Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [8]
I turned and looked at her. The gathering dusk was gold against her window, and it swam in her dark hair. Her honeycomb skin was darker than usual from the long dry summer that had somehow continued to extend well into autumn, and the muscles in her calves and biceps were pronounced after months of daily basketball games at the Ryan playground.
In my previous experience with women, once you’ve been intimate with someone for a while, her beauty is often the first thing you overlook. Intellectually, you know it’s there, but your emotional capacity to be overwhelmed or surprised by it, to the point where it can get you drunk, diminishes. But there are still moments every day when I glance at Angie and feel a gust cleave through my chest cavity from the sweet pain of looking at her.
“What?” Her wide mouth broke into a grin.
“Nothing,” I said softly.
She held my gaze. “I love you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Scary, ain’t it?”
“Sometimes, yeah.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, not at all.”
We sat there for a bit, saying nothing, and then Angie’s eyes drifted to her window.
“I’m just not sure we need this…mess right now.”
“This mess being?”
“A missing child. Worse, a completely vanished child.” She closed her eyes and inhaled the warm breeze through her nose. “I like being happy.” She opened her eyes but kept them fixed on the window. Her chin quivered slightly. “You know?”
It had been a year and a half since Angie and I had consummated what friends claimed was a love affair that had been going on for decades. And those eighteen months had also been the most profitable our detective agency had ever experienced.
A little less than two years ago, we’d closed—or maybe just merely survived—the Gerry Glynn case. Boston’s first known serial killer in thirty years had garnered a lot of attention, as had those of us credited with catching him. The spate of publicity—national news coverage, never-ending rehashes in the tabloids, two true-crime paperbacks with a rumored third on the way—had made Angie and me two of the better-known private investigators in the city.
For five months after Gerry Glynn’s death, we’d refused to take cases, and this seemed only to whet the appetites of prospective clients. After we completed an investigation into the disappearance of a woman named Desiree Stone, we returned to publicly accepting cases again, and for the first few weeks the staircase leading up to the belfry was jammed with people.
Without ever acknowledging it to each other, we refused out-of-hand any cases that smelled of violence or glimpses into the darker caverns of human nature. Both of us, I think, felt we’d earned a break, so we stuck to insurance fraud, corporate malfeasance, simple divorces.
In February, we’d even accepted an elderly woman’s plea that we locate her missing iguana. The hideous beast’s name was Puffy, and he was a seventeen-inch-long iridescent green monstrosity with, as his owner put it, “a negative disposition toward humanity.” We found Puffy in the wilds of suburban Boston as he made a dash across the soggy plains of the fourteenth green at Belmont Hills Country Club, his spiky tail wagging like mad as he lunged for the hint of sunlight he spied on the fairway of the fifteenth. He was cold. He didn’t put up a fight. He did almost get turned into a belt, though, when he relieved himself in the backseat of our company car, but his owner paid for the cleaning and gave us a generous reward for her beloved Puffy’s return.
It had been that kind of year. Not the best for war stories down at the local bar but exceptional for the bank account. And as potentially embarrassing as it was to chase a pampered lizard around a frozen golf course, it beat getting shot at. Beat the hell out of it, actually.
“You think we’ve lost our nerve?” Angie asked me recently.
“Absolutely,” I’d said. And smiled.
“What if she’s dead?” Angie said, as we descended the belfry steps.
“That would be bad,” I said.
“It would be worse than bad, depending on how deep we got into it.”
“You want to tell them no, then.” I