Just coffee.” He grimly regards the stack of mail, more annoyed by the metastasizing pile of paperwork than what it represents, the final nail in the coffin of his latest relationship. He had resigned himself to it already. He’s accustomed to this outcome.
“Thanks,” he adds, as Rausch turns to go.
She tosses an apologetic smile over her shoulder. “Later, Captain.”
Captain. It’s going on two years now, and the epithet still sounds alien to him. Captain Vincent Hanna of the Los Angeles Major Crimes Unit. That’s an outcome he can’t quite get used to. With two loose ends unaccounted for, lost to international airspace, the promotion feels more like cheap plating than solid, hard-earned prestige. The letters on the glass taunt him in reverse. That the remaining three-fifths of McCauley’s crew are rotting in the ground is of little consolation to him, not when Shiherlis and McCauley himself have slipped through his fingers. Not when Bosko is rotting in the ground, too, severed from the lives of his family by a layer of dirt and grief.
This is irrational, he knows. But nothing that has ever fueled him, chewing at his guts like an ulcer, could be strictly described as “rational.” If that were the case, he might still be entwined with his girlfriend in bed—his now ex-girlfriend, at his now ex-residence—instead of catching up on reports at 6:30 in the morning, popping Adderall like breath mints.
(He might not still dream of McCauley, startling awake in the pre-dawn, drenched in sweat. A hot sweat, followed by a cold shower, wishing it were the other way around. That his subconscious could afford him the dignity.)
Three and a half weeks ago, Drucker had leaned over to him in the cruiser: You know what they call that, right? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result?
It had been intended as consolation, and so that was how he had taken it. Good thing I don’t expect a different result.
And then they both had laughed. It was all you could do, sometimes, in this line of work.
He sighs, removing his glasses. Leans back, grinding his hands over his face. Pulls them away and blinks to clear the flurry of sunspots. Pitches forward again, committing himself to the chore of flipping through the past week’s worth of junk mail, credit card bills, policy statements, trade catalogs.
There’s a postcard jammed upright in one of them like a bookmark. Hanna pulls it out, running his eyes over the image on the front, frowning. A gemlike tropical island with turquoise water, lapping at impossibly white sand. Greetings from Fiji, reads the script on the lower right hand corner. He flips it over.
He throws the postcard down at his desk like it’s burned him. He shoots to his feet, shoving his chair back so hard it wheels all the way across the carpet mat and bangs into the wall. He reads it again, over and over, until the words fall out of focus and his vision blurs, pulsing with each surge of blood in his arteries, every nerve ending on fire, cranked into the red on amphetamines and adrenaline.
There is no greeting. No regards. No return address. A single sentence is penned on the other side, a neat hand with a slight rightward slouch, spelled out in uniform capital lettering. It is phrased in the form of a question.
DO THEY STILL HAVE NOTHING TO SAY?
He’s awake, as he often is, in the lonely hours after midnight, in the converted Los Feliz loft he rents but rarely occupies. Even now, it functions mostly as a way station. Moving boxes still line the walls like cardboard hedges.
The postcard interrogates him from the coffee table, framed by a collage of dishware and other household clutter that telegraphs his status of middle-aged bachelor. He’s hunched over it in contemplation, with cigarette number seven of the first pack he’s bought in four years hanging off his finger, pulling a continuous thread of smoke toward the high ceiling. Drucker had smelled it on him in the car, and now he’ll never let Hanna hear the end of it.
The card is a custom print job. Hanna knows this because he looked up the company watermarked on the back and called them fourteen hours ago. This design is one of a kind, they told him, and not a part of the stock collection. A special order.
Did they have a record of who placed it six and a half weeks ago, the address they shipped it to? A gentleman by the name of Frank Hohimer, to a post office box in Pompano Beach. He tried the telephone number from a payphone on Fairfax, and got stonewalled by a much smarter and less chatty receptionist from a corporate service company in Palo Alto.
Both dead ends, unless he wants to involve the rest of the department. He can’t bring himself to do that just yet. So instead he studies the postcard, fuming in every sense of the word, trying and failing to wind down with a few fingers of warm bourbon. Trying to make sense of the transmission, differentiate between what it means and what he wants it to mean. Willing the postcard to talk to him, offer him something more besides that single infernal riddle. Brevity is the soul of Neil McCauley.
The ID itself is definitive. There was never anyone else he had told about the dream, his rotting council of the dead. Festering in silent judgment.
He takes a drag off the cigarette, ignoring the long stalk of ash that crumbles to the polished concrete floor. He chews and picks at his cuticles, yet another bad habit he’s decided recently to resume. This one predates the smoking by several months.
“Fuck,” he mutters, when he bites at a dry thorn of hangnail and takes a chunk of the living nail bed right with it. He sucks the blood off his thumb, stubs out the cigarette in a coffee saucer, and wanders off in search of a band-aid.
“Fuck!” he says again. Louder this time, jerking his head up, barked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He’s so out of sorts that the realization dawns shamefully late. Jogging it had required peeling his own skin off in incremental ribbons.
He tears the cabinet apart in a clamor of pill bottles, metal, and porcelain until he finds a pair of tweezers. He races to the kitchen, fills a coffee mug from the tap, and nukes it in the microwave. From under the sink, he fumbles for the box of rubber gloves, rolling a pair over his hands. The spot on his thumb glows red under the film of pink latex.
Mug in tow, tweezers between his teeth, he returns to the coffee table, hovering the postcard carefully over the plume of steam, waiting for the glue to loosen. After a minute or two, he tweezes gently at a corner of the stamp, exhaling shakily as it comes away. His heartbeat sprints toward a painful crescendo, and a manic grin breaks out across his face.
Underneath the stamp, in faint but legible pencil streaks, is a phone number.
Vincent Hanna moves through life like he’s got a finger held down on the fast-forward button, but for the next fifteen minutes the tape grinds by at agonizing half-speed. It’s 3:30 in the morning on a deserted street corner, a few miles away and one neighborhood over. He picks up the receiver from the payphone, inserts his change before he can think about it, and dials the number he’s been reciting under his breath all the way en route, repeating it like a mantra.
The line picks up after two rings. He spins a violent half turn back out toward the street, clotheslining his shoulder against the metal cable, eyes scanning out into the dark.
McCauley, he tries to say, but all that comes out is a strangled “Mick.” He wants to bash his forehead against the scratched up plexiglass of the payphone vestibule.
“MacGyver,” he suggests instead, throwing a hand up, then smearing it up and down over his face. “Mick Jagger. Mickey Mouse.”
Breathy laughter whispers through the ear piece. Longing surges inside his chest, red-hot and then blackening, crystallizing like glass.
“Talk to me,” he snaps, harsh and immediate. “You wanted me to find you.”
“OK,” says McCauley. “We’ll talk.”
Hanna can hear the wry smile in his voice. His palm is sweating on the grimy receiver. He wedges it in the crook of his shoulder, wipes both hands against his trousers, and switches it to the other ear.
“When?”
“When and where,” McCauley amends. “Not now, not here. Say Friday evening. When’s the last time you took a vacation?”
“Friday evening is in forty-eight hours.”
“Thirty-six. Who’s counting? I hope they banked you some extra paid time with that nice new promotion.”
“They did.”
“But you never take it.”
“I don’t like to.”
“This time, you will.”
“Take it? Or like it?”
Another warm, breathing silence for an answer. A shadow suggesting concealed laughter, or perhaps something else.
They are tethered together by electrical impulse, across copper wire and in parasympathetic signals. Hanna feels himself igniting in tandem, lighting up like a circuit board. The heat from it pooling low in his gut, filling the emptiness with yet another kind of emptiness, with hunger. Every part of him that McCauley has hollowed out, lined with raw animal need.
McCauley gives him an airline, a flight number, and a departure time on Friday morning. Hanna says he’ll be there. The silence that follows is darker, dense with warning.
“Come alone,” McCauley says, low and dangerous. “Don’t get any ideas. If you do, I will know. You tell anyone, I will know. And I will kill you.”
“You won’t hesitate?”
A pensive beat, and then a sharp inhale, a hitch of breath. Whatever he might have intended to say, McCauley thinks better of it. The telephone is a black plastic windpipe Hanna is throttling one-handed.
He hears a click, followed by the synthetic whine of the dial tone. Long seconds elapse before he hooks the receiver inside its cradle again.
Keys jingling in hand, he starts back toward the Crown Vic, half dead from lack of sleep, more alive than he’s ever been.
Friday morning, early. Sunrise blooms over the Sierras, sickly pink in the haze of smog. He barrels down the 110 toward LAX, right past 444 South Flower Street, where McCauley and his crew had held up the Far East National Bank and opened fire in the middle of downtown L.A., killing three of Hanna's comrades and wounding 11 others, making off with a cushy $12.8 million in cash.
It’s September 5, 1997. In two days, it will have been two years.
From the car, he dials another number on his cell, also memorized. He smiles broadly at the voice that answers, its bright and uncomplicated eagerness. Vanishingly few women in his life are this happy to hear from him.
“Vincent!”
“Hi, sweetie. How you doing?”
“It’s, um, I’m getting ready for school.”
“Oh, shit.” Hanna winces, fluttering his fingers over the wheel. “I’m sorry. I forgot what time it is. Is your mom up?”
“I don’t know,” says Lauren, trepidation trickling in. “I can check.”
“No, don’t worry about it. How’s the new school? How’s it feel being a sophomore?”
“It’s great!” The unalloyed enthusiasm returns, and he relaxes. “Mrs. Gardiner, you remember, from my painting course last year? She says we’re going to get a portfolio together. There’s this program, through CSSSA, it wouldn’t be until next summer, but she wants me to apply. She thinks that maybe I could get in—”
“Of course you will.”
“Shhh, no, don’t jinx it!”
“You got it. I said nothing. You didn’t hear a word from me.” This reminds him why he called. “Listen, kiddo. Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“When she gets up, will you tell her I’m going away for a few days? I just want her to know, in case she tries to reach me. I’ll be out of town through Monday night.”
“Where are you going?”
She sounds more surprised than curious. She has good reason to be. Hanna is not exactly the going away, out of town for the weekend type.
