A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane

a spell.’ But then, when they done, I’m just a piece of furniture again. Don’t care if I’m around; don’t care if I ain’t. People can always find someone to clean for ’em, or run to the store for ’em, or lie down with ’em.”
    She walked back to her chair and rummaged through her purse until she found a pack of cigarettes. “Hadn’t smoked in ten years—until a few days ago.” She lit one, blew the smoke out in a rush that clouded the small room. “Ain’t no documents, Mr. Kenzie. You understand? Ain’t no documents.”
    â€œThen what—”
    â€œThere are things. There are things.” She nodded to herself, stabbed her cigarette downward into the air, kept pacing.
    I leaned forward in my chair a bit, my head following her like I was at Wimbledon. I said, “What things, Ms. Angeline?”
    â€œYou know, Mr. Kenzie,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me, “all of a sudden, everyone looking for me, hiring people like yourself, hiring worse people probably, trying to find Jenna, to talk to Jenna, to get what Jenna got. All of a sudden, everyone need Jenna.” She crossed the floor quickly to me, her cigarette poised over me like a butcher knife, her jaw clenched. She said, “Nobody getting what I got, Mr. Kenzie. You hear me? No one. ’Cept who I decide to give it to. I make the decision. I get what I want. I do a little using myself. Send someone to the store for me , maybe. See people work for me for a change. See them fade into furniture when I don’t have no use for them anymore.” She stabbed the glowing cigarette in toward my eye. “ I decide . Jenna Angeline.” She leaned back a bit, took a drag on the cigarette. “And what I got ain’t for sale.”
    â€œThen what’s it for?”
    â€œJustice,” she said through a stream of smoke. “And lots of it. People going to be in pain, Mr. Kenzie.”
    I looked at her hand, shaking so badly the cigarette quivered up and down like a recently abandoned diving board. I heard the anguish in her voice—a torn, slightly hollow sound—and saw its ravages on her face. She was a wreck of a person, Jenna Angeline. A heart beating fast in a shell of a body. She was scared and tired and angry and howling at the world, but unlike most people in the same situation, she was dangerous because she had something that, at least as far as she was concerned, would give her something back in this world. But the world usually doesn’t work that way, and people like Jenna are time bombs; they might take a few people down with them, but they’ll go up in the inferno too.
    I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Jenna, but I was even more certain that I wasn’t going to get hit with anyshrapnel if she self-destructed. I said, “Jenna, here’s my problem: we call this sort of case a ‘find-and-a-phone-call’ because that’s pretty much all I’m paid to do—find you and call the client and then go on my merry way. Once I make the phone call, I’m out of it. The client usually brings in the law or deals with it personally or whatever. But I don’t stick around to find out. I’m—”
    â€œA dog,” she said. “You run around with your nose on the ground, sniffing through bushes and piles of warm shit until you find the fox. Then you step back and let the hunters shoot it dead.” She stabbed out her cigarette.
    It wasn’t the analogy I would have chosen, but it wasn’t entirely false no matter what I wanted to think. Jenna sat back down and looked at me and I held her dark eyes. They had the odd mixture of terror and resilient bravery of a cat backed into a corner; the look of someone who isn’t sure she’s up to the task, but has decided there’s no other way out but straight ahead. It’s the look of the crumbling soul trying to pull it all