Free Short Ride to Nowhere by Tom Piccirilli Page B

asshole’s throat and watch just a drop of blood leak out.   It felt like that was how he was going to have to earn his return into the world, drop by drop.  
    He flicked the butterfly blade across Mike’s chin and watched the shallow cut well with a faint red that hardly looked like blood at all.   It wasn’t even deep enough to trickle.
    Still no one else seemed to care what was happening.  
    Enunciating his words very carefully, Jenks said, “Sit down.”
    Mike dropped back into his seat in silence.   His stomach was acting up and making noises and he held himself tightly around the guts and seemed like he wanted to cry or run to take a shit.   Jenks didn’t blame him.   Jenks had felt that same way for over a year now.  
    He got on the computer and got the database up again, then punched in Angela Pinchot’s name.   She was probably in the phone book.   It would’ve been easier to go elsewhere and not fight with this guy and not cause trouble and not hang twisting in mid-air, which is what he was doing now, turning and turning with the wind whistling around him as he was drawn higher and higher above the city for all to see, the cops drawing their weapons, the place going berserk.   Her address appeared on the screen.
      She lived out on the island, maybe ten minutes from where Jenks and Hale used to live.   He wasn’t surprised.   He should’ve realized from the beginning that somehow this whole mess was somehow going to take him closer to home.
    You always went home again, even though you could never go home again.

14
     

    Jenks pulled over to the curb at the end of Angela Pinchot’s street and watched the house for over an hour.   No one came and no one left.   Angela didn’t cross the front bay windows.   He drummed his fingers across the steering wheel, thinking about love.
    He climbed out of his car, marched up the block, up her driveway past the well-clipped lawn to her door.   He didn’t knock or ring the doorbell.   He walked inside.
    She was sitting on the couch in the living room.
    On the wall, on the coffee table, all over the end tables, were framed photos of a little girl in all the usual poses you expected.   There at the beach, smiling without her front teeth.   At a ballet recital.   At birthday parties, the circus, swimming in a back yard pool.   As a baby swathed in blanket in a crib.   There she was at the Bronx zoo, at the top of the Empire State Building.   On Halloween, dressed like a bumblebee.
    “She was your daughter,” he said.
    “Yes.   Her name was Christine.”
    “What happened to her?”
    The memory of it was something she couldn’t bear up under.   She raised her hands in front of her like she was warding off a blow, turned her chin aside and let out a quiet grunt of agony.   The truth was trying to make its way out.   She turned her head in the other direction, cocked an ear as if listening to the girl’s whispers.   Jenks waited.   Her fingers flexed once.   The fingers were telling the story along with the rest of her.   Jenks got closer.   His hands tightened.   He could hear them as clearly as if they were moving along a violin, playing the music of his life.   He cocked an ear too, listening in.   When Angela brought up a whimper, so did Jenks.
    He said, “You took her to the shelter, didn’t you?   To meet him.   To meet Hale.   To meet...what?   Her new daddy?”  
    Jenks could see it playing out, Angela dressing the girl, smiling for the first time in years, the girl spooked by her mother’s teeth, wondering what was going on.
    “I loved him.”
    “You didn’t even know him.”
    “I loved him.”
    “You’re insane.”
    “Yes, maybe. But it’s true, I loved him.”
    “Tell me what happened.”
    She did, in that dead voice.   “I wanted them to get along.   I wanted them to spend the morning together.   I wanted–”
    “You wanted to bring him home like a puppy dog.”
    “I loved him.   Christina was