“Home,” he lies. “Granite City. Old family friend, passed away last Wednesday night. The service is this Sunday.”
“Oh . . . I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right. I just gotta be there, you know, show up, pay my respects.” He pivots casually around the subject, back to Lauren. It’s easy, because his interest in her is real, his deep care for her wellbeing. “You sound fantastic. Happy. Are you happy?”
“Oh my god. I told you I was happy last week!”
“I know, but this is this week.”
“Ye-e-e-e-s,” she groans, all giggling teenage theatricality.
“See? That wasn’t so hard. Good, that’s real good. Glad the school year’s getting off to a good start.”
“Love you, Vincent,” she says, and he knows she really means it. He also knows it means, Can I go now?
“Love you too, sweetie. And you tell your mom the same, OK? I know she doesn’t want to hear it right now, but promise me you’ll tell her.”
“I promise,” says Lauren, quieter. “She’ll get over it.”
Hanna makes a face out at the road flying by, but manages to keep any trace of it out of his voice. “OK. Take care. Bye now.”
“Bye.”
He hangs up, crushes the antenna down against his chin, and drops the phone through the space between the seat and the car door. He wonders if the battery will fry after a few days of desert sun, baking in the carbon steel casserole dish of the Crown Vic. He’d rather claim it fell out of his pocket, beg forgiveness, than risk a trail. Coming from him, turning it off would read just as aberrant. He told Rausch and Drucker to reach him by phone if they needed, that he was leaving the beeper at home.
He has. It sits with his badge and his .45 on the nightstand in the freshly tidied dark of his condominium. Beneath it is a drawer in which an envelope has been wedged, stuffed with several pages of hastily written farewells, apologies, half-cooked explanations, all torn from a yellow legal pad. How could he possibly explain it to them, that which he can hardly explain to himself? The bulk of his missive is addressed to Lauren and Justine, some to Drucker and his colleagues, a couple of paragraphs for the two sisters he hasn’t seen in almost five years, the ex he hasn’t seen in three and a half weeks. Sorry about all the mail. If you’re reading this, at least you don’t need to feel bad dumping the rest of it. He doesn’t bother pleading for their forgiveness, only implores that they believe him, that he means what he says, has done what he said he’d do.
In the passenger seat sits a nylon duffel bag, small enough to carry on and carry in hand. He’s packed light, only the essentials. Pair of jeans, a couple of short sleeve button downs, undergarments, toiletries—the closest his wardrobe gets to weather-appropriate. A chemistry set of performance enhancers with all the necessary legal backup, illegally procured.
The postcard is inside his shirt, sharing the breast pocket with a dwindling pack of Marlboros. If he were smart, he’d have burned it in the sink already. He’ll get around to it.
He pulls into long term parking, kills the ignition, and leans against the car for a smoke before he heads for the terminal. It’s another cloudless, beautiful day, and for the first time in a long time, he’s got some of it to spare. It’s an uncomfortable novelty. Strange, this sprawling asphalt stillness, the rows of motionless cars in lieu of streaming light trails, paired currents of red and white. He squints in the acid-washed daylight, even through his Revos. Comedown is calling.
He stubs the cigarette out under his boot, withdrawing the postcard from his shirt, the lighter again from his back pocket. Flicks the flame to life, and watches as it chews through a corner of bright blue sky.
Then blows it out. Turns the image over, confirming that it’s eaten away the coded invitation under the residue of stamp glue. He reads the question beneath it again. Once more, for good luck.
“What about you, McCauley?” Flapping it in his hand, glancing up at the sky. “What have you got to say?”
He slides the postcard back inside his shirt pocket.
He’ll get around to it.
Fiji is not the tropical paradise to which he’s headed, and the latter half of that classification is debatable. He dozes fitfully on the plane, five and a quarter hours in tropospheric suspension, Los Angeles to Miami, LAX to MIA. Going missing on the other side of the country.
He startles awake during the descent, a split second of free-fall as the 757 hits a pocket of turbulence. The last flash behind his eyelids, instantly escaping consciousness, is the sight of planes roaring over his head. Great aluminum beasts in the night, swooping low over an open field. He had been running, chasing through a field. Always chasing. Occidental dry brush and weeds, west coast scrub-land, not the waist-high waves of wheat from his childhood, the endless brown nothingness of rural Illinois. It’s a familiar place, but one he has never been to.
He’s never been to Miami, either. An escalator spits him out on a mezzanine with the throngs of fellow arrivals, and he almost grins when the sign comes into view. “MICKEY MOUSE,” it reads, held at the waist by a balding man with a stringy ponytail, his limbs decorated in faded tattoos, the width of a linebacker. He’s wearing cargo shorts, a salmon-colored polo shirt, and an expression that suggests total unfamiliarity with the Happiest Place on Earth.
“Wrists,” says the man, as Hanna is steered into the passenger seat of a mud-streaked SUV, his duffel bag confiscated, searched, tossed in the back with the Mickey Mouse sign.
“I’m Vincent,” says Hanna, presenting his forearms over the console. “Wrists, what’s that, German? Hungarian? That’s an interesting name, I’ve never heard that.”
Hanna receives a disinterested glare over a pair of transition lenses. The man zip-ties his wrists and pats him down as discreetly as the circumstances permit.
“OK,” Hanna sighs.
He gets to keep his sunglasses, cigarettes, and the postcard. Car keys, wallet, and the lighter are a no-go. Hanna tries to tell the guy that he might as well go ahead and take the Reds, too, because what the fuck is he going to light them with now, but the conversation is a non-starter.
Hanna is driven in silence down the turnpike, from teeming tourist destination to the flat, forested wilderness of the Everglades. Miami becomes a pastel sandcastle city shrinking in the rearview mirror. Soon, the gray strip of asphalt is the only mark of civilization the eye can see, a thin line between humanity’s steel triumphs and its primordial origins.
The sight of this much unbroken green rouses memories of another jungle, many years ago and half a world away. The unease it stirs in him is dampened, detached, like a song he can’t stand playing from a tinny speaker in a room down the hall. Without the amphetamine current coursing through his blood, his nerves are a dead battery. He’s calmer than he should be. It’s either a small blessing, or it’ll be the death of him.
It’s early evening by the time they turn off at the marina. The dashboard clock reports 6:34. Hanna angles his bound forearms to check the display on his wristwatch, which reads 3:32, still lodged three hours behind in L.A.
His resolutely dull escort finally deigns to speak in excess of one-word commands. He thumbs down the toggle on a two-way radio and delivers a few sentences of clumsy Spanish into the mouthpiece. Hanna understands enough, but the content is meaningless to him, further encrypted in mundane jargon about a grocery errand. Cena a la hora habitual, which he takes to mean that they’re running on schedule.
Hanna is fully attentive now, swiveling his head around like a periscope. What he can see through the windows and side view mirrors is neither particularly ominous nor especially reassuring. The dock itself is deserted, but there’s only a couple hours of daylight left, if that. It’s after Labor Day, so the seasonal flow of tourists has already reversed.
A few minutes later, a younger man, small and wiry, with a gold stud punched through each ear, materializes in mirror-view and then at Hanna’s passenger side door. Polo Shirt slices through the zip tie with a butterfly knife and the two of them haul Hanna out toward the boardwalk, into a nearby boathouse where he is subjected to a more thorough search. Hanna rolls his eyes as he is forced to strip down to his undergarments. They at least hand him back his duffel when they’re through, and he rummages through it as he dresses, finding the contents of his wallet spilled out, but everything there.
After, it’s all aboard a go-fast boat along the stark white crescent of the Florida Keys, reeled into a rosy sunset. As the wind buffets against his face, Hanna wonders what would have possessed McCauley to risk such a meeting on domestic soil. Domestic sand. He lands on only two options that make sense to him: either McCauley is desperate, in the same forbidden, unspeakable way that Hanna has come to recognize in himself; or else he thinks that Hanna can be trusted. Trusted, perhaps, to repeat the same mistake.
His stomach churns in anticipation, then snarls loudly. It’s been many hours since he’s eaten. He craves a cigarette, too; a chemical rush, a gas pedal to floor, a scent to chase. Every appetite demanding to be fed, new ones seeming to invent themselves.
In a pinch, a different jolt of speed will do, and the white arrow of the boat as it cuts through the water tides him over, scratches at the perimeter of the itch. Soon the buildings on the shoreline become stouter, sparser, resorts giving way to private property, to the gated anti-sociality of the wealthy. Isolation is a tournament prize for these people, not a casualty of higher principle. They seek it out. Hanna comprehends the substance of the need, if not its origin. His own is strictly consequential.
The boat wheels and cruises in toward the beach, as suddenly as if it had changed its mind. The sight of landfall swells up fast over the seawater-streaked curve of the windshield.
He is deposited without ceremony at the mouth of a private pier, a long, narrow walkway of refurbished driftwood on a secluded stretch of sand, what he assumes is either Islamorada or Key Largo—the boat had skirted too far afield on its route for any signs to be legible. He turns to ask, and is drowned out by the motor as the boat pirouettes noisily away, into a sky the color of granite and grenadine, moody with cumulus clouds. Hanna hoists two middle fingers after it as it departs on a trail of foam.
He wipes the spray off his sunglasses and replaces them on his nose, even though he no longer needs them. He swings his duffel over his shoulder and turns to follow the boardwalk where it leads, from the surf to a gentle incline toward the rear patio of a private villa, a fortress of white concrete and plate glass, cleanly and forbiddingly modern. Quaint seaside abode it is not.
There is a lone figure with its arms folded upon the railing, enveloped in sunset fire, watching him.
The squall of the seabirds has died down. Hanna hears only the blood in his ears, the waves at his back, a breeze rustling through the palms. The quiet here is stark, liquid.
He trudges through the sand and up the short stairwell, pausing for a moment at the lip of the patio, dropping the bag at his feet, tearing his sunglasses away again. He hooks them in the collar of his tank and forces a neutrality to his expression, subsumes the wildness in his eyes into a facet of general temperament, a hardwired intensity that on him just looks natural, ingrained. Mad Dog, like they called him at the academy.
