Once the script was played out, she ended the call and put her phone away. “It’s not as strong as I’d like,” she said. “But will they care?”

“Probably not, once they find the bomb,” I said. Liz gave a little start, and I realized she had been talking to herself. Now that I’d done what she wanted, I was just baggage.

She had a roll of paper towels and a can of air freshener in the bag. She cleaned up my puke, dropped it in the gutter (hundred-dollar fine for littering, I found out later), and then sprayed the car with something that smelled like flowers.

“Get in,” she told me.

I’d been turned away so I didn’t have to look at what remained of my lunchtime ravioli (as far as cleaning up the mess went, I thought she owed me that), but when I turned back to get in the car, I saw Kenneth Therriault standing by the trunk. Close enough to reach out and touch me, and still grinning. I might have screamed, but when I saw him I was between breaths and my chest wouldn’t seem to expand and grab another one. It was as if all the muscles had gone to sleep.

“I’ll be seeing you,” Therriault said. The grin widened and I could see a cake of dead blood between his teeth and cheek. “Champ.”

26

We only drove three blocks before she stopped again. She took out her phone (her real one, not the burner), then looked at me and saw I was shaking. I maybe could have used a hug then, but all I got was a pat on the shoulder, presumably sympathetic. “Delayed reaction, kiddo. Know all about it. It’ll pass.”

Then she made a call, identified herself as Detective Dutton, and asked for Gordon Bishop. She must have been told he was on the job, because Liz said, “I don’t care if he’s on Mars, patch me through. This is Priority One.”

She waited, tapping the fingers of her free hand on the steering wheel. Then she straightened up. “It’s Dutton, Gordo…no, I know I’m not, but you need to hear this. I just got a tip about Therriault from someone I interviewed when I was on it…no, I don’t know who. You need to check out the King Kullen in Eastport…where he started, right. It makes a degree of sense if you think about it.” Listening. Then: “Are you kidding? How many people did we interview back then? A hundred? Two hundred? Listen, I’ll play you the message. I recorded it, assuming my phone worked.”

She knew it had; she’d checked it on our short three-block drive. She played it for him and when it was done, she said, “Gordo? Did you…shit.” She ended the call. “He hung up.” Liz gave me a grim smile. “He hates my guts, but he’ll check. He knows it’ll be on him if he doesn’t.”

Detective Bishop did check, because by then they’d had time to start digging into Kenneth Therriault’s past, and they’d found a nugget that stood out in light of Liz’s “anonymous tip.” Long before his career in construction and his post-retirement career as an orderly at City of Angels, Therriault had grown up in the town of Westport, which is, natch, next door to Eastport. As a high school senior, he’d worked as a bag boy and shelf stocker at King Kullen. Where he was caught shoplifting. The first time he did it, Therriault was warned. The second time he got canned. But stealing, it seemed, was a hard habit to break. Later in life he moved on to dynamite and blasting caps. A good supply of both was later found in a Queens storage locker. All of it old, all of it from Canada. I guess the border searches were a lot less thorough in those days.

“Can we go home now?” I asked Liz. “Please?”

“Yes. Are you going to tell your mother about this?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled. “It was a rhetorical question. Of course you will. And that’s okay, doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Do you know why?”

“Because nobody would believe it.”

She patted my hand. “That’s right, Champ. Hole in one.”

27

Liz dropped me off on the corner and sped away. I walked down to our building. My mother and Barbara hadn’t gone for that drink after all, Barb had a cold and said she was going home right after work. Mom was on the steps with her phone in her hand.

She flew down the steps when she saw me coming and grabbed me in a panicky hug that squeezed the breath out of me. “Where the fuck were you, James?” She only called me that when she was super-pissed, which you might have already guessed. “How could you be so thoughtless? I’ve been calling everyone, I was starting to think you’d been kidnapped, I even thought of calling…”

She quit hugging and held me at arms’ length. I could see she had been crying and was starting to again and that made me feel really bad, even though none of it had been my fault. I think only your mother can truly make you feel lower than whale shit.

“Was it Liz?” And without waiting for an answer: “It was.” Then, in a low and deadly voice: “That bitch.”

“I had to go with her, Mom,” I said. “I really had to.”

Then I started to cry, too.

28

We went upstairs. Mom made coffee and gave me a cup. My first, and I’ve been a fool for the stuff ever since. I told her almost everything. How Liz had been waiting outside school. How she told me lives depended on finding Thumper’s last bomb. How we went to the hospital, and to Therriault’s building. I even told her how awful Therriault looked with half his head blown out of shape on one side. What I didn’t tell her was how I’d turned around to see him standing behind Liz’s car, close enough to grab my arm…if dead people can grab, a thing I never wanted to find out one way or the other. And I didn’t tell her what he’d said, but that night when I went to bed it clanged in my head like a cracked bell: “I’ll be seeing you…Champ.”

Mom kept saying okay and I understand, all the time looking more distressed. But she had to know what was happening on Long Island, and so did I. She turned on the TV and we sat on the couch to watch. Lewis Dodley of NY1 was doing a stand-up on a street with police sawhorses blocking it off. “Police appear to be taking this tip very seriously,” he was saying. “According to a source in the Suffolk County Police Department—”

I remembered the news helicopter flying over the Frederick Arms and figured it must have had enough time to chopper out to Long Island, so I grabbed the remote from my mother’s lap and flipped over to Channel 4. And there, sure enough, was the roof of the King Kullen supermarket. The parking lot was full of police cars. Parked by the main doors was a big van that just about had to belong to the Bomb Squad. I saw two helmeted cops with a pair of dogs on harnesses going inside. The chopper was too high to see if the Bomb Squad cops were wearing bulletproof vests and flak jackets as well as helmets, but I’m sure they were. Not the dogs, though. If Thumper’s bomb went off while they were inside, the dogs would be blown to mush.

The reporter in the chopper was saying, “We’ve been told that all customers and store personnel have been safely evacuated. Although it’s possible this is just another false alarm, there have been many during Thumper’s reign of terror—” (Yup, he actually said that) “—taking these things seriously is always the wisest course. All we know now is that this was the site of Thumper’s first bomb, and that no bomb has been found yet. Let’s send it back to the studio.”