Three Hours

"He's been here since four," Gus said.

The Dell Street Tap smelled of fryer oil and wet coats. It was a quarter past one. Gus Marek stood at the end of the bar in a church-basement cardigan with a paper cup of decaf in one big hand, and he did not look like a man who belonged in a bar at all. He looked like a man who had come to collect something.

"You called me," Jose said.

"I found a chip with your number on the back." Gus held it up between two fingers. A bronze coin, worn smooth. Seven digits in black marker, faded to brown. "He put it on the bar next to the glass. Said, if I go, call the number."

"That's my old number."

"Is it still good?"

"I've had it since I was nineteen."

"Then it's good." Gus tipped his head toward the back booth. "Fair warning. He's had two."

Rainer sat with his back to the wall. His jacket was zipped to the chin. In front of him stood a short glass with an inch of amber in it, untouched, and beside the glass a second glass, empty.

"Well," Rainer said. "Look. The cavalry."

"Hi."

"Gus is a snitch."

"Gus is a seventy-one-year-old man with a seven a.m. shift at the food bank," Gus said mildly. "Gus would like to go home."

"Go home, Gus."

"Not till he's in a car."

Jose slid into the booth. Up close, Rainer's face had the stiff, polished look of a man holding something very still. His eyes were bright and a little wet. The stitched hand lay on the table beside the whiskey, and the fingers kept flexing, one, two, three, as if counting.

"You haven't touched that one," Jose said.

"I've been looking at it."

"For how long?"

"Gus knows."

"Three hours," Gus said. "I timed him."

"I stopped counting at two," Rainer said.

"You said you stopped at two," Gus said.

"Jesus Christ, Gus."

Jose reached across and took the glass. Rainer didn't stop him. He carried it to the bar, set it down in front of the bartender, and said, "Pour that out." The bartender looked at Gus. Gus nodded. The whiskey went down the drain.

When Jose came back, Rainer's right hand was inside his jacket.

"What's in there?"

"Nothing."

"Rainer."

"It's a cigarette."

"You don't smoke."

"I hold them."

"Show me."

"Make me."

Jose put out his palm and waited. Rainer looked at it for a long moment. Then the corner of his mouth went crooked, and he drew out a small, folded square of wax paper and laid it in Jose's hand.

It weighed almost nothing. Jose unfolded one corner. Pale oval pills. Eight, maybe nine.

"Teddy Weir," Rainer said. "Used to run the back room at the garage. He walked in around five. Said, *on the house, for old times.* I said I didn't want them. He said, *so don't take them.* And I thought, that's fair. I'll just hold them."

"For three hours."

"I didn't take one."

"I can see that."

"Ask Gus."

"He didn't take one," Gus said. "I'd have known."

Jose folded the paper shut. His voice didn't quite work. "Get up."

"Where are we going?"

"Home. Yours."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

Rainer looked at the table. "Because I'll do it in the car," he said. "You hold them. I'll want them back by the second light."

Jose put the wax paper in his own pocket.

"There. Now they're mine."

Rainer stared at him. Then he laughed, short and awful, and put his face in his hands.

---

The bathroom in Rainer's apartment was the size of a closet. Jose stood over the toilet with the paper open, and he tipped the pills in one at a time because he had a sudden horror of losing one down the side. Nine. He flushed. He waited. He flushed again.

When he came out, Rainer was sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinets and his knees up. He had taken off his jacket. His hands hung loose between his knees.

"Did they go?"

"All nine."

"Don't tell me how many."

"You asked."

"I know I asked." He rubbed his jaw. "I'm a bastard."

"You're a drunk."

"Nine-year-old drunk."

"Eleven years in March."

"You counted."

"Gus told me in the car." Jose filled a glass of water at the sink, set it on the floor, and sat down across from him, close enough that their shoes touched. "Drink."

Rainer drank. His hand shook so badly the water slopped over the rim. Jose reached out without thinking and steadied the glass, and neither of them mentioned it.

"What happened?" Jose said.

"Nothing happened."

"You went to see him."

"I went Thursday. I went again today." Rainer stared at the linoleum. "He didn't open the door."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I stood on the porch with a bag of groceries and he stood on the other side and said, *leave them on the step.*"

"Rainer."

"Through the *door,* Jose. Three years I had a key. I've never knocked on that door." He took another swallow. "I let myself in anyway, and he was at the kitchen table with a phone in his hand. A little silver thing. I said, where did you get that. He said, *from a friend.* I said, *what friend.* He said, *that's what I thought you'd say.*"

"Who gave it to him?"

