Mystic River by Dennis Lehane Read Free Book Online Page A

streetlights had worked in a decade.
    Kevin was good company because he didn’t talk much in general and neither did Jimmy, so they sat and sipped their beers and listened to the scuffle and scrape of rubber soles and wooden stick blades, the sudden metallic clang of the hard rubber ball banging off a hubcap.
    At thirty-six, Jimmy Marcus had come to love the quiet of his Saturday nights. He had no use for loud, packed bars and drunken confessions. Thirteen years since he’d walked out of prison, and he owned a corner store, had a wife and three daughters at home, and believed he’d traded the wired-up boy he’d been for a man who appreciated an even pace to his life—a slowly sipped beer, a morning stroll, the sound of a baseball game on the radio.
    He looked out onto the street. Four of the kids had given up and gone home, but two remained in the street, shrouded by the dark, scrabbling over that ball. Jimmy could barely make them out, but he could feel the fury of their energy in the slap of their sticks, the mad scramble of their feet.
    It had to go somewhere, all that youthful uncoiling. When Jimmy was a kid—hell, until he was almost twenty-three—that energy had dictated his every action. And then…then you just learned how to stow it someplace, he guessed. You tucked it away.
    His eldest daughter, Katie, was in the midst of that process now. Nineteen years old and so, so beautiful, all her hormones on red alert, surging. But lately he’d noticed an air of grace settling in his daughter. He wasn’t sure where it had come from—some girls grew into womanhood gracefully, others remained girls their whole lives—but it was there in Katie all of a sudden, a peacefulness, a serenity even.
    At the store this afternoon, as she was leaving, she’d kissed Jimmy’s cheek and said, “Later, Daddy,” and five minutes afterward Jimmy realized he could still feel her voice in his chest. It was her mother’s voice, he realized, slightly lower and more confident than the voice he remembered his daughter having, and Jimmy found himself wondering when it had made its home in his daughter’s vocal cords and why he hadn’t noticed it until now.
    Her mother’s voice. Her mother, almost fourteen years dead now, and coming back to Jimmy through their daughter. Saying: She’s a woman now, Jim. She’s all grown up.
    A woman. Wow. How’d that happen?
     
    D AVE B OYLE hadn’t even planned on going out that night.
    Saturday night, sure, after a long week of work, but he’d reached an age where Saturday didn’t feel much different than Tuesday, and drinking at a bar didn’t seem all that much more enjoyable than drinking at home. Home, at least, you controlled the remote.
    So he’d tell himself later, after it was all over and done, that Fate had played a hand. Fate had played a hand in Dave Boyle’s life before—or at least luck, most of it bad—but it had never felt like a guiding hand before, more like a pissy, moody one. Fate sitting up in the clouds somewhere, someone saying to him, Bored today, Fate? Fate going, A bit. Kinda think I’ll fuck with Dave Boyle, though, cheer myself right up. What’re you gonna do?
    So Dave knew Fate when he saw it.
    Maybe that Saturday night, Fate was having a birthday or something, decided to finally give ol’ Dave a break, let him release some steam without suffering the consequences, Fate saying, Take a swing at the world, Davey. I promise it won’t swing back this time. As if Lucy, holding the football for Charlie Brown and just this once not being a bitch about it, allowed him to kick it clean. Because it hadn’t been planned. It hadn’t. Dave, alone late at night in the days afterward, would hold out his hands as if speaking to a jury and say that softly to the empty kitchen: You have to understand. It wasn’t planned.
    That night, he’d just come down the stairs after kissing his son, Michael, good night and was heading to the fridge for abeer when his wife, Celeste,