Gone, Baby, Gone

24

By early April, Angie was spending most nights with her poster boards, Amanda McCready notes, and the small shrine she’d built to the case in the tiny second bedroom in my apartment, the one I’d previously used to store luggage and boxes I kept meaning to drop off at Goodwill, where small appliances gathered dust while they waited for me to take them to a repair shop.

She’d moved the small TV and a VCR in there and watched the newscasts from October over and over again. In the two weeks since Samuel Pietro had disappeared, she logged at least five hours a night in that room, photographs of Amanda staring out with that unexcitable gaze of hers from the wall above the TV.

I understand obsession in the same general sense most of us do, and I couldn’t see that this was doing Angie too much harm-yet. Over the course of the long winter, I’d come to accept that Amanda McCready was dead, curled into a shelf 175 feet below the waterline of the quarry, flaxen hair floating with the soft swirls of the current. But I hadn’t accepted it with the sort of conviction that allowed me to look derisively on anyone who believed she was still alive.

Angie held firmly to Cheese’s assurance that Amanda lived, that proof of her whereabouts lay somewhere in our notes, somewhere in the minutiae of our investigation and that of the police. She’d convinced Broussard and Poole to loan her copies of their notes, as well as the daily reports and interviews of most of the other members of the CAC task force who’d been assigned to the case. And she was certain, she told me, that sooner or later all that paper and all that video would yield the truth.

The truth, I told her once, was that someone in Cheese’s organization had pulled a double-cross on Mullen and Gutierrez after they’d dumped Amanda over a cliff. And this someone had taken them out and walked away with two hundred thousand dollars.

“Cheese didn’t think so,” she said.

“Broussard was right about that. Cheese was a professional liar.”

She shrugged. “I beg to differ.”

So at night she’d return to autumn and all that had gone wrong, and I would either read, watch an old movie on AMC, or shoot pool with Bubba-which is what I was doing when he said, “I need you to ride shotgun on something down in Germantown with me.”

I’d only had half a beer by this point, so I was pretty sure I’d heard him right.

“You want me to go on a deal with you?”

I stared across the pool table at Bubba as some heathen chose a Smiths song on the jukebox. I hate the Smiths. I’d rather be tied to a chair and forced to listen to a medley of Suzanne Vega and Natalie Merchant songs while performance artists hammered nails through their genitalia in front of me than listen to thirty seconds of Morrissey and the Smiths whine their art-school angst about how they are human and need to be loved. Maybe I’m a cynic, but if you want to be loved, stop whining about it and you just might get laid, which could be a promising first step.

Bubba turned his head back toward the bar and shouted, “What pussy played this shit?”

“Bubba,” I said.

He held up a finger. “One sec.” He turned back toward the bar. “Who played this song. Huh?”

“Bubba,” the bartender said, “now calm down.”

“I just want to know who played this song.”

Gigi Varon, a thirty-year-old alkie who looked a shriveled forty-five, raised her meek hand from the corner of the bar. “I didn’t know, Mr. Rogowski. I’m sorry. I’ll pull the plug.”

“Oh, Gigi!” Bubba gave her a big wave. “Hi! No, never mind.”

“I will, really.”

“No, no, hon.” Bubba shook his head. “Paulie, give Gigi two drinks on me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rogowski.”

“No problem. Morrissey sucks, though, Gigi. Really. Ask Patrick. Ask anyone.”

“Yeah, Morrissey sucks,” one of the old guys said, and then several other patrons followed suit.

“I put the Amazing Royal Crowns in next,” Gigi said.

I’d turned Bubba on to the Amazing Royal Crowns a few months back, and now they were his favorite band.

Bubba spread his arms wide. “Paulie, make it three drinks.”

We were in Live Bootleg, a tiny tavern on the Southie/ Dorchester line that had no sign out front. The brick exterior was painted black, and the only indication the bar had a name at all was scrawled in red paint on the lower right corner of the wall fronting Dorchester Avenue. Ostensibly owned by Carla Dooley, aka “The Lovely Carlotta,” and her husband, Shakes, Live Bootleg was really Bubba’s bar, and I’d never been in the place when every stool wasn’t filled and the booze wasn’t flowing. It was a good crowd, too; in the three years since Bubba had opened it, there’d never been a fight or a line for the bathroom because some junkie was taking too long to shoot up in the stall. Of course, everyone who entered knew who the real owner was and how he’d feel if anyone ever gave the police reason to knock on his door, so for all its dark interior and shady rep, Live Bootleg was about as dangerous as the Wednesday night bingo game at Saint Bart’s. Had better music, too, most times.

“I don’t see why you’re giving Gigi a small coronary,” I said. “You own the jukebox. You loaded the Smiths CD.”

“I didn’t load no friggin’ Smiths CD,” Bubba said. “It’s one of those Best of the Eighties compilations. I had to live with a Smiths song ’cause it’s got ‘Come on, Eileen’ on it and a whole bunch of other good shit.”

“Katrina and the Waves?” I said. “Bananarama? Real cools bands like that?”

“Hey,” he said, “it’s got Nena, so shut up.”

“‘Ninety-nine Luftballoons,’” I said. “Well, all right.” I leaned into the table, pocketed the seven. “Now what’s this about me accompanying you on a deal?”

“I need backup. Nelson’s out of town and the Twoomeys are doing two-to-six.”

“Million other guys will help you for a C-note.” I dropped the six, but it kissed Bubba’s ten on the way in, and I stepped back from the table.

“Well, I got two reasons.” He leaned over the table and banged the cue ball off the nine, watched it bounce around the table, and then shut his eyes tight as the cue dropped in the side pocket. For someone who plays so much pool, Bubba really sucks.

I put the cue back on the table, lined up for the four in the side. “Reason number one?”

“I trust you and you owe me.”

“That’s two reasons.”

“It’s one. Shut up and shoot.”

I dropped the four, and the cue rolled slowly into a sweet lie across from the two ball.

“Reason number two is,” Bubba said, and chalked his stick with great squeaking turns, “I want you to get a look at these people I’m selling to.”

I pocketed the two but buried the cue behind one of Bubba’s balls. “Why?”

“Trust me. You’ll be interested.”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“I’m not sure if they are who I think they are, so you gotta join me, see for yourself.”

“When?”

“As soon as I win this game.”

“How dangerous?” I said.

“No more dangerous than normal.”

“Ah,” I said. “Very dangerous then.”

“Don’t be such a puss. Shoot the ball.”

Germantown is set hard against the harbor that separates Quincy from Weymouth. Given its name back in the mid-1700s when a glass manufacturer imported indentured laborers from Germany and laid out the town lots with ample streets and wide squares in the German tradition, the company failed and the Germans were left to fend for themselves when it became apparent that the cost of giving them their freedom would be less expensive than sending them someplace else.

A long line of failure followed, seemed to haunt the tiny seaport and the generations descended from the original indentured servants. Pottery, chocolate, stockings, whale-oil products, and medicinal salt and saltpeter industries all cropped up and fell by the wayside over the next two centuries. For a while the cod-and whale-fishing industries enjoyed some popularity, but they, too, picked up and moved north to Gloucester or farther south toward Cape Cod in search of better catches and better waters.

Germantown became a forgotten slip of land, its waters cut off from its inhabitants by chain-link fence and polluted by refuse from the Quincy Shipyards, a power plant, oil tanks, and the Procter amp; Gamble factory that formed the only silhouettes in its skyline. An early experiment with public housing for war veterans left its shoreline marred by cul-de-sac housing developments the color of pumice, each one a collection of four buildings housing sixteen units and curved in on each other in a horseshoe, skeletal metal clothesline structures rising out of pools of rust in the cracked tar.

The house Bubba parked his Hummer in front of was a block off the shore, and the homes on either side of it were condemned and cascading back into the earth. In the dark, the house seemed to sag as well, and while I couldn’t make out much in the way of detail, there was an air of certain decay to the structure.

The old man who answered the door had a close-cropped beard that quilted his jawline in square tufts of silver and black but refused to grow in over the cleft of his long chin, leaving a pink puckered circle of exposed flesh that winked like an eye. He was somewhere between fifty and sixty, with a gnarled curve to his small frame that made him appear much older. He wore a weathered Red Sox baseball cap that looked too small even for his tiny head, a yellow half T-shirt that left a wrinkled, milky midriff exposed, and a pair of black nylon tights that ended above his bare ankles and feet and bunched up around his crotch so tightly his appendage resembled a fist.

The man pulled the brim of the baseball cap farther down his forehead and said to Bubba, “You Jerome Miller?”

“Jerome Miller” was Bubba’s favored alias. It was the name of Bo Hopkins’s character in The Killer Elite, a movie Bubba had seen about eleven thousand times and could quote at will.

“What do you think?” Bubba’s enormous body loomed over the slight man and obscured him from my view.

“I’m asking,” the man said.

“I’m the Easter Bunny standing on your doorstep with a gym bag filled with guns.” Bubba leaned in over the man. “Let us the fuck in.”

The old man stepped aside, and we crossed the threshold into a dark living room acrid with cigarette smoke. The old man bent by the coffee table and lifted a burning cigarette from an overstuffed ashtray, sucked wetly on the butt, and stared through the smoke at us, his pale eyes all but glowing in the dark.

“So, show me,” he said.

“You want to turn on a light?” Bubba said.

“No light here,” the man said.

Bubba gave him a wide, cold smile, all teeth. “Take me to a room that has one.”

The man shrugged his bony shoulders. “Suit yourself.”

As we followed him down a narrow hallway, I noticed that the strap at the back of the baseball cap hung open, the ends too wide apart to clasp, and in general the back of the hat rode oddly on the man’s head, too far up the skull. I tried to put my finger on who the guy reminded me of. Since I didn’t know many old men who dressed in half T-shirts and tights, I would have figured the list of possibilities to be relatively small. But there was something familiar about the guy, and I had the feeling that either the beard or the baseball hat was throwing me off.

The hallway smelled like dirty bathwater left undrained for days, and the walls reeked of mildew. Four doorways opened off the hall, which led straight to the back door. Above us, on the second floor, something made a sudden soft thump. The ceiling throbbed with bass, the vibrations of speakers turned up loud, even though the music itself was so faint-a tinny whisper, really-that it could have been coming from half a block away. Soundproofing, I decided. Maybe they had a band up there, a group of old men in Spandex and half-shirts covering old Muddy Waters songs, gyrating to the beat.

We neared the first two doorways midway down the hall, and I glanced in the one on my left, saw only a dark room with shadows and shapes I guessed were a recliner and stacks of either books or magazines. The smell of old cigar smoke wafted from the room. The one on the right took us into a kitchen bathed so harshly in white light, I was pretty sure the fluorescent wattage was industrial, the kind normally found in truck depots, not private homes. Instead of illuminating the room, it washed it out, and I had to blink several times to regain my vision.

The man lifted a small object off the counter and tossed it sideways in my direction. I blinked in the brightness, saw the object coming in low and to my right, and reached out and snagged it. It was a small paper bag, and I’d caught it by the bottom. Sheafs of money threatened to spill to the floor before I righted the bag and pushed the bills back inside. I turned back to Bubba and handed it to him.

“Good hands,” the man said. He smiled a yellow tobacco-stained grin in Bubba’s direction. “Your gym bag, sir.”

Bubba swung the gym bag into the man’s chest, and the force of it knocked him on his ass. He sprawled on the black-and-white tile, arms spread, and propped the heels of his hands on the tile for support.

“Bad hands,” Bubba said. “How about I just put it on the table?”

The man looked up at him and nodded, blinked at the light above his face.

It was his nose that looked so familiar, I decided, the hawkish curve to it. It jutted out from the otherwise flat plane of the man’s face like a precipice, hooked downward so dramatically the tip cast a shadow on the man’s lips.

He got up off the floor and dusted the seat of his black tights, rubbed his hands together as he stood over the table and watched Bubba unzip the gym bag. Twin orange fires lit the man’s eyes like the glints of taillights in the dark as he stared into the bag, and dots of perspiration speckled his upper lip.

“So these are my babies,” the man said, as Bubba pulled back the folds of the bag and revealed four Calico M-110 machine pistols, the black aluminum alloy glistening with oil. One of the strangest-looking weapons I’ve ever seen, the Calico M-110 is a handgun that fires a hundred rounds from the same helical-feed magazine used for its carbines. Roughly seventeen inches long, the grip and barrel take up the front eight inches, with the slide and the majority of the gun frame jutting back behind the grip. The gun reminded me of the fake ones we’d built as kids out of rubber bands, clothespins, and popsicle sticks to fire paper clips at one another.

But with rubber bands and popsicle sticks, we couldn’t fire more than ten paper clips in a minute. The M-110, at full auto, was capable of unleashing one hundred bullets in roughly fifteen seconds.

The old man lifted one from the bag and laid it flat in the palm of his hand. He raised his arm up and down to feel the weight, his pale eyes glistening as if they’d been oiled like the gun. He smacked his lips as if he could taste the gunfire.

I said, “Stocking up for a war?”

Bubba shot me a look and began counting the money from the paper bag.

The man smiled at the gun as if it were a kitten. “Persecution exists on all fronts at all times, dear. One must be prepared.” He stroked the gun frame with the tips of his fingers. “Oh, my my my,” he cooed.

And that’s when I recognized him.

Leon Trett, the child molester Broussard had given me a picture of in the early days of Amanda McCready’s disappearance. The man suspected in the rapes of over fifty children, the disappearance of two.

And we’d just armed him.

Oh, joy.

He looked up at me suddenly, as if he could sense what I was thinking, and I felt myself go cold and small in the wash of his pale eyes.

“Clips?” he said.

“When I leave,” Bubba said. “Don’t fuck up my counting.”

He took a step toward Bubba. “No, no. Not when you leave,” Leon Trett said. “Now.”

Bubba said, “Shut up. I’m counting.” Under his breath, I could hear: “…four hundred fifty, sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five-”

Leon Trett shook his head several times, as if by doing so he could make the clips appear, make Bubba turn reasonable.

“Now,” Trett said. “Now. I want my clips now. I paid for them.”

He reached out for Bubba’s arm and Bubba backhanded him in the chest, knocked him into the small table underneath the window.

“Motherfucker!” Bubba stopped counting, slammed the bills together in his hands. “Now I gotta start all over.”

“You give me my clips,” Trett said. His eyes were wet and there was a spoiled eight-year-old’s whine in his voice. “You give them to me.”

“Fuck off.” Bubba started counting the bills again.

Trett’s eyes filled and he slapped the gun between his hands.

“What’s the matter, baby?”

I turned my head toward the sound of the voice and laid eyes on the largest woman I’d ever seen. She wasn’t just an Amazon of a woman, she was a Sasquatch, bulky and covered in thick gray hair, at least five inches of it rising off the top of her head and then spilling down the sides of her face, obscuring her cheekbones and the corners of her eyes, billowing out on her wide shoulders like Spanish moss.

She was dressed in dark brown from head to toe, and the girth under those folds of loose clothing seemed to shake and rumble as she stood in the kitchen doorway with a.38 held loosely in one great paw of a hand.

Roberta Trett. Her photograph did not do her justice.

“They won’t give me the clips,” Leon said. “They’re taking the money, but they won’t give me the clips.”

Roberta took a step into the room, surveyed it with a slow roll of her head from right to left. The only one who hadn’t acknowledged her presence was Bubba. He remained in the center of the kitchen, head down, trying to count his money.

Roberta pointed the gun quite casually in my direction. “Give us the clips.”

I shrugged. “I don’t got ’em.”

“You.” She waved the gun at Bubba. “Hey, you.”

“…eight hundred fifty,” Bubba said, “eight hundred sixty, eight hundred seventy-”

“Hey!” Roberta said. “You look at me when I’m talking.”

Bubba turned his head slightly toward her, but kept his eyes on the money. “Nine hundred. Nine hundred ten, nine hundred twenty-”

“Mr. Miller,” Leon said desperately, “my wife is talking to you.”

“…nine hundred sixty-five, nine hundred seventy-”

“Mr. Miller!” Leon ’s shriek was so high-pitched I felt it ring in my inner ears, buzz along the brain stem.

“One thousand.” Bubba stopped in the middle of the wad of money and placed the chunk he’d already counted in his jacket pocket.

Leon sighed audibly and relief sagged across his face.

Bubba looked at me as if unaware of what all the fuss was about.

Roberta lowered the gun. “Now, Mr. Miller, if we could just-”

Bubba licked the corner of his thumb and peeled off the top bill in the pile that remained in his hands. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred…”

Leon Trett looked like he’d suffered an embolism on the spot. His chalky face turned crimson and bloated and he squeezed the empty gun between his hands and hopped back and forth as if he needed a bathroom.

