The Darkest Evening of the Year

“What bizarro magazine were you reading?”

“National Geographic. It was such an uplifting story about the human-dog bond, the empowerment of the disabled.”

“I’ll bet my left foot it wasn’t National Geographic.”

“I’m opposed to gambling,” she said.

“But not to blind men driving.”

“Well, they need to be responsible blind men.”

“No place in the world,” he insisted, “allows the blind to drive.”

“Not anymore,” she agreed.

Brian did not want to ask, could not prevent himself from asking: “Marco isn’t allowed to drive anymore?”

“He kept banging into things.”

“Imagine that.”

“But you can’t blame Antoine.”

“Antoine who?”

“Antoine the dog. I’m sure he did his best. Dogs always do. Marco just second-guessed him once too often.”

“Watch where you’re going. Left curve ahead.”

Smiling at him, she said, “You’re my own Antoine. You’ll never let me bang into things.”

In the salt-pale moonlight, an older middle-class neighborhood of one-story ranch houses seemed to effloresce out of the darkness.

No streetlamps brightened the night, but the moon silvered the leaves and the creamy trunks of eucalyptuses. Here and there, stucco walls had a faint ectoplasmic glow, as if this were a ghost town of phantom buildings inhabited by spirits.

In the second block, lights brightened windows at one house.

Amy braked to a full stop in the street, and the headlights flared off the reflective numbers on the curbside mailbox.

She shifted the Expedition into reverse. Backing into the driveway, she said, “In an iffy situation, you want to be aimed out for the fastest exit.”

As she killed the headlights and the engine, Brian said, “Iffy? Iffy like how?”

Getting out of the SUV, she said, “With a crazy drunk guy, you just never know.”

Joining her at the back of the vehicle, where she put up the tailgate, Brian glanced at the house and said, “So there’s a crazy guy in there, and he’s drunk?”

“On the phone, this Janet Brockman said her husband, Carl, he’s crazy drunk, which probably means he’s crazy from drinking.”

Amy started toward the house, and Brian gripped her shoulder, halting her. “What if he’s crazy when he’s sober, and now it’s worse because he’s drunk?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist, sweetie.”

“Maybe this is police business.”

“Police don’t have time for crazy drunk guys like this.”

“I’d think crazy drunk guys are right down their alley.”

Shrugging off his hand, heading toward the house once more, she said, “We can’t waste time. He’s violent.”

Brian hurried after her. “He’s crazy, drunk, and violent?”

“He probably won’t be violent with me.”

Climbing steps to a porch, Brian said, “What about me?”

“I think he’s only violent with their dog. But if this Carl does want to take a whack at me, that’s okay, ’cause I have you.”

“Me? I’m an architect.”

“Not tonight, sweetie. Tonight, you’re muscle.”

Brian had accompanied her on other missions like this, but never previously after midnight to the home of a crazy violent drunk.

“What if I have a testosterone deficiency?”

“Do you have a testosterone deficiency?”

“I cried reading that book last week.”

“That book makes everyone cry. It just proves you’re human.”

As Amy reached for the bell push, the door opened. A young woman with a bruised mouth and a bleeding lip appeared at the threshold.

“Ms. Redwing?” she asked.

“You must be Janet.”

“I wish I wasn’t. I wish I was you or anybody, somebody.” Stepping back from the door, she invited them inside. “Don’t let Carl cripple her.”

“He won’t,” Amy assured the woman.

Janet blotted her lips with a bloody cloth. “He crippled Mazie.”

Mouth plugged with a thumb, a pale girl of about four clung to a twisted fistful of the tail of Janet’s blouse, as if anticipating a sudden cyclone that would try to spin her away from her mother.

The living room was gray. A blue sofa, blue armchairs, stood on a gold carpet, but a pair of lamps shed light as lusterless as ashes, and the colors were muted as though settled smoke from a long- quenched fire had laid a patina on them.