Unrevealed

ANONYMOUS
    My name is Jane Perry and I’m an alcoholic.
    As I write that, it doesn’t feel like it belongs to me yet. I’m three months sober, so I’ll get another goddamn chip at the meeting tomorrow night. Can’t wait. The fucking thing can rattle around in the left pocket of my jeans and keep the other chips company.
    This whole sobriety trip is still like a new shoe — too constrictive and rubbing my sole the wrong way. But I play along, go to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, listen to the Basement People (as I call them) talk, and convince myself that I am powerless over alcohol and my life has become unmanageable. That’s the first step in AA, and it took me more than twenty years to make that leap.
    But I also fight the notion that there are some alcoholics who really should tap a keg because they suck at sobriety. They are the ones who are wound so fucking tight that the least amount of stress kicks them into a frenzied orbit. That’s when they’re told to meditate or do yoga or take a long walk or breathe deeply. But the fact of the matter is, they really
just need to get a load on, and it’s just too fucking bad they can’t stop popping a cap after one or two beverages.
    Some nights, when I’m lying awake, I wonder if I’m one of those people who shouldn’t be a teetotaler. But then I remember that there’s no way I could stop at two beers or two shots of Jack Daniels. Hell, two drinks was a warm-up for me. I didn’t get my drink on officially until I hit numero six. In AA, you have to delve into why you drink and what triggers the need to disappear. I find it ironic that a group dedicated to uncovering the need to disappear has the word anonymous in its title. Shouldn’t they call it Alcoholics Identified? When you lay it on the table and really start pulling the layers off that goddamn onion, you discover that those of us who like to bend our elbows are really just wishing we could escape and become someone else––and we believe that if we became that someone else, the problems wouldn’t follow us. But then every time you go to a meeting, you’re reminded that the voices and the nightmares follow you no matter how radically you reinvent yourself.
    I thought I was ready to reinvent myself after working my last case at Denver Homicide. I had nothing left in me. My adrenal glands had coughed up their last teaspoon of adrenaline. My world had turned on its ass, and I was forced to understand that there’s more to heaven and earth than we can perceive. I couldn’t digest everything that had happened, and so when my boss, Sergeant Morgan Weyler, offered me the job of sergeant working next to him, I knew I wasn’t ready to deal with it. But I still had to be a cop because I came out of the womb with a desire to solve crimes and to understand why people do evil deeds.
    So, like I said, I reinvented myself and started my own PI agency, called JPI for Jane Perry Investigations. I’ve had the shingle out for a little less than a month, and I’m catching
a few cases that don’t deal with dead bodies. The press I got after the Lawrence murder case helped get my name out there. My reluctant appearance on Larry King’s show still earns me free coffees at the Gourmet Grind. Even though I hated doing it, it was a necessary evil. So when I went from Detective Jane Perry at Denver Homicide to Jane Perry, Private Investigator, I hoped that all those shadows that haunted me as a Denver cop would disappear and I could be reborn and start fresh.
    That all dovetails with the case I worked this week. The fallout still has me smoking more than my normal pack a day.
    It started last Monday night, when I was sitting with the Basement People at the Methodist church. During the break, I went outside to smoke and this woman, who I thought was around fifty, sidled up to me.
    “You’re Jane Perry, right?” she said, taking a hard suck of nicotine off her cigarette.
    “Jane P.,” I corrected her. “Remember where we are?”
    “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, not giving a shit about anonymous protocol. “My name’s Ellen Brigham. I saw you on Larry King’s show.”
    “Who the fuck didn’t?” I said, hoping to God she wasn’t going to ask me to sign a copy of the group members’ phone list.
    Ellen went on to say that she’d heard I’d opened up my own PI office and wanted to know what I charged. I took one look at her shredded jeans, faded T-shirt and dirty tennis shoes and figured she couldn’t