Roberta Trett raised the gun again, and this time there was nothing casual about it. She pointed it directly at Bubba’s head and closed her left eye. She sighted down the barrel and pulled back the hammer.

The harsh light of the kitchen seemed to etch her and Bubba’s outlines as they stood in the center of the room, both of them the size of something you’d normally climb with rope and pitons, not give birth to.

I slid my.45 out of the holster at the small of my back, dropped it down behind my right leg, and released the safety.

“Two hundred twenty,” Bubba said, as Roberta Trett took another step toward him, “two hundred thirty, two hundred forty, dude, shoot this bitch, will ya, two hundred fifty, two hundred sixty…”

Roberta Trett stopped and cocked her head slightly to the left, as if unsure of what she’d heard. She looked unable to identify what her options were. She looked unfamiliar with that sensation.

I doubted she’d ever been ignored in her life.

“Mr. Miller, you will stop counting now.” She extended her arm until it was T-bar straight and hard, and her knuckles whitened against the black steel.

“…three hundred, three hundred ten, three hundred twenty, I said, shoot the big bitch, three hundred thirty…”

That time she was sure of what she’d heard. A tremor appeared in her wrist, and the pistol shook.

“Ma’am,” I said, “put the gun down.”

Her eyes rolled right in their sockets, and she saw that I hadn’t moved, that I wasn’t pointing anything at her. And then she noticed that she couldn’t see my right hand, and that’s when I used my thumb to pull back the hammer on my.45, the sound cutting into the fluorescent hum of that bright kitchen as cleanly as a gunshot itself.

“…four fifty, four sixty, four seventy…”

Roberta Trett looked over Bubba’s shoulder at Leon, and the.38 shook some more and Bubba kept counting.

Beyond the kitchen I heard the sound of a door open and close very quickly. It came from the back of the house, from the far end of the long hallway that split the building.

Roberta heard it too. Her eyes jerked to the left for a moment, then back to Leon.

“Make him stop,” Leon said. “Make him stop counting. It hurts.”

“…six hundred,” Bubba said, and his voice grew an octave louder. “Six ten, six twenty, six twenty-five-enough with the fives already-six thirty…”

A set of soft footsteps approached from the hall, and Roberta’s back stiffened.

Leon said, “Stop it. Stop that counting.”

A man even smaller than Leon went rigid as he stepped through the doorway, his dark eyes widening in confusion, and I removed the gun from behind my leg and pointed it at the center of his forehead.

He had a chest so sunken it seemed to have been produced in reverse, the sternum and rib cage curling in while the small belly protruded like a pygmy’s. His right eye was lazy and kept sliding away from us as if it were asea on a floundering boat. Small scratches over his right nipple reddened in the white light.

He wore only a small blue terry-cloth towel, and his skin was sheened with sweat.

“Corwin,” Roberta said, “you go back to your room now.”

Corwin Earle. I guess he’d found his nuclear family after all.

“Corwin’s going to stay right here,” I said, and extended my arm its full length, watched Corwin’s good eye meet the hole in the barrel of the.45.

Corwin nodded and placed his hands by his sides.

All eyes but mine turned back to Bubba and gave him their full attention.

“Two thousand!” he crowed. He raised the wad of cash in his hand.

“We agree you’ve been compensated,” Roberta Trett said, and her voice shook like the gun in her hand. “Now complete the transaction, Mr. Miller. Give us the clips.”

“Give us the clips!” Leon shrieked.

Bubba looked over his shoulder at him.

Corwin Earle took a step back, and I said, “That’s a no-no.”

He swallowed and I waved the gun forward and he moved with it.

Bubba chuckled. It was a low, soft heh-heh-heh, and it put a hard curve up the back of Roberta Trett’s neck.

“The clips,” Bubba said, and turned back to Roberta, seemed to notice the gun pointed at him for the first time. “Of course.”

He pursed his lips and blew a kiss to Roberta. She blinked and stepped back from it as if it were toxic.

Bubba reached toward the pocket of his trench coat, and then his arm shot back up.

“Hey!” Leon said.

Roberta jerked backward as Bubba slapped his wrist into hers and the.38 jumped from her hand, flew over the sink, and sped toward the counter.

Everyone but Bubba ducked.

The.38 hit the wall above the counter. Its hammer dropped on impact, and the gun fired.

The bullet tore a hole through the cheap Formica behind the sink and ricocheted into the wall beside the window where Leon crouched.

The.38 clattered loudly as it fell to the counter, and the barrel spun and ended up pointing at the dusty dish rack.

Bubba looked at the hole in the wall. “Cool,” he said.

The rest of us straightened, except for Leon. He sat down on the floor and placed a palm over his heart, and those pale eyes of his hardened in such a way that I knew he was far less frail than his cringing act during Bubba’s counting would lead us to believe. It was just a mask, a role he played, I assumed, to lull us into forgetting about him, and it dropped from his face as he sat on the floor and looked up at Bubba with naked hatred.

Bubba stuffed the second wad in his pocket. He closed the distance between himself and Roberta, then tapped his foot on the floor in front of her until she raised her head and met his eyes.

“You had a gun pointed at me, Xena the Large.” He rubbed his jaw with his palm, filled the kitchen with the scratch of bristles against rough flesh.

Roberta placed her hands by her sides.

Bubba smiled gently at her.

Very softly, he said, “So, should I kill you now?”

Roberta shook her head once from side to side.

“You sure?”

Roberta nodded, very deliberately.

“You pointed that gun at me, after all.”

Roberta nodded again. She tried to speak, but nothing came out but a gurgle.

“What was that?” Bubba said.

She swallowed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Miller.”

“Oh.” Bubba nodded.

He winked at me and there was that green and angry light dancing in his smiling eyes that I’ve seen before, the one that said anything could happen. Anything.

Leon used the kitchen table for support as he got to his feet behind Bubba.

“Little man,” Bubba said, his eyes on Roberta, “you reach for that Charter twenty-two you got strapped under the table, and I’ll unload it into your balls.”

Leon ’s hand fell from the edge of the table.

Sweat poured from Corwin’s hair, and he blinked against it, placed his palm against the doorjamb to hold himself up.

Bubba walked over to me, kept his eyes on the room as he leaned in and whispered in my ear, “They’re armed to the fucking teeth. We’re gonna be leaving in a rush. Got it?”

I nodded.

As he crossed back to Roberta, I watched Leon’s eyes glance first at the table, then over at a cupboard, then at the dishwasher, which was rusty, caked with dirt along the door, and probably hadn’t washed a dish since I was in high school.

I caught Corwin Earle doing the same; then he and Leon ’s eyes met for a moment, and the fear dissipated.

I had to agree with Bubba’s assessment. We were, it seemed, standing in the middle of Tombstone. As soon as we dropped our guards, the Tretts and Corwin Earle would grab their weapons and show us their vivid reenactment of the OK Corral.

“Please,” Roberta Trett said to Bubba, “go.”

“What about the clips?” Bubba said. “You wanted the clips. Do you still want ’em?”

“I-”

Bubba touched her chin with the tips of his fingers. “Yes or no?”

She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

“Sorry.” Bubba beamed. “Can’t have ’em. Gotta go.”

He looked at me and cocked his head and headed for the doorway.

Corwin pinned himself against the wall and I trained my gun on the room as I backed out after Bubba, saw the fury in Leon Trett’s eyes and knew they’d be coming out after us in a hurry.

I grabbed Corwin Earle behind the neck and shoved him into the center of the kitchen by Roberta. Then I met Leon ’s eyes.

“I’ll kill you, Leon,” I said. “Stay in the kitchen.”

The whiny, eight-year-old’s voice was gone when he spoke. What replaced it was deep and slightly husky, cold as rock salt.

“You got to make the front door, boy. And it’s a long walk.”

I backed into the hallway, kept the.45 trained on the kitchen. Bubba stood a few feet down the hall, whistling.

“Think we should run?” I whispered out of the side of my mouth.

He looked back over his shoulder. “Probably.”

And he took off, charging toward the front door like a linebacker, his boots slamming the old floorboards, laughing maniacally, a booming Ah-ha-ha! tearing up through the house.

I dropped my arm and ran after him, saw the dark hall and the dark living room swing crazily from side to side as I charged behind Bubba and we ran full out for the front door.

I could hear them scrambling in the kitchen, the swing of the dishwasher door opening, then dropping on its hinges. I could feel target sights on my back.

Bubba didn’t pause to open the screen door between us and freedom, he ran straight through it, the wood frame shattering on impact, the green webbing shrouding his head like a veil.

I risked a look back as I reached the threshold, saw Leon Trett step into the hallway, arm extended. I backed up and pointed down the dark hall at him, but I was outside now, and for a long moment Trett and I stared across dark space at each other, guns pointed.

Then he lowered his arm and shook his head at me. “Another time,” he called.

“Sure,” I said.

Behind me, on the lawn, Bubba made a great racket as he cast what remained of the door off his head and boomed that crazy laugh of his.

“Ah-ha-ha! I am Conan!” he shouted, and spread his arms wide. “Grand slayer of evil gnomes! No man dare test my mettle or strength in battle! Ah-ha-ha!”

I came out on the lawn, and we jogged to his Hummer. I kept my back to the Hummer and my eyes on the house, gripping my gun in both hands as Bubba got in and unlocked my door. Nothing in the house moved.

I climbed in the fat, wide machine and Bubba peeled off from the curb before I’d even shut the door.

“Why’d you renege on the clips?” I asked, once we’d gotten a full block between us and the Tretts.

Bubba rolled through a stop sign. “They annoyed me and fucked up my counting.”

“That’s it? For that you held back the clips?”

He scowled. “I hate when people interrupt my counting. Hate it. Really, really hate it.”

“By the way,” I said, as we turned a corner, “what was with the evil gnomes thing?”

“What?”

“There were no evil gnomes in Conan.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty much.”

“Damn.”

“Sorry.”

“Why do you have to ruin everything?” he said. “Man, you’re no fun at all.”

25

“Ange!” I called, as Bubba and I came bounding into my apartment.

She stuck her head out of the tiny bedroom where she worked. “What’s up?”

“You’ve been following the Pietro case pretty closely, right?”

A needle of hurt pierced her eyes for a moment. “Yeah.”

“Come into the living room,” I said, tugging her. “Come on, come on.”

She looked at me, then at Bubba, who rocked back on his heels and blew a large pink balloon of Bazooka through his thick, rubbery lips.

“What have you two been drinking?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Come on.”

We turned on lights in the living room and told her about our trip to the Tretts’.

“You two are friggin’ chuckleheads,” she said, when we finished. “Like little psycho boys going out to play with the psycho family.”

“Fine, fine,” I said. “Ange, what was Samuel Pietro wearing when he disappeared?”

She leaned back in her chair. “Jeans, a red sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, a blue and red parka, black mittens, and hi-top sneakers.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “So what?”

“That’s it?” Bubba said.

She shrugged. “Yeah. That and a Red Sox baseball cap.”

I looked at Bubba and he nodded, then held up his hands.

“I can’t go anywhere near this. Those are my guns in that house.”

“No problem,” I said. “We’ll call Poole and Broussard.”

“Call Poole and Broussard for what?” Angie said.

“You saw Trett wearing a Red Sox baseball hat?” Poole said, sitting across from us in a Wollaston coffee shop.

I nodded. “Which was three or four sizes too small for him.”

“And this leads you to believe said hat belonged to Samuel Pietro.”

I nodded again.

Broussard looked at Angie. “You going along with this?”

She lit a cigarette. “Circumstantially, it fits. The Tretts are in Germantown, directly across from Weymouth, a couple of miles from the Nantasket Beach playground where Pietro was just before he disappeared. And the quarries, the quarries aren’t too far from Germantown, and-”

“Oh, please!” Broussard crumpled an empty cigarette pack, tossed it to the table. “Amanda McCready again? You think just because Trett lives within five miles of the quarries, then of course he must have killed her? You serious?”

He looked at Poole, and they both shook their heads.

“You showed us the pictures of the Tretts and Corwin Earle,” Angie said. “You remember that? You told us Corwin Earle liked to pick up kids for the Tretts. You told us to keep our eyes peeled for him,” Angie said. “That was you, Detective Broussard, wasn’t it?”

“Patrol officer,” Broussard reminded her. “I’m not a detective anymore.”

“Well, maybe,” Angie said, “If we drop by the Tretts and poke around a bit, you will be again.”

Leon Trett’s house was set off the road about ten yards in a field of overgrown grass. Behind the amber sheets of rain, the small white house looked grainy and smeared by large swirling fingers of grime. Near the foundation, however, someone had planted a small garden, and the flowers had begun to bud or bloom. It should have been beautiful, but it was unsettling to see such a tenderly cared for array of purple crocus, white snowdrops, bright red tulips, and soft yellow forsythia burgeoning in the shadows cast by such a greasy, decrepit house.

Roberta Trett, I remembered, had been a florist, a gifted one apparently, if she’d been able to coax color from the hard earth and long winter. I couldn’t picture it-the same lumbering woman who’d held the gun to Bubba’s head last night, thumbed back the hammer on her.38, had a gift for delicacy, for softness, for drawing growth from dirt and producing soft petals and fragile beauty.

The house was a small two-story, and the upper windows fronting the road were boarded up with black wood. Below those windows, the shingles were cracked or missing in several places, so that the upper third of the house resembled a triangular face with blackened eyes and a ragged smile of shattered teeth.

Just as I’d felt when I approached the house in the dark, decay permeated it like an odor, garden or no garden.

A tall fence with cyclone wire stretched on top divided the back of Trett’s property line from his neighbor’s. The sides of the house looked out on a half acre of weeds, those two condemned and abandoned homes, and nothing else.

“No way to approach but through that front door,” Angie said.

“Seems to be the case,” Poole said.

The screen door Bubba had destroyed last night lay in a tangle on the lawn, but the main door, a white wooden one with cracks in the center, had replaced it. This end of the street was still and had the empty feeling of a place few in the neighborhood ventured. In the time we’d been here, only one car had passed us.

The back door of the Crown Victoria opened and Broussard climbed in beside Poole, shaking rain from his hair, splattering drops on Poole ’s chin and temples.

Poole wiped at his face. “You’re a dog now?”

Broussard grinned. “Wet out.”

“I noticed.” Poole pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “I repeat: You’re a dog now?”

“Ruff.” Broussard gave his head another shake. “The back door’s where Kenzie said it was. Same approximate location as the front door. One upper window on the east side, one on the west, one in back. All boarded up. Heavy curtains over all the lower windows. A locked bulkhead by the rear corner, about ten feet to the right of the back door.”

“Any signs of life in there?” Angie asked.

“Impossible to tell with the curtains.”

“So what do we do?” I said.

Broussard took the handkerchief from Poole and wiped his face, tossed it back on Poole ’s lap. Poole looked down at it with a mixture of amazement and disgust.

“Do?” Broussard said. “You two?” He raised his eyebrows. “Nothing. You’re civilians. You go through that door or tip Trett’s hand, I’ll arrest you. My once and future partner and I are going to walk up to that house in a minute and knock on the door, see if Mr. Trett or his wife wants to chat. When they tell us to fuck off, we’ll walk back out and call Quincy P.D. for backup.”

“Why not just call for backup now?” Angie said.

Broussard looked at Poole. They both glanced at her and shook their heads.

“Excuse me for being retarded,” Angie said.

Broussard smiled. “Can’t call for backup without probable cause, Miss Gennaro.”

“But you’ll have probable cause once you knock on the door?”

“If one of them’s stupid enough to open it,” Poole said.

“Why?” I said. “You think you’re just going to look in through a crack and see Samuel Pietro standing there holding a HELP ME sign?”

Poole shrugged. “It’s amazing what you can hear through the crack of a partially opened door, Mr. Kenzie. Why, I’ve known cops have mistaken the whistling of a kettle for a child’s screams. Now it’s a shame when doors have to be kicked in and furniture destroyed and inhabitants manhandled over such a mistake, but it’s still within the purview of probable cause.”

Broussard held out his hands. “It’s a flawed justice system, but we try to make do.”

Poole pulled a quarter from his pocket, perched it on his thumbnail, and nudged Broussard. “Call it.”

“Which door?” Broussard said.

“Statistically,” Poole said, “the front door draws more fire.”

Broussard glanced out through the rain. “Statistically.”

Poole nodded. “But we both know it’s a long walk to that back door.”

“Through a lot of open ground.”

Poole nodded again.

“Loser gets to knock on the back door.”

“Why not just go together to the front door?” I asked.

Poole rolled his eyes. “Because there’s at least three of them, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Divide and conquer,” Broussard said.

