Mystic River / Таинственная река. Деннис Лихэйн

all I could think about was you and Michael and how I might not have come home alive, like I could've died in some parking lot.” He looked in her eyes and said it again: “I might've killed him, honey.”

      Dave needs me now, Celeste thought. And at that moment she realized why she was bothered: he never complained. When you complained to someone, you were, in a way, asking for help, asking for that person to fix what troubled you. But Dave had never needed her before, so he'd never complained, not after lost jobs. But now, kneeling before her, saying that he may have killed a man, he was asking her to tell him it was all right. And it was. Wasn't it? You tried to mug an honest man, and if it didn't go the way you planned, then too bad you might have died.

      She kissed her husband's forehead. “Baby,” she whispered, “you take a shower. I'll take care of your clothes.” “What are you going to do with them?”

      She had no idea. Burn them? Sure, but where? Not in the apartment. So maybe in the backyard. But someone would notice her burning clothes in the backyard at 3 A.M. Or at any time, really.

      “I'll wash them.” She said it as the idea came to her. “I'll wash them well and then I'll put them in a trash bag and we'll bury it.”

      “Bury it?”

      “Take it to the dump, then. Or we'll hide the bag till Tuesday morning. Trash day, right?”

      “Right.”

      “I know when they come. Seven-fifteen, every week…”

      “Okay. Look. I might have killed someone, honey. Jesus.

      You all right with this?”

      She wanted to touch him. She wanted to get out of the room. She wanted to tell him it would be okay. She wanted to run away.

      She stayed where she was. “Yeah. I'll wash the clothes.”

      She found some plastic gloves under the sink and she put them on. Then she took his shirt and his jeans from the floor. The jeans were dark with blood, too.

      “How did you get the blood on your jeans?”

      He shrugged. “I was kneeling over him.”

      She took the clothes to the kitchen where she put them in the sink and ran the water, watching the blood and pieces of flesh and, oh Christ, maybe pieces of brain, wash down the drain. It amazed her how much the human body could bleed. And all this blood was from one head. She poured dishwashing liquid all over the T-shirt, then squeezed it out and went through the whole process again until the water was clear. She did the same with the jeans, and by that time Dave was out of the shower and sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, watching her.

      “Why aren't you using the washing machine?” he asked.

      She looked at him, smiled nervously and said, “Evidence, honey.”

      “Damn, babe,” he said. “You're a genius.”

      Four in the morning, and she was more awake than she'd been in years. Her blood was caffeine. Your whole life you wished for something like this. You told yourself you didn't, but you did. To be involved in a drama. And not the drama of unpaid bills and quarrels. No. This was real life, but bigger than real life. Her husband may have killed a bad man. And if that bad man really was dead, the police would want to find out who did it. And if they did, they'd need evidence.

      She could see them sitting at the kitchen table, asking her and Dave questions. They'd be polite. And she and Dave would be polite back and calm. Because all they ever need is evidence. And she'd just washed the evidence into the kitchen sink drain. In the morning, she'd take the drain pipe from under the sink and wash that too with bleach and put it back in place. She'd put the shirt and jeans into a plastic trash bag and hide it until Tuesday morning and then throw it into the back of the garbage truck where it would be lost. She'd do this and feel good.

      5

      On Sunday morning, right before his daughter Nadine's First Communion[23], Jimmy Marcus got a call from Pete Gilibiowski, who was working at the store, telling him he needed help.

      “Help?” Jimmy sat up in bed and looked at the clock. “Pete, since when you and Katie can't handle it?”

      “That's the thing, Jim. Katie isn't here.”

      “She isn't what?” Jimmy got out of bed and walked down the hallway toward Katie's room. He pushed the door open after a quick knock. Her bed was empty and, worse, made, which meant she hadn't slept there last night. “I'm coming,” Jimmy said to Pete, then hung up and walked back to the bedroom.

      Annabeth was sitting up in bed, yawning. “The store?” she asked.

      Jimmy nodded. “Katie did not show up.”[24]

      “Today,” Annabeth said. “Day of Nadine's First Communion, she didn't show up for work. What if she doesn't come to the church either?”

      “I'm sure she'll come.”

      “I don't know, Jimmy. If she got so drunk last night. Do you even know where she could be?”

      “Diane or Eve's,” Jimmy shrugged. “Maybe a boyfriend's.”

      There was no talking to Annabeth when it came to Katie. Annabeth – the love of his life, no question – had no idea how cold she could be sometimes. Normally, she was either annoyed with her stepdaughter or happy that they were best friends. Katie was seven when she lost her mother. She was deeply wounded by her mother's death.

      “Yeah? Who's she seeing these days?” Annabeth asked.

      “I thought you knew better than me.”

      “She stopped seeing Bobby O'Donnell in November. That was good enough for me.”

      Jimmy, putting his clothes on, smiled. When Katie had begun seeing him last summer, the Savage brothers told Jimmy they'd sort it out[25], if it became necessary. But Katie had broken up with him herself, though, and quite painlessly.

      Annabeth hated Bobby O'Donnell not only because he had slept with her stepdaughter, but also because he was something of a lousy criminal, and not like the pros she thought her brothers were and her husband had been in the years before Marita died.

      Marita had died fourteen years ago, while Jimmy was in prison. One Saturday, during visitation hours, Marita told Jimmy a mole on her arm had been growing lately, and she was going to see a doctor. Just to be safe, she said. Four Saturdays later she was doing chemo. Six months later she was dead.

      Jimmy, who got out of prison two months after the funeral, stood in his kitchen in the same clothes he'd left it in, smiling at his child. He remembered her first four years, but she didn't. She only remembered the last two, maybe some fragments of the man he'd been in this house, before she was allowed to see him only on Saturdays from the other side of an old table. Standing in his kitchen, watching her, Jimmy had never felt more useless. He had never felt as alone or frightened as when he took Katie's small hands in his.

      Marita had died and left them together, not knowing what the hell they were going to do next.

      “Your mom's smiling down at us from heaven,” Jimmy told Katie. “She's proud of us.”

      Katie said, “Do you have to go back to that place again?” “No. Never again,” Jimmy promised her.

* * *

      Jimmy got to Cottage Market, the corner store he owned and worked the cash register while Pete worked the coffee counter.

      During a five-minute rest before the early church mass crowd, Jimmy called Drew Pigeon and asked him if he'd seen Katie. Jimmy asked the question and only then realized that he'd been very anxious.

      “I think she's here, yeah,” Drew said. “Let me go check.”

      Jimmy listened to Drew's heavy footsteps in the hallway. Then he heard Drew coming back toward the phone.

      “Jimmy, sorry. It was Diane Cestra

23

первое причастие

24

Кэти не явилась.

25

они с этим разберутся