Hold Tight

Sleazy sex—the great unifier.

“You’re on break, Anthony. Take ten.”

Anthony headed toward the door. The sun was fading, but it still made him blink. That was always true with these joints, even at night. It is a different dark in strip clubs. You go outside and you have to blink that dark away like Dracula on a bender.

He reached for a cigarette and then remembered that he was quitting. He didn’t want to, but his wife was pregnant and that was the promise he always made—no secondhand smoke around the baby. He thought about Mike Baye, his problems with his kids. Anthony liked Mike. Tough dude, even if he had gone to Dartmouth. Didn’t back down. Some guys get brave from alcohol or to impress a girl or a friend. Some guys are just plain stupid. But Mike wasn’t like that. He just didn’t have a backup switch. He was a solid guy. Weird as this sounded, he made Anthony want to be more solid too.

Anthony checked his watch. Two more minutes for his break. Man, he wanted to light up. This job didn’t pay as well as his night gig, but it was total cake. He didn’t believe much in superstitious nonsense, but the moon definitely had an effect. Nights were for fighting, and if the moon was full, he knew that he’d have his hands full. Guys were more mellow at lunchtime. They sat quietly and watched and ate the most wretched “buffet” known to mankind, stuff Michael Vick wouldn’t let a dog eat.

“Anthony? Time’s up.”

He nodded and started turning for the door, when he saw a kid hurry past him with a phone pressed against his ear. He only saw the kid for a second, maybe less, and he never really saw his face clearly. There was another kid with him, trailing a little. The kid had on a jacket.

A varsity jacket.

“Anthony?”

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Something I gotta check out.”

AT the front door of his home, Guy Novak had kissed Beth good-bye.

“Thank you so much for watching the girls.”

“It was no trouble. I’m glad I could help. I’m really sorry to hear about your ex.”

Some date, Guy thought.

He idly wondered if Beth would ever be back or if this day would understandably chase her away. He didn’t dwell on it much.

“Thank you,” he said again.

Guy closed the door and moved to the liquor cabinet. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he needed one now. The girls were upstairs watching a movie on DVD. He had yelled up for them to relax and finish the movie. This would give Tia time to pick up Jill—and Guy time to figure out how to break the news to Yasmin.

He poured himself whiskey from a bottle that probably hadn’t been touched in three years. He downed it, let it burn his throat, and poured another.

Marianne.

He remembered how it started all those years ago—a summer romance down the shore, both of them working in a restaurant that catered to the tourist crowd. They would finish cleaning up at midnight and bring a blanket to the beach and stare at the stars. The waves would crash and the wonderful scent of saltwater would soothe their naked bodies. When they went back to college—he at Syracuse, she at Delaware —they talked on the phone every day. They wrote letters. He bought a very used Oldsmobile Ciera so he could drive the four-plus hours to see Marianne every weekend. The drive seemed interminable. He couldn’t wait to sprint out of the car and into her arms.

Sitting in this house now, time zoomed in and out, toying the way it does, making something far away suddenly appear right over your shoulder.

Guy took another deep swig of whiskey. It warmed him.

God, he had loved Marianne—and she had pissed it all away. For what? This ending? Horribly murdered, that face he had so tenderly kissed at the beach crushed like eggshells, her wonderful body dumped in an alley like so much refuse.

How do you lose that? When you fall so hard, when you want to spend every moment with a person and find everything they do wonderful and fascinating, how the hell does that just go away?

Guy had stopped blaming himself. He finished the whiskey, stumbled up, and poured himself another. Marianne had made her bed—and died in it.

You dumb bitch.

What were you looking for out there, Marianne? We had something here. Those blurry nights in bars and all that bed-hopping—where did it lead you, my one true love? Did it give you fulfillment? Joy? Anything besides the empty? You had a beautiful daughter, a husband who worshipped you, a home, friends, a community, a life—why wasn’t that enough?

You dumb crazy bitch.

He let his head loll back. The pulp of what was left of her beautiful face . . . he would never lose that image. It would stay with him always. He might put it away, force it into some closet in the corner of his mind, but it would come out at night and haunt him. That wasn’t fair. He had been the good guy. Marianne had been the one who decided to make her life a destructive search—not just self-destructive, because in the end she’d taken plenty of victims—for some unreachable nirvana.

He sat in the dark and rehearsed the words he would say to Yasmin. Keep it simple, he thought. Her mother was dead. Don’t tell the how. But Yasmin was curious. She would want details. She would go online and find them or hear them from friends at school. Another parental dilemma: Tell the truth or try to protect? Protection wouldn’t work here. The Internet would make sure that there would be no secrets. So he would have to tell it all to her.

But slowly. Not all at once. Start simple.

Guy closed his eyes. There was no sound, no warning, until the hand cupped his mouth and the blade pressed up against his neck, breaking through the skin.

“Shh,” a voice whispered in his ear. “Don’t make me kill the girls.”

SUSAN Loriman sat by herself in her backyard.

The garden was having a good year. She and Dante worked hard on it, but they rarely enjoyed the fruits of their labor. She would try to sit here and relax amongst the fauna and green, but she couldn’t shut off her critical eye. One plant might be dying, another might need trimming back, another wasn’t blooming as wonderfully as last year. Today she turned off the voices and tried to fade into the landscape.

“Hon?”

She kept her eyes on the garden. Dante came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“We’ll find a donor.”

“I know.”

“We don’t give up. We get everyone we know to give blood. We beg, if we have to. I know you don’t have much family, but I do. They’ll all get tested, I promise.”