Page 135 of Hard to Kill

I’ve had no choice about cancer, which chose me the way it chooses everybody else, my sister included.

But tonight I made a choice of my own.

My father’s daughter.

“My girl,”he always called me.

I had a dream about him last night, for the first time in a long time, certainly for the first time since I got sick. He was younger, too, the way my mother is so often younger in my dreams, not the sad old man who dropped dead of a heart attack on the barroom floor, working too hard until the end, drinking too much,doing everything not to go back to the empty apartment after Brigid and I went off to college.

Jack Smith hated being alone, and at least when he was behind the bar, he wasn’t. Alone. The tough ex-Marine who never got over losing her, never stopped beating himself up for not doing enough for her, especially once she got sick.

Who owes him a favor, all this time later?

How far back does this story really go?

He always said this about tending bar, my father did:

“You meet all kinds. But their money looks exactly the same once they slide it across to me.”

In the dream, he’s up in the stands, alone up there, too, watching me play hockey. But when I go up to find him after the game is over, he’s gone.

I take my Glock with me when I walk Rip up and down the street in front of my house, come back inside, set the alarm. When I get into bed, I don’t put the gun in the drawer of the bedside table, I leave it on top.

Maybe I really do have some kind of death wish, as hard as I’m fighting to live.

I leave a light on outside my bedroom door and open it a crack, so Rip and I aren’t entirely in the dark tonight.

It turns out my father wasn’t the only one who met all kinds.

So has his little girl.

ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

Jimmy

NO POINT IN ASKING the guy his name again. Jimmy already has a better idea about finding out later, if he needs to.

Just not now.

“Here’s how I’d like this to go,” the guy says. “Let me help you help me. Think of it that way.”

“Win, win, so to speak?”

“Exactly!”

Jimmy sees that the guy is barely making a dent in his whiskey. Maybe he’s pacing himself. Or he’s already had a few and is worried about driving back to wherever he came from.

“How about we cut to the chase,” Jimmy says. “It’s getting late and I’m tired.”

“Not tired of me, I hope.”

“To be determined.”

“I like a man who doesn’t screw around.”

“You might maybe want to hold off on reaching that conclusion.”

The guy nods in agreement.

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