Okay. I didn’t need to watch the two of them confer over me and how was Idoing, with the sympathetic head tilts of a—
My mind had supplied the phraseparent-teacher conference, but I didn’t want it in there. I hit fast-forward and turned back to my sandwich.
What if I just let the feed run at full fast-forward until we got tonow? And kept going? Crack the space-time continuum and see the future? Handy, right? To see how it would all turn out.
Once the video time code had almost reached noon, I brought down the speed again.
And bang, at standard opening time in the time code, there was Quin tugging at the vestibule door, surprised to find McPhee’s locked. He went to the window and shaded his eyes, glanced toward the camera, then headed away, out of view.
I paused the video to think.
Silent Jim had a point about Quin. In between situations or not, every day, this guy arrived at McPhee’s like he was punching a clock. He sipped a beer down until it was warm, chattering at Alex and anybody who wandered into his orbit, neighborly, friendly.
Gross.
Had his mother not loved him enough?
Oh, yeah, I know. Did you know that landing a wire-monkey mama could go either way? All sharp edges, obviously—yo, over here!—or you could turn out a squish of a person, absorbing everyone’s every mood, waiting to be blamed for them. Cringing against slights, apologizing for being in the room.
I didn’t think that was what this Jim,Quin, was. But he was… something. Someone.
I stopped the video. In the corner of the screen sat the little trash icon. It would be so easy to dump it all, just take our chances.
I’d just watched Alex be Alex, surviving a police visit, surviving the onslaught of Oona’s slobbery mutts with patience. But if I watched Wednesday’s footage again, I’d see Alex scrape Joey along a brick wall.
I could not reconcile the two.
Finally I dragged one of the files back out and hid it, deep, in the weeds of an old e-folder.Deep.
I had time to decide, right? Before the wrong person found the files?
Problem was, I wasn’t sure who the wrong person was anymore.
28
I cleaned up after myself in the pub kitchen and stowed the empties from Quin and Jim in the dishwasher, but I couldn’t face sweeping the floors. Not today, Satan. It had been the longest day in the history of days. Time forbed.
Up at the apartment door, though, the dogs met me with the big eyes, and I knew there would be a note from Oona asking if I wouldn’t mind feeding and walking them again, thaaaaaaanks.
Only about the third or fourth night she’d been out since I moved in. Her life was a mystery to me. What had she done with the dogs before I moved in?
Not like I was inmourningor anything.
But a walk would do me some good, I figured, and maybe that was what Oona thought, too, that my chakras needed a bracing walk.
I harnessed up the dogs, and let them into the alley with the usual prayers. Outside, it was already midnight-dark, even though it was still only early evening. We slid over black ice to the police tape pulled across the alley. Were we not supposed to cross it?
Promising myself we’d come back through McPhee’s, I ducked under the tape and quickly out the other side.
Did the five-second rule work for forensics?
On the street, I let the dogs pull me along wherever they wanted to go. My hands were freezing, pinched and red from the cold. But it did feel good to move, to suck the sharp air into my lungs, fill them up.
As I started singing, the dogs stopped and glanced back, then forged ahead. The empty street bounced my voice along the bricks and concrete.
I should have been thinking of Joey. And I was. But what kept crowding Joey out was Alex, what he might have done. I couldn’t believe it, and yet I also couldn’t dismiss it. He’d never taken to Joey, I don’t know why. Maybe he thought Joey wasn’t a match for me or wastoomatched to me. He was protective of me, and of course, we’d both thought Joey had run off with the rent money. And my self-respect.
Maybe I had called Joey a dead man one time too many.