“What about all those guns?” Angie said.

Poole said, “The ones your mystery friend said he saw in there?”

I nodded. “Those, yeah. Calico M-110s, he seemed to think.”

“But no clips to go with them.”

“Not last night,” I said. “Who knows if they had time to score some somewhere else in the last sixteen hours?”

Poole nodded. “Heavy firepower, if they have the clips.”

“Fall off that bridge when we come to it.” Broussard turned to Poole. “I always lose the coin toss.”

“Yet here’s chance come knocking again.”

Broussard sighed. “Heads.”

Poole flicked his thumb and the coin spun up through the half-dark of the backseat, caught some of the amber light woven on the rain, and shone, for just a millisecond, like Spanish gold. The quarter landed in Poole’s palm and he slapped it over the back of his hand.

Broussard looked down at the coin and grimaced. “Best two out of three?”

Poole shook his head, pocketed the coin. “I have the front, you get the back.”

Broussard sat back against the seat, and for a full minute no one said anything. We stared through the slanted sheets of rain at the dirty little house. Just a box, really, with a prevalent sense of rot in the deep sag of the porch, the missing shingles and boarded windows.

Looking at the house, it was impossible to imagine love being made in its bedrooms, children playing in its yards, laughter curling up into its beams.

“Shotguns?” Broussard said eventually.

Poole nodded. “Real western-style, pardner.”

Broussard reached for the door handle.

“Not to spoil this John Wayne moment,” Angie said, “but won’t shotguns seem suspicious to the occupants of the house if you’re supposedly just there to ask questions?”

“Won’t see the shotguns,” Broussard said, as he opened his door to the rain. “That’s why God created trench coats.”

Broussard walked across and up the road to the back of the Taurus and popped the trunk. They’d parked the car by a tree as old as the town; large, misshapen, its roots having disgorged the sidewalk around it, the tree blocked the car and Broussard from view of the Tretts’ house.

“So we’re clear,” Poole said gently, from the backseat.

Broussard pulled a trench coat from the trunk and shrugged it on. I looked back at Poole.

“If anything goes wrong, use your cellular phone and call Nine-one-one.” He leaned forward and placed an index finger up by our faces. “Under no circumstances do you move from this vehicle. Are we understood?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Miss Gennaro?”

Angie nodded.

“Well, then, it’s all fine.” Poole opened his door and stepped out into the rain.

He crossed the road and joined his partner at the back of the Taurus. Broussard nodded at something Poole said and looked over at us as he slipped a shotgun under the flap of his trench coat.

“Cowboys,” Angie said.

“This may be Broussard’s chance to get back to detective rank. Of course he’s excited.”

“Too excited?” Angie asked.

Broussard seemed to have read our lips. He smiled through the rivulets of water pouring down our windows and shrugged. Then he turned back to Poole, said something with his lips an inch from the older man’s ear. Poole patted him on the back and Broussard walked away from the Taurus, strode up the road through the slanting rain, stepped into the east side of Trett’s yard, ambled casually through the weeds, and made his way toward the back of the house.

Poole closed the trunk and pulled at his trench coat flaps until they covered his shotgun. The shotgun was nestled between his right arm and chest. He held his Glock behind his back in his left hand as he walked up the road, his head tilted up toward the boarded-up windows.

“You see that?” Angie said.

“What?”

“The window to the left of the front door. I think the curtain moved.”

“You sure?”

She shook her head. “I said I ‘think.’” She took her cellular phone from her purse, placed it on her lap.

Poole reached the steps. He raised his left foot toward the first step, and then he must have seen something there he didn’t like, because he extended his leg over the first step, brought his foot down on the second, and climbed up onto the porch.

The porch sagged deeply in the middle, and Poole’s body canted to the left as he stood there, the rain running off the porch between his feet in the gutter formed by the deep sag.

He looked over at the window to the left of the door, kept his head turned that way for a moment, then turned toward the right window, stared at it.

I reached into the glove box, pulled my.45 out.

Angie reached over me and removed her.38, flicked her wrist and checked the cylinder, snapped it back into place.

Poole approached the door and raised the hand that held the Glock, rapped on the wood with his knuckles. He stepped back, waited. His head turned to the left, then to the right, then back to the door. He leaned forward and rapped the wood again.

The rain barely made noise as it fell. The drops were thin and the sheets fell at an angle, and except for the high-pitched moan of the wind, the road outside the car was silent.

Poole leaned forward and twisted the doorknob to the right and left. The door remained closed. He knocked a third time.

A car drove past, a beige Volvo station wagon with bicycles tied to the roof rack, a woman with a peach headband and a pinched nervous face hunched over the wheel. We watched her brake lights flare red at the stop sign a hundred yards down the road; then the car turned left and disappeared.

The blast of a shotgun from the back of the house ripped through the moaning wind, and glass shattered. Something shrieked in the whispering rain like the clack of damaged brakes.

Poole looked back at us for a moment. Then he raised his foot to kick in the door and disappeared in an eruption of splinters and fire and bursts of light, the chattering of an automatic weapon.

The blast blew him off his feet, and he hit the porch banister so hard it cracked and peeled back from the porch like an arm snapped free at the shoulder socket. Poole’s Glock jumped out of his hand and landed in the flower bed below the porch and his shotgun clattered down the steps.

And the gunfire stopped as suddenly as it had started.

For a moment, we froze inside the car, inside the din left in the aftermath of the gunfire. Poole’s shotgun slid off the last step and the stock disappeared in the grass as the barrel shone black and wet on the pavement. A strong gust blew the rain with renewed force, and the small house whined and creaked as the gust pushed hard against its roof, rattled its windows.

I opened the car door and stepped out on the road, kept myself low as I ran toward the house. In the soft hiss of the rain, I could hear the thump of my rubber soles on the wet tar and gravel.

Angie ran beside me, the cellular phone up by her right ear and the corner of her mouth. “Officer down at 322 Admiral Farragut Road in Germantown. Say again: Officer down at 322 Admiral Farragut, Germantown.”

As we ran up the walkway leading to the steps, my eyes darted from the windows to the door and back again. The door had been eviscerated, as if large animals had attacked it with stiletto claws. The wood was gouged in ragged teardrops; in several places I could see through the holes into the house, catch quick glimpses of muted colors or light.

As we reached the steps, the holes were suddenly obscured by darkness. I swung out with my right arm, knocked Angie off her feet and onto the lawn as I dove left.

It was as if the world exploded. Nothing prepares you for the sound of a gun firing seven rounds a second. Through a wooden door, the rage of the bullets sounded almost human, a cacophony of biting, rabid homicide.

Poole flopped to his left as the bullets spit off the porch, and I reached down into the grass by my feet, curled my hand around the stock of his shotgun. I holstered my.45 and rose to one knee. I pointed through the rain and fired into the door, and the wood belched smoke. When the smoke cleared, I was looking at a hole in the center the size of my fist. I rose off my knee but slipped on the wet grass and heard glass tinkling to my left.

I spun and fired over the porch banister into the window, blew the glass and frame to pieces, ripped a hole in the dark curtain.

Inside the house, someone screamed.

The gunfire had stopped. Echoes of the shotgun blasts and the chatter of the automatic weapon stormed through my head.

Angie was on her knees by the bottom of the steps, a tight grimace on her face,.38 pointed at the hole in the door.

“You all right?” I said.

“My ankle’s fucked up.”

“Shot?”

She shook her head, her eyes never leaving the door. “I think it snapped when you pushed me to the ground.” She took a long breath through pursed lips.

“Snapped as in broken?”

She nodded, sucked in another breath.

Poole moaned, and blood slid from the corner of his mouth in a bright, swift current.

“I have to get him off the porch,” I said.

Angie nodded. “I’ll cover.”

I laid the shotgun on the wet grass and reached up, grabbed the top of the banister Poole had bent back when his body had slammed into it. I put my foot against the foundation of the porch and pulled down, felt the base of the banister wrench away from the rotted wood. I gave it another hard pull and the banister and half the railing ripped away from the porch. Poole tumbled back into me, knocked me to the wet grass.

He moaned again and writhed in my arms, and I slid out from under him, saw the curtain in the right window move.

I said, “Angie,” but she’d already pivoted. She fired three rounds into the window and glass spit out of the frame, showered to the porch.

I crouched by the low bushes along the foundation, but no one returned fire and Poole’s back arched off the lawn and a mist of blood burst from his lips.

Angie lowered her gun, took one last long look at the door and the windows, then scrambled across the walk toward us on her knees, her left ankle twisted and held aloft as she pulled herself forward. I drew my.45, pointed over her as she crawled past, and then slid over to the other side of Poole.

Another eruption of automatic weapon fire tore through the back of the house.

“Broussard.” Poole spit the word as he grabbed Angie’s arm, his heels kicking at the grass.

Angie looked at me.

“Broussard,” Poole said again, a thick gurgle in his throat, his back arching off the grass.

Angie pulled her sweatshirt over her head, pressed it to the dark fountain of blood in the center of Poole’s chest. “Sssh.” She placed a hand on his cheek. “Sssh.”

Whoever was firing in the back of the house had a huge clip. For a full twenty seconds, I could hear the staccato screech of that gun. There was a brief pause, then it started again. I wasn’t sure if it was the Calico or some other automatic weapon, but it didn’t make much difference. A machine gun is a machine gun.

I closed my eyes for just a second, swallowed against a painfully dry throat, felt the adrenaline wash through my blood like toxic fuel.

“Patrick,” Angie said, “don’t even fucking think about it.”

I knew if I looked back at her, I’d never leave that lawn. Somewhere in the back of that house, Broussard was pinned down or worse. Samuel Pietro could be in there, bullets flying around his body like hornets.

“Patrick!” Angie screamed, but I’d already vaulted the three steps and landed on the crevice where the two sides of the ruined porch met.

The doorknob had been blown off in the ambush on Poole, and I kicked the door open and fired at chest level into the dark room. I spun right, then left, and emptied my clip, dropped it out of the butt and slammed a fresh one home as it hit the floor. The room was empty.

“Need immediate assistance,” Angie screamed into the cell phone behind me. “Officer down! Officer down!”

The inside of the house was a dark gray that matched the sky outside. I noticed a swath of blood on the floor that had come from a body dragging itself into the hallway. At the other end of the hall, light poured through bullet holes in the back door. The door itself dipped toward the ground, its lower hinge blown off the jamb.

Halfway down the hall, the swath of blood broke to the right and disappeared through the kitchen doorway. I turned in the living room, checked the shadows, saw the broken glass under the windows, the pieces of wood and curtain fabric that had come apart in the gun blasts, an old couch spilling stuffing and littered with beer cans.

The automatic gunfire had ceased as soon as I’d entered the house, and for the moment all I heard was the rain spitting against the porch behind me, the ticking of a clock somewhere in the back of the house, and the sound of my own breathing, shallow and ragged.

The floorboards creaked as I made my way across the living room, followed the blood into the hall. Sweat poured down my face and softened my hands as my eyes darted from the door at the end of the hall to the four separate doorways that lay ahead of me in the narrow corridor. The one ten feet up on my right was the kitchen. The one on the left spilled yellow light into the hall.

I flattened myself against the right wall and inched along until I had a partially obstructed view of the room to the left. It appeared to be a sitting room of some kind. Two chairs were positioned on either side of a wine cabinet built into the wall. One was the recliner I’d been able to make out in the dark last night. The other matched it. The wine cabinet hung in the center of the wall and the glass casing that usually ran over the shelves had been removed. The shelves were filled with stacks of newspaper and glossy magazines, and several more magazines were stacked on the floor beside the chairs. Two old-fashioned pewter ashtrays in three-foot stands stood by the arms of the leather chairs, and a half-smoked cigar still smoldered in one. I stood pressed against the wall, my gun pointed at the right side of that room, watching for moving shadows, listening for creaks on the floorboards.

Nothing.

I took two tight steps across the hall, pinned myself against the other wall, and pointed my gun into the kitchen.

The black-and-white tile floor glistened with streaks of blood and viscera. Wet hand prints, tinged a bright orange under the harsh fluorescent, stained the cupboards and refrigerator door. I saw a shadow spill out from the right side of the room, heard a ragged breathing that wasn’t my own.

I took a long, deep breath, counted down from three, and then jumped across to the other side of the doorway, saw in a flash that the reading room to my right was empty, stared down the barrel of my gun at Leon Trett sitting up on the kitchen counter, his eyes fastened on me.

One of the Calico M-110s lay just inside the doorway. I kicked it under the table to my right as I entered.

Leon watched me come with a pained grin on his face. He’d shaved, and his soft, curdled skin had an unhealthy, raw sheen to it, as if the flesh had been scraped with a wire brush and then lathered in oil, as if it could be lifted from the bone with a spoon. Without the beard, his face was longer than it had appeared last night, the cheeks so sunken his mouth was a perpetual oval.

His left arm hung useless by his side, a hole pumping dark blood from the biceps. His right arm was crossed over his abdomen, trying to hold his intestines in. His tan trousers were saturated with his own blood.

“Come to give me my clips?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Got some of my own this morning.”

I shrugged.

“Who are you?” he said in a soft voice, his right eyebrow cocked.

“Down on the floor,” I said.

He grunted. “Sweetie, you see me holding my guts in up here? How’m I supposed to move and keep them in?”

“Not my problem,” I said. “Down on the floor.”

His long jaw clenched. “No.”

“Get down on the fucking floor.”

“No,” he said again.

“Leon. Do it.”

“Fuck you. Shoot me.”

“Leon-”

His eyes flickered to his left for just a moment, and the tightness left his jaw. He said, “Show some mercy, baby. Come on.”

I watched his eyes flicker again, saw the hint of a smile form on his lips, and I dropped to my knees as Roberta Trett fired at the place I’d been and blew her own husband’s head off with a sustained burst from her M-110.

She screamed in shock and surprise as Leon’s face disappeared like a balloon popped by a pin, and I rolled onto my back and squeezed off a round that hit her right hip and jerked her into the corner of the kitchen.

She spun back toward me, that great mass of gray hair swinging across her face, and unfortunately the M-110 came with her. One sweaty finger grasped for the trigger, kept sliding off the guard, and her free hand grasped at the wound on her hip as her eyes stayed locked on her husband’s missing head. I watched the muzzle swing my way, and I knew that any second she’d come out of shock and find the trigger.

I dove out of the kitchen, back into the hall. I rolled to my right as Roberta Trett spun full circle and the Calico muzzle winked at me. I got to my feet and ran for the back door, saw the door getting closer and closer, and then I heard Roberta step out into the hall behind me.

“You killed my Leon, motherfucker. You killed my Leon!”

The hallway blew up like an earthquake as Roberta got her finger around the trigger and let loose.

I dove without looking into the room off to my left, discovered too late that it wasn’t a room at all but a staircase.

My forehead rammed a stair about seven or eight steps up, and the impact of wood against bone rocked back through my teeth like electrical voltage. I heard Roberta’s heavy footsteps as she stumbled down the hallway toward the staircase.

She wasn’t firing her gun, and that terrified me more than if she were.

She knew she had me boxed in.

My shin screamed as it banged against the edge of a riser as I tore up the staircase, slipped once and kept going, saw a metal door at the top and prayed please God please God let it be open.

Roberta reached the opening below and I lunged for the door, hit it in the center with the heel of my hand, felt it give way like a burst of oxygen breaking from my lungs.

My chest bounced off the floor as Roberta unloaded her gun again. I rolled to my left and slammed the door behind me on a splatter of lead that banged off the metal like hail on a tin roof. The door was heavy and thick-the door to an industrial cooler or a vault-and bolt locks lined the inside: four of them from a height of about five and a half feet to a depth of about six inches. I threw them one by one as the bullets continued to ping and thunk off the other side. The door itself was bulletproof, the locks incapable of being shot out from the other side, sealed by sheets of layered steel on this side.

“You killed my Leon!”

The bullets had stopped and Roberta wailed from the other side of the door, a lunatic’s wail so violated and sheared and steeped in sudden, awful aloneness that the sound of it wrenched something in my chest.

“You killed my Leon! You killed him! You will die! Fucking die!”

Something heavy slammed into the door, and I realized after a second thump that it was Roberta Trett herself, throwing that oversized body of hers against the door like a battering ram, over and over, howling and shrieking and calling her husband’s name, and-bam, bam, bam-hurling herself at the only boundary between us.

Even if she lost her gun and I still had mine, I knew that if she got through that door she’d rip me to pieces with her bare hands, no matter how many rounds I fired into her.

“Leon! Leon!”

I listened for the sounds of sirens, the squawk of walkie-talkies, the bleat of a bullhorn. The police had to have reached the house by now. They had to.