McCauley straightens from the railing and angles toward him in greeting, wrestling for the same poker face, which on him is more subdued, wary. He’s barefoot, in gray chinos and a relaxed white button down, the cuffs rolled up just under his elbows.
Their eyes meet in a shower of sparks, and then Hanna extinguishes the tension, approaching with his arm extended, a jaggedly awkward smile that most would read as more calculating than friendly.
They shake firmly, briskly, and McCauley gestures toward a pair of deck chairs pulled out beside a table. They sit.
Hanna latches his fingers on the edge of the dimpled glass, pitching forward. This posture makes his CIs recoil against their seat backs, squirm under his gaze.
“You’ve got balls the size of coconuts,” he says, “doing this.”
McCauley doesn’t flinch. “I do?”
“This is dangerous. High risk. Even for you.”
McCauley angles his head thoughtfully. “Less than you think.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I don’t waste my time with small scores.”
There’s a glint in his eye, like he’s sure Hanna will go for it, that he’s not immune to flattery.
“So I’m like the major leagues, is that it?” Maybe it’s true; maybe he isn’t. “Go big or go home?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s funny. ’Cause I was trying to put it together on my way here.”
“What’s that?”
“Nature of your business. What kind of operation you’re running these days, has you holed up in this . . . bourgeois Lego enclave on the Keys.”
“What if I’m not?”
“Excuse me?”
“’Running an operation.’ Doing business.”
Hanna leers in disbelief, but he can’t resist playing along, running with the joke. “You and this new crew of yours, then, those two scintillating conversationalists back on the boat. Just a part of the local retirement community? San Quentin chapter of the AARP?”
McCauley comes the closest he has to outright laughter for the first time since Hanna sat down. Hanna grins openly.
“Yeah, sure,” says McCauley. “Let’s go with that.”
“What happened? Your girl make you give it up?”
McCauley’s face falls. Hanna’s does, too. He rides out the urge to pummel his fist through the table.
“She left a long time ago.”
Hanna blinks in surprise, then shrugs in commiseration. “Mine too. Only not long. Not a long time ago.”
“When?”
“Three weeks, give or take. I knew it was coming.” It always comes. “She booted me out of the house a couple months back.”
“How’s the kid taking it? Your stepdaughter?”
“What? Oh, no, that’s—that’s my wife’s daughter, she’s been outta the picture a while now. My wife, I mean.”
“Not divorced yet?”
“Not formally. Probably one of the reasons my girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, decided she’d had enough. She’s got a list of those, I’m sure.” He bobs his head from side to side, contemplating his own situation, how to convey it. “We talk. Not at the moment, but for a while we did. Lauren, my stepdaughter, we’re close. I still see her, pick her up from school now and then, take her to the movies, museums. That kind of thing.”
“And your wife, her mother. She’s good with that?”
“She kinda has to be,” says Hanna sagely, and McCauley takes it as a sign not to pry for the details. Hanna realizes he wouldn’t mind it if he did.
“You still love her,” McCauley says instead, not entirely a question.
“Oh yeah,” Hanna answers easily. “Every one of them. I never stopped. All three of my wives, ex-wives, all my girlfriends. You name it.” Before he knows it, his bark has lost any threat of a bite, all pretense of strategy. This is an honest admission, unguarded. “That’s not the reason they didn’t work, not for any lack of love. Maybe on their part, but not mine. I know how to love. What I don’t know is everything else, how to do all the other shit you’re supposed to in a marriage.”
In turn, a knot in McCauley’s demeanor loosens. He inclines himself carefully over the table. Hanna swallows hard, ears pricked, his pulse off to the races again. The precise, methodical cadence of McCauley’s speech takes on a new inflection, confessional.
“I was gonna . . . teach myself. Study how to do it, do it right. The way I did everything else. I figured, how hard could it be? You can learn to read a schematic, drill through steel, titanium—”
The shake of Hanna’s head is resigned. “This, this is not like that.”
McCauley’s own is like a match striking, a flare of furious self-reproach.
“She said I had this . . . blackness, inside me. A part of me. Like this hole I couldn’t pave over. And she couldn’t look away.”
“How poetic,” says Hanna, glumly sympathetic. “Blackness like what, what’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. Something missing, something that’s supposed to be there.”
“Such as?”
McCauley just shakes his head, makes a curt gesture with the palm that’s been resting on the table, flipping it up on its side and back down. Don’t know, or don’t ask.
“So what’d you do?”
“Nothing. What was I supposed to do?”
“You didn’t try and get her to stay?”
“Of course I did. I begged her.”
“You didn’t tell her she was wrong? About you?”
“Fuck would be the point of that? What people decide to see when they look at you, that is what you are. There is no arguing with it.”
McCauley’s not being fatalistic, uncharitable. For him, this is the reality. He’s done hard time. People find out, regular people, and they never look at you the same. Some of them won’t even look you in the eye.
Hanna’s put away enough parolees to know that the logic is sound. He doesn’t bother to argue, either.
“Then what do you see?” he asks instead.
McCauley only stares for a moment, and then blinks. It feels like a camera shutter. He withdraws with a shrug, aloof again.
Hanna tries a different angle. “Was she afraid of you, do you think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. She knew who I was, what I did. Why shouldn’t she be?”
“But you would never hurt her.”
McCauley shoots him a look, like how the fuck would you profess to know, but the heat behind it vanishes instantly. Hanna knows enough, knows this much at least.
“You let her go,” he says, brandishing his proof, the smoking gun.
McCauley nods slowly out at the water, darkening in the twilight, lips curled tightly over his teeth. “I let her go,” he repeats.
And then turns his gaze back to Hanna, freighted with significance. Hanna’s stomach drops down through the floor. He feels foolish, uncomfortably exposed. He hadn’t even thought about it.
“You want to know what it was?” He accelerates right into it, figuring he might as well. “The final straw, of all things? What killed it?”
“What, your marriage?”
“Yeah.”
He waits for the nod.
“You.”
McCauley’s nostrils flare with the long drag of a breath. Maintaining eye contact feels like staring down a pair of headlight beams, playing chicken with an oncoming tractor trailer. Hanna is nothing if not stubborn. He will not look away first.
McCauley starts to bristle under the pressure, and Hanna likes that in spite of the danger, maybe because of it. That he can get a rise out.
“What do you want, an apology?”
“No, I wouldn’t ask for that. That’s the job. I knew that.” He goes to draw from the familiar reservoir of anger, of shame, finding the tank mysteriously empty. Drained somewhere en route to the Caribbean. “I’m lucky that’s the worst I lost.”
“It rains,” says McCauley, “you get wet.”
“At first I wondered if you were bringing me out here . . . that maybe you were gonna get rid of me. But then I thought, you know, it’s an awful lot of trouble. There are easier ways to whack somebody.”
“Easier and less personal, sure.”
They share an appreciative look, not dissimilar to one exchanged in a diner booth a couple of years ago, conspirators in a private joke known only to the two of them.
“You’re right, it is a lot of trouble. And I didn’t bring you. You brought yourself.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Hanna mulls this over, drumming his battered fingertips against the table. “You killed Waingro,” he points out.
McCauley’s lip warps in disgust. “That’s different.”
“You did the world a favor.”
“Waingro was a loose end. I don’t like loose ends.”
“I don’t either. But he was payback, too. I killed half your crew. More than half.”
“He had it coming,” says McCauley, unexpectedly severe. “Waingro was a sadistic fuck. A coward. Vermin. I’ve known rats with more honor than him.” His eyes narrow, hardening. He does not mince words. “I am not happy about what happened to Michael. Breedan. Chris—my brother—gettin’ stitched up by some back alley fucking veterinarian. Giving up his son. Charlene. Everything.” Then he relents, leaning back against the deck chair, cool and inscrutable again. “But it is what it is. Or what it was. You did what you had to do, and so did I.” Exhaling in submission. “That’s the job.”
Hanna does too, looking out at the water.
Just not what I said I’d do.
The silence between them is anything and everything but empty. They both feel it, both sense that the other feels it. That uncanny alchemy, diametric magic, beyond comprehension. To even make mention of it would be to trespass somehow, tempt fate.
It’s why Hanna, who struggles with many things but candor least among them, can’t quite bring himself to ask the looming question: Why am I here? He knows it’s the reason McCauley is still tiptoeing around the identical retort, its variant on the stress point: Why am I here?
The sun is gone, but the sky remains vibrant, luminous blue and purple watercolor. The fading light is tenacious in the humidity. A papery slice of crescent moon peeks over the wall of thunderheads.
“Pretty fucking magnificent,” says Hanna.
“That’s the Sky Chief,” replies McCauley, like Hanna’s supposed to understand what the fuck that means. Blunt, but not terse. Not resentful.
Hanna finds himself nodding absently in agreement. Maybe he does understand. He saws a hand back and forth over the bemused grin on his face, then flattens his palms to the table, looking brazenly back to McCauley, expectant.
“Got anything to drink around here? Scotch? Bourbon?”
“Just beer.”
“I’ll settle.”
McCauley stands and cocks his head toward the house. After you. He’s not being polite. He doesn’t want his back turned to Hanna.
There’s trust, or lack thereof; and then there’s precautions, forces of habit. Hanna isn’t sure what this files under. He stands, eyes lingering on McCauley for a beat, and then proceeds inside.
In the weeks following the bank score, they had tracked down McCauley’s abandoned hideout on the Pacific Palisades, an austere and palatial bunker overlooking the water. This place is not so different. Cavernous, immaculate, sparsely furnished. Nothing like Hanna’s pad, which looks like it should qualify for a FEMA grant on a good day.
“Shoes,” says McCauley, passing toward the kitchen.
Hanna purses his lips into an o-shape and toes off his boots, glancing around until he spies the mat beside the patio door. He drops them next to the single pair of black driving loafers, brushing the sand off his socks, feeling an emergent self-consciousness he can’t place.
McCauley doesn’t seem to notice. He’s standing at the breakfast bar of the gleaming, open-concept kitchen, popping the tops off a pair of Dos Equis bottles, setting each of them down on a coaster.
“This is what your cut buys you, huh? Not bad. Little dismal for my tastes, but not bad. Kokomo morgue chic.”
“You sound like Eady. Place was livelier before she left. Want a glass?”
