Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

you now.
    “I know you want me to go. I know the minute I run out of things to say you’re going to tell me to leave. I just remember how safe I felt here, the way I felt knowing you were out here sleeping on the couch or sitting in the kitchen eating or in your chair looking out the window. And I don’t really want to let go of that feeling.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said the only thing I could. “I should probably get some sleep. You should get going.”
    “Do you really think the Chief’s going to pick tonight to make trouble for you? I can stay for just a few hours, leave before it’s morning out. No one knows I’m here.”
    “You and Lizzie didn’t drag me up two flights of stairs by yourselves, right? You had help.”
    “Yeah. The bartender from downstairs helped us. I don’t remember his name.”
    “His name is George. Do you remember what I told you about him last summer? Do you remember what I said to you when you moved in?”
    “You said he talks too much.”
    “Maybe some part of what happened tonight is making its way around town right now. Maybe it isn’t. But the chance exists that someone might go running to the Chief with the news, because that’s the way it works in this town. You know that better than anybody.”
    “I’m not fifteen anymore, Mac. I’m not a child.”
    “It doesn’t matter. The Chief doesn’t want to make charges stick, he just wants to get my name in the papers. The people in this town will do the rest. All he needs is to make it look like I was busted for statutory rape or some kid of sex crime. Everything else will take care of itself.”
    “I’d tell the truth. About why I’m here, about last summer. About the lies I told everyone about us being lovers. I’d tell them the truth, that you never touched me, no matter how much I begged. There’s nothing they could say.”
    “It wouldn’t matter. They’d just say you’re afraid of me, or protecting me, or that you’re just afraid of your father finding out. They’d say anything. In the end fighting it would only make things worse. I can’t afford to give the Chief anything more than he already has. I need you to leave. I need you to stay away till this whole thing blows over.”
    She didn’t move, just stood there by the kitchen door with her arms folded and stared at me. I had forgotten how relentless she could be, how much like her father she really was. I had forgotten a lot about her, good and bad.
    “He wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” she said then. “I know for a fact that if the Chief came after you, my father wouldn’t sit for it. And neither would that Frank Gannon guy. I’ve heard him tell my father that if the Chief came after you, it’d be a war.”
    “No one would win,” I said quietly.
    “Frank Gannon has something on the Chief, something bad. He said he’d use whatever it is he had to get you out of trouble.”
    “Frank says a lot.”
    “Do you want to live like this, like a criminal in hiding? Is that it?”
    “I’m just trying to keep the pieces in place, Tina. That’s all I want.”
    “What pieces? What are you talking about?”
    “I don’t want your father and Frank Gannon and the Chief of Police cutting each other to pieces because of something I did. I’m doing what I have to do so it doesn’t come to that. It’s really a small price to pay in my book.”
    The fine bones in my hands still ached from the cold, and my skin felt as if it had been drawn tight over them to keep them in place, a glove to keep them collected, to keep them from spilling with a sickening noise to the wood floor.
    I suddenly craved sleep, a solid unbroken day and night beneath my heavy blankets. I wanted to burrow like some hibernating rodent, on a leave of absence from the whole of the world.
    “I can drive you back to Lizzie’s, if you want,” I said.
    Tina shook her head. “It’s too cold for you to go out. I’ll call Eddie.”
    She called him from my rotary phone on the table by my couch. I went to my front windows and looked down on Elm Street. No one was around. The trees, everything, was still. The streetlights were on, gleaming off the newer cars parked along the curb. I could feel the cold coming in through the panes of glass. I looked toward the train station, around the corner and halfway down the block, visible through the trees. It was empty but still well lit. There was a single car parked in the small gravel lot alongside the