Moonlight Mile - By Dennis Lehane Page 0,44

cut short, the gray just finding its way along the temples and along the edges of his goatee. Well-dressed for a social worker-black cotton crewneck and dark blue jeans far nicer than anything you'd find at The Gap, black cashmere overcoat with red lining.

"So," he said, "Sophie."

"Sophie."

"You met her father."

"Yup," Angie said.

"What'd you think?"

The waitress brought our drinks. He plucked the lemon wedge out of his vodka tonic, stirred the drink, and then placed the stirrer beside the lemon wedge. His fingers moved with the confident delicacy of a pianist.

"The father," I said. "Piece of work, isn't he?"

"If by piece of work you mean douche bag, yeah, he's that."

Angie laughed and drank some wine.

"Don't sugarcoat it, Dre."

"Please, don't," Angie said.

He took a sip of his drink, chewed a chip of ice. "So many of the kids I deal with, the problem's not the kid. It's that the kid drew an asshole in the parental lottery. Or two assholes. I could sit here and be all PC about it, but I do that enough at work all day."

"Last thing we want is PC," I said. "Anything you can tell us would be greatly appreciated."

"How long you two been private investigators?"

"I've been on a five-year sabbatical," Angie said.

"Until when?"

"This morning," she said.

"You missed it?"

"I thought I did," she said. "Not so sure anymore, though."

"You?" he asked me. "How long have you been at it?"

"Too long." It unsettled me how true those words felt. "Since I was twenty-three."

"You ever think of doing anything else?"

"More and more every day. You?"

He shook his head. "This is my second career."

"What was your first?"

He finished his drink and caught the waitress's eye. I still had half my scotch and Angie still had two-thirds of her wine, so he pointed at his own drink and showed her one finger.

"My first career," he said. "I was a doctor, believe it or not."

Suddenly the delicate grace of his fingers made sense.

"You think it's going to be about saving lives but you find out quick it's about turnover, just like any other business. How many services can you deliver at a premium price with the lowest expenditure on supplies and labor? Treat 'em, street 'em, and upsell 'em when the opportunity presents itself."

Angie said, "And you weren't any more PC then, I take it?"

He chuckled as the waitress brought his drink. "I was fired from four hospitals in a five-square-mile area for insubordination. It's a record of some kind, I'm pretty sure. I suddenly found myself unhireable in the city. I mean, I could have moved to, I don't know, New Bedford or something. But I like the city. And I woke up one day and realized I hated my life. I hated what I was doing with it. I'd lost my faith." He shrugged. "A couple days later I saw an ad for a human services position with the DCF, and here I am."

"You miss it?"

"Sometimes. More often than not, though? Not so much. It's like any dysfunctional relationship-sure there were good things about it or else how would you get into it in the first place? But for the most part, it was killing me. Now I have regular hours, I do work I'm proud of, and I sleep like a baby at night."

"And the work you did with Sophie Corliss?"

"Confidential mostly. She came to me for help, and I tried to help. She's a pretty lost kid."

"And the reason she dropped out of school?"

He gave me an apologetic grimace. "Confidential, I'm afraid."

"I can't really get a clear picture of her," I said.

"That's because there isn't one. Sophie's one of those people-she entered adolescence with no real skills, no ambition, and zero sense of self. She's smart enough to know she has deficiencies but not smart enough to know what they are. And even if she did, what could she do about them? You can't decide to be passionate about something. You can't manufacture a vocation. Sophie's what I call a floater. She bobs along waiting for someone to come along and tell her where to go."

"You ever meet a friend of hers named Amanda?" Angie asked.

"Ah," he said, "Amanda."

"You've met her?"

"If you meet Sophie, you meet Amanda."

"So I've heard," I said.

"You met Amanda?"

"I knew her a long time ago when she was-"

"Ho," he said, pushing his chair back a bit. "You're the guy who found her back in the '90s. Right? Jesus. I knew the name sounded familiar."

"There you go then."

"And now you're looking a second time? A