“Nah, I’m a barbarian.”
“You too, huh?”
Hanna trots over for his beer, maybe too eagerly, because McCauley’s enigmatic barely-there smirk ratchets up to a full blown smile. Teeth showing, eyes crinkling, the whole nine yards. Hanna has to consciously dial his own back so as not to look like some horrible crossbreed of court jester-serial killer.
He lifts up his bottle. “What do we drink to?”
McCauley raises his own, looks like he’s about to say something, and then stops. Drawing a blank. There’s an awkward pause. He tilts his head, mugging skeptically, and then starts to laugh.
So does Hanna. Neither of them have anything to drink to. Both their lives are pissing down a storm drain in the torrent of their worst decisions.
“Wait,” Hanna pleads, recovering a sliver of composure. “My stepdaughter. Lauren. She uh, she started her sophomore year of high school like a week and a half ago. She’s going for this scholarship thing, summer arts program. Big stuff. You know. She’s going places.”
McCauley straightens respectfully.
“A toast, then,” he says. “To Lauren and her work. To all the beautiful things she will make, that she will put out there in the world.”
Hanna tries not to let his expression betray his surprise. They clink their bottles and drink, elbows propped on the bar.
Hanna just about drains his in one go, even reaping a slight buzz. He’s a few gulps short of polishing it off when the shrieking digital warble of a telephone interrupts the moment. He startles, almost chugging beer into his lungs. McCauley sends a lacerating glare over to the cordless phone on the counter, then glances at Hanna. Hanna holds up his hands, backing away.
“I gotta take this,” says McCauley, in a tone that implies the subject is not up for discussion. Not with Hanna, that’s for certain.
He plucks the phone out of the cradle and answers brusquely, stalking off in search of privacy. The impulse is to find a way to follow, sneak behind and eavesdrop, but Hanna decides against it. He hasn’t got much in the way of manners to speak of, but self-preservation beats out curiosity, if only by a hair.
He glances around instead, venturing into the adjacent living room, which he can at least write off as innocent wandering if confronted. He's searching for signs, information. Like McCauley watching him out of the corner of his eye, this is decades of encoded instinct at work, a matter of muscle memory. It’s not like McCauley is going to give him the proper tour. It’s not like McCauley is especially talkative.
That’s all right—houses generally are, real garrulous if you know the right questions to ask, how to listen. What he’s going to get will be through the usual channels, observation of the scene, the stories it decides to tell him. Pattern recognition.
He scopes it out, swinging wide on the first pass. Clockwise, systematic. There are dark marks stippled all over the living room walls. Pinhole epitaphs on a room once decorated, filled with art, now a blank graveyard in a painted eggshell finish. The glass bookshelves are almost entirely empty, filigreed at the outer edges with a fine layer of dust. She left a long time ago, but he kept the books until recently.
No structural engineering texts, French philosophers, Roman emperor life coaches. This is a different wing of the minimalist McCauley library. In L.A., there was Camus, Marcus Aurelius. Here there’s Hemingway, Dostoevsky. The Old Man and the Sea, and Demons. Ouch. He finishes his beer, and scans around for a trash can.
He doesn’t see one. What he spots instead is an armchair on the other side of the bookcase, positioned with its back turned to him, out toward another beach-facing wall of plate glass. There’s a floor lamp beside it with a hanging shade. What must have once been a reading nook is now a site of solitary contemplation.
There is a cardboard banker’s box at the foot of the chair. Slowly, thoughtlessly, Hanna sets the empty beer bottle down at his feet. He approaches the lonely domestic still life like it's a museum exhibit.
He tries the lamp, but the bulb is dead. So he crouches over the banker’s box, squinting in the dusk as it bleeds out into night.
Pieces of sea glass. A collection of shells. A barrette. Cuff links embossed with . . . a ship’s wheel? A fridge magnet—Fiji. A history book on the age of sail, and several more on how to read nautical maps. No letters. No photographs. The only remains that could be salvaged. The only treasure he couldn’t part with.
There’s a piece of driftwood stuck upright against the side of the box. Hanna nudges it with his finger, spying something on its underside, a splash of color. He picks it up and turns it over.
It’s been painted. His eyes dart over the image, taking it in. A siren, or a mermaid, clings to a ship’s mast above the surface of a turbulent sea. On one side of her, a wall of dark shoal, a serrated mountain range, sharp as a shark’s maw. On the other, a swirling typhoon, like a black spiral galaxy without stars. Scylla and Charybdis: either/or. Waking from a dream, or corrupting her own soul. Heartbreak or Neil McCauley.
Hanna feels a stab of vicarious mourning, painful enough that he has to close his eyes for a moment, ride it out.
Not for lack of love. He remembers the girl with the waterfall of tawny hair, her face bathed in the strobes of emergency beacons, strikingly beautiful even at a distance, turbid behind a windshield. Recognizing who she was, and what her presence had meant. The stillness that had gripped him, unprecedented, nailing him to the ground outside the Hotel Marquee, chaos flowing around him.
He had watched as McCauley emerged from the back of the building, smiling when he saw her. Then fading as he turned his head, glancing over to where Hanna stood. Snuffed out like a candle when their eyes met.
Hanna was immobile, paralyzed by something he could neither understand nor explain. Gone slack, limp as a corpse over the gallows, his hand falling down from the holster of his sidearm for the first time in his life.
Then he watched as McCauley got into the car. He would remember the sight forever, the torment of that endless moment. The girl’s face, blooming like a rose, opening up in joyous relief. How she looked, when she looked at McCauley. How McCauley looked, when he looked at Hanna.
Hanna wonders how he must have looked.
They were gone by the time he could move again. Home free. Hanna had only stood there, caught in limbo. Lost at sea.
The girl had not left because she saw the blackness inside McCauley, the emptiness, and was afraid of what he was or what he might do. She had seen it, stared right into it, and loved him anyway. What she had fled was the precipice upon which she stood, the magnetism of the abyss. What frightened her was the depths into which she herself might fall.
Hanna drops the piece of driftwood back in the banker’s box and stands, scrubbing his hands up and down over his eyes.
When he pulls them away, he sees a pair of boats all the way off on the water, jetting along the surface like tiny white teeth. He approaches, squinting through the glass. One is closer than the other, only slightly, but at this distance it looks for a moment as if their paths might converge. An optical illusion. They pass on, going their separate ways. The clouds shudder pale gray with lightning, and for an instant he sees his own reflection in the flash.
He sees McCauley, coming up behind him.
It happens too fast. All he registers is each discrete sensation: the dull ache of his right arm being forced into an unusual angle, wrenched behind his back; a stinging firework erupting from his scalp, causing him to suck in a gasp. That gasp is punched out of him as he’s thrown against the glass, greeted in front with a postcard-caliber view of the beach at night, from behind by the full-body charge of McCauley’s weight against his back, pinning him, covering him. McCauley’s fierce baritone rasp scalds his ear.
“Can’t take my eyes off you for a fucking minute.”
“I’m just too good to be true.”
“Why the fuck are you here?”
Hanna’s forehead is pressed to the window. He pants from the surprise, the strange fluorescence of the pain, McCauley’s hand fisted in his hair. The lethal voltage of this new thrill, lighting him up like a third rail.
“Hospitality leaves something to be desired,” says Hanna, his tattered reply fogging up the glass. “Why’d you write?”
“You got a smart mouth,” McCauley warns. “Nate told me you were a maniac—”
“That’s what they all say.”
“—You got a death wish, too?”
“At this point, do you even need to as-k-ha—ah!”
"Shut up." The grip on his hair tightens. “Cut the bullshit. You have ten seconds to give me an answer I like, that I am amenable to. Don’t lie to me. Or I will bust open your fucking skull like a tail light, you understand?”
It’s not the threat that undoes him, the very real and immediate prospect of his own doom. Poetically self-orchestrated, as are the majority of his misfortunes. It’s not even the warm, deadly weight of McCauley sheared up against him, like a blade to a whetstone.
It’s the force of the crash, its splintering physicality. The entanglement of the wreckage. Two ships, not passing in the night, but coming together in a storm, breaking into pieces.
“I’m drowning,” says Hanna, heaved out in a surge of relief, the ecstasy of unburdening a terrible secret.
He feels himself tugged backward, spun around by the shoulders, and endures it without complaint.
“Say that again,” says McCauley, low and menacing. An executioner’s register.
“I said I got this dream,” says Hanna, letting his head knock back against the glass, wincing through the echo of pain, blinking slow. “Where I’m drowning.”
He opens his eyes, and sees McCauley’s own ablaze, gone wide with shock.
“So what the fuck are you waiting for, McCauley? Huh?” Hoarse but swaggering, fearlessly defiant. “Don’t waste my time. Pull me up, or get it over with. Fuckin' finish the job. Hold me under.”
McCauley’s lip tremors with a snarl. It lasts for an instant. He hauls them together with such force that Hanna first mistakes the collision for a botched head-butt, crying out from the impact. The kiss is rough and ugly, a smash of brow bone and then cartilage and teeth, a swipe of tongue that wants to taste his blood. Judgment could go either way. A rescue or a mercy kill.
Doesn’t matter. Hanna revs right into it like a gun’s gone off, burning rubber. His hands fly up to McCauley’s face, and the both of them stumble blindly into the uncharted, into the angular lagoon of dark blue.
Hanna smashes his toe on the leg of the coffee table. He curses and buckles, and McCauley huffs a laugh. This is his turf, his advantage. He swings Hanna around by the lapels of his shirt, throwing him down on the sectional. Hanna lands on his back with a grunt.
“Cheap shot,” he accuses.
“Fair game,” says McCauley, with an admonishing quirk of his head, undoing buttons one by one.
Hanna is rarely at a loss for words or tactical maneuvers, but he finds himself lodged in a daze, shell-shocked by the dawning reality of what has come to him so often in dreams: the sight of McCauley standing above him, shrugging off his shirt, trousers lewdly tented.
He must be going insane. He doesn’t believe it. Any minute now, he’ll bolt upright in his bed back in Los Feliz—it’s too perfect. It’s too sick, floridly fucked up, even for him. McCauley is as striking as a painting, or like one of those Renaissance sculptures, a tattooed fugitive Michelangelo.
