Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

“No, I’m serious.” He struggled against the couch cushion, sat up. “I ever want to send you a message from beyond the grave, say, it’ll be ‘fail-safe.’”

“A message from beyond the friggin’ grave?” I laughed. “You’re serious.”

“As a coronary. No, no, lookit.” He leaned forward, widened his eyes to clear his head. “This is a rough business, man. I mean, it’s not as rough as the Bureau, but it’s no cakewalk. Something ever happens to me…” He rubbed his eyes, shook his head again. “See, I got two brains, Patrick.”

“You mean two heads. And Esmeralda would say, you used the wrong one tonight, which is why she wants to cut it off.”

He snorted. “No. Okay, yeah, I got two heads, sure. But I’m talking about brains. I got two brains. I do.” He tapped his head with his index finger, squinted at me. “One of them, the normal one, is no problem. But the other one, that’s my cop brain, and it never shuts off. It wakes my other brain up at night, forces me to get out of bed and think about something that was bugging me and I didn’t even know it was. I mean, I’ve solved half of my cases at three o’clock in the morning, all because of this second brain.”

“It must be tough getting dressed every day.”

“Huh?”

“With those two brains,” I said. “I mean, do they have different tastes in clothes and whatnot? Food?”

He shot me the bird. “I’m serious.”

I held up a hand. “Seriously,” I said, “I sorta know what you’re talking about.”

“Nah.” He waved his hand. “You’re still too green. But you will know. Someday. This second brain, man, it’s a pisser. Say, you meet this person—a potential friend, a lover, what have you—and you want this relationship to work, but your second brain starts working. Even if you don’t want it to. And it sets off alarm bells, instinctual ones, and you know deep in your heart that you can’t trust this person. Your second brain’s picked up on something your regular brain can’t or won’t. Might take you years before you figure out what that something was—maybe it was the way the friend stuttered over a certain word or the way the lover’s eyes lit up when she saw diamonds even though she said she couldn’t care less about money. Maybe it was—Who knows? But it’ll be something. And it’ll be true.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m not speaking God’s truth. Look, I’m just saying, I ever get whacked?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not going to be by some mob ice-man or scumbag drug dealer or somebody I’d smell a mile off. It’s going to be by someone I trust, someone I love. And maybe I’ll go to my grave trusting them. Most of me.” He winked. “But my second brain, I swear it’s a bullshit detector, and it’ll tell me to set up some sort of safeguard against this person, whether the rest of me wants to do it or not. So, that’s it.” He nodded to himself, sat back.

“That’s what?”

“That’s the plan.”

“What plan? You haven’t said a thing that’s made sense in at least twenty minutes.”

“If I ever die, and someone who was close to me comes up to you and says some bullshit about having a message about Fail-Safe, then you know you got to take them out or take them down or generally fuck up their shit in a big way.” He held up his beer. “Drink on it.”

“This doesn’t involve slicing our thumbs with razors and mingling the blood or anything, does it?”

He frowned. “Don’t need that with you. Drink.”

We drank.

“But what if it’s me who sets you up for a hit, Jay?”

He looked at me, one eye squinted shut. “Then I’m screwed, I guess.” And he laughed.

He refined the “message from the grave,” as I called it, over the years and beers in between. April Fools’ Day was added as a second joke on the person or persons who might hurt him and then try to befriend me.

It’s such a long shot, I used to tell him. It’s like placing a single land mine in the Sahara Desert and expecting a particular guy to step on it. One guy, one land mine, a desert three and a half million square miles.

“I’ll take the odds,” he said. “Might be a long shot, but that land mine goes off, people are going to be able to see it for miles. Just remember that second brain of mine, buddy. When the rest of me’s in the ground, that second brain might just send you a message. You make sure you’re there to hear it.”

And I was.

“Take them out or take them down or generally fuck up their shit in a big way,” he’d asked me all those years ago.

Okay, Jay. No problem. My pleasure.

33

“Get up. Come on. Get up.” I threw back the curtains and the hard sunlight poured into the room, filled the bed.

Angie had somehow managed to turn herself completely sideways on the bed while I’d been gone. She’d kicked the covers off her legs, and just a slim triangle of white sheet covered her bottom as she looked up at me through bleary eyes, her hair hanging in her face like a tangle of black moss.

“Ain’t you just the Romeo in the morning?” she said.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.” I grabbed my gym bag, started stuffing it with my clothes.

“Let me guess,” she said. “There’s money on the dresser, it was swell, but don’t let the door hit my butt on the way out.”

I dropped to my knees and kissed her. “Something like that. Come on. We’re in a rush.”

She rose to her knees and the covers dropped away and her arms slid over my shoulders. Her body, soft and warm with sleep, crushed against my own.

“We sleep together for the first time in seventeen years, and you wake me up like this?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “yes.”

“This better be good.”

“It’s better than good. Come on. I’ll tell you on the way to the airport.”

“The airport.”

“The airport.”

“The airport,” she said with a yawn and stumbled out of bed and went into the bathroom.

The forest greens and coral whites, pale blues and burnt yellows dropped away and turned to square quilted patches as we rose into the clouds and headed north.