Fat Tuesday(24)

In an instant, there she was in his mind's eye: the whore in Duvall's gazebo.

He rubbed every bad thought from his mind and focused on the woman in the snug-fitting black dress, her hair as dark and glossy as a raven's wing, her breasts kissed by moonlight.

Her face was indistinct. In his mind, he brought it closer. She gazed back at him with sultry eyes. She spoke his name. She stroked him with a soft hand. An even softer mouth caressed him. Her tongue He came, cursing blasphemously through bared teeth.

It left him feeling weak and dizzy and slightly disoriented, but that could be as much from the hot water and whiskey as the sexual release.

It was comforting to know that he was still a functioning male. But on an emotional level he felt only marginally better.

Well on his way to being good and drunk, he climbed out of the tub and, wrapping one of two thin towels around his middle, sat down on the edge of the bed to reflect on his future.

He supposed he should be contacting a divorce lawyer, freezing bank accounts, canceling credit cards, all the things people do for spite and self-protection when their marriage becomes a statistic.

But he lacked the wherewithal to enter that kind of legal fray.

Let Barbara have it all, whatever the hell she wanted from the spoils of their life together. He'd salvaged all he needed, a few changes of clothes, his badge, his nine-millimeter.

He reached across his pile of discarded clothes on the bed and picked up the pistol, weighing it in his hand. It was from this gun that he'd fired the bullet that had killed Kevin Stuart.

His personal life was for shit. So was his career. He no longer nursed illusions about valor and duty. Only fools believed in that crap.

Those standards were outdated and didn't apply to contemporary society.

When he enrolled in the police academy, he had fancied himself a knight, but the Round Table was history before he even began.

Burke Basile was a pariah, an embarrassment to the Narcotics Division for shooting one of his own men, then for demanding justice when no one else seemed to give a damn.

Wayne Bardo was free to kill again, and he had.

Duvall was ensconced in his ivory tower with his servants, and his rich friends, and their expensive whores.

Meanwhile Burke Basile's expressions of sympathy were being rebuffed and his wife was screwing younger men in his own house.

Again he hefted the pistol in his palm. He wouldn't be the first cop, dejected over the futility of his work, to eat a bullet. How long before he'd be missed? Who would miss him? Pat? Mac? Possibly.

Or, secretly, maybe they'd be glad he had solved their problem for them.

When he began to stink up this horrible little room, when the land lord's cat began scratching at the door, they'd find him. Who would be surprised that he'd taken his own life? He had destroyed his marriage, they'd say. Gossip would get around that he had caught his old lady, the one with the great body, doing the wild thing with another man in Basile's own shower. Poor schmuck. They would shake their heads and lament the fact that he had never fully recovered from killing Stuart. That's when all his troubles had started.

While Stuart's widow struggled to keep food on the table for her children, unscrupulous lawyers and criminals threw lavish parties to celebrate their lawless successes. Ol' Burke Basile couldn't take that.

He couldn't handle the guilt anymore.

So, bang. Simple as that. It occurred to him that he might be suffering a bad case of selfpity, but why the hell not? Wasn't he entitled to a little self-analysis and regret? He'd been deeply wounded by Nancy Stuart's decision, although he admitted it was the right one for her. She was holding onto her life with both hands.

Eventually the pain of Kev's death would abate, she would meet someone else and remarry. She didn't blame him for the accident, but his visits were bound to stoke her most painful memories.

He wanted to think of Barbara as a cheating bitch who'd been unwilling even to try to understand the hell he'd gone through over his partner's death. But that wasn't entirely fair. She certainly wasn't without flaws, but he hadn't exactly been an ideal husband either, even before the fatal shooting incident and certainly not since.

The marriage should have ended long ago, putting both of them out of their misery.

He'd made lousy choices all around. Bad choice of wife. Bad choice of career. What the hell had all the overtime hours and all the hard work been about? He had accomplished nothing. Nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. He had killed Kev Stuart.

Damn, he missed that mick! He still missed Kev's quiet logic, and his stupid jokes, and his unshakable sense of right and wrong. He even missed his bursts of temper. Kev wouldn't have minded dying in the line of duty. Actually, that was probably how he would have preferred to go. What he wouldn't be able to tolerate was that his death had gone unavenged. The criminals responsible for it had gone unpunished by the system of law that Kev had dedicated himself to uphold. Kevin Stuart would have had a hard time accepting that.

And that was the thought that sobered Burke Basile like a cold shower.

He set the bottle of Jack Daniel's on the rickety nightstand, and, alongside it, his pistol. Removing the towel from around his waist, he stretched out on the lumpy bed and stacked his hands beneath his head.

For hours he lay there, staring at the ceiling and thinking.

Although there really was nothing more to think about.