My Brother's Keeper by Keith Gilman

spotted with light brown freckles that covered the tops of his cheeks and ran like speckled dust across the bridge of his nose. His teeth had gone gray but his smile had remained wild and childlike as if he was always ready with some old joke or thinking of an old girlfriend who was supposed to have broken his heart. He’d get drunk and play as if he’d never regretted a day in his life.
    Danny’s hair was a dull, coarse red and didn’t seem to fit the shape of his head, jutting out at strange angles with no real pattern. Butchy had said that Danny didn’t bother to comb his hair anymore. Danny said it had a mind of its own. One of the waitresses, Daisy Arguello, would always beg him to let her cut it and he’d just keep playing with that same contented smile plastered on his face. He’d make love to Daisy when the mood struck him and Daisy would say that Danny Butler had played her like a baby grand.
    They found Danny dead behind the bar one night, the needle still in his arm. Butchy never replaced him. It was quiet in Fortunato’s for a long time. The piano sat idle with a layer of dust across the top. Guys using the pay phone in the corner started putting their bottles on top of it and Butchy would get pissed, yelling at them to keep the bottles off the piano. He’d wipe the wet rings from the dark wood with a bar towel and soon after that he got rid of the phone. The piano stayed.
    It was around that time Lou had been terminated from the police department and his wife had thrown him out, the two events coalescing in his mind, becoming one colossal weight. If it hadn’t been for Fortunato’s and Danny Butler’s piano and the endless supply of Irish whiskey, he might have gone the way of so many other policemen who’d found themselves on the outside looking in, no longer part of the only family they’d ever known. Some cops decided that swallowing a bullet was better than living with the humiliation.
    They’d found more than one dead cop with his service weapon in one hand and his badge in the other.
    The officer turned to him through the window, the remnants of his dying laughter still showing through the faint smile on his face.
    â€˜Any luck?’
    â€˜Girl’s in a coma. They got her over at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. One of those deals where she could sleep forever or wake up tomorrow. They don’t know.’
    â€˜Best damn doctors in the world and they don’t know?’
    â€˜That’s just their way of saying don’t get your hopes up.’
    â€˜You wouldn’t know the girl’s name, would you?’
    â€˜Sure. Her name’s Catherine Waites. Poor girl’s over there by herself. That was the medic I had on the phone. He said they still haven’t been able to locate a family member. She’s over eighteen but they’d still like to get a hold of her parents. So far, no luck.’
    Lou heard the name and it hit him somewhere between his chest and his scrotum, like a punch in the gut. He knew the name, knew it as well as he knew his own. Catherine Waites, the girl from his dreams, the girl from his past, his last call as a Philly cop, the face that had been haunting his every night. He’d listened to the officer say it and even as it reached his ears, he didn’t want to believe it.
    It had taken a few seconds to sink in and hearing it spoken out loud after all this time, from the mouth of a total stranger, gave it a prescient reality that seemed to pin Lou to the back of his seat and take the wind out of him. His face grew pale and he felt suddenly sick to his stomach. His eyes clouded over, parked there on a city street and talking with this cop who was wondering now if maybe Lou was drunk. He hadn’t thought so at first. But now he wasn’t so sure.
    Lou had climbed back into the driver’s seat of his car, thanking the officer. The headlights coming at him in broken streams of