Mirror Image

uh, rode here in the limousine,” he said, as though just remembering that when he reached it.
    “Wanna go back that way?”
    Irish looked toward Van’s battered heap of a van. “I’ll go with you.” He dismissed the funeral home driver with a wave of his hand and climbed inside the van. The interior was worse than the exterior. The ripped upholstery was covered with a ratty beach towel, and the maroon carpet lining the walls reeked of stale marijuana smoke.
    Van climbed into the driver’s seat and started the motor. While it was reluctantly warming up, he lit a cigarette with long, nicotine-stained fingers and passed it to Irish.
    “No thanks.” Then, after a seconds’ reconsideration, Irish took the cigarette and inhaled deeply. Avery had gotten him to quit smoking. It had been months since he’d had a cigarette. Now, the tobacco smoke stung his mouth and throat. “God, that’s good,” he sighed as he inhaled again.
    “Where to?” Van asked around the cigarette he was lighting for himself.
    “Any place where we’re not known. I’m likely to make a spectacle of myself.”
    “I’m known in all of them.” Left unsaid was that Van frequently made a spectacle of himself, and, in the places he patronized, it didn’t matter. He engaged the protesting gears.
    Several minutes later Van ushered Irish through the tufted red vinyl door of a lounge located on the seedy outskirts of downtown. “Are we going to get rolled in here?” Irish asked.
    “They check you for weapons as you go in.”
    “And if you don’t have one, they issue you one,” Irish said, picking up the tired joke.
    The atmosphere was murky. The booth they slid into was secluded and dark. The midmorning customers were as morose as the tinsel that had been strung from the dim, overhead lights several Christmases ago. Spiders had made permanent residences of it. A naked señorita smiled beguilingly from the field of black velvet on which she had been painted. In stark contrast to the dismal ambience, lively mariachi music blared from the jukebox.
    Van called for a bottle of scotch. “I really should eat something,” Irish mumbled without much conviction.
    When the bartender unceremoniously set down the bottle and two glasses, Van ordered Irish some food. “You didn’t have to,” Irish objected.
    The video photographer shrugged as he filled both glasses. “His old lady’ll cook if you ask her to.”
    “You eat here often?”
    “Sometimes,” Van replied with another laconic shrug.
    The food arrived, but after taking only a few bites, Irish decided he wasn’t hungry after all. He pushed aside the chipped plate and reached for his glass of whiskey. The first swallow played like a flamethrower in his stomach. Tears filled his eyes. He sucked in a wheezing breath.
    But with the expertise of a professional drinker, he recovered quickly and took another swig. The tears, however, remained in his eyes. “I’m going to miss her like hell.” Idly, he twirled his glass on the greasy tabletop.
    “Yeah, me, too. She could be a pain in the ass, but not nearly as much as most.”
    The brassy song currently playing on the jukebox ended. No one made another selection, which came as a relief to Irish. The music intruded on his bereavement.
    “She was like my own kid, you know?” he asked rhetorically. Van continued smoking, lighting another cigarette from the tip of the last. “I remember the day she was born. I was there at the hospital, sweating it out with her father. Waiting. Pacing. Now I’ll have to remember the day she died.”
    He slammed back a shot of whiskey and refilled his glass. “You know, it never occurred to me that it was her plane that went down. I was only thinking about the story, the goddamn news story. It was such a piss-ant story that I didn’t even send a photographer along. She was going to borrow one from a station in Dallas.”
    “Hey, man, don’t blame yourself for doing your job. You couldn’t have known.”
    Irish stared into the amber contents of his glass. “Ever had to identify a body, Van?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “They had them all lined up, like…” He released an unsteady sigh. “Hell, I don’t know. I never had to go to war, but it must have been like that.
    “She was zipped up in a black plastic bag. She didn’t have any hair left,” he said, his voice cracking. “It was all burned off. And her skin… oh, Jesus.” He covered his eyes with his stubby fingers. Tears leaked