"Somebody named Juno. That's all I got. He wouldn't say who she is. I think she paints." Rainer rubbed his face. "And then I said, you can't have this. It isn't safe. And he said something."

"What did he say?"

Rainer didn't answer.

"What did he say?"

"He said *you're my jailer.*" The words came out flat. "He said it very kindly. As if he were telling me I had spinach in my teeth."

Jose said nothing for a moment. Then, carefully: "He's angry."

"He's accurate."

"Don't."

"What? Say it?" Rainer lifted his eyes. They were red-rimmed and very clear. "You think I haven't had the word in my head for three years? I just never heard it said. By him. In that voice."

"You kept him alive."

"I kept him in a room."

"Both things can be true."

"That's a thing you say to people who haven't done it." Rainer set the glass on the floor. "I'm not going to drink. I want you to know that. I'm not. I was never going to."

"I know."

"You don't. You don't know." He almost smiled. "But thank you for saying it."

---

At three, Rainer slept. He did it the way a tired animal does, all at once, flat on the mattress with one arm thrown over his face. Jose sat on the floor with his back against the bed and didn't leave.

He thought he would feel the pull to. The old pull, the one that took him out of rooms. It didn't come. What came instead was a strange, heavy stillness he had no name for, as though he'd finally set down a bag he hadn't known he was carrying and was sitting beside it, waiting to find out what was in it.

Somewhere past four Rainer's voice said, from under the arm: "Don't go."

"I'm not."

"You always say that at midnight."

"It's four."

"Then you're running late."

Jose almost laughed. He turned his head and found Rainer watching him over his forearm.

"Go to sleep."

"Can't."

"Try."

"Talk to me. About anything. Tell me about work." A pause. "Tell me about the boring part."

"Marcus got a card."

The arm came down. "What?"

"A typed card. Left with a photograph of his daughter at school. Seven words." Jose watched his face. "*Please stop asking about March. Thank you.*"

Rainer sat up. He did it slowly, but something in the room had changed, as though a window had gone out somewhere. "Say it again."

"*Please stop asking about March.*"

"Who's Marcus asking?"

"Himself. The development account. There's a transfer on the eleventh every year to a company called Marrow Street."

"Marrow Street." Rainer repeated it like a man testing ice. "Typed."

"Yes."

"Politely."

"Yes. It said thank you."

"That isn't her," Rainer said.

"How do you know?"

"Because she'd have been warmer."

It wasn't a joke, and neither of them treated it as one.

"Cards are theirs," Rainer said. "They don't send men first. They send manners. They find out where your kid goes to school and they type you a note, and by the time you've read it, you've understood that they never needed to raise their voice."

"Whose?"

"The people Victor worked for."

Jose waited.

"Camel coat," Rainer said. "Mrs. Hallett's friend from the bank."

"You said you didn't know his name."

"I said I know a lot of men."

"Rainer."

"Victor Lang." He swung his legs off the mattress and sat with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor between his feet. "He came to the house the week after the funeral. Sunday, as usual, with the good bourbon, as usual. He sat in Maggie's kitchen and took off his coat and said he'd seen Elias at the window."

"At the window."

"The upstairs one. He saw him. Alive. A face in the glass." Rainer wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "And he said he'd keep it quiet. For a price. And for her signature on some papers."

"What papers?"

"Ask me another night."

"What happened to him?"

Rainer didn't answer.

"What happened to Victor Lang?"

Rainer lifted his head. His eyes were steady. Terribly steady.

"I killed him."

Jose's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.

"Not in the kitchen. Not that week. I waited." Rainer's voice didn't shake. "I told him I'd get the money. I let him think it. He took me for a boy who'd sell anything to keep his brother quiet."

"Rainer."

"I did it for Elias. And for us."

"Us."

"You were on the list. Did you know that? He had a list. You, the firm, the wedding date, a year before you'd even picked it. He knew about you before you knew about her." Rainer's hands were open on his knees. "If I'd done nothing, he'd have gone to the people who owned him, and they'd have come for all three of us. So I did something."

The window over the sink had begun to gray. A bus went past below, empty, its lights on.

"Say something," Rainer said.

Jose looked at the bare hands. The stitched one. The one that had held nine pills for three hours and given them up for nothing but a number on a chip.

"Who else knows?"

"You."

"Who else?"

"Now?" Rainer tried to smile and couldn't. "Just you."

He said *now* gently, almost tenderly, and Jose understood that he had been handed something. A gift or a sentence. It would be a long time before he could tell the difference.