Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

strata, were differing shades of night. Gale was not in bed with me, so when I could I got up and put on my sneakers and made my way assisted only by the railing down the stairs. There were few lights on in the house, and I went from room to room till I found her on the glassed-in porch, in her rocker, under an afghan. Her feet were on the seat of the rocker, her knees to her chest. She hugged them.
    She didn’t look at me when I entered, just kept her eyes ahead and looked through the windows at the dark shape of an oak tree in her front yard. It looked like a hand with countless narrowing fingers.
    She knew I was there, I knew that, but I waited a while, and when she didn’t speak or show any signs of speaking, I said, “What’s up?”
    “Eddie called a few minutes ago,” she said. Her voice was monotone. She continued to look straight ahead. “He’s on his way to pick you up and take you out of town. Or so he thinks, anyway.”
    I nodded. “I’m doing what I have to do, Gale.”
    She said nothing to that.
    A pair of headlights swung into her driveway, long beams scanning her lawn. I knew they belonged to Eddie. I looked and saw his cab move slowly down the driveway. I could hear leaves crumbling under the tires.
    Gale stood, wearing the afghan like an embrace, and faced me. Again, she said nothing. Then she turned away from me and went into her house.
    I stood there on her dark porch for a minute, dazed, then joined Eddie in his warm cab. Together we rode in silence toward violence.
    ***

    “You sure you want to do this?” Eddie said.
    We were parked across the street from the Hansom House. There wasn’t a cop in sight. I looked at Eddie’s tired eyes framed in the long rectangle of the rear view mirror. I wondered when was the last time he had slept.
    “Yeah. I’m sure.”
    “I’m giving you five minutes, then I coming in to get you, okay?”
    I reached for the door handle. “Okay,” I said. I looked up and down Elm Street but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Train station and Mexican restaurant on one end, a long row of middle-class houses on the other. I walked up the path and through the front door. I looked down the entrance hallway and saw George behind the bar. I saw the backs of a handful of regulars. To left of the hallway was the stairs.
    I started up, slowly. It was difficult to walk lightly. I made it to the first landing and started up the second flight. At the top of the stairs I stopped and listened before turning the corner. I heard nothing. I started down the dim hallway to my door. From what I could tell I was alone on the third floor.
    I paused at my door to listen again, then opened it and stepped inside. Nothing seemed out of place. I left the lights off and made my way across my living room by the light from the street lamps outside my front windows. The floorboards squeaked twice under my feet. I went to the bureau and pulled open the top door. There were just a few things in there, bits of mail and a photograph of Catherine and newspaper clippings, but no knife.
    I stood there in the half dark and wondered just how long the Chief had been in my apartment the other night before I woke up. Long enough, it seemed. I picked up the photograph of Catherine and looked at it, then put it back and closed the drawer fast and ran into my kitchen.
    I grabbed a paper napkin off my eating table and a pen from the countertop and wrote “Sorry, Eddie” in big letters. I searched through a kitchen drawer and found a thumb tack, then grabbed a fork from the dish drainer and my roll of silver duck tape and went out into the hallway. I tacked the napkin to the door, then went down one flight of stairs to the second floor.
    George’s door was locked, but I could tell by the way it gave when I leaned against it that he hadn’t thrown the dead bolt. I slid the fork between the door and the jamb and pried back the smaller bolt at the knob. It took about a minute for me to catch it just right and pull it back enough for the door to swing open. Once inside I grabbed the keys to his Bug from a dish on a table by the door. I left four hundred dollars of Jim Curry’s money where the keys had been. I put the fork into my back pocket and moved through his living room to his bedroom. His bedroom window, like mine, looked out over the yard behind the Hansom House. It was for me the only way out.
    I opened the window, tossed out my roll of tape, then made my way out onto the sill. I sat on its edge