The only thing bolting upright is trapped painfully inside his jeans. Hanna’s hands are shaking as remembers how to peel off his shirt, unbuckle his belt.
McCauley’s shadow descends, followed by McCauley himself, the arc of each movement smooth and unhurried, imposingly confident. He swings low, knees pinned to the seat cushion in the space between Hanna’s own, his face stern but searching, keenly curious. He reaches down, tearing Hanna’s belt away like a ripcord, tossing it aside.
Hanna’s breath is coming hard and loud, in shuddering and undignified spasms. This dawns on him, too. The imminence of what he does not know, and knows only of. The kinds of things that go down in there, in the joint. For the first time, a cold spike of fear drills up from the base of his spine.
McCauley smiles a little. Crooked, but not sinister. He knows.
“Is this why you let me go?”
Through his jeans, McCauley grinds the heel of his hand down the side of Hanna’s cock, tearing a disgraceful sound from deep in his throat. He seizes McCauley’s forearm in both hands, locking eyes, imperious. Chin jutted for emphasis.
“I did not let you go.”
McCauley cuts a shrewd glance to the two-handed grip fastened around his wrist, arching his eyebrows.
“Fuck you,” Hanna snaps, a dry bite. “I—hesitated.”
“Six of one, half dozen of the other.” McCauley’s left hand is snaking under Hanna’s tank, ascending the trembling ladder of his ribs. “Shook out the same, didn't it?”
“Ends justify the means? Yeah, that checks out. Guy like you.”
“Like me,” muses McCauley, and suddenly the palm sliding across Hanna’s chest feels more dangerous than the one between his legs. “Who’s like me?”
The hand stills, settling on the patch of skin pulled taut over Hanna’s pounding heart.
“What, what about you? You figure this was how it’d turn out? Motherfucking postcard, that your idea of a booty call?”
McCauley rumbles with amusement.
“Don’t tell me. You’re just old fashioned. You send for hookers by telegram. C-carrier pigeon.”
“There’s nobody like either of us,” he murmurs. “It’s just you and me.”
“Misery loves company,” suggests Hanna. Inside, he’s cresting over, breaking apart, a wave smashing against the rocks.
“I had no idea it was gonna go like this.”
“Me neither.”
All at once, McCauley’s breathing starts to fray. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says.
“Me neither,” says Hanna, sputtering laughter.
McCauley crushes them together in another bruising kiss, frenzied from elation. Hanna is buzzing in tune with the same frequency, his whole body singing with gratitude, primal salvation.
There’s blackness in him, too, a piece that’s missing. He can feel it coalescing under his fingertips, the exact shape of its outline, fitted against him. On top of him. Right now.
He lets himself fall. So help him, but it's the easiest thing he’s ever done. His arms entwine around McCauley’s neck, pulling him in. They’re going down together.
He feels a broad hand working into his waistband, warmed from the heat of his own skin, wrapping around him. The noise he makes is downright shameful.
He tries to tell McCauley that he’s ready for it. You can do whatever the hell you want, suggests the sonorous groan as he throws his head back, the roll of his hips, the proposition in the shape of his body. A parenthetical, bending into McCauley’s touch. Go ahead. Tie up loose ends.
He awaits the turn: to feel teeth scraping down his neck, the nails down his thighs, flipping him on his stomach, tugging his jeans down under his ass. For McCauley to make good on his threat, to bust him open. He’s prepared for it to hurt.
It never arrives. There’s no pain; not like that. Only the pleasant abrasions of McCauley’s beard against the hinge of his jaw, like the brush of sisal rope.
McCauley doesn’t want to hurt him, inflict some transposed caricature of punishment, of prison violence. Far from it. He’s kissing Hanna’s throat with exploratory tenderness, the hollow of his cheek and collar bone; pulling him off languid and indulgent, like he’s got a hand on Hanna’s waist and shoulder instead of on his cheek and on his cock. Like they’re slow dancing instead of screwing on a couch, through hiked-up and torn-open hems and closures. It’s the most romantic hand job he’s ever gotten in his life. He would laugh if he weren’t so overcome by this, by the tides of pleasure washing over him, the tendrils of shame unfurling with them. The darkness of that fantasy, just the construct of his own mind. What kind of monster did he take McCauley for? The same kind that he is? Ravenous, wanton, destructive?
No, he’s nothing like that at all. McCauley is a generous lover, selfless and attentive, instinctively aware of the terror that Hanna is wrestling down, protesting against. Protesting too much. There’s proclaiming readiness, and there’s being ready. McCauley knows the difference even if Hanna doesn’t. He’s good. Real good. Always one step ahead.
Hanna is receiving the introductory course, he realizes, the starter lesson on getting fucked by Neil McCauley. If this is remedial education, he shudders to imagine the master class.
You were out of your mind, honey, he thinks, as McCauley picks up the rhythm. It’s a little awkward at this angle, the twist of his hand falling off the beat here and there, but more than enough. Hanna comes like a teenager, fast and hard, christening the edge of his tank. McCauley watches approvingly, glazed over with satisfaction.
The idea takes hold while he's still ransacked in the afterglow, eyelids fluttering, catching his breath. An urge too powerful to resist, even though he’s never felt anything like it before in his life, and would have been repelled by the suggestion. Suddenly, it’s the opposite of repellent. It’s as though McCauley has gotten inside him, on the prowl, broken into his head. Putting things in there instead of taking them away.
He hoists himself up, bolting forward, shoving McCauley in the chest as he pulls back. McCauley makes a noise of surprise and loses his balance, slumping into a seat. He stares, puzzled, until Hanna swings his legs over the edge of the couch and drops himself down to the floor, eager and wily. His knees are loud when they hit the carpet.
He relishes the transformation in McCauley’s face, from confusion to affection to dark, simmering urgency. McCauley repositions slightly to accommodate, feet on the ground, legs falling open in invitation. Hanna flashes him a grin, irreverent. He shrugs: How hard could it be, right? McCauley just laughs as he takes his cock out. It’s a laugh that dissolves into a guttural groan, as Hanna takes him enthusiastically into his mouth.
For all his reticence over the width of a table, McCauley is pleasantly vocal when Hanna’s down on his knees, right up against him and with his mouth around him, that last short distance profanely erased. Beginner’s luck.
He doesn’t have to wonder if he’s doing things right. The feedback is explicit, in the jump of a thigh or a buck of hips, low tones of encouragement set to one- or two-word phrases, mostly things like Yeah and Like that. McCauley weaves his fingers through Hanna’s hair again, less roughly this time, and the pain of it is pleasant, instructive rather than punishing.
The experience of sucking McCauley’s cock is both humiliating and fearsomely empowering, which seems appropriate somehow. He’s not sure which part he likes more, only that he does like it. Very, very much. It’s exhilarating, despite the mounting agony in his jaw, down his neck, sprouting up from his knees. The vulgarity of the smear on his chin, a painted stripe descending his throat, the shine of his spit in the low light. Trying not to choke when he does something a little too right, and McCauley briefly lapses in his commitment to his principles, forgoing self-discipline, hitting the back of Hanna’s throat.
McCauley tastes warm, alive, like skin and earth and salt, the amber-tinted burn of a weird spirit. He smells like faded soap, rinsed over with the pleasant funk of perspiration. He sounds caught in the grips of rapture, or like Hanna could be twisting a knife inside him.
He exhorts Hanna to go easy, take it easy, laughing shamelessly. Slow down or I’m not gonna last. Hanna feels a little better about going off like a firecracker all over his own stomach. They’re both painfully electrified, reeling at every touch. It’s a fine idea, savoring two years’ worth of mutual longing, but tougher in practice. Like a score or a sting gone wrong, even the best laid plans have a way of falling through. High-minded aspirations are no match for hot blood, brute physical impatience.
McCauley tries to warn him, pull him off. Hanna won’t let him. He glances up, making a point of it. Wanting to see. Their eyes meet.
That does it. McCauley comes with a ragged cry, hips jerking, erratic. Hanna swallows, without hesitation.
He falls back, coughing, smearing his chin on his shoulder. McCauley lunges forward, eyes wide and panicked for an instant, an arm outstretched. Then lets it flop down in his lap. He looks terribly annoyed, even in the mellowed-out, post-orgasmic flush. Hanna rolls his head around inquiringly, and spies just how narrowly he’s missed smashing it against the corner of the coffee table.
He turns back to McCauley, still coughing, and salutes him feebly. McCauley manages to look both dignified and exasperated while putting his dick away, which is a feat for the ages. He gets to his feet unsteadily, buttressing an arm against the sectional. At least there’s that.
Hanna realizes it may be a while before he can pick himself up off the floor. He lies down for a minute, enjoying the gently hypnotic rotations of a ceiling fan.
“McCauley,” he says, before he’s figured out the rest. The rest of the sentence, the intent behind it. He thinks maybe he just wants the company, to feel the heat next to him. To find another excuse to reach his hand out toward the burner. He imagines laying his head in McCauley’s lap, looking out at the waves and distant tremors of lighting, going off like flashbulbs behind the tower of clouds.
“Hanna,” answers McCauley.
“Sorry.”
“You think maybe we’re on a first name basis? Now?”
Fair enough. Hanna sits up, arms braced out behind him, his head drooping over his chest in assent.
“Neil,” he tries.
It’s weird, but good. It fits. Turns over in his mouth like a key, the tumbler inside of a lock.
McCauley glances up in reply, just long enough to qualify as too long, and then returns to the task at hand. He’s poured two glasses of water, and is now pulling a pair of plates out from a mostly empty cupboard, a butter knife from a side drawer. He sets a jar of mayonnaise out on the counter and digs through the door of the fridge, still shirtless, cast in rectangular spotlight. His skin is tanned from the sun, hair a little grayer around the temples. It suits him.
“You look great,” says Hanna.
“You look like shit,” says McCauley, tossing a resealable bag of cold cuts on the counter.
“Thanks.”
“When was the last time you ate?” Another bag retrieved, and slices of bread doled out, the twist tie diligently re-twisted, re-tied. McCauley would buy whole wheat. “Last time you slept?”
