LITMIR.BIZ

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what happened to Charlie Baxter after he shot Jack. Did he mean for his boss to get shot so that he could steal his fortune and run off with his girl? And did he try to kill Jack in order to prevent him from getting to the fortune before he did? No one ever believed Baxter tried to gun down Jack just to avenge his boss’s death. There obviously wasn’t that kind of loyalty there. There had to be more to Charlie Baxter.”

      “And where’s the girl?” asked Lapointe.

      “Ever heard of Pearl Shipley?” said Shorty.

      “Hasn’t she been in some pictures?” said Thom.

      “Small ones,” said Mud.

      Lapointe’s eyes got big and Thom started breathing heavy.

      “You’re steaming up the windows,” said Lapointe.

      Lapointe slapped Thom’s shoulder and Shorty leaned back, folded his arms together, and continued. “Anyway, accounts are sketchy. Piecing it together, it sounds like Baxter had been following Jack all morning, and at the Michigan Central train station pulled a gun on Jack while Jack was sitting in his car. With his boxer’s reflexes, Jack shouldered open the unlatched door, throwing off Charlie’s aim. Jack took the bullet between his chest and his shoulder. The strange thing is, it was the exact place his brother took a bullet in a street fight.”

      “Where’s Baxter now?” asked Thom.

      “No one knows,” said Shorty. “It sounds like he used the chaos at the train station to disappear. And the cops were so distracted by the events from the previous night, they kind of forgot about him. Maybe it would have been different had it been a homicide.”

      The boys who hadn’t heard the story before were listening intently, not minding the wind blowing through the crumbling house. Mud lit a cigarette and quietly poked through the rubble. Three Fingers was busy watching the river from the sunroom at the back of the house.

      “Jack was well-liked and respected by all, even his enemies. Whether they knew it or not, he was the glue holding the city together — or at least the city that we live in. Depending who you ask, you’ll hear that either the Guard got Charlie, that he went over to the States, or that he went back up north to the lumber camp that Davies recruited him from.”

      There was a pause, and then Thom asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. “Do you think the Guard knows we have the key?”

      “Again,” said Mud, “how would they know?”

      “If they did, they’d be all over us by now,” said Gorski.

      “Maybe they’re waiting for us to make our next move,” said Lapointe. “Maybe they’re just waiting for us to lead them to Davies’s fortune.”

      “They’re watching us right now,” said Three Fingers as he re-entered the room. He didn’t talk much, but when he did he had everyone’s undivided attention. The gang held their maybes and stood very quiet and very still for a moment, looking around the place and listening. Nothing but the wind off the river, whistling through the holes and cracks in the house.

      “Whatever you might believe,” said Shorty, “I don’t think this is a good place for us to be right now.”

      “But we came here to have a look around,” said Thom.

      “Look at this place,” said Shorty, turning slowly around the room with his arms outstretched. “But don’t look too hard because you’re liable to knock it down.”

      “It’s been picked clean,” said Mud

      “By the vultures,” said Three Fingers.

      They were quiet again, feeling the cold, the emptiness, and the dark, bottomless pit of this sorry address on Riverside Drive.

      “This house drinks from us,” said Three Fingers.

      Shorty had heard enough. “We should split up,” he said.

      “But we gotta watch each other’s backs,” said Gorski.

      Shorty pocketed the key. “Okay,” he said, “you can start with mine.” He knew the Guard had been here. He had felt their presence before. Hell, he had even seen them. But he wasn’t going to get into that with the boys. He had never told anyone what he saw, not even McCloskey. Part of him didn’t believe it. The other part just hoped he would never have to experience them again.

      — Chapter 4 —

      BULLETS, RYE, AND REMEDIAL GYMNASTICS

      Afternoon

      “Maybe you should just sit down.”

      McCloskey was pacing about the room. He was in one of his moods again. “Not right now,” he said and then he sat down. He was in Clara Fields’s apartment, in her reading chair.

      “Do you want to —?”

      “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

      “All right.”

      And then he started talking. “I still don’t remember.”

      “Remember what?”

      “You know.”

      “Sorry,” she said. She sat back on the chesterfield with her ashtray in her lap and a lit the cigarette she cradled between her fingers. She gave him time to put his thoughts together. This was becoming a ritual of theirs, quite different from their past rituals.

      “There’s the war, but it’s not like I’m trying to remember that … it surfaces occasionally … this is different … last summer —”

      “You know what happened last summer,” she said.

      “I know what people told me, people who were there. But there’s still that gap, those lost hours. I just feel like something important is missing, some place, or someone.”

      McCloskey’s memory had been returning gradually, progressing backwards, from when he was convalescing, to arriving at the hospital, to being at the train station, seeing Charlie Baxter’s face and the gun in his hand, to the gunshot, and then the memories stopped and his mind was blank, and then his memories picked up again at the night before, in the storm and the gunfight at the house on Riverside Drive.

      “Does it matter?”

      “It bothers me. It’s like an open wound … that needs to be sewn up.”

      “What do you remember?”

      “I’ve told you everything I remember,” he said.

      “Let’s walk through it again. Start from the last thing you remember, before the blank hours.”

      “You … at the cemetery … after Billy’s funeral.”

      “You really remember that?”

      “What you mean?”

      “Like you said, do you remember details because you were told them, or because they are your actual memories?”

      “It’s a memory, I know it now. I can see all of it, from my point of view. We separated, you and me, and after that it goes blank.” McCloskey rubbed his face with his hands and sank back further into the chair.

      “And what is the very first thing you remember after that?”

      He reached over, picked up Clara’s cigarette case from the end table, and got one going. He exhaled at the ceiling. “Sitting in a wheelchair on the grounds of the hospital. It’s sunny. There are other patients. Everyone’s in white. There’s music playing on a gramophone.”

      “All right, let’s back it up again. You don’t remember leaving the cemetery?”

      McCloskey stood up and started pacing the room again. “I know I got in my car.” He sat down, this time in a little wooden chair that was part of the dinette

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