Free The Blade Itself by Marcus Sakey Page B

of protesting further. Then he shrugged, turned, and flicked his cigarette off the balcony. ‘Your call.’
    Danny nodded, went to stand beside him.
    ‘What are you going to do, then?’
    ‘I have an idea, but I really don’t like it.’ Danny paused. ‘You remember Sean Nolan?’
    ‘Sure. I felt up his sister on the playground behind St Mary’s. He chased me for a week. Would’ve kicked my ass, too. He’s a cop now, still in the parish. Why?’
    Danny just stared at the sky, let Patrick work it out. Funny, though the answer was perfectly obvious, it ran so counter to the lessons of Danny’s old world that it took a minute.
    ‘Jesus,’ Patrick said, pronouncing it ‘Jay-sus,’ surprise revealing the edges of his father’s accent. ‘Going to the cops?’
    ‘Just one cop. A guy we grew up with, from the neighborhood.’
    Patrick whistled.
    ‘Yeah. I’m not sure yet. Just thinking about it.’
    ‘But –’
    ‘What are you boys up to out here?’ Karen stepped out smiling, carrying three beer bottles in one hand with practiced ease. She turned to close the door, and Danny shot Patrick a quick warning look. He hadn’t told her about Evan’s visit, convincing himself he hadn’t wanted to scare her, knowing that was only part of the truth.
    ‘Just watching the drunks,’ he said.
    ‘And the girls, right?’ She smiled, handed a bottle to each of them. ‘Speaking of which, Patrick, I have a friend you’ve got to meet. She’s a nurse.’
    Their eyes met, locked. Patrick started first, then Danny, the laughter bubbling up from within, loud, ceaseless peals of it, each fueling the other until it turned to sobbing for breath, their sides hurting as they fell into deck chairs.
    Karen looked at them funny. ‘What’d I say?’
    It was enough to get them going all over again.

13. Better to Roar
    The edge of the switchblade already glowed with a liquid shimmer, but he’d broken out the whetstone anyway. Patrick held the knife at thirty degrees and stroked it in a practiced motion. Once, twice, three times. And with each stroke, he remembered last night, and got angrier.
    ‘He pulled a piece on you?’
    ‘Just let me see it, like it was an accident. Then he asked when Karen would be home.’
    Poor Danny had been trying to play it cool, but it hadn’t been hard to spot the fury beneath his words. But there was something else there, too. A weird kind of helplessness it killed Patrick to see. He knew what it was; Danny was a civilian now.
    And civilians were prey.
    He’d raised a burr on one side of the knife, so he flipped it over and began work on the other edge.
    After Karen had come out they’d had another couple beers, all three of them, the conversation on safe topics. Patrick had told them a story about this girl he’d met a couple years ago, a twenty-year-old chick who told him she lived with her daddy. They’d had a few drinks, one thing led to another, and then they were back at her house, ending up on the kitchen counter, of all places.
    ‘You know, we’re going at it, everything’s good. And then I hear a door open. So I panic, grab for my clothes, thinking I better get out a window before her father comes at me with a shotgun, right?’ Danny had laughed, and Karen had rolled her eyes. ‘Only you know what she says?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘She says, “It’s okay – daddy likes to watch.”’ He’d held the pause, dragged it out till he had them both on the edge of their seats, then gave it up. ‘This whole time she’d been talking about her
sugar daddy
. Guy’s a sixty-year-old broker likes to see his pet stripper with other men.’
    That’d cracked them up, and from there the conversation had gone on like normal, stories and jokes. Danny had sat down in one of the chairs, and Karen had taken the arm and leaned back into him, looking perfectly happy, two halves of a greater whole. And Patrick, he’d had to watch the glow in Karen’s eyes, the fear in Danny’s, and pretend like