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“You like it?” Jay said. “It handle well?”
The cop giggled as he looked at his partner. “Handled just
fine, buddy.”
“Good. Steering wasn’t too tight when you were doing
your doughnuts?”
“Come on,” Angie said to Jay, “get in the car.”
“Steering was just fine,” the cop said.
His partner stood by me at the open passenger door. “Axles
felt a little wobbly, though, Bo.”
“That’s true,” Bo said, still blocking Jay from entering the
car. “I’d get a mechanic take a look at your U-joints.”
“Sound advice,” Jay said.
The cop smiled and stepped out of Jay’s way. “You drive
her careful, Mr. Fischer.”
“Remember,” his partner said, “a car is not a toy.”
SACRED / 181
They both laughed at that one and walked up the steps
into the station.
I didn’t like the look in Jay’s eyes, or his whole demeanor
since he’d been released. He seemed paradoxically lost and
determined, adrift and focused, but it was an angry, spiteful
focus.
I hopped in the passenger seat. “I’ll ride with you.”
He leaned in. “I’d really prefer if you didn’t.”
“Why?” I said. “We’re going to the same place. Right, Jay?
To talk?”
He pursed his lips and exhaled loudly through his nostrils,
looked at me with a burned-out gaze. “Yeah,” he said eventu-
ally. “Sure. Why not?”
He got in and started the car as Angie walked over to the
Celica.
“Buckle up,” he said.
I did, and he slammed the gearshift into first and nailed
the gas, dropping into second a split second later with his
wrist flexed for another quick push into third. We cleared
the small ramp leading out of the parking lot, and Jay shifted
into fourth while the wheels were still in the air.
He took us to an all-night diner in downtown Bradenton.
The streets around it were deserted, devoid of even the
memory of human life, it seemed, as if a neutron bomb had
hit an hour before we arrived. Blank, dark window squares
in the few skyscrapers and squat municipal buildings around
the diner stared down at us.
There were a few people in the diner, night owls by the
look of them—a trio of truck drivers at the counter flirting
with the waitress; a lone security guard with a patch for
something called Palmetto Optics on his shoulder reading a
newspaper with a pot of coffee for com-
182 / DENNIS LEHANE
panionship; two nurses with wrinkled uniforms and low,
tired voices two booths over from our own.
We ordered two coffees and Jay ordered a beer. For a
minute we all studied our menus. When the waitress returned
with our drinks, we each ordered a sandwich, though none
of us sounded particularly enthusiastic about it.
Jay placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth and stared out
the window as a clap of thunder ripped a hole in the sky and
it began to rain. It wasn’t a light rain or one that grew heavy
gradually. One moment the street was dry and pale orange
under the streetlights, and the next, it disappeared behind a
wall of water. Puddles formed in seconds and boiled on the
sidewalk, and the raindrops hammered the tin roof of the
diner so loudly it seemed the heavens had dumped several
truckloads of dimes.
“Who’d Trevor send down here with you?” Jay said.
“Graham Clifton,” I said. “There’s another guy, too.
Cushing.”
“They know about you coming to get me out of jail?”
I shook my head. “We’ve been shaking their tails since we
arrived.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like them.”
He nodded. “The papers release the identity of the guy I
supposedly killed?”
“Not that we know of.”
Angie leaned across the table and lit his cigarette. “Who
was it?”
Jay puffed on the cigarette, but didn’t withdraw it from
his mouth. “Jeff Price.” He glanced at his reflection in the
window as the rain poured down the pane in
SACRED / 183
rivulets and turned his features to rubber, melted his
cheekbones.
“Jeff Price,” I said. “Former treatment supervisor for Grief
Release. That Jeff Price?”
He took the cigarette from his mouth, tapped the ash into
the black plastic ashtray. “You’ve done your homework,
D’Artagnan.”
“Did you kill him?” Angie asked.
He sipped his beer and looked across the table at us, his
head cocked to the right, his eyes swimming from side to
side. He took another drag off his cigarette and his eyes left
us and followed the smoke as it pirouetted from the ash and
floated over Angie’s shoulder.
“Yeah, I killed him.”
“Why?” I said.
“He was a bad man,” he said. “A bad, bad man.”
“There are lots of bad men out there,” Angie said. “Bad
women, too.”
“True,” he said. “Very true. Jeff Price, though? That fucker
deserved a lot slower death than I gave him. I guarantee you
that.” He took a good-sized slug from his beer. “He had to
pay. Had to.”
“Pay for what?” Angie said.
He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, and his lips
trembled around it. When he placed the bottle back on the
table, his hand was as tremulous as his lips.
“Pay for what, Jay?” Angie repeated.
Jay gazed out the window again as the rain continued to
clatter against the roof and boil and snap in the puddles.
The dark hollows under his eyes reddened.
“Jeff Price killed Desiree Stone,” he said and a single tear
fell from his eyelid and rolled down his cheek.
For a moment, I felt a deep ache bore through the center
of my chest and leak into my stomach.
184 / DENNIS LEHANE
“When?” I said.
“Two days ago.” He wiped his cheek with the back of his
hand.
“Wait,” Angie said. “She was with Price all this time, and
he just decided to kill her two days ago?”
He shook his head. “She wasn’t with Price the entire time.
She ditched him three weeks ago. The last two weeks,” he
said softly, “she was with me.”
“With you?”
Jay nodded and sucked at the air, blinked back the tears
in his eyes.
The waitress brought our food but we barely looked at it.
“With you?” Angie said. “As in…?”
Jay gave her a bitter smile. “Yes. With me. As in, Desiree
and I were falling in love, I guess.” He chuckled but it only
half left his mouth; the other half seemed to strangle in the
back of his throat. “Hilarious, ain’t it? I come down here
hired to kill her and I end up falling for her.”
“Whoa,” I said. “‘Hired to kill her’?”
He nodded.
“By whom?”
He looked at me like I was retarded. “Who do you think?”
“I don’t know, Jay. That’s why I’m asking.”
“Who hired you?” he said.
“Trevor Stone.”
He looked at us until we got it.
“Jesus Christ,” Angie said and hit the table with her fist so
loudly the three truck drivers turned in their seats to look at
us.
“Glad I could bring you both up to speed,” Jay said.
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