That’s when it hit me that I couldn’t hear anything except Roberta, and only because she was directly on the other side of the door.

A bare forty-watt bulb hung over the room, and as I turned and took in my surroundings, I felt an express train of cold fear barrel through my veins.

I was in a large bedroom fronting the street. The windows were boarded up, thick black wood screwed into the molding, the dead silver eyes of forty or fifty flatheads apiece staring back at me from each window.

The floor was bare and strewn with the droppings of rodents. Bags of potato chips and Fritos and tortilla chips were scattered by the baseboards, their crumbs ground into the wood. Three bare mattresses, soiled with excrement and blood and God knew what else lay against the walls. The walls themselves were covered in thick gray sections of sponge and the Styrofoam soundproofing found in a recording studio. Except this wasn’t a recording studio.

Metal posts had been hammered into the walls just above the bare mattresses, and handcuffs hung to small ringlets that had been welded to the ends of the posts. A small metal wastebasket in the western corner of the room held a variety of riding crops, whips, spiked dildos, and leather straps. The entire room smelled of flesh so soiled and tainted the taint had spilled into the heart and poisoned the brain.

Roberta had stopped banging into the door, but I could hear her muffled wailing in the stairwell.

I walked toward the east end of the bedroom, saw where a wall had been knocked down to open the room up, the ridge of plaster and dust still rising from the floor. A fat mouse with spiked fur ran past me, took a right at the east end of the room, and disappeared through an opening just past the end of the wall.

I kept my gun pointed ahead of me as I stepped through more bags of chips and NAMBLA newsletters, empty cans of beer with mold growing by their openings. Magazines, printed on the cheapest glossy paper, lay open and gaping: boys, girls, adults-even animals-engaged in something I knew wasn’t sex, even though it appeared to be. Those photos seared their way into my brain in the half second before I could turn away, and what they’d captured and imprisoned on film had nothing to do with normal human interaction, only with cancer-cancerous minds and hearts and organs.

I reached the opening where the mouse had disappeared, a small space under the eaves of the house, where the roof slanted to the gutters. Beyond it was a small blue door.

Corwin Earle stood in front of the door, his back hunched under the eaves, a crossbow held up by his face, the stock resting against his shoulder, his left eye trying to squint down the sight and blink away sweat at the same time. His lazy right eye searched for focus, slid toward me again and again before it was pushed back to the right as if by a motor. He closed it eventually, resettling his shoulder against the crossbow stock. He was naked, and there was blood on his chest, a smattering of it on his protruding abdomen. A sense of defeat and weary victimization was imprinted in his sad crumble of a face.

“The Tretts don’t trust you with the machine guns, Corwin?”

He shook his head slightly.

“Where’s Samuel Pietro?” I said.

He shook his head again, this time more slowly, and flexed his shoulders against the weight of the crossbow.

I looked at the tip of the arrowhead, saw it wavering slightly, noticed the tremors running up and down the undersides of Corwin Earle’s arms.

“Where’s Samuel Pietro?” I repeated.

He shook his head again, and I shot him in the stomach.

He didn’t make a sound. He folded over at the waist and dropped the crossbow on the floor in front of him. He fell to his knees and then tipped to his right in a fetal ball, lay there with his tongue lolling out of his mouth like a dog’s.

I stepped over him and opened the blue door, entered a bathroom the size of a small closet. I saw the boarded-up black window, and a tattered shower curtain lying under the sink, and blood on the tile, the toilet, splashed against the walls as if hurled from a bucket.

A child’s white cotton underwear lay soaked in blood in the sink.

I looked in the bathtub.

I’m not sure how long I stood there, head bent, mouth open. I felt a hot wetness on my cheeks, streams of it, and it was only after that double eternity of staring into the tub at the small, naked body curled up by the drain that I realized I was weeping.

I walked back out of the bathroom and saw Corwin Earle on his knees, his arms wrapped around his stomach, his back to me, as he tried to use his kneecaps to carry himself across the floor.

I stayed behind him and waited, my gun pointed down, his dark hair rising up from the other side of the black metal sight on the barrel.

He made a chugging sound as he crawled, a low yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh that reminded me of the chug of a portable generator.

When he reached the crossbow and got one hand on the stock, I said, “Corwin.”

He looked back over his shoulder at me, saw the gun pointed at him, and scrunched his eyes closed. He turned his head, gripping the crossbow tight with a bloody hand.

I fired a round into the back of his neck and kept walking, heard the shell skitter on wood and Corwin’s body thump against the floor as I turned left, back into the bedroom, and walked to the vault door. I unsnapped the locks one by one.

“Roberta,” I said. “You still out there? You hear me? I’m going to kill you now, Roberta.”

I unsnapped the last of the locks, threw the door open, and came face-to-face with a shotgun barrel.

Remy Broussard lowered the barrel. Between his legs, Roberta Trett lay facedown on the stairs, a dark red oval the size of a serving dish in the center of her back.

Broussard steadied himself against the railing as sweat poured like warm rain from his hairline.

“Had to blow the lock on the bulkhead and come up through the basement,” he said. “Sorry it took so long.”

I nodded.

“Clear in there?” He took a deep breath, watched me steadily with dark eyes.

“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Corwin Earle is dead.”

“Samuel Pietro,” he said.

I nodded. “I think it’s Samuel Pietro.” I looked down at my gun, saw that it jumped from the tremors in my arm, the shakes wracking my body like a series of small strokes. I looked back at Broussard, felt the warm streams spring from my eyes again. “It’s hard to tell,” I said, and my voice cracked.

Broussard nodded. I noticed that he was weeping, too.

“In the basement,” he said.

“What?”

“Skeletons,” he said. “Two of them. Kids.”

My voice didn’t sound like my own as I said, “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

“I don’t either,” he said.

He looked down at Roberta Trett’s corpse. He lowered the shotgun and placed it against the back of her head, and his finger curled around the trigger.

I waited for him to blow her dead brains all over the staircase.

After a while, he removed the gun and sighed. He took his foot and brought it down gently on the top of her head, and then he pushed her down.

That’s what the Quincy police met as they reached the stairs: Roberta Trett’s large corpse sliding down the dark staircase toward them and two men standing up top, weeping like children because they’d somehow never known the world could get this bad.

26

It took twenty hours to confirm that the body in the bathtub had, in fact, been that of Samuel Pietro. The work the Tretts and Corwin Earle had done on his face with a knife had made dental records the only sure means of identification. Gabrielle Pietro had gone into shock after a reporter from the News, acting on a tip, called before the police contacted her to ask for a statement regarding her son’s death.

Samuel Pietro had been dead forty-five minutes by the time I found him. The medical examiner ascertained that in the two weeks since his disappearance he’d been sodomized repeatedly, flogged along his back, buttocks, and legs, and handcuffed so tightly that the flesh around his right wrist was worn down to the bone. He’d been fed nothing but potato chips, Fritos, and beer since he’d left his mother’s house.

Less than an hour before we’d entered the Trett house, either Corwin Earle, one or both of the Tretts, or maybe all three of them-who the hell knew and ultimately what difference did it make?-had stabbed the boy in the heart and then drawn the knife blade across his throat and severed his carotid artery.

I’d spent the morning and most of the afternoon up in our cramped office, tucked in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church, feeling the weight of the great building around me, the spires reaching for heaven. I stared out the window. I tried not to think. I drank cold coffee and sat, felt a soft ticking in my chest, in my head.

Angie’s ankle had been set and plastered last night at the New England Med emergency room, and she’d left the apartment this morning as I was waking up, taken a taxi to her doctor’s office so he could check the ER resident’s work and tell her what to expect from time spent in a cast.

I left the belfry office, once I got the details regarding Samuel Pietro from Broussard, and descended the stairs into the chapel. I sat in the front pew in the still half-dark, smelled the remains of incense and the bloom of chrysanthemums, met the gem-shaped gaze of several stained-glass saints, and watched the lights of small votive candles flicker off the mahogany altar rail, wondered why an eight-year-old child had been allowed to live on this earth just long enough to experience everything horrific in it.

I looked up at the stained-glass Jesus, his arms held open above the gold tabernacle.

“Eight years old,” I whispered. “Explain that.”

I can’t.

Can’t or won’t?

No answer. God can calm up with the best of them.

You put a child on this earth, give him eight years of life. You allow him to be kidnapped, tortured, starved, and raped for fourteen days-over three hundred and thirty hours, nineteen thousand eight hundred long minutes-and then as a final image You provide him with the faces of monsters who shove steel into his heart, cleave the flesh from his face, and open his throat on a bathroom floor.

What’s your point?

“What’s Yours?” I said loudly, heard my voice echo off stone.

Silence.

“Why?” I whispered.

More silence.

“There’s no goddamned answer. Is there?”

Don’t blaspheme. You’re in church.

Now I knew the voice in my head wasn’t God’s. My mother’s probably, maybe a dead nun’s, but I doubted God would get hung up on technicalities during such a time of dire need.

Then again, what did I know? Maybe God, if He did exist, was as petty and trivial as the rest of us.

If so, He wasn’t a God I could follow.

Yet I stayed in the pew, unable to move.

I believe in God because of…what?

Talent-the kind Van Gogh or Michael Jordan, Stephen Hawking or Dylan Thomas were born with-always seemed proof of God to me. So did love.

So, okay, I believe in You. But I’m not sure I like You.

That’s your problem.

“What good comes from a child’s rape and murder?”

Don’t ask questions your brain is too small to answer.

I watched the candles flicker for a while, sucked the quiet into my lungs, closed my eyes to it, and waited for transcendence or a state of grace or peace or whatever the hell it was the nuns had taught me you were supposed to wait for when the world is too much with you.

After about a minute, I opened my eyes. Probably the reason I’d never been a successful Catholic-I lacked patience.

The rear door of the building opened and I heard the clack of Angie’s crutches against the door bar, heard her say, “Shit,” and then the door closed and she appeared at the landing between the chapel and the stairs leading up to the belfry. She noticed me just before she turned toward the stairs. She swiveled around awkwardly, looked at me, and smiled.

She worked her way down the two carpeted steps to the chapel floor, swung her body past the confessionals and baptismal font. She paused by the altar rail in front of my pew, hoisted herself up onto it, and leaned her crutches against the rail.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

She looked up at the ceiling, the painting of the Last Supper, back down at me. “You’re inside the chapel and the church is still standing.”

“Imagine,” I said.

We sat there for a bit, neither of us saying anything. Angie’s head tilted back as she scanned the ceiling, the detail carved into the molding atop the nearest pilaster.

“What’s the verdict on the leg?”

“The doctor said it’s a stress fracture of the lower left fibula.”

I smiled. “You love saying that, don’t you?”

“Lower left fibula?” She gave me a broad grin. “Yeah. Makes me feel like I’m on ER. Next I’m going to ask for a Chem-Seven and BP count. Stat.”

“The doctor told you to stay off it, I suppose.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s what they always say.”

“How long you have to wear the cast?”

“Three weeks.”

“No aerobics.”

She shrugged again. “No a lot of things.”

I looked down at my shoes for a bit, then back up at her.

“What?” she said.

“It hurts all over. Samuel Pietro. I can’t get my head around it. When Bubba and I went to that house, he was still alive. He was upstairs and he was…we-”

“You were in a house with three heavily armed, very paranoid felons. You couldn’t have-”

“His body,” I said, “it…”

“They confirmed it was his body?”

I nodded. “It was so small. It was so small,” I whispered. “It was naked and cut into and…Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” I wiped at acidic tears, leaned my head back.

“Who’d you talk to?” Angie said gently.

“Broussard.”

“How’s he doing?”

“’Bout the same as me.”

“Any word on Poole?” She leaned forward a bit.

“He’s bad, Ange. They don’t expect him to pull through.”

She nodded and kept her head down for a bit, her good leg swaying back and forth lightly off the rail.

“What did you see in that bathroom, Patrick? I mean, exactly?”

I shook my head.

“Come on,” she said softly. “This is me. I can take it.”

“I can’t,” I said. “Not again. Not again. I think about it for a second-I see that room flash through my head-and I want to die. I don’t want to carry it around with me. I want to die and make it go away.”

She slid gingerly off the rail and used the front of the pew to pull herself around to the seat. I moved over and she sat beside me. She took my face in her hands, but I couldn’t meet her eyes, was sure that seeing the warmth and the love in them would make me feel more soiled, for some reason, more unhinged.

She kissed my forehead and then my eyelids, the tears drying on my face, brought my head down to her shoulder, and kissed the back of my neck.

“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.

“Nothing to say.” I cleared my throat, wrapped my arms around her abdomen and lower back. I could hear her heart beating. She felt so good, so beautiful, so everything that was right in the world. And I still felt like dying.

That night we tried to make love, and at first it was fine, fun actually, trying to work around the heavy cast, Angie giggling from the painkillers, but then once we were both naked in the light of the moon shining through my bedroom window, I’d see a flash of her flesh and it would meld with a snapshot image of Samuel Pietro’s. I touched her breast and saw Corwin Earle’s flabby stomach splattered with blood, ran my tongue over her rib cage and saw blood splashed on the bathroom wall as if hurled from a bucket.

Standing over that bathtub, I’d gone into shock. I saw everything and it was enough to make me weep, but some part of my brain shut down as a protective impulse, so that the true horror of everything I was looking at didn’t fully compute. It had been bad, bloody and unconscionable-I’d known that much-but the images had remained random, floating in a sea of white porcelain and black-and-white tile.

In the thirty hours since, my brain had collated everything, and I was alone and in that tub with Samuel Pietro’s naked, ravaged, debased body. The door to the bathroom was locked, and I couldn’t get out.

“What’s wrong?” Angie said.

I rolled away from her, looked out the window at the moon.

Her warm hand stroked my back. “Patrick?”

A scream died in my throat.

“Patrick, come on. Talk to me.”

The phone rang and I picked it up.

It was Broussard. “How you doing?”

I felt a flush of relief at the sound of his voice, a sense that I wasn’t alone.

“Pretty bad. You?”

“Pretty real fucking bad, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” I said.

“Can’t even talk to my wife about it, and I tell her everything.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Look…Patrick, I’m still in the city. With a bottle. You want to drink some of it with me?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be at the Ryan. That all right with you?”

“Sure.”

“See you when you get here.”

He hung up, and I turned to Angie.

She had pulled the sheet up over her body and was reaching across to her nightstand for her cigarettes. She placed the ashtray on her lap and lit the cigarette, stared through the smoke at me.

“That was Broussard,” I said.

She nodded, took another drag on the cigarette.

“He wants to meet.”

“Both of us?” She looked down at the ashtray.

“Just me.”

She nodded. “Best get going, then.”

I leaned in toward her. “Ange-”

She held up a hand. “No apology necessary. Off you go.” She appraised my naked body and smiled. “Put some clothes on first.”

I picked my clothes up off the floor and put them on as Angie watched from behind her cigarette smoke.

As I left the bedroom, she stubbed out her cigarette and said, “Patrick.”

I stuck my head back in the door.

“When you’re ready to talk, I’m all ears. Anything you need to say.”

I nodded.

“And if you don’t talk, that’s up to you. You understand?”

Again, I nodded.

She placed the ashtray back on the nightstand and the sheet fell away from her upper body.

For a long time, neither of us said anything.

“Just so we’re clear,” Angie said eventually. “I won’t be like one of those cop wives in the movies.”

“How do you mean?”

“Nagging and begging you to talk.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

“They never know when to leave, those women.”

I leaned back into the room, peered at her.

She shifted the pillows behind her head. “Could you hit the light on your way out?”

I turned off the light, but I stood there for a few moments more, feeling Angie’s eyes on me.

27

It was one very drunk cop I met in the Ryan playground. Only when I saw him wavering on a swing as I entered, no tie, wrinkled suit jacket scrunched under a topcoat stained by playground sand, one shoe untied, did I realize that it was the first time I’d ever seen him with so much as a hair out of place. Even after the quarries and a jump onto the leg of a helicopter, he’d looked impeccable.

“You’re Bond,” I said.

“Huh?”

“James Bond,” I said. “You’re James Bond, Broussard. Mister Perfect.”

He smiled and drained what remained of a bottle of Mount Gay. He tossed the dead soldier into the sand, pulled a full one from his topcoat, and cracked the seal. He spun the cap off and into the sand with a flick of his thumb. “It’s a burden, being this good-looking. Heh-heh.”

“How’s Poole?”

Broussard shook his head several times. “Nothing’s changed. He’s alive, but barely. He hasn’t regained consciousness.”

I sat on the swing beside his. “And the prognosis?”

