Mystic River / Таинственная река. Деннис Лихэйн

making funny noises.

      Dave turned to face the older boy, but he suddenly hit him in the face.

      “You got something to say, freak? Huh? You want me to hit you again?”

      “He's crying,” someone said, and Dave's tears fell harder. It wasn't the pain that bothered him. Pain had never bothered him much, and he'd never cried from it, not even when he'd fallen off his bike. It was the emotions he could feel coming from the boys in the bathroom: hatred, disgust, anger, contempt. All directed at him. He didn't understand why. He'd never bothered anyone his whole life. Yet they hated him. And the hate made him feel dirty and guilty and small, and he cried because he didn't want to feel that way.

      They all laughed at his tears, and Dave dropped his head, but the older boy was walking away with his friends, all of them laughing as they left the bathroom.

      Dave sat down on the bathroom floor and wished he had the will to kill someone in himself. He'd start with that older boy, he supposed, and move on to Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf, if he ever saw them again. But, truth was, he just didn't think he could. He didn't know why people were mean to other people. He didn't understand. He didn't understand.

      Dave found that even the few classmates who'd been his friends after he'd first returned to school started to ignore him. If they ran into each other[15] as they left their houses, Jimmy Marcus would sometimes walk silently together with him to school because it would have been strange not to, and he'd say, “Hey,” when he passed him in the hall on the way to class. Dave could see some mix of pity and embarrassment in Jimmy's face, as if Jimmy wanted to say something but couldn't put it into words. But it felt to Dave as if their friendship had died when Dave got in that car and Jimmy had stayed on the street.

      Jimmy, as it happened, wouldn't be in school with Dave much longer, so even those walks together soon ended. At school, Jimmy had always hung out with Val Savage, a small, psycho boy. They finally stole a car – almost a year after their fight on Sean's street – and it got Jimmy and Val expelled from the school. They were allowed to finish sixth grade, since there were only a few days left in the year, and then their families were told they had to look elsewhere for the boys' schooling. They found a place for them in a mostly black school where the two of them, Dave heard, soon became the local terror – two white kids so crazy they didn't know how to be scared.

      Dave hardly saw Jimmy after that, maybe once or twice a year. Dave's mother didn't let him leave the house anymore, except to go to school. She was sure those men were still out there, waiting, driving that car that smelled of apples, looking for Dave.

      Dave knew they weren't. They were just wolves. But they visited his mind more often now – the Big Wolf and the Greasy Wolf, and what they'd done to him. They came, and Dave closed his eyes, trying not to remember that Big Wolf's name had been Henry and Greasy Wolf's name had been George.

      And Dave would tell himself that he was the Boy Who'd Escaped from the Wolves. And sometimes he replayed his escape in his head: the crack by the hinge he'd noticed in the door, the sound of their car driving away, the screw he'd used to open the crack wider and wider until the old hinge fell off. He'd come out of the cellar, this Boy Who Was Smart, and he'd run straight into the woods and followed the late afternoon sun to the gas station a mile away. It was a shock to see it – that neon sign already lit for the night. It made Dave drop to his knees at the edge of the woods. That's how the owner of the station found him: on his knees and staring up at the sign.

* * *

      In Sean's dream, he looked into the open door of the car that smelled like apples, and the street held his feet. Dave was already inside the car. All Sean could see in the dream was that open door and the backseat. He couldn't see the guy who'd looked like a cop. He couldn't see his partner who'd sat in the front passenger seat. He couldn't see Jimmy, though Jimmy had been right beside him the whole time. He could just see that seat and Dave and the door and the trash on the floor. That, he realized, had been the alarm – there had been trash on the floor. He hadn't remembered the trash until now. Even when the cops had been in his house and asked him to think – really think – about any detail he might have forgotten to tell them, it hadn't occurred to him that the back of the car had been dirty, because he hadn't remembered it. But in his dream, it had come back to him, and he'd realized, without realizing it, somehow, that something was wrong about the “cop,” his “partner,” and their car. Sean had never seen a cop car in real life, but a part of him knew that it wouldn't be filled with trash. Maybe under all that trash had lain half-eaten apples, and that's why the car smelled as it had.

      A year after Dave's abduction Sean's father came into his bedroom to tell him two things. The first was that Sean had been accepted to Latin School, and would begin seventh grade there in September. His father said he and Sean's mother were really proud. Latin was where you went if you wanted to make something out of yourself.

      The second thing he said to Sean was: “They caught one of them. One of the guys who took Dave. They caught him. He's dead. Suicide in his cell.”

      “Yeah?”

      His father looked at him. “Yeah. You can stop having nightmares now.”

      But Sean said, “What about the other one?”

      “The guy who got caught,” his father said, “told the police the other one was dead, too. Died in a car accident last year.”

      Sean hoped he'd been driving the car that had smelled of apples, and that he'd driven it off a cliff, and took that car straight to hell with him.

      Part II

      3

      Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy. He loved her waking up, going to bed, loved her all day and every second in between. Brendan Harris would love Katie Marcus fat and ugly. He'd love her toothless. He'd love her bald.

      Katie. Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him. Brendan loved traffic and smog. He loved his old man who hadn't sent him a birthday or Christmas card since he'd left Brendan and his mother when Brendan was six. He loved Monday mornings and standing in line. He even loved his job, though he wouldn't be going back ever again.

      Brendan was leaving this house tomorrow morning, leaving his mother, walking out that door and down those steps, and into the heart of Buckingham to take his Katie's hand, and then they were leaving it all behind for good[16], hopping on that plane and going to Vegas and getting married – and then, forget about it all, they were married and they were gone and they were never coming back, no way, just him and Katie, and the rest of their lives.

      He looked around his bedroom. Clothes packed, toiletries packed. Pictures of him and Katie packed. He looked at what he was leaving behind. Posters on the walls. His CDs. A pair of speakers he bought last summer, working for Bobby O'Donnell, when he'd first come close enough to Katie to start a conversation. Jesus. Just a year ago. Sometimes it felt like a decade, in a good way, and other times it felt like a minute. Katie Marcus. He'd known of her, of course; everyone in the neighborhood knew of Katie. She was so beautiful, but few people really knew her.

      But Katie, from that very first day, she was so basic, so normal. She knew his name, and she said, “How come a guy as nice as you, Brendan, is working for Bobby O'Donnell?”

      And tomorrow, as soon as she called, they would be gone. Gone together. Gone forever. Brendan lay back on his bed and pictured her face. He knew he'd never sleep.

* * *

      After work that night Jimmy Marcus had a beer with his brother-in-law, Kevin Savage, at the pub, the two of them sitting at the window and watching some kids playing outside. Kevin was good company because he didn't talk much and neither did Jimmy.

      At thirty-six, Jimmy Marcus had come to love[17] the quiet of his Saturday nights. He had no use for loud, crowded bars and drunken conversations. Thirteen years since he'd walked out of prison, and he owned a corner store, had a wife and three daughters at home. He was a changed man now, a man who enjoyed his life – a Saturday beer, a morning stroll, a baseball

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