A change of gravity

Janet had nothing in her life but raw time. When she sat in her best chair to watch her shows all day on TV, and her hockey games at night Boston and Providence Bruins; Hartford Whalers; Springfield Indians, Kings, Falcons; New York Islanders; Rangers; or New Jersey Devils; God only knows which teams or how many after she got back from Dineen's convenience store each morning, that was all she had: time, nothing but time. She was waiting to die.

Sam Paradisio thought Chapelle could make it happen for her. He thought Chappelle had done it to others, committed murder. "Just because nobody ever caught him at it, that doesn't mean the bastard hasn't done it. There was this one bank that got robbed, 'way the hell out in western New York State, Olean, during the time that he was out before he went in this last time that he got caught. All the earmarks of a Big Sid Charpinsky job that was his neck of the woods, out that way, part of the world he come from. He was in the Rockingham County Jail up in New Hampshire, there, Exeter, same time Chappelle was in for an armored car thing he did. The two of them became asshole buddies.

"Bastards do not stay put any more. They refuse to just stay in one place nowadays, where a man can keep an eye on them. They're all over the place now like horse shit. Well, I saw the surveillance photos on that one, the New York job. The US Attorney showed them to me, and they showed this one poor bastard getting' mowed down. Just getting' fuckin' riddled he was. And the guy that was doin' it looked an awful lot to me like my friend Lowell, guy who's usin' the Mac Ten. Wearin' a mask, but even so, more than a passin' resemblance. The same build, and the same way he's got of movin', way he carries himself. We know what Chappelle is capable of.

Army trained him too good. He could be anyone's killer. Available, formal occasions. Weddings and funerals, bar mitzvahs. Bastard'd have to get his own eight-hundred number, there'd be so much demand for his work."

Merrion rejected that notion at once. It alarmed him. He didn't like being alarmed. Larry'd said one day to him when he was still feeling really good, which usually meant savage and mean: "I've reached that magic age where I only have to do the fuckin' things I want to do, and only think about the things I fuckin' like to think about. So, if I don't like to do it, it's a thing that I don't like, or I don't like to think it, well then, my friend, then I don't." Merrion had agreed with Larry at the time, and now, approaching the same age, agreed with Larry even more, even though he was dead and had been dead for more than twenty years. Another legacy from Larry: words to be dead by.

Still the thought lingered, skulking around in the back of his head, bothering him with its shadow. "I'm never gonna leave this place,"

Larry Lane'd said to him. "Well, I go out now and then, time to time, right now. And I'm gonna leave, of course some day I'm gonna have to.

But the only way I'm gonna do it is when the six guys bring the long black car around. Then, well, I'll have to leave."

Somehow or other about a year or so into Larry's last mission Richie Hammond'd found out that Merrion had been going to visit him. "Every week, is it?" Richie'd said to him. "Every week you go up there, and stay about two hours! What the hell you do up there with him, up there in that place with that shrivelled-up old bastard he is, all that time alone with him? Guy's fuckin' dyin' isn't he? That's what I hear, every place I go. Everyone says it, all over town. "Larry Lane isn't long for this world," 's what I hear. "Larry Lane's on his way out, this time." That's what everyone's sayin'." Then he had paused and looked hopeful, waiting for confirmation.

Merrion had not said anything. He had shrugged, throwing in the eyebrow-raising. He did that whenever Richie started irritating him, which was fairly often. It wasn't insubordinate not that Richie as a practical matter could harm him in any way at all. Even if he did start keeping a log and writing it up whenever Merrion yanked his chain; as long as Danny Hilliard had access to a telephone that worked and a friend alive on Beacon Hill, it would take St. Michael the Archangel to lay a bad hand on Ambrose Merrion.

His silence pissed Richie off. That was another thing Richie didn't know how to do right, get pissed off properly. And usefully, so's to set a precedent, one that people would shudder to remember and try not to do again whatever it was that had set him off. He just got plaintive and made himself look ridiculous. "Well answer me, for Christ sake, Amby. I asked you a fuckin' question." That was why Merrion did it. "What the hell do you do up there with him, for Christ sake? The man's a dyin, fuckin', man."