Back Story. Part 37

"No."

I nodded. Hawk reached over and opened the study door. Sonny looked at his daughter and jerked his head.

"Have a nice life," I said.

And the Karnofskys walked out.

62.

I was sitting on the top step of the front porch, watching people walk by on Linnaean Street, with Susan next to me and Hawk on the other side of her. I was drinking Blue Moon Belgian White Ale from the bottle. Susan and Hawk sipped Iron Horse champagne from proper crystal. Taste varies. A woman with long, straight hair and no makeup walked by in a formless ankle-length tan floral-print dress. Pearl the Wonder Dog II bounded about inside Susan's front fence, deciding on a basis none of us understood whom to bark at ferociously and whom to ignore. She decided to bark at the woman in the dress.

"Why has she decided to bark at her?" I said.

"I think it's the dress," Susan said "I say it the whole look," Hawk said.

"That's the Cambridge look," Susan said.

"If that's the Cambridge look," I said, "what do they think of your look?"

"They think I'm a ho," Susan said.

Pearl stood with her forefeet on the top of the fence, glaring alertly down the street in the direction the woman had gone. The fur was stiff between her shoulder blades.

"Maybe the bodyguards were superfluous," I said.

"Everybody like Ty-Bop and Junior hanging on your front porch?" Hawk said.

"This is a very liberal community," Susan said.

"So how many people cross the street when they pa.s.s by your house?" Hawk said.

"Everybody."

Hawk smiled and sipped some champagne. He looked at me. "Now lemme see I got you straight," he said. "You and me shoot up almost anybody that move in eastern Ma.s.sachusetts, so's we can find out who killed Emily Gordon."

"We did," I said.

Hawk nodded thoughtfully.

" 'Cause you promise Paul and Daryl you would."

"Yes."

"Even though Daryl tell you she don't want you to no more."

"She did say that."

"And then you finally find out who done it, and you make a deal with her and her old man and you let her go."

"You want to spend the rest of your life guarding Susan?" I said.

"Depends what else I got goin'," Hawk said. "But I get your point. You going to tell Daryl?"

"I don't know."

"If they wasn't a threat to Susan, would you have busted Sonny's daughter?"

I thought about that for a moment.

"He wouldn't have," Susan said.

"Tha's right," Hawk said.

Pearl bounded up onto the porch and squeezed in between me and Susan and sat down and lapped the top of my beer bottle.

"It's cool," I said, "having people answer their own questions for me. Saves thinking."

"Which be a good thing in your case," Hawk said. "Being as how you got so little to spare."

"Fine," I said. "And why did I stay on the case?"

"It like s.e.x," Hawk said. "Don't want to pull out 'fore you finished."

"Rich imagery," I said.

"He's right, though," Susan said. "You can't quit early."

"You should know," I said.

"I do," she said. "You have no way to know until you get to the end, what the end is going to be."

"You sound like Yogi Berra."

"When you get to the end, then you decide. But you have to get to the end. You have to know how it will turn out."

"Because?" I said.

"Because it's how you are," Susan said.

"Which is?"

"Weird," Hawk said.

I looked at Susan. "More or less," she said.

I drank some beer. Hawk poured some more champagne for himself and Susan. Pearl lapped some champagne out of Susan's gla.s.s and shook her head and sneezed.

"Now that we've settled that," I said, "maybe we could return to the subject of pulling out."

Susan looked at me and smiled her wonderfulness-with-a-touch-of-evil smile.

"Or perhaps, later on, the reverse," she said.

The End