please just do what I ask and I swear I’ll tell you everything later.”
He hesitated, then finally stood and walked past her and Danny. Maggie heard Bobby rummaging through closets and the medicine cabinet, slamming doors, spilling things onto the floor, hurrying. He returned with most of what she asked for and then went to boil water in her small kitchen.
Maggie looked down at Danny, who was unconscious. She wondered if kitchen-table stitches were anything like riding a bicycle, that once you learned how to do them, you never forgot. It wasn’t all that different from sewing cloth. And the Malone men were never ones to worry about leaving a scar. She told herself it would all come back to her.
She was fourteen, and after Jimmy Malone had locked up the bar, he called upstairs to their apartment. She answered on the first ring.
“Mags?”
“Yeah, Daddy?”
“I need you to come down to the bar. Danny’s doing some things for me…won’t be home until late.”
Things. Maggie knew that could mean anything from driving out with Uncle Con to New Jersey to bury something, to hiding money in a hole in the wall behind the toilet where there was a loose tile. It also meant not asking questions.
“Be right down.”
The Twilight bar was in Hell’s Kitchen, which itself was bound by the Hudson River. Eventually, if you walked west, you’d hit the water, as black and ugly and foul-smelling as it was. When she was very little, she’d imagined the Hudson River as the sea, mystical and grand, carrying the scent of fresh water and the sounds of sails whipping into the wind. But she was older now and realized it was just the dirty, brown Hudson. Hell’s Kitchen’s other border, depending on who you asked, was Eighth. Either way, it was a haven for the Westies and addicts, and the streets were harsh. But Maggie had never felt unsafe. She knew everyone in a thirty-block radius was aware of her father’s power in the small jungle of their neighborhood. He’d fought two tours in Vietnam, and some people said he’d flown for the CIA in Laos. Or maybe it wasn’t for the CIA, but for some shadowy arm of the government that had condoned paying him $10,000 cash each month back in 1973. Maybe he’d flown for Air America. That was the rumor, at least, and she had no reason to doubt it, collecting small clues like a hungry bird snatched up bread crumbs. She stored the information away in her mind, hoping to one day understand all that her father was. After he’d come back from Laos, some of the money—from whoever had paid it to him—had gone to buying the bar.
Maggie’s teeth chattered. Her father’s mysteries always made her nervous. He was the antithesis of what she remembered of her mother. Where she embodied the rituals of incense and quiet and candles, her father and Uncle Con immersed themselves in the never-spoken threat of violence—not against her or Danny or her mother when she’d been alive, but against anyone who dared to even breathe on them. Maggie pulled a sweatshirt over her head and looked around her bedroom. The far wall was lined with shelves on which perched at least a hundred Buddhas, maybe more. Some had been her mother’s, some her father had bought her in Chinatown. And some, she knew, came from faraway places in Asia from before she was born. On the opposite wall was a crucifix, a pretty wooden one with a pewter Jesus. On her dresser were the spilled secrets of a teenage girl—hair clips, lip gloss she had just been allowed to start wearing, earrings and rings and fortune-cookie promises of good luck and prosperity, movie stubs and cutout pictures of movie stars she planned to stick on her bulletin board.
She took a deep breath to settle her nerves and left her bedroom and then the apartment, locking the door behind herself. She descended the metal staircase to the back entrance of the bar, the scent of beer as familiar to her as her own name, as her reflection in the mirror.
Maggie walked through the back of the bar and then made her way to the cluttered office, where she assumed her father would be waiting for her. He was, though he was slumped over his desk. He looked up, with effort, as she came in the door.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, even as she saw the wet crimson stain on the back of his shirt.
“Nothin’,” he said, winking at her, his face sweaty and ashen. “I just need you to do me a favor, baby girl, and dig this stupid thing out of my shoulder, out of my back.”
“What stupid thing?”
“A bullet. I’d do it myself if I could reach, but I can’t.”
Maggie felt queasy, not because he’d been shot, but from the idea of sticking a knife, tweezers, anything, into a hole in someone’s flesh, let alone her father’s.
“Daddy…” she said in a whisper, laden with the question, there in the way she spoke his name, do I have to?
“I can’t ask Danny. He’s doing something for me. And I can’t get Uncle Con on the phone. Please, I’m asking you. I’m starting to run a fever, and I’ve got to get it out of me. I’ll talk you through it. Piece of cake. You’re a Malone.”
Maggie nodded. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I promise. And you know I never promise unless I can deliver the goods. Please, baby.”
She breathed deeply, not sure if she would pass out or not. “I’m going to get me a drink.”
“Sure. Get me one, too.”
Maggie went out to the bar and pulled down a bottle of scotch. She took two fat water tumblers and set them on the bar. She hated scotch. Although her father had let her and Danny drink beer since they were small, she never drank anything uglier than peppermint schnapps. But she wanted something powerful and nasty. She poured two generous scotches as if she were pouring water. She took one and downed it in a few gulps, fighting the retching feeling in her throat and gut, emitting an audible gag. She put the tumbler on the bar and literally shook her shoulders and head, trying to keep the vile liquid inside her. Then she refilled her glass and brought it along with her father’s drink into the office.
A first-aid kit was open and his shirt was off. The kit looked like an army-issue one, and she imagined it had come home from Vietnam with him, long before she had even been born.
“Thanks, darlin’,” he said, taking the scotch from her and downing it without shivering or even making a face.
Maggie stood behind him, staring at the bullet wound. Its edges were clean, and it looked deep. She could only see dark red blood, but she knew that in the hole, layers of skin gave way to muscle and below that bone. Steadying herself, she peered into the hole of flesh and blood, smelling the bitterness of burned skin, again feeling a violent convulsion in her stomach.
On her father’s desk was a scalpel. A real scalpel, not a knife. She didn’t ask where he’d gotten it or why he had it. She never asked about anything. Not about the loaded gun that always sat on his nightstand, or about the occasional 2:00 a. m. visitor, men with whispered secrets and file folders and photographs. Next to the scalpel was a pair of very long tweezers with pointed ends.
“Okay, Maggie,” he said as he handed the scalpel to her. “Now, the scalpel is really sharp, so don’t cut yourself. Just poke this into the hole and dig out the bullet a little. Use the tweezers when you can finally see it. Get all of it. Make sure of that. If it’s hit bone, you’ll have to dig more.”
She gritted her teeth, hands shaking. Gingerly, she entered the back of his shoulder with just the very tip of the scalpel, feeling as if she were going to throw up.
“Honey,
