The White Road-CP-4 by John Connolly

Katahdin has mismatched furniture, eccentric decor, and feels like eating in somebody’s living room. Rachel and I love it. Unfortunately, so do a lot of other people, so we had to wait for a while at the cozy bar, listening to the locals who regularly eat there gossiping and chatting. Angel and Louis ordered a bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay and I allowed myself a half glass. For a long time after the deaths of Jennifer and Susan I hadn’t touched alcohol. I had been in a bar on the night they died and had found a whole series of ways to torment myself for not being there when they needed me. Now I took an occasional beer and, on very special occasions, a glass of Flagstone wine at home. I didn’t miss drinking. My taste for alcohol had largely disappeared. We eventually got a table in a corner and started in on Katahdin’s excellent buttermilk rolls. We talked about Rachel’s pregnancy, dissed my furniture, and caught up on New York gossip over their seafood and my London broil.
    “Man, your house is full of old shit,” said Louis.
    “Antiques,” I corrected him. “They were my grandfather’s.”
    “I don’t care they were Moses’s, they just old shit. You like one of them eBay motherfuckers, peddling trash on the Web. When you gonna make him buy some new furniture, girl?”
    Rachel raised her hands in an I’m-staying-out-of-it gesture, just as the hostess stepped up to make sure everything was okay. She smiled at Louis, who was slightly nonplussed to find that she wasn’t intimidated by him. Most people tended to find Louis intimidating at the very least, but the hostess at Katahdin was a strong, attractive woman who didn’t do intimidated, thank you for asking. Instead, she fed him more buttermilk rolls and gave him the kind of look a dog might give a particularly juicy bone.
    “I think she likes you,” said Rachel, radiating innocence.
    “I’m gay, not blind.”
    “But then, she doesn’t know you like we do,” I added. “Still, you’d better eat up. You’ll need all your strength for running away.”
    Louis scowled. Angel remained quiet, as he had for much of the day. He cheered up a little when talk turned to Willie Brew, who ran the auto shop in Queens that had supplied my Boss 302, and in which Angel and Louis were silent partners.
    “His son got some girl pregnant,” he told me.
    “Which son, Leo?”
    “No, the other one, Nicky. The one who’s like an idiot savant, minus the savant.”
    “Is he going to do the right thing?”
    “Already has. He ran away to Canada. Girl’s father is seriously pissed. Guy’s name is Pete Drakonis, but everybody calls him Jersey Pete. You know, you don’t fuck with guys who’ve got a state as part of their names, except maybe Vermont. The guy’s got Vermont in his name, the only thing he’s gonna try to make you do is save the whales and drink chai tea.”
    Over coffee I told them about Elliot Norton and his client. Angel shook his head wearily. “South Carolina,” he said, “is not my favorite place.”
    “An official Gay Pride Day march is some way off,” I admitted.
    “Where’d you say this guy’s from?” asked Louis.
    “A town called Grace Falls. It’s up by—”
    “I know where it’s at,” he replied.
    There was something in his voice that made me stop talking. Even Angel gave him a look, but didn’t press the point. We just watched as Louis fragmented a piece of discarded roll between his thumb and forefinger.
    “When you planning on leavin’?” he asked me.
    “Sunday.” Rachel and I had discussed it and agreed that my conscience was unlikely to rest unless I went down for a couple of days at least. At the risk of developing a roughly Rachelshaped hole in my body where she had gone through me for a short cut, I had raised the subject of my conversation with MacArthur. To my surprise, she had agreed to both regular drop-bys and panic buttons in the kitchen and main bedroom.
    Incidentally, she had also agreed to find