Once, a few minutes before he’d gone out on the ice with histruck, a deputy asked him, “Why do you do that, Corbel? Drink and fuck around on the river?”
Cain answered, “Because that’s what we do. We’ve always done that.”
—
Off the ice, but no less hammered, Cain pulled the Jeep to the side of the street and said to Burke, “I gotta tell you something, Denwa. Not exactly a secret, but kinda like that.”
“Go for it,” Burke said.
“You know Ryan Harney?”
“The doctor? He did my hemorrhoids,” Burke said. “What’s the secret?”
“A few years back, he was fuckin’ Gina Hemming.”
Burke looked at him slack-jawed, puzzled by the importance of this secret. “Yeah? So what?”
“So what? So everybody in town knows he’s got trouble with his wife, and what I think is, Gina told him she was gonna come out with the news, and his wife was gonna find out, so he killed her and threw her body in the river.”
“No shit,” Burke said. He held up the bottle of Stoli, realized there was less than half an inch left. He finished it and threw the bottle out the window, where it shattered on the street. “What’re we gonna do about it?”
“Go kick his ass,” Cain said.
“Let’s do it,” Burke said. “Motherfucker can’t go around killing our women.”
Cain dropped the hammer, and the Jeep lurched away from the curb.
“Say,” Burke said, “Didn’t I hear from somebody once that you used to fuck Gina? Might have been your wife said it.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t kill her. She needed me, because... Justine.”
“Huh. Justine,” Burke said. He burped. “You know, if he gets the operation, I could go for a piece of that.”
“What?”
“Good-looking woman... or whatever,” Burke said.
Cain didn’t want to hear it. And had an idea that he wouldn’t remember it anyway. That was a good thing.
—
They showed up at Harney’s house, a sprawling tan-brick affair with a three-car garage and a couple of bay windows poking out on either side of the recessed front door. There were lights on at both ends of the house. Cain pulled into the driveway, killed the engine, the two men piled out, and Cain led the way to the door. He rang the doorbell and pounded on the door, and a minute later the door popped open, and Harney was there in a robe and slippers, the open robe showing the top of a pair of blue pajamas.
He asked, “Somebody hurt?”
“You motherfucker,” Burke shouted. “You killed Gina Hemming. You motherfucker...”
Burke seemed to have lost the thread at “motherfucker,” and Cain stepped up. “We know all about it, Harney,” he said. “Gina was going to turn you in, to your wife, and you decided to shut her up.”
“You guys are drunk.”
“Damn right,” Burke said.
Harney’s wife, Karen, showed up in a robe behind Harney and asked loudly, “Ryan, what’s going on?”
“There she is,” Burke shouted. “Your old man killed Gina Hemming because he was fuckin’ her and he didn’t want you to find out.”
She crossed her arms. “What?”