Good question. Hanna has to think about it.
He looks back out the windows instead of answering, gazing at the water, the starless sky. The thin line bisecting the two. He palpates his fingers along his jaw, reveling in the soreness there like a pervert. An ache he’s never felt before. He’s discovering a whole new universe of those tonight.
He thinks he knows why McCauley prefers these lavish lairs that are like forty percent transparent by surface area. It’s so he can always see a way out. The whole concept of an escape hatch, writ large right in front of him, built into the design. This seaside diorama will never suffocate him, box him in like a cell. Not with that far wall exploding out into a view of breathtaking tropical infinity. He thinks, for the first time, I’ve just sucked off Neil McCauley on the Skydeck Florida Keys. No big deal. How’s that for a smart mouth?
“Come here,” says McCauley, in a tone of voice that goes straight to Hanna’s prick, makes him want to do instantly and unquestioningly as he’s told. First time for everything.
He pushes to his feet and hobbles over to the kitchen, partly from the creaky twinge in his knees, mostly because he’s half-hard in his briefs again.
McCauley shakes his head and nudges a plate and a glass across the breakfast bar. Hanna suddenly remembers that he’s hungry, starving even, that he’s been running on stimulant fumes instead of calories as of late. The sandwich is nothing special, and he gets the sense that McCauley is as ascetic in his pursuit of nourishment as he is with most other things, but after the week he’s had, sliced turkey breast is as decadent as a steak dinner. McCauley’s prepared an identical meal for himself, and they eat in the dark across from each other, standing up at the counter. Without speaking, communicating only in stern looks and eye movements, he browbeats Hanna into finishing a full glass of water.
“I was gonna leave tonight,” says McCauley eventually.
Hanna makes a noise of acknowledgment through the next mouthful of turkey sandwich.
“She was the only reason I’m here to begin with.” Talking like he owes Hanna an explanation. “Wanted to be closer to her family. So that she could . . . ” He trails off, trying to decide if it matters any longer, whether it’s worth it to bother. “Whatever. There’s nothing left for me in this house.”
Hanna just stares at him and chews. He makes short work of the sandwich, shoveling it down in enormous bites like a carrion bird, devouring with graceless efficiency. McCauley eats politely, methodically, an elbow leaned up on the counter. Looking down aslant at his plate, like it contains the day’s headlines.
Hanna steps back, wiping off his hands. His heart hurts, but he can take a hint.
“You got a shower around here I could use?”
“Other side of the patio, down the hall to your left.” McCauley puts his sandwich down half-eaten, looks up at him. “Want me to bring your bag upstairs?”
Hanna freezes with his palms still aloft, convinced he’s misheard. “Say what?”
“I’ll take your bag upstairs,” says McCauley, not asking this time. “You left it outside.”
A moment hangs there, awkward.
“Yeah, OK,” says Hanna, casually stunned.
McCauley straightens, averting his eyes. He bins the rest of the sandwich and scrapes both plates into the sink, dropping them down with a clatter, crumpling his napkin and spiking it into the trash. He sidesteps Hanna on his way out of the kitchen, marching stiffly past him towards the deck.
“I would have eaten that,” submits Hanna.
He hears the sliding door open, McCauley from over his shoulder.
“You want to dig around in the garbage, be my guest.”
He stands there for a minute, running his tongue over his teeth, mouth twisting and untwisting over the verge of a smile. Working through the evidence. Running through a possible scenario.
He grins, and scrambles off to shower.
When he emerges from the bathroom, toweling at his hair, he sees his belt has been rolled up neatly on the coffee table, his overshirt folded beside it. The postcard is arranged face-up on the breast pocket, like a card atop a birthday gift. He drops his defiled tank and crumpled jeans beside them, stuffing his socks and briefs in the back pockets. The empty beer bottle still sits by the bookcase, so he brings it over to the kitchen and rinses it out in the sink. He bangs off the faucet, lingering there with his arms dripping, a bath towel wrapped around his waist. Dwelling, temporarily, in the absurdity of that.
He turns around, drying his hands against the tops of his legs. He looks up.
There’s no light coming from the landing upstairs, but he senses the presence there. He can feel his heart spinning out, then settling like a compass needle, Neil McCauley its magnetic north. His powerlessness to it is humbling.
It should weigh on his conscience, the feelings that stir in him, and the ones he can’t summon. The things that he’s done. The things he’s failed to do.
The logic of anything and everything he should, collapsing underneath a singularity of want, the only reflexive urge to ever surmount his instinct to hunt. It’s terrifying. It’s dizzying.
He’s weightless as he follows it, tracking damp footprints across the hardwood floor, ascending the floating stairwell. Upstairs, he proceeds down a dark hallway and finds McCauley in the master bedroom, leaned against a great slab of a wooden dresser, staring out through a parted cascade of curtains. Out beyond yet another wall of glass, facing toward the sea.
Hanna feels the air seize in his lungs at the sight of the bed, the linens on one side of it pulled up, tousled with evidence of occupancy. Conspicuously unmade, a lone sign of disarray. McCauley doesn’t turn. He’s shirtless still, his trousers buttoned but slung low on his hips, curved like a bow with his shoulders tensed, fingers clenched tightly around the lip of the dresser. There’s a glass of water by his hand, the base of it wrapped in a napkin, folded like origami. Hanna’s duffel is slumped over by his feet.
Hanna goes and sits at the foot of the bed in front of him. Facing him, but not directly. Positioned cautiously at an angle.
“I was supposed to leave tonight,” says McCauley again, pulled tight like a garrote. Muttered like a curse. Frustrated with himself.
“Hey,” rasps Hanna quietly.
McCauley looks over, pained underneath the mask of indifference, made obvious by the effort required to suppress it. Hanna can feel it coming off him, this dark radiance of grief.
“I’m tired,” he tells Hanna, softening a little. “It can wait ‘till morning.”
There’s a question lurking somewhere in there, like the outline of an object underwater. Hanna can’t tell what it is, but he nods anyway.
“Sure,” he says.
They’re quiet for a while. Hanna is learning to appreciate the stillness, the quiet. It used to drive him mad, corroding at the edges of his sanity, first stage of mental decomp. It was get up, get moving, or feel himself start to crumble away. A gust of laughter falls out of him.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking. About the last time I enjoyed a view like this. It was a long time ago. On my honeymoon.”
“Here? Near here?”
“Hell no.” Hanna tosses his head to indicate, other side. “Hawaii. That’s the farthest I would go, farthest from L.A. Five days. Less than a week. She didn’t mind it yet—Justine. Making those kinds of concessions.”
“Hawaii sounds like an easy concession.”
“Not if you’d rather spend a week on the Amalfi coast, another two on the French Riviera. Her ex-husband’s some hotshot architect, built the kind of houses you’d cream your pants over. High class standards, real tough bar to clear. He had me beat on all counts except for personality, basic human decency.”
McCauley smirks, glancing down at his feet.
“Nah, to her that wasn’t much of a honeymoon. That was expectation management. How’s that for a portent? And for me, it was torture.”
A look of dubious amusement pierces McCauley’s veil of gloom. “Torture?”
“No, of course not.” Hanna makes a face, reconsiders. “No, not all of it. I was desperately in love, head over heels, over the moon. Overjoyed to be married to her. Who wouldn’t be? But I couldn’t stop thinking about my crew, you know, uh—the team, back at Robbery-Homicide. We had this big case we were working at the time, going on for months. A year, almost. Nothing glamorous about it. Just busting our asses, noses to the grindstone.”
“What was it?”
“String of home invasions, burglaries, all high-line targets. People with connections. The worst kind.”
“So nobody would talk to you.”
“Yeah. We were flying blind, hitting every wall you could think of. It was genius, in a way. The guy was a madman, fuckin' nuts, but he was fastidious. Kinda like you.”
McCauley hums dryly. “Max Dembo,” he says, as if recalling the name of an old classmate, a real character.
“Get out of here," says Hanna. "You knew him?”
“I knew the guy he burned a bit better.”
“Well, yeah, then. Then you know that was it. Our big break. Dumb luck. Nothing but a former associate who hated Dembo’s guts slightly more than he hated ours. If Jacob Spragg hadn’t waltzed right into the precinct that morning, guy probably would have just kept on going. Picking mobsters’ pockets ‘till he could finance his great escape.”
McCauley snorts so loudly and abruptly that Hanna jumps, snaps his head back over from the window to look.
“Fuck,” says Hanna.
McCauley’s got his face turned into his arm, laughing silently.
“I’m an asshole.”
“Yeah.” Nodding, shouldering at the corner of his eye. “Let me guess. You were lying on a beach in Maui the day the guy walked in.”
“Just about the moment the landing gear touched down on the ground. Yeah. I did the math. Son of a bitch had impeccable comic timing, I gotta hand it to him. They did the takedown two days later. Without me. Stormed the joint like Normandy.”
Hanna can’t hold back a scowl. McCauley almost starts laughing again, incredulous.
“He wounded four officers. I remember. It was all over the news. Fuckin’ miracle he didn’t take anyone else with him.”
“Yeah. Uh-huh. And I was fucked all the way off in the middle of the Pacific when they gunned him down, gettin’ loaded on frozen cocktails all day. Making love to my beautiful wife all night. Stranded in paradise. Going nuts, trying to pretend I wasn’t going nuts. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. How I wasn’t there with ‘em.” He runs a hand through his hair, flashing McCauley a rakish, can-you-believe-it smile. “Fucked up, right?”
McCauley can’t seem to decide whether to shake his head in amazement or nod vigorously in agreement. “Yeah, that’s pretty fucked up.”
“Took me seven years to top that.”
McCauley’s smile is warmer, slighter. A lamentation.
“Hawaii drove you nuts, you must be going stir crazy down here.”
“No,” says Hanna quickly, with a frankness that is surprising even to himself. “No, I like it here.”
They watch while scattered raindrops strike the window, distorting into elongated streaks. The storm that’s been brewing way out on the water is making its way over.
In profile, Hanna can also see the clouds gathering on McCauley’s face.
McCauley brushes a hand down his beard, like wiping a slate blank. He reaches in his pocket with one hand, picks up the water glass with the other, approaching Hanna, all business. Holding both out in proposition.
