Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

anything more. That was all I had to say. She looked at me for a long time, then suddenly flung both her arms around my neck and clamped onto me tight.
    I laid my hands on her back. It was the first time I held her since Tommy Miller had tried to rape her, when she clung to my side as I walked her from the back of the Southampton library to my car.
    Tina and I stayed like that for a while, and then I said, “We have to go.” I got her to her feet. We took one last look at Augie, and when we turned away from him, Eddie was standing just a few feet away.
    He was looking out over the clearing. There was still gun smoke churning in the cold air. The wind seemed to somehow have stopped, as if it had been chased away from this place along with so much life. The sight of the dark clearing seemed to occupy Eddie for a long time. When he finally turned and looked back at me, he was clearly awestruck.
    “Jesus Christ,” he said softly. “It looks like a goddamn war.”

Chapter Seven

    I said nothing to Tina or Eddie about Frank Gannon’s private graveyard. It seemed to me for the best that they didn’t know. The events of that night in the clearing were enough to bear as it was, and anyway it had nothing to do with them. Three days after Augie’s military funeral in a veteran’s cemetery in Riverhead, the yellow police tape surrounding the clearing was taken down, and the investigation, or what passed for an investigation, was over. A detective came to the Hansom House one afternoon to interview Tina, but his questions were mostly formalities and he left after ten minutes. I had stood by the door and watched him closely as he sat and spoke with her and got the impression they thought her father and Frank had been killed by drug dealers. I didn’t know if they knew the truth and that was just their cover story, something Frank’s men came up with for the press, or if they actually believed it themselves. As the cop left his eyes met mine, and he nodded without a word.
    Tina stayed with me for a week after the funeral. We spent every moment together but barely spoke. At night she slept in my bed while I slept on the couch. Once she woke up an hour before dawn crying and we sat up at my kitchen table and drank cold tea and said nothing. I gradually came to see that the nonsense between was over. Augie’s absence had done something to us, made somehow our presence in each other’s lives much more important, much more vital.
    Not long after that night in the clearing, while Tina was at Lizzie’s house, James Curry paid me an unannounced visit at the Hansom House. He arrived at my door one stark evening, and after a moment of staring at him I stepped aside to let him in. He was carrying a briefcase and was dressed in jeans, a shirt, and black leather coat lined with dark fur. After he entered I took a look down the dim hallway to be certain that no one else was with him. Then I closed my door and folded my arms across my chest and leaned against the doorframe and waited.
    Curry went to my couch and laid the briefcase on its arm. Outside was a silent and motionless dark. It was more frozen void of space than night. I looked at the side of Curry’s face as he opened his briefcase.
    “I didn’t come at a bad time, did I?” he said.
    I waited a while, hearing what he said, dealing with the feelings his choice of words brought up in me, the sense of having come somehow full circle. “What do you want?” I said.
    He withdrew something from his briefcase and stood up straight and turned to face me. It was a folder, and there was bulk to it. My eyes lingered on it, then went back to his face.
    “I don’t have much time,” he began. “So excuse me if I seem in a hurry.” His attitude was somehow both denim casual and all business. “What I like about working with you the most, Mac, is you don’t care. You don’t want to get involved. You’re no hero, no crusader. You don’t care who gets rich or goes broke. You couldn’t be bothered. So I know that you’ll keep to yourself things that you may have heard or may have learned along the way. None of this has anything to do with you, and you have the smarts to stay out of things that don’t have anything to do with you. Do you understand me so far?”
    I said nothing, just looked at him.
    “Thanks to you, Mac, I’m about to become a very rich man.”
    “I thought you were already rich.”
    “You can always be richer. Anyway, the deal is close to going