“Not good. Even if he lives, he’s had several strokes in the last thirty hours, lost a ton of oxygen to the brain. He’d be partially paralyzed, the doctors figure, mute most likely. He’ll never get out of bed again.”

I thought of that first afternoon I’d met Poole, the first time I’d seen his odd ritual of sniffing a cigarette before snapping it in half, the way he’d looked up into my confused face with his elfin grin and said, “I beg your pardon. I quit.” Then, when Angie’d asked if he’d mind if she smoked, he’d said, “Oh, God, would you?”

Shit. I hadn’t even realized until now how much I liked him.

No more Poole. No more arch remarks, delivered with a knowing, bemused glint in his eye.

“I’m sorry, Broussard.”

“Remy,” Broussard said, and handed me a plastic cocktail cup. “You never know. He’s the toughest bastard I ever met. Has a hell of a will to live. Maybe he’ll pull through. How about you?”

“Huh?”

“How’s your will to live?”

I waited while he filled half the cup with rum.

“It’s been stronger,” I said.

“Mine, too. I don’t get it.”

“What?”

He held the bottle aloft and we toasted silently, then drank.

“I don’t get,” Broussard said, “why what happened in that house has got me so turned around. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of horrible shit.” He leaned forward in his swing, looked back over his shoulder at me. “Horrible shit, Patrick. Babies fed Drano in their bottles, kids suffocated and shaken to death, beat so bad you can’t tell what color their skin really is.” He shook his head slowly. “Lotta shit. But something about that house…”

“Critical mass,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Critical mass,” I repeated. I took another swig of rum. It wasn’t going down easy yet, but it was close. “You see this horrible thing, that one, but they’re spaced out. Yesterday, we saw all sorts of evil shit and it all reached critical mass at once.”

He nodded. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as that basement,” he said. “And then that kid in the tub?” He shook his head. “A few months shy of my twenty, and I’ve never…” He took another swig and shuddered against the burn of alcohol. He gave me a slight smile. “You know what Roberta was doing when I shot her?”

I shook my head.

“Pawing at the door like a dog. Swear to God. Pawing and mewing and crying about her Leon. I’d just climbed out of that cellar, found those two little kid skeletons sunk in limestone and gravel, the whole fucking place something out of a spook show, and I see Roberta at the top of the stairs? Man, I didn’t even look for her gun. I just unloaded mine.” He spit into the sand. “Fuck her. Hell’s too good a place for that bitch.”

For a while we sat in silence, listening to the creak of the swings’ chains, the cars passing along the avenue, the slap and scrape of some kids playing street hockey in the parking lot of the electronics plant across the street.

“The skeletons,” I said to Broussard after a bit.

“Unidentified. Closest the ME can tell me is that one’s male, one’s female, and he thinks neither is older than nine or younger than four. A week before he knows shit.”

“Dentals?”

“The Tretts took care of that. Both skeletons showed traces of hydrochloric acid. The ME thinks the Tretts marinated them in the shit, pulled out the teeth while they were soft, dumped the bones in boxes of limestone in the cellar.”

“Why leave them in the cellar?”

“So they could look at them?” Broussard shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?”

“So one could be Amanda McCready.”

“Most definitely. Either that or she’s in the quarry.”

I thought about the cellar and Amanda for a bit. Amanda McCready and her flat eyes, her lowered expectations for all the things that kids should have the highest expectations for, her lifeless corpse being dropped in a bathtub filled with acid, her hair stripping away from her head like papier-mâché.

“Hell of a world,” Broussard whispered.

“It’s a fucking awful world, Remy. You know?”

“Two days ago I would have argued with you. I’m a cop, okay, but I’m lucky, too. Got a great wife, nice house, invested well over the years. I’ll leave all this shit soon as I hit my twenty and a wake-up call.” He shrugged. “But then something like-Jesus-that carved-up kid in that fucking bathroom and you start thinking, ‘Well, fine, my life’s okay, but the world’s still a pile of shit for most people. Even if my world is okay, the world is still a pile of evil shit.’ You know?”

“Oh,” I said, “I know. Exactly.”

“Nothing works.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing works,” he said. “Don’t you get it? The cars, the washing machines, the refrigerators and ‘starter’ houses, the fucking shoes and clothes and…nothing works. Schools don’t work.”

“Not public ones,” I said.

“Public? Look at the morons coming out of private schools these days. You ever talked to one of those disaffected prep-school fucks? You ask ’em what morality is, they say a concept. You ask ’em what decency is, they say a word. Look at these rich kids whacking winos in Central Park over drug deals or just because. Schools don’t work because parents don’t work because their parents didn’t work because nothing works, so why invest energy or love or anything into it if it’s just going to let you down? Jesus, Patrick, we don’t work. That kid was out there for two weeks; no one could find him. He was in that house, we suspected it hours before he was killed, we’re sitting in a doughnut shop talking about it. That kid got his throat cut when we should have been kicking in the door.”

“We’re the richest, most advanced society in the history of civilization,” I said, “and we can’t keep a kid from getting carved up in a bathtub by three freaks? Why?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head and kicked at the sand by his feet. “I just don’t know. Every time you come up with a solution, there’s a faction ready to tell you you’re wrong. You believe in the death penalty?”

I held out my cup. “No.”

He stopped pouring. “Excuse me?”

I shrugged. “I don’t. Sorry. Keep pouring, will you?”

He filled my cup and sucked back on the bottle for a moment. “You capped Corwin Earle in the back of the head, you’re telling me you don’t believe in capital punishment?”

“I don’t think society has the right or the intelligence. Let society prove to me they can pave roads efficiently; then I’ll let them decide life and death.”

“Yet, again: you executed someone yesterday.”

“Technically he had his hand on a weapon. And besides, I’m not society.”

“What the fuck’s that mean?”

I shrugged. “I trust myself. I can live with my actions. I don’t trust society.”

“That why you’re a PI, Patrick? The lone knight and all that?”

I shook my head. “Piss on that.”

Another laugh.

“I’m a PI, because-I dunno, maybe I’m addicted to the great What Comes Next. Maybe I like tearing down facades. That doesn’t make me a good guy. It just makes me a guy who hates people who hide, pretend to be what they’re not.”

He raised the bottle, and I tapped my plastic glass into the side.

“What if someone pretends to be one thing because society deems he must, but in reality he’s something else because he deems he must?”

I shook my head against the booze. “Run that one by me again.” I stood up, and my feet felt unsteady in the sand. I crossed to the jungle gym opposite the swings and perched myself on a rung.

“If society doesn’t work, how do we, as allegedly honorable men, live?”

“On the fringes,” I said.

He nodded. “Exactly. Yet we must coexist within society or otherwise we’re-what, we’re fucking militia, guys who wear camouflage pants and bitch about taxes while they drive on roads paved by the government. Right?”

“I guess.”

He stood and wavered, grasped the swing chain, and tilted back into the pools of dark behind the swing-set arch. “I planted evidence on a guy once.”

“You what?”

He tilted back into the light. “True. Scumbag named Carlton Volk. He was raping hookers for months. Months. A couple pimps tried to stop him, he fucked them up. Carlton was a psycho, black-belt, prison-weight-room kind of guy. Couldn’t be reasoned with. And our buddy Ray Likanski gives me a phone call, lets me in on all the details. Skinny Ray, I guess, had a soft spot for one of the hookers. Whatever. Anyway, I know Carlton Volk is raping hookers, but who’s going to convict him? Even if the girls had wanted to testify-which they didn’t-who would believe them? A hooker saying she was raped is a joke to most people. Like killing a corpse; supposedly it ain’t possible. So I know Carlton’s a two-time loser, out on probation; I plant an ounce of heroin and two unlicensed firearms in his trunk, way back under the spare where he’ll never find ’em. Then I put an expired inspection sticker over the up-to-date one on his license plate. Who looks at their own plate until it’s near renewal time?” He floated back into the dark again for a moment. “Two weeks later, Carlton gets stopped on the inspection sticker, cops an attitude, et cetera, et cetera. Long story short, he gets dropped as a three-time felon for twenty years hard, no parole possibility.”

I waited until he’d swung back into the light again before I spoke.

“You think you did the right thing?”

He shrugged. “For those hookers, yes.”

“But-”

“Always a ‘but’ when you tell a story like that, ain’t there?” He sighed. “But a guy like Carlton, he thrives in prison. Probably goes through more young kids sent up for burglary and minor dope-dealing than he ever would have raped in hookers. So did I do right for the general population? Probably not. Did I do right for some hookers no one else gave a shit about? Maybe.”

“If you had to do it again?”

“Patrick, lemme ask you: What would you do with a guy like Carlton?”

“We’re back to the death penalty again, aren’t we?”

“The personal one,” he said, “not the societal one. If I’d had the balls to whack Volk, no one gets raped by him anymore. That’s not relative. That’s black and white.”

“But those kids in prison, they’ll still get raped by someone else.”

He nodded. “For every solution, a problem.”

I took another swig of rum, noticed a lone star floating above the thin night clouds and city smog.

I said, “I stood over that kid’s body and something snapped. I didn’t care what happened to me, to my life, to anything. I just wanted…” I held out my hands.

“Balance.”

I nodded.

“So you popped a cap in the back of a guy’s head while he was on his knees.”

I nodded again.

“Hey, Patrick? I’m not judging you, man. I’m saying sometimes we do the right thing but it wouldn’t hold up in court. It wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of”-he made quotation marks with his fingers-“society.”

I heard that yuh-yuh-yuh yammering Earle had made under his breath, saw the puff of blood that had spit from the back of his neck, heard the thump as he’d fallen to the floor and the spent shell skittered on the wood.

“In the same circumstances,” I said, “I’d do it again.”

“Does that make you right?” Remy Broussard ambled over to the jungle gym, poured some more rum into my cup.

“No.”

“Doesn’t make you wrong, though, does it?”

I looked up at him, smiled, and shook my head. “No again.”

He leaned back into the jungle gym and yawned. “Nice if we had all the answers, wouldn’t it?”

I looked at the line of his face etched in the darkness beside me, and I felt something squirm and niggle in the back of my skull like a small fishing hook. What had he just said that bugged me?

I looked at Remy Broussard and I felt that fish hook dig deeper against the back of my skull. I watched him close his eyes and I wanted to hit him for some reason.

Instead I said, “I’m glad.”

“About what?”

“Killing Corwin Earle.”

“Me too. I’m glad I killed Roberta.” He poured more rum into my cup. “Hell with it, Patrick, I’m glad none of those sick pricks walked out of that house alive. Drink to that?”

I looked at the bottle, then at Broussard, searched his face for whatever it was about him that suddenly bothered me. Frightened me. I couldn’t find it in the dark, in the booze, so I raised my cup and touched the plastic to the bottle.

“May their hell be a lifetime in the bodies of their victims,” Broussard said. He raised his eyebrows up and down. “Can I get an amen, brother?”

“Amen, brother.”

28

I sat for a long time in the ashen, half-dark of my moonlit bedroom watching Angie sleep. I ran my conversation with Broussard over and over in my head, sipped from a large cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I’d picked up on my walk home, smiled when Angie mumbled the name of the dog she’d had as a child and reached out and stroked the pillow with the palm of her hand.

Maybe it was shell shock over the interior of the Tretts’ house that had triggered it. Maybe it was the rum. Maybe it was just that the more determined I am to keep painful events at bay, the more likely I am to focus on the little things, minutiae, a casually dropped word or phrase that rings in my head and won’t stop. Whatever the case, tonight in the playground, I’d found a truth and a lie. Both at the same time.

Broussard had been right: nothing worked.

And I had been right: facades, no matter how well built, usually come down.

Angie rolled onto her back and let out a soft moan, kicked at the sheet tangled up by her feet. It must have been that effort-trying to kick with a leg encased in plaster-that woke her. She blinked and raised her head, looked down at the cast, then turned her head and saw me.

“Hey. What’re…” She sat up, smacked her lips, pushed hair out of her eyes. “What’re you doing?”

“Sitting here,” I said. “Thinking.”

“You drunk?”

I held up my coffee cup. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

“Then come to bed.” She extended her hand.

“Broussard lied to us.”

She pulled the hand away, used it to push herself farther up the headboard. “What?”

“Last year,” I said. “When Ray Likanski bolted the bar and disappeared.”

“What about it?”

“Broussard said he barely knew the man. Said he was one of Poole’s occasional snitches.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Tonight, with half a pint of rum in him, he told me Ray was his own snitch.”

She reached over to the nightstand, turned on the light. “What?”

I nodded.

“So…so maybe he just made an oversight last year. Maybe we heard him wrong.”

I looked at her.

Eventually she held up a hand as she turned toward the nightstand for her cigarettes. “You’re right. We never hear things wrong.”

“Not at the same time.”

She lit a cigarette and pulled the sheet up her leg, scratched at her knee just above the cast. “Why would he lie?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been sitting here wondering the same thing.”

“Maybe he had a reason to protect Ray’s identity as his snitch.”

I sipped some coffee. “Possibly, but it seems awful convenient, doesn’t it? Ray is potentially a key witness in the disappearance of Amanda McCready; Broussard lies about knowing him. Seems…”

“Shady.”

I nodded. “A bit. Another thing?”

“What?”

“Broussard’s retiring soon.”

“How soon?”

“Not sure. Sounded like very soon. He said he was closing in on his twenty, and as soon as he reached it he was turning in his shield.”

She took a drag off her cigarette, peered over the bright coal at me. “So he’s retiring. So what?”

“Last year, just before we climbed up to the quarry, you made a joke to him.”

She touched her chest. “I did.”

“Sí. You said something like ‘Maybe it’s time we retired.’”

Her eyes brightened. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s time we hung ’em up.’”

“And he said?”

She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and thought about it. “He said…” She jabbed the air with her cigarette several times. “He said he couldn’t afford to retire. He said something about medical bills.”

“His wife’s, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “She’d been in a car accident just before they were married. She wasn’t insured. He owed the hospital big.”

“So what happened to those medical bills? You think the hospital just said, ‘Ah, you’re a nice guy. Forget about it’?”

“Doubtful.”

“In the extreme. So a cop who was poor lies about knowing a key player in the McCready case, and six months later the cop’s got enough money to retire-not on the kind of money a cop gets after thirty years in, but somehow on the kind a cop gets after twenty.”

She chewed her lower lip for a minute. “Toss me a T-shirt, will you?”

I opened my dresser, took a dark green Saw Doctors shirt from the drawer, and handed it to her. She pulled it over her head and kicked away the sheets, looked around the room for her crutches. She looked over at me, saw that I was chuckling under my breath.

“What?”

“You look pretty funny.”

Her face darkened. “How’s that?”

“Sitting there in my T-shirt with a big white cast on your leg.” I shrugged. “Just looks funny is all.”

“Ha,” she said. “Ha-ha. Where are my crutches?”

“Behind the door.”

“Would you be so kind?”

I brought them to her and she struggled onto them, and then I followed her down the dark hall into the kitchen. The digital display on the microwave read 4:04, and I could feel it in my joints and the back of my neck, but not in my mind. When Broussard had mentioned Ray Likanski on the playground, something had snapped to attention in my brain, started marching double time, and talking with Angie had only given it more energy.

While Angie made half a pot of decaf and pulled cream from the fridge and sugar from the cupboard, I went back to that final night in the quarry, when it seemed we’d lost Amanda McCready for good. I knew a lot of the information I was trying to recall and sift through was in my case file, but I didn’t want to rely on those notes just yet. Poring over them would just put me back in the same place I’d been six months ago, while trying to conjure it all back up from this kitchen could bring a fresh perspective.

The kidnapper had demanded four couriers to bring Cheese Olamon’s money in return for Amanda. Why all four of us? Why not just one?

I asked Angie.

She leaned against the oven, crossed her arms, thought about it. “I’ve never even considered that. Christ, could I be that stupid?”

“It’s a judgment call.”

She frowned. “You didn’t question it.”

“I know I’m stupid,” I said. “It’s you we’re trying to decide on.”

“A whole dragnet,” she said, “swept those hills, locked down the roads around it, and they couldn’t find anyone.”

“Maybe the kidnappers had been tipped off to an escape route. Maybe some of the cops had been paid off.”

“Maybe there was no one up there that night besides us.” Her eyes shimmered.

“Holy shit.”

She bit down on her lower lip, raised her eyebrows several times. “You think?”

“Broussard fired those guns from his side.”

“Why not? We couldn’t see anything over there. We saw muzzle flashes. We heard Broussard saying he was under fire. But did we see him at all during that time?”

“Nope.”

“The reason, then, that we were brought up there was to corroborate his story.”

I leaned back in my chair, ran my hands through the hair along my temples. Could it be that simple? Or, maybe, could it be that devious?

