The Good Guy

Michelle said, “I’ve been making a lamp for you.”

He glanced at the drawing of stylized trees.

“Not this. Another one. It’s already under way.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’ll be done by the end of the month. You’ll see it then.”

“All right.”

“Come back and see it then.”

“I will. I’ll come back for it.”

“Come back for it,” she said, and reached out to him with the stump of her left arm.

She seemed to hold tight to him, as if with ghost fingers, and she kissed the back of his hand.

“Thank you for Liam,” she said softly.

“God gave you Liam, not me.”

“Thank you for Liam,” she insisted.

Tim kissed the top of her bent head. “I wish I had a sister, and I wish she was you. But you’ve got this trouble thing all wrong.”

“No lies,” she said. “Evasions, if it has to be that way, but no lies. You’re not a liar, and I’m not a fool.”

She raised her head and met his eyes.

“All right,” he said.

“Don’t I know bad trouble when I see it?”

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “Yes, you know it.”

“The coffeecake must be nearly done.”

He glanced at the prosthesis on the counter by the refrigerator, palm turned up, fingers relaxed. “I’ll get it from the oven for you.”

“I can manage. I never wear the hand when I’m baking. If it burned, I wouldn’t feel it.”

Using oven mitts, she transferred the cake to a cooling rack.

By the time Michelle took off the mitts and turned from the cake, Tim had moved to the door.

“I’ll look forward to seeing the lamp,” he said.

Because her lacrimal glands and tear ducts had not been damaged, both her living eye and the dead one glimmered.

Tim stepped onto the landing at the head of the stairs, but before he let the screen door fall shut behind him, Michelle said, “It’s lions.”

“What?”

“The lamp. It’s lions.”

“I bet it’ll be terrific.”

“If I do it right, you’ll get a sense of their great hearts, their courage.”

He closed the screen door and descended the steps, seeming to make no noise on the scaling concrete.

Gliding by in the street, the traffic surely was not quiet, but Tim remained deaf to its chorus. Headlights approached and taillights receded like luminous fish in the silence of an oceanic abyss.

As he neared the bottom of the steps, the noise of the city began to rise to him, softly at first, but then loud, louder. The sounds were mostly made by machines, yet they had a savage rhythm.

Four (#u65e7b131-c2e7-55e0-bb92-b6c31e1b1967)

The woman marked for death lived in a modest bungalow in the hills of Laguna Beach, on a street that lacked a money view but that was being gentrified nonetheless. Compared to the aging structures, the land under them had such value that every house sold would be torn down regardless of its condition and its charm, to make way for a larger residence.

Southern California was shedding all its yesterdays. When the future proved to be a cruel place, no evidence of a better past would exist, and therefore the loss would be less painful.

The small white house, huddled under tall eucalyptuses, had plenty of charm, but to Tim the place looked embattled, more bunker than bungalow.

Lamplight warmed the windows. Sheer curtains made mysteries of the rooms beyond.

He parked his Ford Explorer across the street from—and four doors north of—Linda Paquette’s property, at another house.

Tim knew this place: three years old, in the Craftsman style, with stacked stone and cedar siding. He had been the head mason on the job.

The walkway was random flagstone bordered by a double row of three-inch-square cobbles. Tim found this combination unattractive; but he had executed it with care and precision.

Owners of three-million-dollar homes seldom ask masons for design advice. Architects never do.

He pressed the doorbell once and stood listening to the faint susurration of the palm trees.

The offshore flow was less a breeze than a premonition of a breeze. The mild May night breathed as shallowly as an anesthetized patient waiting for the surgeon.

The porch light came on, the door opened, and Max Jabowski said, “Timothy, old bear! What a surprise.”

If spirit could be weighed and measured, Max would have proved to be bigger than his house.

“Come in, come in.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” Tim said.

“Nonsense. How could you intrude in a place you built?”