Chapter 16
Someone had their hands on me, pulling me up, but I tore away. My palms scraped against the rough pavement, blistering ice. I looked up, up from a deep well, darkness, and was among strangers, could barely tell where one figure ended and the next began.
Then Alex was there, jacketless and grim. The sight of him, the feel of his flannel shirt against my cheek, his arm around me. I came back to the alley from wherever I’d gone.
“Is that someone she knows?” a man’s low voice said.
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “Doll—”
I was shivering, and not just from the cold. My throat was raw. My mouth was dry and tasted of metal. “It’s Joey,” I said.
“Joey,” Alex said.
“The boyfriend?” It was Silent Jim standing there.
“He’s gray,” I said into Alex’s shirt. “He’s … I think he’s…”
“I’ll take care of it,” Alex said.
But he couldn’t fix this.
I buried my face in his shoulder, catching the scent of his deodorant and something more animal that I couldn’t identify. It scared me. What was it? I couldn’t stop shaking.
What was Joey doing lying in our alley? Dead. Dead.
Dead? I pulled my face away from Alex to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.
Joey, wrapped in the blue curtains from our bedroom.
A real crowd had gathered, all the people getting their weekends started early emerging from the warmth of the pub to stand aghast, staring and whispering.
Pascal stood at the corner, his face long.
Silent Jim wore an expression I couldn’t quite grasp, more surprised than concerned.
He was already looking past Joey, down the alley, as if looking for the waiter who’d brought the wrong dish to his table.
Behind him, Primary Jim had the humanity to look startled.
Then I realized Primary Jim had turned my way.
“She’s in shock, Alex,” he said. “Here. I’ll take her inside, get her a glass of water. Or something stronger.”
Alex transferred me to him.
“But…” I reached for Alex, but this young Jim was capable, strong. I couldn’t seem to put up enough resistance to hold my ground. He steered me through the crowd that had gathered. I looked back, once. Alex, barely visible.
Then we were along the street, heading to the pub, and I had time to worry who was watching the tap with Alex away from the bar. No one was. Most of the customers had rushed out to watch the spectacle, but there were faces here, too, staring.
Jim was saying something.
“No,” I said, not sure what he had asked. I sank into the nearest chair before my legs gave out.
It couldn’t be Joey, right?
Joey, who would nod his head along to our songs, tapping the heel of a boot on the floor. He’d be wearing one of his short-brimmed hats, a Bat-Signal to the crowd that he was in the music scene, too, not just a hanger-on. Not just a boyfriend.
He had wanted so badly to pull his banjo from its case and join in, and now I wished I’d broken the band rule and shared the stage, just once. I thought of his curly hair, a little too long most of the time, wild at the best of times, his slow smile spreading across his face—
Had he not left me high and dry after all? I didn’t understand, didn’t know how to feel. Not that I was being given a choice. I didn’t feel anything.
A siren called out, a thin needle in my ear, tiny in the distance but building, heading toward us.
Primary Jim appeared at my side. Time had passed because he placed a steaming mug in front of me. I tried to wrap my hands around the cup but I was far from steady enough. I shook in my seat, afraid I might knock over the table.
Outside, the sirens wailed up and down their scales and back again, drawing near. My mind leapt to the vocal warm-up I’d used to shut Marisa up.
Was that only yesterday? Yesterday that I had stripped Joey’s drawer of wool socks out of spite?
The siren had compressed and swallowed all the air. I could barely stand the volume. Then it cut out abruptly. A fire truck filled the pub windows, jerking to a quick stop against the curb.
Joey’s sister. What would I say to her?
Jim was saying something again.
“No,” I said without hearing the question. The rattle of doors and equipment from outside had my attention. I couldn’t look away. “What?”
He sat across from me. “I said, that’s the guy? The one who used to come watch you perform?”
“Joey.”
“Joey, yeah.” He sucked at his teeth. “I’m sorry. That must be … terrible?”
Was he asking? I couldn’t sit still. I stood up, and he did, too. I didn’t know where to go. There was nowhere to go where this wasn’t happening.
I sat back down. He hesitated, then sat down across from me again. “Was he maybe … mixed up in something?” he asked. “Something bad?”
“Joey? Joey wasn’t mixed up in anything.
Like, nothing.” Joey worked at a trampoline park in a strip mall for a buck over minimum wage and routinely got written up by his manager, a guy younger than him, for talking to the customers too much.
He played banjo for a group that never quite launched into a band, with Ned on pedal steel guitar.
Pedal steel! Might as well be a pianoforte, the instrument was so precious and disjointed from modern times.
And heavy. They could have been a theremin and xylophone duo and got more gigs.
For fun, Joey argued with people in pubs about free will until they gave up their spot in line for the dartboard.
He had wanted more for himself. For us. I was the one who hadn’t been game to try.
“Oh, God,” I gasped, curling into myself.
“No drugs? Nothing like that?”
I sat up quickly. “He barely drank,” I barked. “No! I don’t … I don’t know. Why are you bothering me about this right now, Jim?”
“I’m not … My name’s Quin,” he said.
I wiped at my nose with the back of my hand. “Is it?”
“It’s weird, him ending up in that alley in a rug.”
I wasn’t sure which part of what he’d just said to argue with. That it was weird, that he could possibly be named anything other than Jim. That Joey was rolled up in—
“Curtains,” I said.
Quin leaned over the table. The room closed in. “What about Alex?”
A long moment passed, until I realized he was serious, that my body had gone still. “What about Alex—what do you mean?”
“Is he into anything dirty? Costs a lot to run a place like this in the city. To keep hold of it, keep it open.”
“He inherited it,” I said. “McPhee, that’s his name. His family. His great-great-something, his grandpa, his dad. And now him. If he’d started his own business, he never would have chosen a bar…”
I’d said too much.
“I know about the drugs,” Quin said.
I turned to the window and the commotion outside. “What drugs?” I tried casually.
“You know which drugs I mean. He’s mentioned it in passing.”
I found that hard to believe. Alex didn’t have a setting for in passing. “He’s clean now,” I said. “Years and years.”
“Once it’s under your skin, though…” He pressed a hand on the table in front of me in a gesture I took to mean concern for my welfare. “Look, you might want to—”
The door behind me opened, and frozen air rushed up the back of my neck. Quin leaned back from me and stood up.
I turned. Alex was coming into the tavern, eyes darting anywhere but mine.
He towed a few people behind him, a guy in a dark jacket and tie and a couple of men in blue, their service weapons in place.
Probably the guy in the suit had one under his jacket.
Guns had a gravity to them all their own, trapping my attention in a loop of scenarios, every one of them bad.
Whenever a uniform came into McPhee’s with his sidearm visible, I had trouble not concentrating on it, imagining it drawn, pointed.
“Dahlia McPhee?” the guy in the suit said. Alex leaned in to correct him before I could do it.
Quin took a step back, and never finished saying what I might want to do.
I had wanted to do so much. At the moment, I only wanted to survive the week.