Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

working the dispatch and answered on the third ring.
    “It’s Mac,” I said. “I need Eddie to meet me.”
    “Where?”
    “Outside the Hansom House.”
    “What time?”
    “As soon as he can.”
    “He’s on a run to Water Mill. He’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
    “Thanks, Angel.”
    “Take care, Mac.”
    We hung up. I sat in the booth and thought things through. I was tired. I had no idea where to look now for the man Frank thought could help us clear Augie. I felt helpless and frustrated. I wanted more than anything to be up in my warm bed, but of course Tina was there. I looked through the narrow panes of glass in the booth door and saw the bar and the people seated at it. I recognized a few faces. I wanted to be among them, drinking Jack neat and not caring about anybody or anything. I didn’t want Augie’s fate in my hands; I refused on a good day to carry even my own. I had made my choice long ago, when I decided not to enter the police academy, not to follow my father, and stepped off into the fringe of life and was content to stay there, if only people like Frank would let me. The first trouble I had gotten into was when I saved a neighborhood girl from being mauled in the street by a mastiff the summer I was ten. It seemed someone always turned up in need of some kind of help or another every now and then since. It was, a girlfriend of mine told me once long ago, my karmic debt. Some I saved, others I didn’t. Was that all part of some cosmic checks and balances? Would failing to save Augie diminish or increase some debt? I wondered as I sat there in that booth if it was possible to be someone else if you wished long enough.
    I hadn’t had anything to drink in a while – months – and a part of me missed the way it relaxed me, the effect it had that nothing else in the world had. Every time I drank I could see why people drank. If every machine has its friction, than booze is the oil to the human machine. Things go easier, friendships seem deeper, strangers are welcomed. For a while anyway. I always drank for free at the Hansom House, when George was behind the bar, and that didn’t make it any easier to practice restraint. I was never an ugly drunk, or a sloppy one, or even a sullen one. I was simply inebriated, impaired, useless. A girl named Becky once died because I was too drunk to pull a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from the hands of her irate boyfriend, my old house-painting partner and longtime friend, Jamie Ray. She had been cheating on him, and when he cornered her and demanded to know who, she lied and told him she was cheating on him with me, thinking he would not dare make trouble with me. He dragged her to the Hansom House one morning and sent George to get me. When I came down, still in the bag from the night before, I found them on one of the overstuffed sofas in the parlor room off the bar. Jamie Ray sat beside her with his arm around her and the shotgun to her head. He wanted to hear it from me that she and I were lovers. But there was no talking to him. He was drunk, spitting mad. I stalled him and stepped closer to them and waited for the best possible moment. It never came, and when it became clear he had reached his end, when he rose up on his knees beside her and pressed both barrels against the side of her head, I moved as fast as I could, grabbing the gun with both hands. I felt the shot rush through and I felt the heat swelling within my grip. The next day Jamie Ray hanged himself with his shoelaces in his cell at the Suffolk County Jail.
    Drinking makes it easier, makes the failures easier. I could forget them for a time after a few tumblers of Jack. I could be free of it for a time, free of the weight, and awaken in the morning on my living room floor with holes punched in my memory and more pressing concerns with which to deal, like the collapsing star just behind my forehead and the ringing anvil in my ear. I’ve chosen each drink I had. I’ve chosen this life I live.
    This was the deal:
    Augie and I, while waiting for a sports car to tail, see a man in the dark alongside the road a few hundred feet behind us and witness a car wreck in which a high school girl, the daughter of a wealthy man, is killed. According to Augie, the Chief’s boys do more of a clean-up job than document the scene. Augie and I go back for a look later, hear a sports car gearing through the back roads in the distance. Augie finds what seem like the marks of a spike strip, a