One Hundred Seven

ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

I SEE A MISSED call from Jimmy when I get home, but his phone is turned off when I try to hit him back.

I call Brigid then, wanting to be honest with her about where I've been and what I've done at Edmund McKenzie's house, and what it might mean for both of us going forward.

I tell it all in a rush after she answers.

When I finish, there's a long silence on her end. I can hear jazz playing softly in the background. One thing she did inherit from Jack Smith is her love of jazz.

"You never change, do you, Jane? You do what you want when you want, and to hell with what anybody else might want."

"Not fair."

"Fair? You told me you were going to leave all of this alone, because you told me it was the best way to keep me safe. But now I'm probably right back in the line of fire, aren't I? Good work, sis. You've pissed them off and you've pissed me off."

"We were already in the line of fire, both of us."

Another silence, longer than the one before.

"I'm going away," she says finally. "I'm going to get away from here and I'm going to get away from you."

"Go where?" I ask.

"To save my marriage."

Before I can respond she says, "I love you. I hope we both get better. But you really are a selfish bitch."

She ends the call before I can tell her it's the second time I've been called a bitch tonight.

It's late on a Friday night. I try Jimmy again. Phone still off. But what I need to tell him about Nick Morelli and Eric Jacobson can wait until the morning. He'll probably be as angry at me as I've made my sister. Maybe even angrier.

I try to do a little more work, jury selection a few days away. There was a time when this upcoming trial, on the heels of the first one, my client really on trial for another triple homicide, seemed all-consuming to me. But as hideous as these crimes are, more and more I've started to think that they're just one element to a much bigger story.

Maybe Brigid is right. Maybe it was selfish of me to even go looking for those two punks tonight, much less roust them the way I did. But I'm tired of being threatened. I'm tired of being pushed around. I've never let anybody push me around, at least not for very long, all the way back to the mean girls. Martin did it for a while at the end of our marriage.

But I didn't let him get away with it for long.

I've had no choice about cancer, which chose me the way it chooses everybody else, my sister included.

But tonight I made a choice of my own.

My father's daughter.

"My girl," he always called me.

I had a dream about him last night, for the first time in a long time, certainly for the first time since I got sick. He was younger, too, the way my mother is so often younger in my dreams, not the sad old man who dropped dead of a heart attack on the barroom floor, working too hard until the end, drinking too much, doing everything not to go back to the empty apartment after Brigid and I went off to college.

Jack Smith hated being alone, and at least when he was behind the bar, he wasn't. Alone. The tough ex-Marine who never got over losing her, never stopped beating himself up for not doing enough for her, especially once she got sick.

Who owes him a favor, all this time later?

How far back does this story really go?

He always said this about tending bar, my father did:

"You meet all kinds. But their money looks exactly the same once they slide it across to me."

In the dream, he's up in the stands, alone up there, too, watching me play hockey. But when I go up to find him after the game is over, he's gone.

I take my Glock with me when I walk Rip up and down the street in front of my house, come back inside, set the alarm. When I get into bed, I don't put the gun in the drawer of the bedside table, I leave it on top.

Maybe I really do have some kind of death wish, as hard as I'm fighting to live.

I leave a light on outside my bedroom door and open it a crack, so Rip and I aren't entirely in the dark tonight.

It turns out my father wasn't the only one who met all kinds.

So has his little girl.