The Interrogation Read Free

shift,” Eddie said, making sure that the raw hostility he felt for Terry Siddell didn’t show.
    Siddell peered morosely into the night. “Twelve hours,” he griped. “Twelve fucking hours.”
    It wasn’t just the hours, Eddie knew. It was that Terry had to spend them with a guy like Eddie, a little guy, going nowhere, without power or influence, a guy who could never make Siddell pay for anything he did, which Eddie yearned to do … just once.
    “Nobody likes a twelve-hour shift,” Eddie said. Again he thought of Laurie. Her sickness. Her fever. The way she’d vomited through the night. Then his mind shifted to her mother, snatched from the secretarial pool, screwed, and tossed aside. He’d scooped something out of her, the guy who did that, so that she’d collapsed from the inside, abandoned her husband and daughter, leaving nothing behind but the lingering smell of her afternoon gin.
    The terrible loss that had been inflicted upon his life abruptly swept down upon Eddie Lambrusco, a grown man who couldn’t hold on to a wife or stay home with a sick daughter or say “Go fuck yourself” to anyone at all, not even the little punk who sat whining at his side.
    “So, you getting out?” he asked.
    “Okay, okay,” Siddell answered sourly. He graspedthe door handle, jerked it up, and pulled himself out of the truck, leaving the door open behind him.
    “Fucking wimp,” Eddie growled under his breath. He leaned over and violently jerked the door closed, imagining Siddell’s right hand smashed by the impact, screaming for him to open the door, release him, gazing in horror at his mangled fingers when he did. The only problem was that such vengeful fantasies were brief, and in their wake Eddie felt only smaller and more powerless.
    In the wide rearview mirror, he watched as Siddell lumbered toward the bulging cans. Christ, he thought, what a lousy break. A twelve-hour run ahead of him, every second of it with a rich kid who’d be his boss in five years, another jerk he’d have to answer to. He imagined Terry Siddell behind a big desk, dressed in a suit and tie, pinkie ring on his finger, puffing a big cigar as he handed him the pink slip. Sorry, Eddie, but we just can’t keep you on.
    In the old days he’d been partnered with Charlie Sweeney, and the two of them had laughed the night away. If Eddie hadn’t lost his job with the city, they’d have still been partners, gotten the work done, cleaned up the whole area around police headquarters, the park, Briarwood, where the big Dumpsters bulged with the dreadful garbage of Saint Vincent’s Hospital, and finally the crumbling tenements of Cordelia. They’d have laughed their way through the whole damn thing because Charlie was a jokester, a guy who made faces and could imitate the people he saw on the street. Charlie moved the clock forward one gag at a time, lightened the load for everybody else. Every shift run, Eddie decided, needs a comedian, and he knew that without Charlie, tonight would be long, the work arduous, and there’d hardly be a moment when he wasn’t broodingabout Laurie, chewing at the fact that he wasn’t with her, despising himself for leaving her alone.
    A clatter sounded behind the truck, the intentionally vicious noise Siddell always made, rolling the cans back and forth and banging them against the metal sides of the truck as if trying to get even with Old Man Siddell for making him work for his supper. Amazing, Eddie thought, what some guys feel entitled to. He reached in his pocket and drew out the battered pocket watch he’d inherited from his father, a laborer’s timepiece with its chinks and scratches and slightly skewed hands that circled turgidly around the yellowing dial. After a lifetime, he thought, this.
    Siddell groaned as he crawled back into the truck. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”
    Eddie glanced in the mirror. A trail of garbage lay strewn across the wet street. “Next time try to get some of it in the