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Back in his car, Simon rummaged his memory.
Jessica Balzano.
Where did he know that name from?
He picked up a copy of last week’s Report, thumbed through it. When
he got to the meager sports page, he saw it. A small quarter-column ad for prizefights at the Blue Horizon. An all-female fight card. At the bottom:
Jessica Balzano v. Mariella Munoz.
13
MONDAY, 7:20 PM
He found himself on the waterfront before his mind had the opportunity or the inclination to say no. How long had it been since he had been here?
Eight months, one week, two days.
The day Deirdre Pettigrew’s body was found.
He knew the answer just as clearly as he knew the reason he had
come back. He was here to recharge, to once again tap into the vein of madness that pulsed just beneath the asphalt of his city.
Deuces was a protected drug house that occupied an old waterfront building beneath the Walt Whitman Bridge, near Packer Avenue, just a few feet from the banks of the Delaware River. The steel front door was covered by gang graffiti and ma
Now it was a crack house.
But Kevin Byrne wasn’t here for the drugs. While it was true that he
had flirted with every substance known to mankind over the years in order to stop the visions rumbling in his head, none had ever taken control. It had been years since he had dallied with anything other than Vicodin or bourbon.
He was here to reclaim the mind-set.
He broke the seal on a bottle of Old Forester, considered his day. On the day his divorce had become final, nearly a year earlier, he and
Do
This night they had muddled and mumbled their way through another di
For the past five years Do
Back in the day, in the summer of their marriage, they would meet for lunch in Center City two or three times a week, and Do
But just about eighteen months earlier, Do
No note. No explanation. No rationale.
But Byrne knew why. When they had gotten married, he had promised her that he had ambitions within the department, that he was on a steady track to lieutenant, perhaps captain. Beyond that, politics? He had ruled it out within, but never without. Do
And then Morris Blanchard was found swinging from the end of a towrope. Do
A few days later, she filed.
After a long, tearful talk with Colleen, Byrne decided not to fight it. They had been watering a dead plant for a long time anyway. As long as Do
This night, while her parents postured, Colleen had dutifully sat with them at their pantomimed di
Do
He also recalled the day they found out Colleen was deaf. It was on Colleen’s first Fourth of July. They had been living in a cramped threeroom apartment at the time. The eleven o’clock news had just come on and there had been a small explosion, seemingly just outside the tiny bedroom where Colleen slept. Instinctively, Byrne had drawn his service weapon and made his way down the hall and into Colleen’s room in a three giant steps, his heart slamming in his chest. When he pushed open her door, relief came in the form of a pair of kids on the fire escape, tossing firecrackers. He would deal with them later.
The horror, though, came in the form of stillness.
As the firecrackers continued to explode, not five feet from where his six-month-old daughter slept, she didn’t react. She didn’t wake up. When Do
But now, Byrne often coveted his daughter’s world of i
He thought about his pretty, distant ex-wife, his Celtic rose. Do