Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

who could save my ass go? You chose his fucking life over mine?”
    “That wasn’t the choice I was making, Aug.”
    “What choice were you making?”
    “It seemed like Frank was more interested in killing the guy than finding out who the second man was.”
    “You’re not Gandhi, Mac. In fact, you’re far from it.”
    “We don’t kill people, Augie, we don’t do that, not unless we have no choice. And it seems that even if it is in some way justified something bad always ends up coming out of it.”
    “So you’re going to let me go to jail?”
    “No.”
    “Then what exactly are you going to do to stop that from happening?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
    “You know, in jail, when people find out I’m ex-DEA, I won’t last very long. I could do the time; I’ve been in worse places. But if I go to prison I won’t live to finish my sentence.”
    “I swear to you, Aug, I won’t – “
    “ -- Get out, Mac.”
    Tina came out of the kitchen then and looked at us. She had an oven mitt in her hands.
    “What’s going on?” she said.
    “Get out.”
    I looked at Augie. I could feel the rage moving along his nerves as well as if it were moving along my own. It caused some places in me to throb with currents of electricity and others to contract, as if gotten by snakes. Augie and I looked at each other, wordless. I had taken us over a line. When it was clear there was no point in me staying, I put my glass of juice on the coffee table and stood. Tina came into the room and placed herself in the middle of it all.
    “Mac’s staying for dinner, Augie,” she told him.
    I have seen them stand toe to toe many times before. I have yet to see her concede or back down.
    I started toward the door. Tina came after me and put her hand on my shoulder. I turned and looked at her. She opened her mouth to speak but said nothing. She knew my face almost as well as she knew her father’s.
    I continued toward the door, leaving them both to their silence. I felt very tired. I walked out and hit the cold air and started across the lawn. At the halfway point I realized someone was approaching me. I glanced up and saw a well-built teenager walking full stride toward the house. He startled me from my thoughts. I assumed he was Tina’s new boyfriend, the one Augie had told me about, the one she tortured with stories about me, of what I did for her and how much I meant to her, of admiration and heroics and other such shit. I knew by the way he looked at me, with something close to the deep hate Augie had just thrown my way, that she had done a good job making me a threat to his budding ego. I actually felt bad for the kid.
    We passed each other without a word. We were all hard stares. But really I wasn’t in the mood for this, so I looked away and passed him by and headed for my LeMans. The radio, like so much of it, didn’t work. I drove home through the cold night in silence.
    I sat in my chair at my living room window and watched the November sky darken and night rise up like a flood of black water. I fought the urge to go downstairs and have a drink. I tried not to think about much but it wasn’t easy. Augie was the only friend I had. He and Tina were the only family I knew. I had let him down, but I knew if I had to I would do the same thing again. Nobody dies. When it reached full night out I thought of all of them out there: the man with the limp, the dead man’s partner, Amy Curry’s father, whomever had ransacked her room, Frank, the Chief – all of them out there with their feet touching ground somewhere on the East End. I could almost sense them moving around, feel the waves their motions caused in the cold night air. I sat there in my chair for hours, not moving, staring at the train station and thinking. I thought of Augie extending his cane to me just as I was about to go under in that icy pond. I thought of the afternoons back when we first met that we spent drinking Jack at his house. Then I remembered Tina after the Chief’s son and friends had tried to rape her, when Frank had come by to tell us that Augie was out on a job and long overdue. This was the night I found Augie almost beaten to death in his study. I remembered the look on Tina’s face after Frank left. I remembered telling her I would find her father.
    I knew nothing, only that something was going on in my town, that a girl was dead and that Augie was in a jam. I felt helpless, and you would have thought I would have gotten