Free Clockers by Richard Price

book—accessories from another planet, both beautiful and ridiculous.
    Rocco had had a few brushes with celebrity himself—if you could call a dozen or so mentions in the Dempsy Advocate for various homicide arrests celebrity—and once about three years ago when he was still living alone in Dempsy, a local journalist had come to his apartment to interview him for an article, “The Manhunters.” After two hours of talking, they had finished up with a fast fuck in the living room, and Rocco had been pretty pleased and excited by that. But afterwards, when she was putting her clothes back on, the journalist had burst into tears and said, “Why do I always do this to myself?” and he had wound up alone, sitting on his couch in his underwear, staring at the wall.
    In those days he was working the midnight tour, and he had fallen into the habit of wearing a sleep mask. He couldn’t drop off without one, in fact, but after the journalist had left he had envisioned dying alone in his sleep, pictured the local cops, all of whom he knew, coming upon his body in boxer shorts and the mask. It would be the most humiliating scene imaginable, like coming upon an auto-erotic asphyxiation or something, and two weeks later, after having forced his way into a house, responding to a report of a woman possibly murdering a child, he had met Patty and decided for the first time in his life that it was time to fall in love.
    “It’s like three o’clock, Patty.” Rocco eyed his .38, which now lay behind a box of maxipads on the top shelf of her open shoe closet.
    “I know,” she mumbled, not taking her eyes from her reading, something about myths and origins.
    In the beginning—not now. thank God—Patty was always sharing the important books of her life with him, like Black Elk Speaks, The Golden Bough and Hero with a Thousand Faces. The books always vaguely hippie-ish to him. although “hippie” was a word from his life, not hers, since she had been Erin’s age when Woodstock went down.
    “It’s like three-oh-five, in fact.”
    “What—you’re going to tell me the time every minute?”
    “Hey, fine, I’m just saying, whatever, but…” He tilted his head to the door, to Erin.
    “I’ll get up with her. Don’t worry, OK? I do it all the time.”
    “You’re gonna walk around all day on four hours?”
    “I do it all the time.”
    “No problem then.” Feeling sulky, Rocco thought about marriage, how it should be an island of comfort. He liked that, an island of comfort. Rocco wondered what his marriage would be like in six months when he planned to retire. He had no idea what the future would hold for him except that he would be going out at half pay, about twenty thousand dollars a year. But Patty had a trust fund that reduced his full salary to mad money, so maybe he could just live off her, be a dapper drunk private investigator like the Thin Man. The Fat Man.
    “I’m gonna grab something,” he said. “You want tea or anything?”
    “No thanks.” Patty gave him a quick look, as if she knew what snack he had in mind but didn’t want to take him on at this hour. Still, her silence didn’t make him feel any less accused.
    Rocco got up, took another Pledge and then stood over Erin again. If he died at sixty, Patty would only be a hot forty, the baby a teenager. He had to stop drinking, get back into fighting trim.
    Erin looked up, but not at him. She made a clicking noise with her tongue, over and over.
    Rocco reached in, picked her up, held her high against his chest. The baby was wide awake, calm, but far away. Here I am, Rocco thought, I’m picking her up in the middle of the night, a good father.
    He carried Erin over to one of the big kitchen windows and began counting irons in the fire: going in on Mazilli’s liquor store, employment and security polygraphs, private investigator. But tonight those prospects all seemed like bullshit, the usual cliches, no hedge against oblivion in any of them. At times like