Free Canary by Duane Swierczynski Page B

there was a vital piece missing: our audience. Without you giggling or rolling your eyes, there was no reason for the puns or the banter. It sounded hollow. We stopped. It was bullshit anyway.
Now Dad’s out back trying to make the grill thing work, but it’s not the same. I miss you two out there, standing around the grill, sipping iced tea and laughing. I miss Marty waging action figure spy wars near the edge of the woods. I miss pretending to read, but mostly listening to you and Dad goof around. I miss the smell of the burning coals and wood chips. After you died, Mom, the whole backyard routine died, too. If me or Marty asked about cooking out, an awful look washed over his face. Kind of like guilt mixed with sorrow mixed with a bit of anger for even bringing it up in the first place.
Then school resumed and Dad inexplicably rekindled his love for the backyard. I arrived home one day to find him scrubbing the grime off the Weber with a wire brush and a hose. That night, he’d started small—spiral-cut hot dogs for the boys and marinated tofu for me. Dad continued to expand his repertoire, coming up with a surprising number of vegetable dishes. Last week he announced that he would be grilling the Thanksgiving turkey.
I want to tell him, No thanks, Dad—the police already grilled me down at the station.
I want to tell him, Dad I’m in serious fucking trouble and there you are playing around in the backyard. Your wife is dead and your daughter’s probably going to jail on a drug charge.
I want to tell him so much, but for the past year I’ve found it impossible to tell him anything. Why start now?
     
FRANKFORD
     
NOVEMBER 29
     
    At approximately 1:30 in the morning, Confidential Informant #69, a twenty-six-year-old junkie whore, hears a noise.
    CI #69 isn’t stupid; she suspects the cops assigned her that number on purpose. I mean, for fuck’s sake, can you be more obvious? But let them laugh all they want. She’s just received a letter from her friend down in Naples, Florida. She says that her back room is cleaned out and that she can come down and spend Christmas there, with good chances for a job if she can clean up. CI #69 knows she can. All she needs is to be out of the cold and dark under the fucking El and be on a beach with warm sun and the clean fresh sand all around her. She’s young. She’ll rebound. This city and all of its sickness will be just a bad dream.
    The El; she won’t miss the relentless rumbling of the El, just a block away from the place she’s been bedding down lately.
    But wait.
    It’s not the El she hears now.
    It’s the cracking of wood.
    Oh fuck, someone’s breaking in. CI #69 isn’t the legal owner of this row home on Darrah Street—that’s some dealer who was sent up earlier this year. But she considers it her squat, man. She’s been taking care of it. Practicing for when she’s a guest in her friend’s place down in Naples. She grew up dusting and vacuuming and generally slaving away for her bitch stepmom; she knows what to do.
    CI #69 isn’t so much frightened by the intrusion as annoyed. In a few minutes the burglars are going to see she owns nothing worth carrying out of here. And she’ll have to figure a way to secure the back door again.
    “You picked the wrong house, assholes,” she calls down the staircase. “Ain’t got nothing worth stealin’!”
    The voice that responds frightens her. Not because it is inherently menacing or sinister-sounding, but because CI #69 knows a cop when she hears one.
    “We’re not here for your stuff,” the voice says. “We’re here for you.”
    And with that CI #69 grabs her bag and is out the back window. Which is why she chose to bed down in the back bedroom—just in case she had to leave in a hurry. It’s a quick hop down to the roof outside the rear room of the house, then another hop to the small fenced yard. But from here, there are three ways out: left or right down a weeded alley, the left leading to Herbert