The Chill of Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

laden with half a million barrels of North Sea crude, work its way into Portland harbor. A couple of tugs pushed and prodded its blue hulk toward the marine terminal in South Portland where the oil would be pumped into holding tanks to await transmission via pipeline to refineries in Quebec. As he watched he wondered about the men who worked big ships like these. Lonely men, he imagined. Hard men as well. Used to living without the comforts of women. Would they think him soft or self-indulgent? Whining about a woman who gave him everything up to a point. And then stopped. He supposed they would, but he didn’t much care.
    He got up, took a last sip of the whisky, walked to the kitchen, and poured the rest, more than half the glass, down the kitchen sink. Hell of a waste of fine single malt. He was already feeling the effects, though, and he realized getting drunk wasn’t what this was about. He washed out the Waterford glass, the last of a set of four his sister Fran, twenty years a nun, gave Sandy and him for a wedding present. He thought about the irony of that. Of Sister Fran, the daughter of a drunk and the bride of Christ, giving her younger brother whisky glasses to celebrate his marriage to a slut. A beautiful slut, but a slut nonetheless. When the marriage failed and Sandy walked out on him, she took two of the glasses with her to her new life as the wife of a rich investment banker. The third was broken in the move to Portland. This was the last, and it was precious to him. He dried it carefully and placed it back on its high shelf out of harm’s way.
    McCabe glanced at his watch. Nearly six o’clock. If he was going to make it to Kyra’s opening at all, he’d better get moving. He called Casey’s cell to make sure she’d arrived safely at Sunday River. She had. He took a quick shower. Before dressing, he clicked on the small TV in the corner to look at the Weather Channel. Fifteen degrees. Wind chill of minus five. Going down to single digits overnight with heavy snow predicted for after midnight. Jesus. When was this goddamned cold ever gonna let up? It’d been brutal all winter. Even forced him to renounce his inner New Yorker and buy some thermal underwear at the Bean’s outlet on Congress. He found a clean pair still in their plastic wrapper and put them on. He hated wearing the things but had to admit they did make the cold more tolerable. His small closet was stuffed with his minimal selection of clothing plus boxes of stuff he hadn’t unpacked from the move to Portland four years ago. He picked out a pair of brown corduroys and slipped them on over the long johns. Then a dark brown crewneck pullover. Then his sport jacket. Brown wool, butter soft.
    A present from Kyra, purchased just before Christmas at a high-end men’s boutique in Copley Place in Boston. ‘Somebody’s got to dress you decently, McCabe,’ she said at the time. ‘Since you’re obviously incapable of doing it yourself.’
    He remembered the weekend with pleasure. Casey was away that weekend, too, visiting her mother in New York. Sandy had only begun seeing Casey again last year after three years of total abandonment. This was the first time she’d be staying in her mother’s apartment, meeting Peter Ingram, Sandy’s new husband. Thinking about it had been making him edgy. Anxious. He needed a distraction. Turned out a friend of Kyra’s from Yale was heading out of town and offered Kyra the keys to her apartment in Cambridge. So they snuck down, just the two of them, for a romantic interlude. The idea was to eat well and maybe take in a Celtics game – the Knicks were in town, and Kyra’s friend, an art director at one of Boston’s hot young ad agencies, had access to season tickets. On Sunday, they planned to see a Hockney show at the MFA. As it turned out, they did eat well. But skipped both the Celtics and the Hockney and wound up spending the weekend alternately in restaurants and in bed. It was probably what both of