• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Other headlines: Two children and their welfare mother asphyxiated. Mix poor people with no heat and a faulty gas oven. Result, death. A drunk driver killed four teens on the highway. And, near the insular working-class area where Mayor Daley was born and resided to this day, a twenty-eight-year-old black man identified as Larry Dean was found shot to death. Police said they had no leads as yet in the case.

Well, that set the right funereal tone for the day.

I moved around quietly, trying not to wake anyone. But before I left the apartment, I went in carefully to look in on them all as they slept—Taylor and Barry, Beth, Cliff. I even tipped into Dan’s room, hoping against hope I’d see his lovely hair splayed across the pillow on his mat. Pretend time. I let myself fantasize for a moment. If only I could be the Good Witch, a chubby little fairy in gossamer, I’d just wave my magic wand and make all the awful shit that had marked the last two days go away. I’d even let skanky Bev keep her baby.

2

I was lucky to get a seat. Most people on the number 11 bus were going to work, and didn’t look particularly happy about it. I didn’t blame them. Who wanted to stoke the fires of capitalism taking shorthand or delivering interoffice mail in some airless coop in the Loop?

However, I was going somewhere every bit as odious. Woody had arranged for me to talk to his cop buddy, Jack Klaus, who might be able to give me the inside track on the homicide investigation. Klaus might prove to be a good source, but I didn’t much like him. As the bus jerked along, I stared out the window.

Where the fuck is Dan? as Annabeth had so trenchantly put it.

Good question.

Funny about memory. I kept harking back to that stoned-out weekend we’d spent at Annabeth’s family’s farm in Wisconsin, how beautiful it was, how close I felt to the others, what fun we had.

So why was I constantly flashing on some out-of-place feelings from that weekend? Now I had to wonder if Dan Zuni had given off some hint of trouble then. I couldn’t think of anything particularly weird about the way Dan was acting that weekend. Nothing bad had happened, or had it? Maybe the delightful mind-expanding trips I’d been enjoying were killing off brain cells quicker than you could say “Light my fire.”

I made a big bowl of popcorn and took it into the musty sitting room in the farmhouse. I was planning to leaf through some old magazines, maybe read the copy of The Marble Faun I’d spotted on the bookshelf in there. But I was startled when Dan popped up from the sofa.

“Oh! I didn’t know you were in here. Would you rather be alone?”

He grinned at me. “No way. Come on in. Let’s rap.”

It cracked me up when Dan used words like rap.

“Is that popcorn?”

“Yeah. I just made it.”

“Far out. I’m dying for popcorn. And look—we got beer.”

“Are you stoned, Dan?”

“Uh-huh. You?”

“Yeah.”

We polished off the bowl of popcorn in quick order. A few minutes later I thought I heard him humming under his breath, and he was keeping a kind of tom-tom beat on the arm of the couch.

“What’s that you’re singing? Creedence again?”

“No. Remember that hokey song—’Running Bear’?”

That was a blast from childhood. “Yeah. Running Bear and Little White Dove.” AM radio Top Ten stuff. “They were like the Indian Romeo and Juliet. And they committed suicide at the end of the song.”

He chuckled. “My pop had this big job at the BIA. Big fucking bureaucrat job. Sent me and my brother to this tight-assed private school in Tucson. The white kids used to call me Running Bear. Jesus, they were so ignorant. I thought it was funny. But Bobby, my brother, couldn’t take that kind of shit. Wasn’t just those kids, though. He couldn’t deal with much of anything. He was always begging Pop to let us come home.”

“And did he?”

Dan shook his head. “Well, he did finally. But it was too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bobby killed himself. After that, he let us come home.”

“God, Dan. I never knew that about you.”

“Yep. Old Bobby. We used to talk about running away to New York. That woulda been funny.”

Dan joined me on the