There are two tablets in his right palm. Hanna doesn’t know what, exactly, but the color tells him enough. Blue. Blue is for downers. Hanna subsists almost exclusively on a diet of red. He looks up at McCauley, more amused than insulted, though he feels obligated to play at indignation.
“Are you serious?”
“Do I look like I’m fucking around?”
“No, you look like you have not fucked around a day in your life. You should try it sometime. Might do you some good.”
“I’ll consider it. When I sprout a pair of eyes in the back of my head and I’m not crawling into bed with a cop.”
“‘Crawling into bed with a cop,’ what, have I got cooties? Come on. You really think I’m gonna do that? Wake up in the morning, ‘Nope! Changed my mind. You know what, I think I’ll call in the cavalry now, on the wanted felon I’ve been fucking in the Florida Keys since Friday night.’ Hey. It’s got a great ring to it. Don’t think we've got a code for that one.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know you.”
“You know enough,” says Hanna, and by now an undercurrent of seriousness has crept into the bit.
McCauley is taken aback, enough that he can’t immediately dispose of the evidence on his face. Hanna is surprised, too. He shuts his mouth, studying McCauley with fascination, a trace of guilt.
Rain drums against the glass, coming down steadily now.
Fuck it.
Hanna takes the pills in hand, the glass, palms the former into his mouth, washes it down with fast gulps from the latter, never once breaking eye contact. He sets the empty glass down on the nightstand.
McCauley steps toward him, clasping fondly at the side of his face, pushing a lock of hair off his forehead. There’s an erotic profundity to the gesture, both poignant and intensely arousing. If Hanna didn’t know what the drugs were about to do to him, his legs would be hooked around the backs of McCauley’s knees already.
“I bet you roofie all the other girls, too.”
McCauley returns a listless smile, sinking into a seat beside him. “It was that or the restraints.”
“You didn’t tell me that was an option.” He shoves at McCauley’s shin with his foot. “I should be tying you down. Where do you have to be that you gotta boogie so fast? Retirement, my ass. Stick around for a while, stay the weekend. My flight’s not ‘till Monday.”
“I want to. I wish I could.”
“So do it. Do what you want.”
McCauley brings both his hands up to Hanna’s face, around his ears, cradling him roughly, swaying him once. Gazing at him, heavy.
Hanna stares back until the understanding hits. It tears through him like shrapnel.
“Oh," he says. His voice comes out rough and brittle. “That’s right. I almost forgot. About your whole credo.”
The last word receives particularly scornful emphasis. McCauley just exhales through his nose, nobly tolerant.
“That’s it, huh? And here I thought this was the start of a . . . beautiful cat and mouse game. But you just don’t wanna wake me up before you go-go. Spare yourself the trouble.”
“What did you think was gonna happen—”
Hanna scoffs laughter, slashing the hands away from his face and immediately regretting it, caught off guard by McCauley’s wounded flicker of confusion. “Not what happened!”
“That we were gonna go again? You go home, I walk, another two years gone—”
“—One of us gets lonely and horny, horny and lonely, lather, rinse, repeat? We trade flirty postcards in perpetuity? Have fucked up, mind-blowing sex in the latest funereal beach front mansion you’ve bought with your dirty money? Yeah, actually.”
“I can’t afford to keep making mistakes like this.”
“I don’t know, you’re looking pretty flush. Did that feel like a mistake to you?”
“It’ll be easier for both of us.”
“Speak for yourself, don’t fucking speak for me. Nobody speaks for me but me. Mistakes. Fuck you.”
McCauley reaches out again, and Hanna doesn’t have the heart to flinch away. He feels the unsmiling mouth pressed up against his forehead, nose buried in his hair, hand wrapped at the base of his skull and holding him there. He watches, seething in stone-faced anguish, while McCauley pulls back to examine his face. Then yields, grudgingly, as he’s kissed, incapable of steeling himself against it. A man’s got his limits.
What starts slow and soft goes awry, turning possessive, despairing and angry. McCauley’s doing, not his own.
Hanna yields to that, too. Wondering if this is where McCauley will get carried away by what the inertia is suggesting, and wishing that he would. It only falters, fading out, as quickly as it had come on.
The numbing sedative wave is rushing in fast. Hanna’s being swept away on his end, as well, wilting into McCauley’s arms, boneless and exhausted. He’s let down so carefully, so brutally, guided gently into bed. It’s infuriating, or it’s supposed to be. The acknowledgment doesn’t translate. Neither does the command he sends to his arm, to cuff McCauley with a right hook as the duvet is pulled up and folded over his hips, the towel tugged away, out from underneath.
Hanna fights the call to sleep instead, talking just to stay awake. If he closes his eyes, McCauley will be gone when he opens them again.
“You don’t have to run. I don’t have to run. What if I didn’t? I could give it up. No more running, chasing on this hamster, torture, hamster wheel . . . ”
Besides, the view right now is spectacular. A close-up shot of McCauley’s hands, hips, dark hair trailing down a bare stomach. He’s unbuttoning his fly, stepping out of his trousers. No, don’t walk away. Hanna tries to reach out, but his arm won’t budge for that, either. Thankfully, he feels a weight settling down beside him shortly after. He rolls over on his back with tremendous effort.
“We could do it together. We could be like . . . Oh, shit. What were they called? Those two criminals? From the Depression?”
McCauley is wedging a pillow against his back, propped up against the headboard. He looks down at Hanna, brow furrowed.
“Bonnie and Clyde?”
“That’s it!” He touches McCauley’s wrist. “Bonnie and Clyde. Or, uh, Donnie and Clyde. Ronnie . . . ”
He feels the bed shaking with McCauley’s mute laughter.
“What? I’m serious. You could stay. Why not? We could stick around here forever, screwing each other senseless. Drinking Mai Tais on the beach.”
“Sounds nice.”
“I know. I know. It’s a great idea, right? That’s why they made me Captain. 'Cause I got all these great ideas. Like going to Florida, blowing the guy I’m supposed to be blowing out of his socks. Ah, fuck. What the fuck’s a captain? L-A-P-D. Po-lice Cap-tain. A ship has captains.”
“So does the military.”
“So do cereal boxes. Fuck that. Been there, done that. But a ship’s crew . . . hey. You ever go sailing?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“You wanna be my first mate?”
“Yeah. OK.”
“Really? You’d do that?”
“That’s what I just said.”
Hanna arches his eyebrows seriously. “It’d be a demotion.”
McCauley shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll start a union. Me and the crew.”
“That’s a mutiny, asshole,” says Hanna, reverently. Then, bitterly: “Traitor. Fuckin’ chickenshit."
"Hey. Come on."
Hanna curls into him apologetically, burrowing his head into McCauley's lap. He takes in a deep, skin-warm breath. It's hard to feel miserable in this position, with rough fingers threading over his scalp and tracing down the nape of his neck, delicately untwisting the knotted pair of gold chains. It's hard to feel much of anything with a mind-erasing dose of tranquilizers in his stomach, swimming out to his bloodstream, dissolving at the edges of reality.
"So you got more than you bargained for. Think I didn't? You don't . . . don’t wanna roll with it? See what happens?"
"We both crash and burn."
"Bull . . . shit. You don't know that."
He has to speak slower so his consonants don't degrade. Really takes the venom out of his ripostes. He's not sure he believes what he's saying, either. Crashing and burning is what he does best.
But that's never stopped him.
"Let’s . . . do it. Let's . . . go up . . . in smoke.”
He uses his last ounce of strength to wrap his arms around McCauley's waist, bury his face against his stomach.
"Go to sleep, Vincent, quit fighting it.”
McCauley strokes down his spine like a cat, switching off all coherent thought, higher order reasoning.
"No . . . f-f-fucking way."
I’m not the one fighting.
He listens to the rain coming down.
Rain. Rain coming down and soaking the pavement, turning the streets to black mirrors, reflecting the colorful strobes of city light. He dashes out of the cab with a newspaper held over his head, toward the red glowing sign across Franklin, splashing grimy water over the hems of his trousers. His suit’s cheap polyester, but the floodlight grin on his face is worth a million bucks. He’s jogging on air, beaming into the night.
He shoulders open the door to the steakhouse, damp from sweat under his clothes, soaked through on the outside in spots, where the thunderstorm's caught him. He tumbles into a bustling front bar, a low-ceilinged cavern of wood paneling and maroon upholstery, the lights dim and golden, welcoming like an old photograph. A barmaid takes one look at him and points him toward the room in the back.
A year ago, Hanna returned home from Vietnam, to where his family now lives in Chicago. He’d applied to Boston University, and has since been accepted, enrolled under the G.I. Bill. This is his combination party, Swiss Army soirée, congratulations-slash-goodbye-slash-birthday bonanza. In a few weeks, he'll load the trunk of his car with a few cases of luggage, his clothes crammed in and bursting out at the zippers; books tossed in the back seat with a crate full of records, his turntable riding shotgun. He'll make the 15-hour drive to Massachusetts in one straight marathon shot, East on I-90, overnight. Tonight, however, celebration is the sole item on the agenda. They're pulling out all the stops, steaks and champagne at Gene and Georgetti. The occasion calls for it. He’s not leaving home to get shot at this time. He's the very first in a long line of Hannas to go to college. And as of this past Tuesday, July 15, 1969, he’s 21 years old.
Although it sure doesn't look that way, he realizes, catching a glimpse of himself as he passes by one of the great big mirrors in the restaurant dining room. The sight of a haunted and hollowed-out 49-year-old police captain gives him pause, but only for a moment. He hears the boisterous melody of voices and laughter drifting from the back, calling to him.
What truly stuns him, stopping him in his tracks, is the crowd that awaits him when he arrives. He turns the corner and skids to a halt.
Seated and standing, conversing and cavorting, is a cross-generational cross-section of dramatis personae, all the significant figures of Hanna’s life. They hardly take notice of his entry. They’re too busy talking and laughing together, corralling squealing children, sharing plates of food and pouring glasses of wine, caught up in the carefree revelry of a weekend summer night.