“You think Poole was in on it?” Angie turned from the counter as steam rose from the coffeemaker behind her.

“Why do you say that?”

She tapped her coffee mug against her thigh. “He was the one who claimed Ray Likanski was his snitch, not Broussard’s. And, remember, he was Broussard’s partner. You know how that works. I mean, look at Oscar and Devin-they’re closer than husband and wife. A hell of a lot more blindly loyal to each other.”

I considered that. “So how did Poole play into it?”

She poured her coffee from the pot even though the machine was still percolating and coffee dripped through the filter, sizzled off the heating pan. “All these months,” she said as she poured cream into her cup, “you know what’s nagged me?”

“Give it to me.”

“The empty bag. I mean, you’re the kidnappers. You’re pinning a cop down to a cliff top and sneaking in to scoop up the money.”

“Right. So?”

“So you pause to open the bag and pull the money out? Why not just take the bag?”

“I don’t know. Either way, what difference does it make?”

“Not much.” She turned from the counter, faced me. “Unless the bag was empty to begin with.”

“I saw the bag when Doyle handed it to Broussard. It was bulging with money.”

“But what about by the time we reached the quarry?”

“He unloaded it during the walk up the hill? How?”

She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “I don’t know.”

I came out of my chair, got a cup from the cupboard, and it fell from my fingers, glanced the edge of the counter, and fell to the floor. I left it there.

“Poole,” I said. “Son of a bitch. It was Poole. When he had his heart attack or whatever it was, he fell on the bag. When it was time to go, Broussard reached under him and pulled the bag out.”

“Then Poole goes down the side of the quarry,” she said in a rush, “and hands off the bag to some third party.” She paused. “Kills Mullen and Gutierrez?”

“You think they planted a second bag by the tree?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t either. I could maybe buy that Poole had siphoned two hundred thousand in ransom money, but executing Mullen and Gutierrez? That was a stretch.

“We agree there had to be a third party involved.”

“Probably. They had to get the money out of there.”

“So who was it?”

She shrugged. “The mystery woman who made the phone call to Lionel?”

“Possibly.” I picked up my coffee cup. It hadn’t broken, and after checking for chips, I filled it with coffee.

“Christ,” Angie said and chuckled. “This is a hell of a reach.”

“What?”

“This whole thing. I mean, have you been listening to us? Broussard and Poole orchestrated this whole thing? To what end?”

“The money.”

“You think two hundred thousand would be enough motive for guys like Poole and Broussard to kill a child?”

“No.”

“So, why?”

I fumbled for an answer, but didn’t come up with one.

“Do you honestly think either of them is capable of killing Amanda McCready?”

“People are capable of anything.”

“Yeah, but certain people are also categorically incapable of certain things. Those two? Killing a child?”

I remembered Broussard’s face and Poole’s voice as Poole had talked about finding a child in watery cement. They could be great actors, but those were De Niro-caliber performances if they really did feel as indifferent to a child’s life as they would to an ant’s.

“Hmm,” I said.

“I know what that means.”

“What?”

“Your ‘hmm.’ It always means you’re completely baffled.”

I nodded. “I’m completely baffled.”

“Welcome to the club.”

I sipped some coffee. If just a tenth of what we were hypothesizing was true, a pretty large crime had been committed right in front of us. Not near us. Not in the same zip code. But as we’d knelt beside the perpetrators. Right under our noses.

Did I mention that we make our livings as detectives?

Bubba came to the apartment shortly after sunrise.

He sat on the living room floor with his legs crossed and signed Angie’s cast with a black marker. In his large fourth-grader’s scrawl, he wrote:

Angie

Brake a leg. Or too. Ha ha.

Ruprecht Rogowski

Angie touched his cheek. “Aww. You signed it ‘Ruprecht.’ How sweet.”

Bubba blushed and swatted her hand, looked up at me. “What?”

“Ruprecht.” I chuckled. “I’d almost forgotten.”

Bubba stood up and his shadow fell across my entire body and most of the wall. He rubbed his chin and smiled tightly. “’Member the first time I ever hit you, Patrick?”

I swallowed. “First grade.”

“’Member why?”

I cleared my throat. “Because I gave you shit about your name.”

Bubba leaned over me. “Care to try again?”

“Ah, no,” I said, and as he turned away I added, “Ruprecht.”

I danced away from his lunge and Angie said, “Boys! Boys!”

Bubba froze and I used that time to put the coffee table between the two of us.

“Could we address the matter at hand?” She opened the notebook on her lap, uncapped a pen with her teeth. “Bubba, you can beat up Patrick anytime.”

Bubba thought about it. “This is true.”

“Okay.” Angie scribbled in her notebook, shot me a look.

“Hey.” Bubba pointed at her cast. “How do you shower in that thing?”

Angie sighed. “What did you find out?”

Bubba sat on the couch and propped his combat boots up on the coffee table, not an act I usually tolerate, but I was already on thin ice with the Ruprecht thing, so I let it slide.

“The word I get from what’s left of Cheese’s crew is that Mullen and Gutierrez didn’t know nothing about a missing kid. As far as anyone knew, they went to Quincy that night to score.”

“Score what?” Angie said.

“What drug dealers usually score: drugs. Chat around the campfire,” Bubba said, “was that after one hell of a dry spell the market was going to be flooded with China White.” He shrugged. “It never happened.”

“You’re sure about this?” I said.

“No,” he said slowly, as if talking to a slow child. “I talked to some guys in Olamon’s organization, and they all said Mullen and Gutierrez never mentioned going to the quarries with a kid. And no one on Cheese’s crew ever saw a kid hanging around. So, if Mullen and Gutierrez had her, it was strictly their deal. And if they were going to Quincy that night to dump a kid, that was strictly their deal, too.”

He looked at Angie, jerked a thumb at me. “Didn’t he used to be smarter?”

She smiled. “Peaked in high school, I think.”

“Another thing,” Bubba said. “I never could figure why someone didn’t just kill me that night.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Everyone I talk to on Cheese’s crew swears up and down they had nothing to do with piping me. I believe ’em. I’m a scary guy. Sooner or later, someone would have coughed it up.”

“So the person who piped you…”

“Probably isn’t the type who kills on a regular basis.” He shrugged. “Just an opinion.”

The phone rang from the kitchen.

“Who the hell calls here at seven in the morning?” I said.

“No one familiar with our sleeping patterns,” Angie said.

I walked into the kitchen, picked up the phone.

“Hey, brother.” Broussard.

“Hey,” I said. “You know what time it is?”

“Yeah. Sorry about that. Look, I need a favor. Big one.”

“What is it?”

“One of my guys broke his arm chasing a perp last night and now we’re one short for the game.”

“The game?” I said.

“Football,” he said. “Robbery-Homicide versus Narcotics-Vice-CAC. I might be Motor Pool, but I’m still Narco-Vice-CAC when it comes to ball.”

“And this,” I said, “concerns me how?”

“I’m short a player.”

I laughed so loudly Bubba and Angie turned their heads in the living room, looked over their shoulders at me.

“That’s hilarious?” Broussard said.

“Remy,” I said, “I’m white and over thirty. I have permanent nerve damage to one hand, and I haven’t picked up a football since I was fifteen.”

“Oscar Lee told me you ran track in college, played baseball, too.”

“To pay my tuition,” I said. “I was second-string in both cases.” I shook my head and chuckled. “Find another guy. Sorry.”

“I don’t have time. Game’s at three. Come on, man. Please. I’m begging you. I need a guy can tuck a ball under his arm and run short yards, play a little defensive end. Don’t bullshit me. Oscar says you’re one of the fastest white guys he knows.”

“I take it Oscar will be there.”

“Hell, yeah. Playing against us, of course.”

“Devin?”

“Amronklin?” Broussard said. “He’s their coach. Please, Patrick. You don’t help me out, we’re screwed.”

I looked back at the living room. Bubba and Angie were staring at me with perplexed faces.

“Where?”

“Harvard Stadium. Three o’clock.”

I didn’t say anything for a bit.

“Look, man, if this helps, I play fullback. I’ll be punching your holes for you, making sure you don’t get a scratch.”

“Three o’clock,” I said.

“Harvard Stadium. See you there.”

He hung up.

I immediately dialed Oscar’s number.

It was a full minute before he stopped laughing. “He bought it?” he sputtered eventually.

“Bought what?”

“All that shit I sold him about your speed.” More laughter, loud and followed by a few coughs.

“Why’s that so funny?”

“Whoo-ee,” Oscar said. “Whoo-ee! He’s got you playing running back?”

“That seems to be the plan.”

Oscar laughed some more.

“What’s the punch line?” I said.

“The punch line,” Oscar said, “is you better stay away from the left side.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m starting at left tackle.”

I closed my eyes, leaned my head against the fridge. Of all the appliances in the kitchen, the fridge was the most apt to touch my flesh to in the current situation. It was roughly the size, shape, and weight of Oscar.

“See you on the field.” Oscar hooted loudly several times and hung up.

I walked back through the living room on my way toward the bedroom.

“Where you going?” Angie said.

“To bed.”

“Why?”

“Got a big game this afternoon.”

“What sort of game?” Bubba said.

“Football.”

“What?” Angie said loudly.

“You heard me right,” I said. I went into the bedroom, closed the door behind me.

They were still laughing when I fell asleep.

29

It seemed like every other guy on the Narcotics, Vice, and Crimes Against Children squads was named John. There was John Ives, John Vreeman, and John Pasquale. The quarterback was John Lawn and one of the wide receivers was John Coltraine, but everyone called him The Jazz. A tall, thin, baby-faced narcotics cop named Johnny Davis played tight end on offense and free safety on D. John Corkery, night watch commander at the 16th precinct and the only guy with the team besides me who wasn’t attached to Narco, Vice, or CAC, was the coach. A third of the Johns had brothers in the same squad, so John Pasquale played tight end and his brother Vic was a wide receiver. John Vreeman set up at left guard while his brother Mel crouched at right. John Lawn was supposedly a pretty good quarterback but took a lot of razzing for favoring passes to his brother Mike.

All in all, I gave up trying to put names to faces after ten minutes and decided to call everyone John until I was corrected.

The rest of the players on the DoRights, as they called themselves, had other names, but they all shared a similar look, no matter what their size or color. It was the cop look, the way they had of carrying themselves that was loose and wary at the same time, the hard caution in their eyes even when they were laughing, the sense you got from all of them that you could go from being their friend to their enemy in a split second. It didn’t matter which way to them, it was your choice, but once the decision was made they would act accordingly and immediately.

I’ve known a lot of cops, hung out with them, drank with them, considered a few to be my friends. But even when one was your friend, it was a different kind of friendship than you had with civilians. I never felt completely at ease with a cop, completely sure I knew what one was thinking. Cops always hold something back, except occasionally, I assume, around other cops.

Broussard clapped his hand on my shoulder and introduced me around to the team. I got several handshakes, some smiles and curt nods, one “Nice fucking job on Corwin Earle, Mr. Kenzie,” and then we all huddled around John Corkery as he gave us the game plan.

It wasn’t much of a plan. Basically it had to do with what a pack of prima-donna pussies the guys in Homicide and Robbery were, and how we had to play this game for Poole, whose only chance to make it out of ICU alive, apparently, was if we stomped the shit out of the other team. Lose, and Poole’s death would be on our conscience.

While Corkery talked, I looked across the field at the other team. Oscar caught my eye and waved happily, a shit-eating grin on his face the size of the Merrimack Valley. Devin saw me looking and smiled, too, nudged a rabid-looking monster with the scrunched features of a Pekinese, and pointed across the field at me. The monster nodded. The rest of the Homicide and Robbery guys didn’t look quite as big as our team, but they looked smarter, and quick, and had a leanness to them that spoke more of gristle than delicacy.

“Hundred bucks to the first guy knocks one of them out of the game,” Corkery said, and clapped his hands together. “Kill the motherfuckers.”

That must have been it for the Rockne-like inspiration, because the team came off its haunches and banged fists and clapped hands.

“Where are the helmets?” I said to Broussard.

One of the Johns was passing as I said it, and he clapped Broussard’s back and said, “Fucking guy’s hilarious, Broussard. Where’d you find him?”

“No helmets,” I said.

Broussard nodded. “It’s a touch game,” he said. “No hard contact.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Sure.”

Homicide-Robbery, or the HurtYous as they called themselves, won the coin toss and elected to receive. Our kicker drove them back to their eleven, and as we lined up, Broussard pointed to a slim black guy on the HurtYous and said, “Jimmy Paxton. He’s your guy. Stick to him like a tumor.”

The HurtYous’ center snapped the ball and the quarterback dropped back three steps, fired the ball over my head, and hit Jimmy Paxton on the twenty-five. I had no idea how Paxton got past me, never mind to the twenty-five, but I made an awkward lunge that tapped his ankles at the twenty-nine, and the teams moved upfield to the line of scrimmage.

“I said like a tumor,” Broussard said. “Did you get that part?”

I looked across at him and saw a hard fury in his eyes. Then he smiled, and I realized how far he’d probably gotten on that smile his whole life. It was that good, that boyish and American and pure.

“I’ll see if I can adjust,” I said.

The HurtYous broke their huddle, and I saw Devin on the sideline exchange a nod with Jimmy Paxton.

“They’re going to come right back at me again,” I said to Broussard.

John Pasquale, the cornerback, said, “Might want to improve then, huh?”

The HurtYous snapped the ball and Jimmy Paxton streaked down the sideline and I streaked with him. His eyes flickered and he extended his back and said, “’Bye, white boy,” and I went up with him, spun my body around and extended my right arm, whacked at the air, hit pigskin instead, and swatted the ball out of bounds.

Jimmy Paxton and I came down together in a heap, banged off the ground, and I knew it was the first of many impacts that would probably keep me in bed all through tomorrow.

I got up first and reached down for Paxton. “I thought you were going somewhere.”

He smiled and took the hand. “Keep talking, white boy. You’re getting winded already.”

We walked back down the sidelines toward the line of scrimmage and I said, “Just so you don’t have to keep calling me white boy, and I don’t have to start calling you black boy, start a race riot at Harvard, I’m Patrick.”

He slapped my hand. “Jimmy Paxton.”

“Nice to meet you, Jimmy.”

Devin ran the next play at me again, and once again I swatted the ball out of Jimmy Paxton’s waiting hands.

“Fucking mean bunch you’re with, Patrick,” Jimmy Paxton said, as we started the long walk back to scrimmage.

I nodded. “They think you guys are pussies.”

Jimmy nodded. “We might not be pussies, but we ain’t cowboys like those crazy fuckers. Narco, Vice, and CAC.” He whistled. “First ones through the door because they love the jizz.”

“The jizz?”

“The action, the orgasm. Forget the foreplay with those boys. They go right to the fucking. Know what I mean?”

The next play, Oscar lined up at fullback and leveled three guys at the snap, and the running back ran through a hole the size of my backyard. But one of the Johns-Pasquale or Vreeman, I had lost track-grabbed the ball carrier’s arm on the thirty-six, and the HurtYous decided to punt.

The rain came five minutes later and the rest of the first half was a sloppy grind-it-out Marty Schottenheimer-Bill Parcells kind of game. Slogging and slipping and tripping through the mud, neither team made much progress. As running back, I gained about twelve yards on four carries, and as a safety I got burned twice by Jimmy Paxton, but I broke up another potential bomb and otherwise stuck to him so tight the quarterback chose other receivers.

Near the end of the half, the score was tied at zero but we were threatening. Down in the HurtYous’ red zone, on a second and two with twenty seconds left, the DoRights ran an option and John Lawn tossed the ball to me and I saw a gaping hole and nothing but green beyond, did a little spin around a linebacker, stepped into the hole, tucked the ball under my arm, put my head down, and then Oscar loomed out of nowhere, his breath steaming through the cold rain, and hit me so hard I felt like I’d stepped into the path of a 747.

By the time I got off my back, the clock had run out and the hard rain splattered mud up off the field into my cheek. Oscar reached down with one of those porterhouses he calls hands and lifted me to my feet, chuckling softly under his breath.

“You gonna puke?”

“Thinking about it,” I said.

He whacked me on the back in what I guess was a friendly show of camaraderie that almost sent me into a face plant in the mud.

“Nice bid,” he said, and walked off toward his bench.

“What happened to touch football?” I said to Remy on the sidelines, as the DoRights opened a cooler full of beer and soda.

“Soon as someone does what Sergeant Lee just did, the gloves come off.”

“So we get helmets for the second half?”

He shook his head, pulled a beer from the cooler. “No helmets. We just get meaner.”

“Anyone ever died at one of these games?”

He smiled. “Not yet. Could happen, though. Beer?”

