That was a long time ago. I haven't seen the locket since the last time she visited me at Dixon. "That's my wife's."
"Not anymore." His lips curl into a shape nothing like a smile. "You know who was wearing it last?"
And all of a sudden I know where this is going. "Yes."
"Say it."
I force the syllables. "Jessica."
"Who?"
"My daughter."
"So, then, Frank," he curls his lips again, "I guess you better do exactly what I say. Right?"
#
I don't have many pictures. Three, to be precise.
We used to have tons, albums full. I once joked Lucy that she must've been born with a Nikon attached to her head, all the pictures she took. And once Jessica came along, forget it. Our daughter was the most documented kid on the North Side.
But you can't take that shit inside. They'll let you, but you don't want to. It kills you slowly to have proof of the way time passes, all those frozen instants that used to be yours. So you keep a couple of shots, two or three, and you stare at them until they don't mean anything any more, and at the same time, they mean everything.
After I got out, I tried to find out what happened to the rest of our pictures. But after Lucy died, shit fell apart. What little we had that was worth anything was sold for bills, and the rest probably ended up in a dump. I like to think that maybe a collector got the photos, one of those guys who sell random snaps in boxes down at the Maxwell Street Market. I check it some Sundays, flipping through other people's lives, but I never find mine.
Three.
One of Lucy, dressed as a sort of slutty angel for Halloween a million years ago. It's faded and blurry, but she looks the way I remember when I close my eyes.
One of the room in Cook County Hospital, Luce red-eyed but smiling, Jessica bundled like a burrito in her arms.
One of Jess from Nag's Head, the summer before I went in. Eleven years old, just beginning to fill out the bikini Lucy and I fought about her having. I'm dragging her into the surf, and she's fighting me, legs scrabbling at the sand, face framed into the kind of mock fear you only have around someone you trust. You can almost hear her shrieking, almost hear her laughing.
I can, anyway.
#
I reach out, and he lets the locket slip from his fist, the thin chain coiling in my palm. The filigree is worn, the hinges dark with age. I stare at it, and then I look up at the kid, and think about taking that pistol away from him and cracking his fucking skull with it. Then I say, "I don't have it."
"You think I don't know who you are? What you do?"
"I'm a bartender."
"Bullshit. I know all about you. The jobs you've pulled. Lucky I'm not asking for twenty."
"Those jobs were a long time ago." I gesture down the bar. "You think I had any kind of money, I'd be working here?"
He looks it over, taking in the two geezers staring at their beer, the Cubs sign in the dingy window, the bowls of pretzels the regulars know better than to eat. For a second, his confidence seems to slip. But then he shakes his head, fingers his shirt to make extra-sure I get a view of the cheap Chinese pistol. "Ten grand," he says. "By Friday. Or she fucking dies."
My fingers go to fists. "Don't," I say.
"Don't what?" His mask is back in place, all insolence and swagger.
"Don't threaten my daughter."
He curls his lips again. "Friday," he says. Then he turns and struts out.
I open my hand to look at the locket. I know it's warm from being in his pocket, but it's hard not to pretend that it's because she had it around her neck.
#
Ten years ago—Jesus, a decade—one of the neighborhood kids came to get me.
It was eleven in the morning, and I had been up all night doing a thing, so when I heard the doorbell, I wanted more than anything to bury my head under my pillow. But Lucy was at work, so I staggered out of bed.
The kid was named Jimmy-something, a scraggly little brat that had lately been sniffing around Jessica. She was nine and he was maybe eleven, but things happen earlier these days. I didn't open the screen door, just glowered down at him. "Yeah?"
And Jimmy-something, he said the scariest words a father can hear. "It's Jess. She's hurt."
I didn't even change out of my pajama bottoms.
Growing up in the city, it's a blessing and a curse. Kids are wired to run around shrieking like carefree morons, and that's exactly the way the should be. But between drug dealers and speeding buses and evil fuckers in raincoats, it's tough to just let them go. So Lucy and I had set up boundaries; Jess could go to the school playground but not to the city park, she could walk on Augusta but not on Division.