As we ate he told me a little about Chicago, about his grandmother's house. When I asked about the rest of his family, he filled that in too. Since we had arrived, we had continued to side-step the reason he was here at all, as though it was simply not polite dinner conversation, or as though the Saint was a child too young to hear the details.
Right before he left, my phone rang. They had found my car, and most of its contents in the visitor parking at a hospital in Chicago. The plates had been switched as we suspected, and it was absent of fingerprints--both mine and hers. According to the ticket stub they found slid between the ceiling and visor, it had been in the lot since ten o'clock the night before.
As a precaution, the police had staked it out, but no one had returned. The keys were in their usual pouch in my purse. My extra cash was gone, along with a suitcase worth of clothes, and some of my food.
The call broke whatever spell we had been under since the car ride. It hit Vecchio much harder than myself. He came screeching into the moment.
"What was the name of the hospital?" Vecchio asked, as if he knew.
I told him.
He scowled.
"I don't think you'll see her again," I offered as he stood to leave the table and the house.
He got his coat and turned at the door, where I held it open, planning to thank him for his help.
"What happened last night," he asked, all the gloss of concern for me as a citizen in peril and the casual detachment of a professional gone. "What really happened between you two?"
"I don't know," I said, which was the truth. Someone had put a gun to my ribs, threatened me with fatal violence, stolen my car, my Thanksgiving and most of my stuff. But as far as what had happened, I didn't know. It was like looking through fog, or trying to touch light.
He stopped on the porch to make a call and see if his partner's room had been breached when she visited the hospital. The answer had not satisfied him. The duty roster had been thin for the holiday, and there had been no one posted outside his partner's room last night or today. The heat of Vecchio's exhaled curses turned quickly into steam, enveloping his mobile phone with a beauty and grace curses should never have.
"I've got to go," he said when he had hung up, as if to remind himself.
"You're going to chase after her?" I asked.
"No," he said, "there's someone I've got to go see."
And I knew, even as I watched him walk to his car, as he brushed away the lightly falling snow from the windshield with the sleeve of his coat, that he was going to visit the hospital. The one where my car sat abandoned in the parking lot, the one that held him--the man with a bullet lodged in his spine.
"Wait," I called after Vecchio. I turned and grabbed my coat and chap-stick. I locked the door without even saying a second farewell to the Saint. Our two glasses and bowls sat on the table, untouched after our meal. As long as he was going to Chicago, I told myself, I might as well ask if he didn't mind if I rode along to claim my car.
He said yes, it would be nice to have some company for the drive. After all, it was Thanksgiving and someone (he didn't say who, a great man, I suppose) had once told him that it only takes an extra moment to be courteous.
End Part One