I shook my head, waiting for the ringing to stop in there. “Take a water.”

He passed me a bottle of Poland Spring, put a hand on my shoulder, and led me up the sideline a few yards, away from the rest. In the stands, a small group of people had gathered-runners, mostly, who’d stumbled on the game as they prepared to jog the steps, one tall guy sitting off to himself, long legs propped up on the rail, baseball hat pulled low over his eyes.

“Last night,” Broussard said, and let the two words hang in the rain.

I sipped some water.

“I said a thing or two I shouldn’t have. Too much rum, my head gets a little fucked up.”

I looked out at the collection of wide Greek columns that rose beyond the stands. “Such as?”

He stepped in front of me, his eyes dancing and bright. “Don’t try and play with me here, Kenzie.”

“Patrick,” I said, and took a step to my right.

He followed, his nose an inch from mine, that weird, dancing brightness filling his eyes. “We both know I let slip something I shouldn’t have. Let’s leave it at that and forget about it.”

I gave him a friendly, confused smile. “I don’t know where this is coming from, Remy.”

He shook his head slowly. “You don’t want to play it this way, Kenzie. You understand?”

“No, I-”

I never saw his hand move, but I felt a sharp sting on my knuckles and suddenly my water bottle was lying at my feet, chugging its contents into the mud.

“Forget last night, and we’ll be friends.” The lights in his eyes had stopped dancing but burned hard, as if embers were locked in the pupils.

I looked down at the water bottle, the mud encasing the sides of the clear plastic. “And if I don’t?”

“That’s not an ‘if’ you want to bring into your life.” He tilted his head, peered into my eyes as if he saw something there that might require extraction, might not; he wasn’t sure yet. “Are we clear on this?”

“Yeah, Remy,” I said. “We’re clear. Sure.”

He held my eyes for a long minute, breathing steadily through his nostrils. Eventually, he raised his beer to his lips, took a long pull on the can, lowered it.

“That’s Officer Broussard,” he said, and walked back upfield.

The second half of the game was war.

The rain and the mud and the smell of blood brought out something horrible in both teams, and in the carnage that ensued, three HurtYous and two DoRights left the game permanently. One of them-Mike Lawn-had to be carried off the field, after Oscar and a Robbery dick named Zeke Monfriez collided on either side of his body and damn near snapped him in half.

I sustained two heavily bruised ribs and one shot to the lower back that would probably have me pissing blood the next morning, but in view of all the bloody faces, noses flattened to pulps, and one guy spitting two teeth into the first-down hash mark, I felt comparatively fortunate.

Broussard switched to tailback and stayed away from me the rest of the game. He got a torn lower lip on one play, but two plays later clotheslined the guy who’d given it to him so viciously the guy lay on the field coughing and puking for a full minute before he could stand on legs so wobbly it looked like he was on the keel of a schooner in high seas. After he’d clotheslined the poor bastard, Broussard had kicked him while he was down for good measure, and the HurtYous went apeshit. Broussard stood behind a wall of his own men as Oscar and Zeke tried to get at him, called him a cheap-shot motherfucker, and he caught my eyes and smiled like a gleeful three-year-old.

He raised a finger caked with dark blood, and wagged it at me.

We won by a field goal.

As a guy who grew up as desperate to be a jock as any other guy in America, and one who still cancels most engagements on autumn Sunday afternoons, I suppose I should have been ecstatic at what would probably be my last taste of team sports, the thrill of conquest and the sexual intensity of battle. I should have felt like whooping, should have had tears in my eyes as I stood at midfield in the first football stadium ever built in this country, looked at the Greek columns and the rain boiling off the long planks of seating in the stands, smelled the last hint of winter dying in the April rain, the metallic odor of the rain itself, the lonely advance of evening in the cold purple sky.

But I didn’t feel any of that.

I felt like we were a bunch of foolish, pathetic men unwilling to accept our own aging and willing to break bones and tear the flesh of other men just so we could move a brown ball a couple of yards or feet or inches down a field.

And, also, looking along the sidelines at Remy Broussard as he poured a beer over his bloody finger, doused his torn lip with it, and accepted high-fives from his pals, I felt afraid.

“Tell me about him,” I said to Devin and Oscar, as we leaned against the bar.

“Broussard?”

“Yeah.”

Both teams had chosen to convene the postgame party at a bar on Western Avenue in Allston, about a half mile from the stadium. The bar was called the Boyne, after a river in Ireland that had snaked through the village where my mother grew up, lost her fisherman father and two brothers to the lethal liquid combination of whiskey and the sea.

It was excessively well-lit for an Irish bar, and the brightness was heightened by blond wood tables and light beige booths, a shiny blond bar. Most Irish bars are dark, steeped in mahogany and oak and black floors; in the darkness, I’ve always thought, lies the sense of intimacy my race feels is necessary to drink as heavily as we often do.

In the brightness of the Boyne, it was clear to see how the battle we’d just fought on the field had spilled over into the bar. The Homicide and Robbery guys stuck to the bar and the small high tables across from it. The Narco-Vice-CAC cops took over the rear of the place, draped themselves over the backs of booths, and stood in packs near the tiny stage by the fire exit, talking so loudly that the three-piece Irish band quit playing after four songs.

I have no idea how the management felt about the fifty bloody men who’d piled into the sparsely populated bar, if they had a team of extra bouncers waiting in the kitchen and a Def-Con alert called into the Brighton P.D., but they were definitely pulling down a profit, pouring beers and shots nonstop, trying to keep abreast of the calls for more coming from the rear of the bar, sending barbacks to wade through the men and sweep up the broken bottles and overturned ashtrays.

Broussard and John Corkery held court in the back, their voices rising loudly in toasts to the prowess of the DoRights, Broussard alternating a napkin and a cold beer bottle against his damaged lip.

“Thought you guys were buddies,” Oscar said. “What, your moms won’t let you play together anymore, or’d you have a spat?”

“The moms thing,” I said.

“Great cop,” Devin said. “Bit of a showboat, but all those Narco-Vice guys are.”

“But Broussard’s CAC. Hell, he’s not even that anymore. He’s Motor Pool.”

“CAC was recent,” Devin said. “Last two years or so. Before that he did like a nickel in Vice, a nickel in Narco.”

“More than that.” Oscar belched. “We came out of Housing together, did a year in uniform each, and he went into Vice, I went into Violent Crimes. That was ’eighty-three.”

Remy’s head turned away from two of his men as they each chatted in his ear, and he looked across the bar at Oscar and Devin and me. He raised his beer bottle, tilted his head.

We raised ours.

He smiled, kept his eyes on us for a minute, then turned back to his men.

“Once Vice, always Vice,” Devin said. “Those fucking guys.”

“We’ll get ’em next year,” Oscar said.

“Won’t be the same guys,” Devin said bitterly. “Broussard’s packing it in, so’s Vreeman. Corkery hits his thirty in January, heard he’s already bought the place in Arizona.”

I nudged his elbow. “What about you? You gotta be close to thirty in.”

He snorted. “I’m going to retire? To what?” He shook his head, threw back a shot of Wild Turkey.

“Only way we’re leaving the job is on stretchers,” Oscar said, and he and Devin clinked their pint glasses.

“Why the interest in Broussard?” Devin said. “Thought you two were bonded in blood after Trett’s house.” He turned his head, slapped my shoulder with the back of his hand. “Which, by the way, was a righteous piece of work.”

I ignored the compliment. “Broussard just interests me.”

Oscar said, “That why he slapped a water bottle out of your hand?”

I looked at Oscar. I’d been pretty sure Broussard had blocked the move with his body.

“You saw that?”

Oscar nodded his huge head. “Saw the look he gave you after he clotheslined Rog Doleman, too.”

Devin said, “And I can see how he keeps looking over here while we talk so friendly and casually.”

One of the Johns nudged his way between us, called out for two pitchers and three shots of Beam. He looked down at me, his elbow all but resting on my shoulder, then at Devin and Oscar.

“How’s it going, boys?”

“Fuck you, Pasquale,” Devin said.

Pasquale laughed. “I know you mean that in the most loving way.”

“But of course,” Devin said.

Pasquale chuckled to himself as the bartender brought the pitchers of beer. I leaned out of the way as Pasquale passed them back to John Lawn. He turned back to the bar, waited for his shots, drummed the bar with his fingers.

“You guys hear what our buddy Kenzie did in the Trett house?” He winked at me.

“Some of it,” Oscar said.

Pasquale said, “Roberta Trett, I hear, had Kenzie dead to rights in the kitchen. But Kenzie ducked and Roberta shot her own husband in the face instead.”

“Nice ducking,” Devin said.

Pasquale received his shots, tossed some cash down on the bar. “He’s a good ducker,” he said, and his elbow grazed my ear as he pulled his shots off the bar. He caught my eye as he turned. “That’s more luck than talent, though. Ducking. Don’t you think?” He turned so that his back was to Oscar and Devin, his eyes locked with mine as he threw back one of the shots. “And the thing about luck, man, it always runs out.”

Devin and Oscar turned on their stools and watched him as he walked back through the crowd toward the back.

Oscar pulled a half-smoked cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it, his flat gaze staying on Pasquale. He sucked back on the cigar, and the black, torn tobacco cackled.

“Subtle,” he said, and tossed his match into the ashtray.

“What’s going on, Patrick?” Devin’s voice was a monotone, his eyes on the empty shot glass Pasquale had left behind.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“You made an enemy of the cowboys,” Oscar said. “Never a bright move.”

“Wasn’t intentional,” I said.

“You got something on Broussard?” Devin said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Yeah.”

Devin nodded and his right hand dropped off the bar, gripped my elbow tight. “Whatever it is,” he said, and smiled tightly in Broussard’s direction, “let it go.”

“What if I can’t?”

Oscar’s head loomed around Devin’s shoulder, and he looked at me with that dead gaze of his. “Walk away, Patrick.”

“What if I can’t?” I repeated.

Devin sighed. “Then you might not be able to walk anywhere soon.”

30

In the blind hope that it might make a difference, we decided to drive over to see Poole.

The New England Medical Center sprawls across two city blocks, its various buildings and skywalks occupying a linchpin spot between Chinatown, the theater district, and what remains, gasping and gulping, of the old Combat Zone.

On an early Sunday morning, it’s tough to find an open parking meter around New England Med: on a Thursday night, it’s impossible. The Schubert was playing its upteenth revival of Miss Saigon and the Wang was showing the latest bombastic Andrew Lloyd Webber or someone similar’s piece of sold-out, overwrought, overdone, singing dung extravaganza, and lower Tremont Street was teeming with taxis, limos, black ties, and blond fur, angry cops blowing whistles and waving traffic in a wide arc around the triple-parked throng.

We didn’t even bother circling the block, just turned into New England Med’s parking garage, took our ticket, and drove up six levels before we found a spot. After I’d exited the car, I held Angie’s door for her as she struggled onto her crutches, shut the door behind her as she worked her way out between the cars.

“Which way to the elevator?” she called back to me.

A young man with the tall, ropy build of a basketball player said, “That way,” and pointed to his left. He leaned against the hatch of a black Chevy Suburban and smoked a slim cigar with the red Cohiba label still wrapped around it near the base.

“Thanks,” Angie said, and we proffered stock-friendly smiles as we passed him.

He smiled back, gave a small wave with the cigar.

“He’s dead.”

We stopped, and I turned back and looked at the guy. He wore a navy-blue fleece jacket with a brown leather collar over a black V-neck and black jeans. His black cowboy boots were as weathered as a rodeo rider’s. He tapped some ash from the cigar, put it back in his mouth, and looked at me.

“This is the part where you say, ‘Who’s dead?’” He looked down at his boots.

“Who’s dead?” I said.

“Nick Raftopoulos,” he said.

Angie turned fully around on her crutches. “Excuse me?”

“That’s who you came to see, right?” He held out his hands, shrugged. “Well, you can’t, because he died an hour ago. Cardiac arrest due to massive trauma as a result of gunshot injuries incurred on Leon Trett’s front porch. Perfectly natural, given the circumstances.”

Angie swung her crutches and I took a few steps until we were both standing in front of the man.

He smiled. “Your next line is, ‘How do you know who we’re here to see?’” he said. “Take it, either one of you.”

“Who are you?” I said.

He slung his hand low in my direction. “Neal Ryerson. Call me Neal. Wish I had a cool nickname, but some of us aren’t so blessed. You’re Patrick Kenzie, and you’re Angela Gennaro. And I must say, ma’am, even with the cast and all, your picture doesn’t do you justice. You’re what my daddy’d call a looker.”

“Poole’s dead?” Angie said.

“Yes, ma’am. ’Fraid so. Say, Patrick, could you shake my hand? It’s a little tiring holding it out like this.”

I gave it a light squeeze, and he offered it to Angie. She leaned back on her crutches and ignored it, looked up into Neal Ryerson’s face. She shook her head.

He glanced at me. “Fear of cooties?”

He withdrew the hand and dug it into his inside coat pocket.

I reached behind my back.

“No fear, Mr. Kenzie. No fear.” He withdrew a slim wallet and flipped it open, showed us a silver badge and ID. “Special Agent Neal Ryerson,” he said, in a deep baritone. “Justice Department. Ta-da!” He closed the wallet, slipped it back in his jacket. “Organized Crime Division, if you need to know. Christ, you’re a chatty couple.”

“Why are you bothering us?” I said.

“Because, Mr. Kenzie, judging by what I saw at that football game this afternoon, you’re kinda short of friends. And I’m in the friend business.”

“I’m not looking for one.”

“You might not have a choice. I may have to be your friend whether you like it or not. I’m pretty good at it, too. I’ll listen to your war stories, watch baseball with you, generally pal around with you at all the hip watering holes.”

I looked at Angie, and we turned and started walking toward our car. I went to her side first, unlocked the door, and started to open it.

“Broussard will kill you,” Ryerson said.

We looked back at him. He took a puff of his Cohiba and came off the back of the Suburban, sauntered toward us with loose, long strides, as if he were walking off court at the end of a period.

“He’s real good at that, killing people. Usually doesn’t do it himself, but he plans it well. He’s a first-rate planner.”

I took Angie’s crutches from her and brushed Ryerson back with the rear door as I opened it to slide them in the backseat. “We’ll be fine, Special Agent Ryerson.”

“I’m sure that’s what Chris Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierrez thought.”

Angie leaned against her open door. “Was Pharaoh Gutierrez DEA?” She reached into her pocket, removed her cigarettes.

Ryerson shook his head. “Nope. Informant for the OCD.” He stepped past me and lit Angie’s cigarette with a black Zippo. “My informant. I turned him. I’d worked him for six and a half years. He was going to help me bring down Cheese, and Cheese’s organization was going to be next. After that, I was going after Cheese’s supplier, guy named Ngyun Tang.” He pointed at the east wall of the garage. “Chinatown bigwig.”

“But?”

“But”-he shrugged-“Pharaoh got hisself iced.”

“And you think Broussard did it?”

“I think Broussard planned it. He didn’t kill them himself because he was too busy pretending to get shot at up in the quarry.”

“So who killed Mullen and Gutierrez?”

Ryerson looked up at the garage ceiling. “Who took the money out of the hills? Who was the first person found in the vicinity of the victims?”

“Wait a sec,” Angie said. “Poole? You think Poole was the shooter?”

Ryerson leaned against the Audi parked beside our car, took a long puff off his cigar, and blew smoke rings up into the fluorescent lights.

“Nicholas Raftopoulos. Born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, 1948. Joined Boston Police Department in 1968, shortly after returning from Vietnam, where he was awarded the Silver Star and was, surprise, an expert-class marksman. His lieutenant in the field said Corporal Raftopoulos could, and I quote, ‘shoot the asshole ring out of a tse-tse fly from fifty yards.’” He shook his head. “Those military guys-they’re so vivid.”

“And you think-”

“I think, Mr. Kenzie, that the three of us need to talk.”

I took a step back from him. He was easily six-three, and his perfectly coiffed sandy hair, his easy bearing, and the cut of his clothes spoke of a man who’d come from money. I recognized him now: He’d been the spectator sitting alone at the far end of the stands in Harvard Stadium this afternoon, long legs hooked over the guardrail as he slouched low in his seat, baseball hat down over his eyes. I could see him at Yale trying to decide between law school and a job with the government. Either career held the promise of political office once the gray had blended in just right around his temples, but if he went with the government, he’d get to carry a gun. Outstanding. Yes, sir.

“Nice meeting you, Neal.” I walked around to the driver’s door.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said he’ll kill you.”

Angie chuckled. “And you’ll save us, I suppose.”

“I’m Justice Department.” He placed a palm to his chest. “Bulletproof.”