Cross-factional, too. Drucker and Casals are chatting amiably with Chris and Charlene Shiherlis, leaning to peer over the tablecloth and smiling at what they see, at Trejo and Drucker’s kids supervising the construction of a Hot Wheels track on the carpet. Bosko and his wife are fawning over Dominick, who is perched on Michael Cerrito’s shoulders, a few fingers stuck bashfully in his mouth, grinning down at them with all four of his teeth.
Hanna’s mother, who passed long before he transferred out to L.A., is alive and well, seated beside Mrs. Drucker and Fiona. They’re complimenting a trio of young girls on their dresses, sandy-haired and bright-eyed. One of them is Bosko’s daughter. The other two, Hanna realizes, are Cerrito’s. Nearby, his older sisters are giggling conspiratorially with his first wife, Sofia. Sofia turns and says something into the ear of McCauley’s fixer, a man by the name of Nate, who Hanna had shaken down in his own bar on the night of September 7, 1996. Roughed him up pretty bad, right in front of his patrons.
Talking animatedly, with the intensity and easy intimacy of old friends, are Justine and Eady. They are deep in conversation, their wine glasses almost untouched. Justine glances over at him, wiggling her fingers in hello, coyly adoring. Even Eady smiles at him in recognition.
Hanna smiles back, lifting his hand in an awkward wave. They turn back to each other, laughing, buoyant.
He surveys the room, and astonishment gives way to a strange acceptance. This may look wrong, but it feels right. A could-be, or should-have-been, a different roll with the same fistful of dice. A luckier hand, drawn from an identical deck. Just an outcome that got lost in the shuffle.
He sees McCauley, seated at the far corner of the table, his head bowed close to Hanna’s father, who is whispering in his ear, a hand wobbling on his cane. McCauley is nodding along intently, mouthing his understanding, Right, right, sure. Many years ago, long after the war, Frank Hanna was hit in the pelvis in a gunfight outside a cigar store, in the larynx by a piece of shrapnel. He has spoken in a strained whisper ever since. He doesn’t like to talk much. He’s been talking quite profusely to McCauley.
They break apart suddenly, grinning at each other, laughing. A joke, most likely. Hanna’s father was a real comedian, the life of the party before he lost most of his voice. A born flirt, a bootlegger and a troublemaker, but fiercely principled. Doting, with a heart of gold. McCauley claps him warmly on the back.
Hanna hears a jubilant scream and spins around. The level of his gaze falls to meet the source. Lauren is barreling towards him, arms held in the air, dress swinging. Hanna drops down, his own outstretched, and screams right back.
He catches her, lifts her up, swings her around in a half-circle. She hangs off him with her legs around his waist, her arms hooked around his neck.
“Lauren, look at you!” he exclaims. “How did you get here?”
“I’m five!” Lauren says.
Hanna blinks at her a few times, realizing that this non-sequitur is nevertheless true. She’s dressed in the same outfit she wore when Justine had brought her to accompany them to dinner for the first time, at a Chinese restaurant in Silver Lake, to be introduced in neutral territory. Lauren had been wary of him at first, but then intrigued, swiftly disarmed by the eccentric pageantry. The same qualities in Hanna that could be weaponized against the bad people were also those that enchanted some of the good kinds. Kids usually saw him as one of their own, an overgrown kindred spirit. He’d brought a box of crayons in his suit jacket so Lauren could draw on the sheet of paper laid out over the tablecloth. That night, he’d won her mother fully over, too.
“No way,” he says finally, dramatic.
She nods, laughing. “Yes, way.”
“Five years old, I don’t believe it. You’re pulling my chain. You know that’s how old you were when I first met your mother over there?”
He tilts his chin over at Justine, who is now looking at them with her cheek propped on her hand, grinning at them both, brimming with affection. Hanna winks at her. Justine blows him a kiss.
“Gross,” says Lauren.
“Disgusting. Vile. I fell in love with her the moment I laid eyes on her. Sitting there across the room, just like that.”
“Like . . . that?”
Lauren pulls a hand out in front of him, trying to snap her fingers like Hanna has shown her. She’s getting there.
“Yeah. And you too, baby.” He kisses the swoop of bangs fallen over her forehead. “Loved you since the day I met you. I always will, no matter what. No matter what happens. You know that, right?”
Children are smart. Lauren detects the subtle shift in tone, the adult seriousness behind the kid-friendly, pasted-on cheer. She nods at him slowly.
He smiles at her, and then grins, zany. She laughs at him. He glances furtively over toward McCauley, almost forgetting to wipe the crazed look off his face.
“Vincent,” says Lauren, “are you happy?”
“Am I what?” His eyes nearly pop out of his head. “Oh, my gosh. Honey. What a question. Where did that come from?” He laughs nervously, bouncing her in his arms. “That’s, you can’t just drop that one on people, ‘Are you happy.’ Fuck. Please don’t tell your mother I said ‘fuck.’”
Lauren just giggles, watching him. Sometimes children are too smart.
He feels another pair of eyes on him. He looks back over at the culprit, his heart in his throat, an entire legion of butterflies scattering around in his stomach.
McCauley is smiling at him. Hanna smiles back, still holding Lauren, shifting his weight on the balls of his feet. Still bouncing her. He watches as McCauley excuses himself, pushes his chair back from the table, and stands up. He’s coming over.
“Yeah, yeah,” says Hanna, sounding far off. “I’m happy.”
Lauren wriggles free and drops down to the floor, her Mary Janes thumping on the carpet. She runs over to where McCauley is squeezing behind Nate’s chair, on his way to greet them. He makes a face down at her of exaggerated surprise, presenting the palm of his hand in the universal signal for low five, put her there. Lauren slaps hers down into his, and now they’re both approaching Hanna, hands clapsed, arms swinging.
McCauley looks up at him. Hanna draws a sharp breath.
He opens his eyes.
It’s blinding, brutal, a glowing pair of knitting needles boring all the way through each socket. He’s sprawled on his stomach, turned toward a bar of sunlight that’s coming in through the curtains, landing directly on his face.
His eyelids feel like sandbags. The sedative hangover is like a lead blanket draped over his body, bunched up around his fumbling consciousness. He’d recoil, turn away if he could move, but he can’t seem to summon the motivation.
Suddenly, he remembers where he is, how he’s gotten here. The realization is a defibrillator jolt. He whirls over and swings an arm out across the bed. It comes down on an empty pillow. He jerks upright at the waist, feeling his insides sloshing around in protest, glancing frantically around the bedroom.
Silence. Blank, sterile emptiness. He’s alone, in paradise, in hell.
McCauley is gone.
He sinks back into the mattress, down into the sheets, like a flounder trying to bury itself in the sand, flattened and pathetic. He rolls over onto his stomach again, creeping underneath a piled mass of pillows, burying himself inside it, pulling the duvet up over his head.
He refuses to scream. He wants to, but he won’t allow himself to do it. Drawing this arbitrary line doesn’t make him feel any better, but right now, the illusion of control is preferable to obeying calls to impulse. He’s been doing that all weekend, and now look where it’s gotten him.
He writhes under the covers, fists knotted in the linens, smothering his face in them, frothing terrible dying animal sounds through his teeth. He takes in deep, sucking breaths through his nose, wheezing through a damp screen of memory foam. He succeeds at smashing his fist up into the headboard only once. Twice. The quilted leather puts a real damper on catharsis. The impact injures his pride more than his hand.
The agony doesn’t subside, but after several minutes spent contorting, physically and emotionally, he finds a place to put it. Consults the emptiness, and lets it sink down into that trench, someplace out of reach. It can hang out there while he gets his fucking act together, out of bed, and back to L.A. Back to work. The only solace he’s got left.
It’s a solace he finds himself dreading vaguely, its once reliable comforts now polluted somehow, damaged goods. Son of a bitch. Sayonara. See ya later.
Bye-bye, McCauley. You were good.
He lifts his head up at last, trailing strings of snot and spit from the wet Rorschach his face has printed on the bed. He throws the duvet back over his head, and kicks it off violently. Leverages the momentum to swing himself out, plant his feet on the ground, tear through his duffel, dress himself in clean but thoroughly wrinkled clothes. He pops an Adderall, dry, and scrubs his teeth with a travel size toothbrush in the en suite bathroom. Smooths down the spiky rat’s nest of his hair, fixes the necklace situation that’s tangled around his collarbone. He splashes a few handfuls of cold water over his face, and tries not to linger on the sorry image in the mirror. The trick is to keep moving.
He lurches down the stairs, bag swinging low in hand, down by his ankles like a ball and chain. He leans heavily on the banister. Taking each step is an active process, the conscious decision to place one foot in front of the other.
Halfway down, he stops. He has to stay there for a while, kept vertical by the rigid crutch of his arm, just barely. Has to make sure he’s not hallucinating, still drugged-out and dreaming. Waiting for the Adderall to percolate, carbonate, until he can feel those first few prickling shimmers of clarity.
Coffee. He definitely smells coffee.
He wobbles down the stairs as fast as he can go, pausing to tear his socks off, reduce the risk of a slapstick suicide. He drops the duffel somewhere on his way to the living room and doesn’t even notice.
He keeps moving, his head swiveling as he passes through the kitchen, catching and dragging on the sight of the carafe on the hot plate in the machine. Turning, then, to the entryway ahead, the arrangement on the glass bookshelves as it comes into view. The contents of the banker’s box, now on display. The box itself is gone.
He staggers into the living room. The orientation of the armchair has been adjusted, turned inward, facing inside the house. McCauley is seated upon it, an ankle on his knee with one of the nautical books cracked open on top. He’s still barefoot, dressed in a plain cotton t-shirt and track pants. A mug steams on the floor beside the base of the lamp.
McCauley looks up. Their eyes meet in a shower of sparks, catching into a furious blaze. White sunlight drenches the room.
Hanna can’t speak. McCauley has to clear his throat first, but he manages.
“You want any coffee?” he asks.
Hanna can’t speak, but he can run. He can always give chase.
So he does, swerving like a drunk, feet falling loud and clumsy, catapulting himself into McCauley’s lap. He feels arms flying around him, pulling him in close, the chair tipping backwards, a split second of free-fall.
He hears McCauley on their way down, crying out in surprise.