Almost.
I tell myself that I’m going to find my way to the word that Fiona Mills had called the most beautiful in the English language.
Remission.
I joked with Sam Wylie and Dr. Ludwig that they needed to use all of their technical medical terms in any given sentence.
I just want to use “remission.”
Alone on the beach in the night I say, “I’m in remission.”
Then I’m shouting it, all the way back to the car, glad I am alone out here in the night.
“I’m in remission!”
It does make me feel a little better.
I tell myself not to think about Rob Jacobson and Edmund McKenzie, and the terrible things they might have done, in Jacobson’s own home, thirty years ago. Tell myself not to think about all the people, some of them innocent people, who have died since Jimmy and I took on Rob Jacobson as a client.
I turn and look at the water and then the full moon, andthe kind of big sky full of stars you get out here on clean, moonlit nights like this.
There will, I know, be plenty of time to think about dying, maybe when I am once again wide awake in the middle of the night, and sleep can’t find me because the night terrors have gotten to me first.
As soon as I pull into the driveway, I see that all the lights are on in the house.
I see that my front door is wide open.
I shut off the car and lean over to where my bag is on the passenger seat and take out my Glock. Then I am covering the distance between the car and the house, moving along the front of the house, crouching as I move toward the door, keeping myself below the windows.
Invariably, when I drive up to my house, Rip is waiting for me just inside that door, and when he hears the car, somehow knowing it’s my car and not someone else’s, barks out a greeting, jumping up and trying his best to knock me over as soon as I open the door.
But there is no sound coming from inside the house now.
I press myself against the outside of the doorframe, two hands on the gun now, and yell Rip’s name as I wheel around and step inside, immediately seeing that the place has been trashed.
Cushions pulled out of the couch, coffee table turned over.
Like that.
Just no barking dog.
TWENTY-FIVE
I CONDUCT A QUICK search of the house and then call Jimmy, who’s still at the bar, and tell him what happened.
“You have any idea what they might have been looking for?” he asks. “Or what they might have taken?”
“Just my goddamn dog!” I yell into the phone, before he tells me he’s on his way.
All the rooms have been tossed, including the kitchen and the spare bedroom I’ve turned into an office. My laptop is still on the desk, but its drawers have been pulled out, papers and files strewn across the carpet. In my bedroom I see that the mattress is halfway off the bed frame. More drawers on the floor in there, along with clothes from the closet.
I have no way of knowing if whoever did thiswaslooking for something in particular, or if vandalizing the inside of my house was a scare tactic. It meant they know where I live, but absolutely nothing about who I am.
I check the places where I keep my other two handguns. Both are where I left them, one in a bedside table, one in a small bureau in the foyer.
I yell Rip’s name again and then whistle. It’s a shot in the dark, literally, as he never comes when I whistle. But then he never strays very far.
Nothing.
