Free Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block Page A

what I'd been doing when he killed her. I'd come to Armstrong's after the meeting, but what time had it been when I'd left? I made it a fairly early night, but even so it had probably been close to midnight by the time I packed it in. Of course the time of death was approximate, so I might have been already asleep when he started to chop her life away.
    I sat there and I kept drinking coffee and I read the story over and over and over.
    From Armstrong's I went to St. Paul's. I sat in a rear pew and tried to think. Images kept bouncing back and forth, flashes of my two meetings with Kim intercut with my conversation with Chance.
    I put fifty futile dollars in the poor box. I lit a candle and stared at it as if I expected to see something dancing in its flame.
    I went back and sat down again. I was still sitting there when a soft-spoken young priest came over and told me apologetically that they would be closing for the night. I nodded, got to my feet.
    "You seem disturbed," he offered. "Could I help you in any way?"
    "I don't think so."
    "I've seen you come in here from time to time. Sometimes it helps to talk to someone."
    Does it? I said, "I'm not even Catholic, Father."
    "That's not a requirement. If there's something troubling you--"
    "Just some hard news, Father. The unexpected death of a friend."
    "That's always difficult."
    I was afraid he'd hand me something about God's mysterious plan, but he seemed to be waiting for me to say more. I managed to get out of there and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, wondering where to go next.
    It was around six-thirty. The meeting wasn't for another two hours.
    You could get there an hour early and sit around and have coffee and talk to people, but I never did. I had two hours to kill and I didn't know how.
    They tell you not to let yourself get too hungry. I hadn't had anything to eat since that hot dog in the park.
    I thought of food and my stomach turned at the notion.
    I walked back to my hotel. It seemed as though every place I passed was a bar or a liquor store. I went up to my room and stayed there.
    I got to the meeting a couple of minutes early. Half a dozen people said hello to me by name. I got some coffee and sat down.
    The speaker told an abbreviated drinking story and spent most of the time telling of all the things that had
    happened to him since he got sober four years ago. His marriage had broken up, his youngest son had been killed by a hit-and-run driver, he'd gone through a period of extended unemployment and several bad bouts of clinical depression.
    "But I didn't drink," he said. "When I first came here you people told me there's nothing so bad that a drink won't make it worse. You told me the way to work this program is not drink even if my ass falls off. I'll tell you, sometimes I think I stay sober on sheer fucking stubbornness.
    That's okay. I figure whatever works is fine with me."
    I wanted to leave at the break. Instead I got a cup of coffee and took a couple of Fig Newtons. I could hear Kim telling me that she had an awful sweet tooth. "But I never gain an ounce. Aren't I lucky?"
    I ate the cookies. It was like chewing straw but I chewed them and washed them down.
    During the discussion one woman got into a long riff about her relationship. She was a pain in the ass, she said the same thing every night. I tuned out.
    I thought, My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic. A woman I know got killed last night. She hired me to keep her from getting killed and I wound up assuring her that she was safe and she believed me. And her killer conned me and I believed him, and she's dead now, and there's nothing I can do about it. And it eats at me and I don't know what to do about that, and there's a bar on every corner and a liquor store on every block, and drinking won't bring her back to life but neither will staying sober, and why the hell do I have to go through this? Why?
    I thought, My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic and we sit around in these goddamned rooms