The Sugar House

Flashing red and blue lights shone through the windows.

“Gentlemen,” Tull said to Pete and Repete, “your ride is here. Let’s go.”

“I won’t.” It was Repete, who so seldom said anything first. “I’m not go

The last two words hung in the air. Tess turned to look at Repete. Even in his fury, he had a smirk for her.

“You’re”-she dug for the name-“Paul. Sukey’s boyfriend.”

“Paul’s my given name, but I wasn’t her boyfriend. I hung around, got her to tell me all about her boring life, which included what you’d been doing in Locust Point, who you’d been talking to. She couldn’t wait to tell me how you were playing with the phones the very day you were there.”

“But how did you know about Sukey?” Even as she asked the question, Tess knew the answer, saw herself before the television, bragging about how she had identified Gwen Schiller, dropping the girl’s name.

“Yeah, you all but told us how to find her. And you were the one who said you’d been to Philadelphia, so Gene zeroed in on that number when it came up on the phone logs. But man, that was hard work, pretending to be interested in old fatty. Pete here had it easy, compared to what I had to do. He just had to put a bullet in the big foreign lady.”

“Shut up,” Pete said. “You’re making it worse.”

“Sukey’s only fifteen,” Tess said.

“He didn’t really do her,” Pete said. “He just fooled around a little. Nothing major.”

Repete-Paul-shrugged off his uncle’s defense.

“I’ve had younger,” he said. “Prettier, for sure. She had big tits, I’ll give her that much. But you know what they say-big tits don’t count on a fat chick.”

Later, Spike and Tull told Tess what happened, as if it were a movie and she had ducked out for popcorn during a crucial scene. But she was there for every minute of it. She simply didn’t remember walking around the table and yanking Paul’s chair backward, so he landed on his back, hitting his head hard on the wooden floor.

“Hey, you could break someone’s spine that way,” Pete said. Paul didn’t have the breath to object as Tess grabbed him by the hair and dragged him halfway across the barroom floor.

She had a vague memory of straddling him so his arms were pi

Something hard pressed into her left leg, and she reached into his jacket pocket, extracted the knife he had pressed into her back. She thought of Gwen, of Sukey, of Devon, of monkey-face Sarah, of all the girls who had to live in a world where such men existed. Men who reduced them to their parts, men who used and discarded them, men who failed to love them, when that was all they ever wanted.

“Tess-” it was Tull’s voice, gentle but insistent. He put a hand on her shoulder, but he didn’t pull her away.

She looked into Paul’s face. Fear was there, but something else as well-something evil and ecstatic. It was almost as if he was welcoming her to his world, gri

But there was a greater power in letting him live. She stood up and walked over to the bar, where she put down Repete’s knife and poured herself a Rolling Rock from the tap. The officers came through the door, guns drawn, handcuffs ready. Tull told them to leave the old woman alone, it was just the boys who were going to Central lockup.

“How’d the one on the floor get that goose egg on his head?” one officer asked.

“Fell out of his chair,” Tull said.

chapter 32

ON THE FRIDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS, TESS SAT AT HER desk in the winter twilight, looking at the envelope that had come in that day’s mail, an envelope with two tickets to a $1,000-per-person fund-raiser for Sen. Ke

Her phone rang almost the moment she placed it back in the cradle.

“Peters here.”

“Monaghan here.” It was hard not to mimic him. “That big story I promised you is here, just in time for Christmas.”

“If you mean the confession in Gene Fulton’s murder, I got it on my own, and it wasn’t such a big story. It didn’t even make metro front. Sorry.”

“Come with me to Martin’s West tonight, and I’ll make sure you get a page-one story, with enough fallout to keep you on page one every day through Christmas.”

“Martin’s West? What is it, some fund-raiser?”

“What else?”

“When did a fund-raiser ever make news?”

“Make a leap of faith, Herman. And wear a tie. We should look like the paying guests we’re not, at least for a little while.”

Tess supposed it was possible to spend one’s life in Baltimore and never venture into Martin’s West, but she didn’t know anyone who had managed this feat. All roads eventually led to this glitzy, overwrought banquet hall on the western edge of the Beltway. If Dante’s Inferno were updated and relocated to Charm City, it would have to include a new circle of hell-political fund-raisers at Martin’s West.

But she was enjoying herself this evening, grabbing hors d’oeuvres from the trays that whizzed by-once she ascertained there was no crabmeat in them. She didn’t want to have an allergic reaction and miss all the fun. The food was pretty good, for banquet hall slop, but Dahlgren, a Baptist, had made predictably poor wine selections. All the money in the world, and he cheaped out on the wine, serving Romanian swill. Tess sipped a gin-and-tonic, a relatively foolproof drink.

Herman Peters paced in restless circles around her, disdaining food and drink, keeping in constant touch with the city desk by cell phone and pager.

“There’s a homicide in the Eastern district,” he said mournfully. “A woman shot her husband because he wouldn’t stop changing the cha

“You’d hate missing this more,” Tess assured him. “By the way, you did make sure Feeney was there to do rewrite, right? This is going to break close to deadline, and you’ll need someone who actually knows something about Maryland politics.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s there. I just wish you’d tell me more about what’s going to happen.”

“Go with the flow, Herma

A mediocre jazz band had been playing standards, interspersed with the inevitable Christmas music, on a stage at one end of the hall. They broke after a particularly funereal version of “A Christmas Song,” and Whitney came out in the WASP seasonal uniform-long velvet skirt and white silk blouse. At least she didn’t have on one of those embroidered Christmas sweaters that so many otherwise sensible women do