Cold Service Read Free

drank the rest of her cosmopolitan.
    "And except for being white, I think you are just goddamned fucking like him," she said.
    "No," I said. "I'm not."
    She was studying my face like it was the Rosetta stone.
    "Susan," she said. "You need Susan."
    "I do."
    "Well, he doesn't need me."
    "I don't know if he does or not," I said. "But not wanting to see you now doesn't prove it either way."
    "If he doesn't need me now, when will he?"
    "Maybe need is not requisite to love."
    "It seems to be for you," she said.
    "Maybe that would be my weakness," I said.
    "Maybe it's not a weakness," she said.
    "Maybe an infinite number of angels," I said, "can balance on the point of a needle."
    She nodded. The waiter brought her another drink.
    "We are getting a little abstract," she said.
    "I don't know if he loves you," I said. "And I don't know if you love him. And I don't know if you'll stroll into the sunset together, or should or want to. But as long as you know Hawk, he will be what he is. He's what he is now, except hurt."
    "And being hurt is not part of what he is?" she said.
    I grinned.
    "It is, at least, an aberration," I said.
    "So if I'm to be with him, I have to take him for what he is?"
    "Yes."
    "He won't change."
    "No."
    "And just what is he?" Cecile said.
    I grinned again.
    "Hawk," I said.
    Cecile took a sip of her drink and closed her eyes and tilted her head back and swallowed slowly. She sat for a moment like that, with her eyes closed and her head back. Then she sat up and opened her eyes.
    "I give up," she said.
    She raised her glass toward me. I touched the rim of her glass with the rim of mine. It made a satisfying clink. We both smiled.
    "Thank you," she said.
    "I'm not sure I helped."
    "Maybe you did," she said.

5
    HAWK AND I went to a meeting with an assistant prosecutor in the Suffolk County DA's office in back of Bowdoin Square. It wasn't much of a walk from the hydrant I parked on One Bullfinch Place, but Hawk had to stop halfway and catch his breath.
    "Be glad when my blood count get back up there."
    "Me too," I said. "I'm sick of waiting for you all the time."
    He looked bad. He'd lost some weight, and since he didn't have any to lose, his muscle mass was depleted. He still seemed to walk slightly bent forward, as if to protect the places where the bullets had roamed. And he looked smaller.
    The meeting room was on the second floor-in front, with three windows, so you could look at the back of the old Bowdoin Square telephone building. Quirk was already there, at the table, with a Suffolk County ADA, a fiftyish woman named Margie Collins, whom I had met once before.
    "Hawk," Quirk said. "You look worse than I do."
    "Yeah, but I is going to improve," Hawk said.
    Quirk smiled and introduced Margie, who didn't seem to remember that she'd met me once before. Since Margie was still quite good-looking, in a full-bodied, still-in-shape, blond-haired kind of way, her forgetfulness was mildly distressing.
    "Our eyewitness shit the bed," Margie said when we sat down.
    "Stood up in court and said he had been coerced by the police," Quirk said. "Didn't know the defendants. Didn't know anything about any crimes they'd committed. He was our case. Judge directed an acquittal."
    Hawk was quiet. For all you could tell, he hadn't heard what was said.
    "How'd they get to him?" I said.
    "We had him in the Queen's Inn," Quirk said. "In Brighton. Two detectives with him all the time. Nobody in. Nobody out."
    "Except his lawyers," Margie said.
    "Bingo," I said.
    "Yeah. Can't prove it. But when we flipped him in the first place, his lawyer was fighting us all the way."
    "Did I hear you say lawyer s?" I said.
    "Yes," Margie said. "The second one was in fact an attorney. We checked. But I'm sure he was the one carried the message."
    "What does whatsisname get for bailing on his deal."
    "Bohdan," Quirk said.
    "He does life," Margie said.
    "Which is apparently a better prospect than the one they offered him," I said.
    "Apparently," Margie