Free Bad Radio by Michael Langlois Page B

mouth twisted in disgust. “Why would there be so much blood? How could there be that much blood?”
    I told another lie. “We never found out. About then the demo charges we’d planted went off, and we got out as fast as we could.”
    “You must have seen something. What were you doing when you fell?”
    “I was trying to kill a man named Piotr Rafal Ostrowski. We were at an old train yard, long since bombed out of service by the Germans, and I had chased him up to the control room overlooking the tracks. We fought, he won. Then he threw me right out the window from three stories up.”
    “Peter who?”
    We heard the screen door creak open, then slap shut.
    “Piotr. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
    Leon tromped into the room, bringing the scent of the night air and pine trees with him. “It’s all clear, Uncle Henry.”
    Henry stood up creakily and clapped his nephew on the shoulder. “Thank you, Leon. I think we’ll be alright tonight.”
    “Me and Carlos will be back tomorrow morning, early.”
    “You don’t have to do that, we can handle it from here on out.”
    Leon looked at Anne and myself, then back at his uncle. “No offense to your friends, but I don’t think so. If somebody is coming here to mess with you, they’re gonna be damn sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow. Nice to meet you folks.”
    I could see the pride in Henry’s eyes as we waved good-bye. I knew what sort of trouble was coming to visit tomorrow and wished there was some way to keep Leon out of it.
    Leon left and Henry got everyone settled for the night. Anne got the guest room, and I got the couch in the den. I listened to Anne moving around and making the zippers on her duffel bags sing. A little while later I heard the sharp snap of the light going off and then the creak of the bed as she settled down. Henry must have heard it, too, because a few minutes later he padded into the den and sat down in his easy chair. “Still up?”
    “Looks like it.”
    He sighed and rubbed his knees. “My joints act up at night. Everything but my hands. I guess that shows that there’s a blessing in everything if you look at it the right way.”
    “I guess so. Of course, if you close the other eye, you see there’s a curse in everything, too. Is that because there’s good and evil in everything, or because everything is both good and evil depending on how you look at it?”
    He shook his head. It was an old fireside conversation. “I like Patty’s granddaughter.”
    “Me, too.”
    “Seems a shame.”
    “She insisted that I bring her along. She lost her grandfather to the bags. They killed him right in front of her, Henry.” I clenched my fists in my lap. “They’re here. All those years and miles, and they’re right back here with us. Can you believe that?”
    “Oh, yes. And so can you. We knew it wasn’t over. We’ve been waiting all these years for the other shoe to drop, the both of us. Anne doesn’t care about ancient history, though. She doesn’t really even want revenge, I’d wager. Oh, there might be some of that in her heart, but mostly I imagine that she wants to know that there’s order in the world. Justice. She wants reassurance that things happen for a reason, that her world still makes sense the way it used to.”
    “I know. I’d like a little reassurance on that score, too, come to think of it.”
    He chuckled, his deep voice smooth in the moonlit room. “I think you and I both know better by now. It’s not that the universe doesn’t want justice, it’s that it doesn’t even know the concept. Like color to a blind man.”
    “Maybe that’s what we’re here for, then. Maybe we, of all things in the universe, sow justice in a field that was never meant to have it.”
    “Could be. In any case, you know that she wouldn’t be here right now if you didn’t want it, no matter what she said or who her grandfather was.”
    “I need her, Henry. I can’t finish this without her.”
    “Is it worth it, considering