I looked over the roof of the Crown Victoria at him. “That’s because you’re always behind the people you’re supposed to be protecting, Neal.”

“Oooh.” His hand fluttered over his chest. “Good one, Pat.”

Angie climbed in the car, and I followed. As I started the engine, Neal Ryerson rapped his knuckles on Angie’s window. She frowned and looked at me. I shrugged. She rolled the pane down slowly, and Neal Ryerson dropped to his haunches, rested one arm on her windowsill.

“I got to tell you,” he said. “I think you’re making a big mistake by not hearing me out.”

“Made ’em before,” Angie said.

He leaned back from her door and took a puff of his cigar, blew the smoke out before he leaned back in.

“When I was a kid, my daddy’d take me hunting in the mountains not far from where I grew up, place called Boone, North Carolina. And Daddy, he always told me-every trip from the time I was eight till I was eighteen-that what you had to watch out for, really watch out for, wasn’t the moose or the deer. It was the other hunters.”

“Deep,” Angie said.

He smiled. “See, Pat, Angie-”

“Don’t call him Pat,” Angie said. “He hates that.”

He held up the hand with the cigar clenched between the fingers. “All apologies, Patrick. How can I say this? The enemy is us. You understand? And ‘us’ is going to come looking for you soon.” He pointed the thin cigar at me. “‘Us’ already had words with you today, Patrick. How long before he ups the ante? He knows that even if you back off for a bit, sooner or later you’ll come around again, asking the wrong questions. Hell, that’s why you came to see Nick Raftopoulos tonight, am I right? Hoping he’d be coherent enough to answer some of your wrong questions. Now you can drive away. Can’t stop y’all. But he’ll come for you. And this’ll just get worse.”

I looked at Angie. She looked at me. Ryerson’s cigar smoke found the inside of the car and then the back of my lungs, clogged there like hair in a drain.

Angie turned back to him, waved him off the windowsill with a flick of her wrist. “The Blue Diner,” she said. “You know it?”

“Just a short six blocks away.”

“See you there,” she said, and we pulled out of our parking slot and headed for the exit ramp.

The exterior of the Blue Diner looks really cool at night. The only hint of neon fronting Kneeland Street at the base of the Leather District, a large white coffee cup hovers over its sign in a mostly commercial zone, so that the establishment appears, from the highway at least, like something straight out of Edward Hopper’s night-washed daydreams.

I’m not sure Hopper would have paid six thousand dollars for a hamburger, though. Not that the Blue Diner charges quite that much, but it’s in the ballpark. I’ve bought cars for less than I’ve paid for a cup of their coffee.

Neal Ryerson assured us the tab was on the Justice Department, so we splurged on coffee and a couple of Cokes. I would have ordered a hamburger, but then I remembered that the Justice Department budget was provided by my tax dollars, and Ryerson’s generosity didn’t seem like so much of a big deal.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” he said.

“By all means,” Angie said.

He poured some cream into his coffee, passed it to me. “Where did all this start?”

“With Amanda McCready’s disappearance,” I said.

He shook his head. “No. That’s just where you two came into it.” He stirred his coffee, removed the spoon, and pointed it at us. “Three years ago, Narcotics officer Remy Broussard busts Cheese Olamon, Chris Mullen, and Pharaoh Gutierrez doing a quality-control check of a processing plant in South Boston.”

“I thought all drug processing was done overseas,” Angie said.

“‘Processing’ is a euphemism. Basically, they were stomping the shit-cocaine, that time-cutting it with Similac. Broussard and his partner, Poole, couple of other Narcotics cowboys, bust Olamon, my boy Gutierrez, and a bunch of other fellas. Thing is, they don’t arrest them.”

“Why not?”

Ryerson removed a fresh cigar from his pocket, then frowned when he noticed a sign that read NO CIGAR OR PIPE SMOKING PLEASE. THANK YOU. He groaned and put the cigar on the table, fingered the cellophane wrapping.

“They don’t arrest them, because after they burned the evidence, there was nothing to arrest them for.”

“They burned the coke,” I said.

He nodded. “According to Pharaoh, they did. There’d been rumors floating around for years that there was a rogue unit of the Narcotics Division that had been given a mandate to hit dealers where it hurt the most. Not with busts that would give the dealers street cred, news coverage, and a very dubious conviction rate. No. This rogue unit was alleged to destroy what they caught them with. And make them watch. It was, remember, a war on drugs, supposedly. And some enterprising Boston cops decided to fight it like a guerrilla war. These guys, rumor had it, were the true untouchables. They couldn’t be bought. They couldn’t be reasoned with. They were zealots. They ran a lot of smaller dealers out of business, ran a lot of newcomers straight back out of town. The bigger dealers-the Cheese Olamons, the Winter Hill gang types, the Italians, and the Chinese-pretty soon started factoring in these raids as the price of doing business, and ultimately, because the whole drug business went into a downswing, and because the raids never proved all that much more effective than anything else, the unit was rumored to have been disbanded.”

“And Broussard and Poole transferred to CAC.”

He nodded. “Some other guys did, too, or stayed in Narcotics, or transferred to Vice or Warrants, what have you. But Cheese Olamon never forgot. And he never forgave. He swore that one day he’d get Broussard.”

“Why Broussard and not the other guys?”

“According to Pharaoh, Cheese felt personally insulted by Broussard. It wasn’t just the burning of his product, it was that Broussard taunted him while they did it, embarrassed him in front of his men. Cheese took that to heart.”

Angie lit a cigarette, held out the pack to Ryerson.

He looked at his cigar, back at the sign that told him he couldn’t smoke it, and said, “Sure. Why not?”

He smoked the cigarette like a cigar, not really inhaling, just puffing, allowing the smoke to roll around on his tongue for a moment before exhaling it.

“Last autumn,” he said, “Pharaoh makes contact with me. We meet, and he says Cheese has something on that cop from a few years back. Cheese, he promises me, is playing Payback’s a Bitch, and Mullen has intimated to Pharaoh that everyone who was in that warehouse that night and had to sit by and be humiliated while Broussard and his boys burned the coke and laughed in their faces is going to enjoy this one. Now, besides everything else, I’m a little confused why Mullen and Pharaoh are suddenly so chummy that Mullen would intimate anything to him. Pharaoh gives me this bygones-be-bygones shit, but I don’t buy it. I figure there’s only one thing Pharaoh and Chris Mullen would bond over, and that’s greed.”

“So there was a palace coup in the works,” I said.

He nodded. “Unfortunately for Pharaoh, Cheese got wind of it.”

“So what did Cheese have on Broussard?” Angie said.

“Pharaoh never told me. Claimed Mullen wouldn’t say. Said it would ruin the surprise. The last word I ever got from Pharaoh was the afternoon of the night he died. He told me he and Mullen had been dragging cops all over the city the last few days, and that night they were going to collect two hundred grand, humiliate the cop, and go home. And as soon as that was done, and Pharaoh could figure what it was exactly that the cop had done, he was going to rat him and Mullen out to me, give me the biggest collar of my career, and then I’d be off his back for good. Or so he hoped.” Ryerson stubbed out his cigarette. “We know the rest.”

Angie gave him a confused frown. “We don’t know anything. Shit. Agent Ryerson, have you come up with any sort of theory as to how Amanda McCready’s disappearance plays into all this?”

He shrugged. “Maybe Broussard kidnapped her himself.”

“Why?” I said. “He just woke up one day, decided he wanted to kidnap a child?”

“I’ve heard of weirder things.” He leaned into the table. “Look, Cheese had something on him. So, what was it? Everything keeps coming back to that little girl’s vanishing. So let’s look at it. Broussard kidnaps her, maybe as a way to force the mother’s hand, come up with the two hundred grand Pharaoh told me she embezzled from Cheese.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “This has bothered me forever: Why didn’t Cheese send Mullen to beat the location of the stolen money out of Helene and Ray Likanski months before Amanda disappeared?”

“Because Cheese didn’t find out about the scam until the day Amanda disappeared.”

“What?”

He nodded. “The beauty of Likanski’s scam-while shortsighted, I admit-was that he knew everyone would assume the money was impounded along with the bikers and the drugs. It took Cheese three months to find out the truth. The day he did was the same day Amanda McCready disappeared.”

“So,” Angie said, “that points to Mullen being the kidnapper.”

He shook his head. “I don’t buy it. I think Mullen or someone working for Cheese went to Helene’s that night to fuck her up bad and find out where the money was. But instead, they saw Broussard taking the kid. So now Cheese has something on Broussard. He blackmails him. But Broussard then plays both sides up against the middle. He tells the law enforcement side that Cheese kidnapped her and demands the ransom. He tells Cheese’s side that he’ll bring the money to the quarries that night and give it to Mullen, knowing he’s going to drop them, dump the little girl, and scoot with the cash. He-”

“That’s idiotic,” I said.

“Why?”

“Why would Cheese allow himself to be perceived as the kidnapper of Amanda McCready?”

“He didn’t allow himself. Broussard set him up for it without telling him.”

I shook my head. “Broussard did tell him. I was there. We went to Concord Prison in October and quizzed Cheese about the disappearance. If he were complicitous with Broussard, they both would have had to agree that the blame would fall on Cheese’s men. Now why would Cheese do that, if, as you say, he had Broussard by the balls? Why take the fall for the kidnapping and death of a four-year-old when he didn’t have to?”

He pointed his unlit cigar at me. “So you would believe it, Mr. Kenzie. Haven’t you two ever wondered why you were allowed so deeply into a police investigation? Why you were named to be at the quarry that night? You were witnesses. That was your role. Broussard and Cheese put on a show for you at Concord Prison: Poole and Broussard put on another one at the quarry. Your whole purpose was to see what they wanted you to see and accept it as truth.”

“By the way,” Angie said, “how could Poole have faked a heart attack?”

“Cocaine,” Ryerson said. “Seen it once before. It’s risky as hell because the coke could easily trigger a real coronary. But if you do pull it off, a guy of Poole’s age and occupation? Not many doctors would have thought to look for coke, just would have assumed a heart attack.”

I counted twelve cars pass by on Kneeland Street before any of us spoke again.

“Agent Ryerson, let’s back up again.” Angie’s cigarette had burned to a long curve of white ash in the ashtray, and she pushed the filter off the indented crevice that held it. “We agree Cheese saw Mullen and Gutierrez as threats. What if he felt he had to take them out? And what if what he had on Broussard was so bad, he put him up to it?”

“Put Broussard up to it?”

She nodded.

Ryerson leaned back in the booth, looked out the window at the dark cast-iron buildings on the South Street corner. Over his shoulder, on Kneeland Street, I noticed the familiar urban sight of a boxy, nut-brown UPS truck idling with its hazards on, blocking a lane as the driver opened the back and took out a two-wheeler, pulled several boxes from the truck, and stacked them on the upright cart.

“So,” Ryerson said to Angie, “your operating theory is that while Cheese thought he was putting one over on Mullen and Gutierrez, Broussard was putting one over on all three of them.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. We have information that Mullen and Gutierrez thought they were picking up drugs at the quarry that night.”

The UPS guy jogged past the window, pushing the two-wheeler in front of him, and I wondered who got deliveries this late at night. Law firms burning the midnight oil on a big case, perhaps? Printers in a rush to make deadline, maybe. A high-tech computer firm doing whatever it was high-tech computer firms did while the rest of the world prepared for sleep.

“But, again,” Ryerson said, “we keep coming back to motive. If what Cheese had on Broussard was that he kidnapped the girl? Fine. But why? What was Broussard thinking when he went to the house that night to grab a child he never met and take her away from her mother? It doesn’t add up.”

The UPS guy was back in a flash, clipboard tucked under his arm, jogging faster now that the two-wheeler was empty.

“And another thing,” Ryerson said. “If we accept that a decorated cop who works for a unit that finds kids would do something as loony and seemingly motiveless as snatching a kid from her home, how’s he to do it? He watches the house on his own time until the woman leaves, knowing somehow that she’d leave her door unlocked? It’s stupid.”

“But yet you think that’s what happened,” Angie said.

“In my gut, yeah. I know Broussard took that girl. I just can’t for the life of me figure out why.”

The UPS guy hopped in the truck and it slipped past the window, cut into the left lane, and disappeared from view.

“Patrick?”

“Huh?”

“You still with us?”

“Not with a criminal record, you can’t.”

Angie touched my arm. “What did you just say?”

I hadn’t realized I’d said it aloud. “You can’t get a job driving for UPS if you have a criminal record.”

Ryerson blinked and gave me a look like he thought he should produce a thermometer, see if I had a fever. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I glanced back at Kneeland Street, then looked at Ryerson, then Angie. “That first day he was in our office, Lionel said he’d taken a bust-a hard bust-once, before he cleaned his act up.”

“So?” Angie said.

“So if there was a bust, there should be a record of it. And if there’s a record of it, how’d he get a job working for UPS?”

Ryerson said, “I don’t see-”

“Ssshh.” Angie held up a hand, looked in my eyes. “You think Lionel…”

I shifted in my seat, pushed my cold coffee away. “Who had access to Helene’s apartment? Who could open the door with a key? Who would Amanda readily leave with, no fuss, no noise?”

“But he came to us.”

“No,” I said. “His wife did. He kept saying, ‘Thanks for listening to us, blah, blah, blah.’ Getting ready to brush us off. It was Beatrice who put the pressure on. What did she say when she was in our office? ‘No one wanted me to come here. Not Helene, not my husband.’ It was Beatrice who kept this thing alive. And Lionel-he loves his sister, okay. But is he blind? He’s not stupid. So how does he not know about Helene’s association with Cheese? How does he not know she has a drug problem? He acted surprised when he heard she did some coke, for Christ’s sake. I talk to my own sister once a week, see her only once a year, but I’d know if she had a drug problem. She’s my sister.”

“What you said about the criminal record,” Ryerson said. “How’s that play into it?”

“Let’s say it was Broussard who busted him, had him on a hook. Lionel owed him. Who knows?”

“But why would Lionel kidnap his own niece?”

I thought about it, closed my eyes until I could see Lionel standing in front of me. That hound-dog face and sad eyes, those shoulders that seemed to have the weight of a metropolis pushing down on them, the pained decency in his voice-the voice of a man who truly didn’t understand why people did all the shitty, neglectful things they did. I heard the volcanic rage in his voice when he’d blown up at Helene in the kitchen that morning we’d confronted her about knowing Cheese, the hint of hatred in that volume. He’d told us he believed that his sister loved her child, was good for her. But what if he’d lied? What if he believed the opposite? What if he thought less of his sister’s parenting skills than his own wife did? But he, the child of alcoholics and bad parents himself, had learned how to mask things, to cover his rage, would have had to in order to build himself into the kind of citizen, the kind of father, he’d become.

“What if,” I said aloud, “Amanda McCready wasn’t abducted by someone who wanted to exploit her or abuse her or ransom her?” I met Ryerson’s slightly skeptical eyes, then Angie’s curious, excited ones. “What if Amanda McCready was abducted for her own good?”

Ryerson spoke slowly, carefully. “You think the uncle stole the child…”

I nodded. “To save the child.”

31

“Lionel’s gone,” Beatrice said.

“Gone?” I said. “Where?”

“North Carolina,” she said. She stepped back from the door. “Please, come in.”

We followed her into the living room. Her son, Matt, looked up as we came in. He lay on his stomach in the middle of the floor, drawing on a pad of paper with a variety of pens, pencils, and crayons. He was a good-looking kid, with the smallest hint of his father’s hound-dog sag in his jaw but none of the weight on his shoulders. He’d inherited his eyes from his mother, and the sapphire blazed under his pitch-black eyebrows and the wavy hair atop his head.

“Hi, Patrick. Hi, Angie.” He looked up with benign curiosity at Neal Ryerson.

“Hey.” Ryerson squatted by him. “I’m Neal. What’s your name?”

Matt shook Ryerson’s hand without hesitation, looked in his eyes with the openness of a child who’s been taught to respect adults but not fear them.

“Matt,” he said. “Matt McCready.”

“Pleased to meet you, Matt. Whatcha drawing there?”

Matt turned the pad so we could all see it. Stick figures of various colors appeared to climb all over a car three times their height and as long as a commercial airliner.

“Pretty good.” Ryerson raised his eyebrows. “What is it?”

“Guys trying to ride in a car,” Matt said.

“Why can’t they get in?” I asked.

“It’s locked,” Matt said, as if the answer explained everything.

“But they want that car,” Ryerson said. “Huh?”

Matt nodded. “’Cause it-”

“Because, Matthew,” Beatrice said.

He looked up at her, confused at first, but then smiled. “Right. Because it has TVs inside and Game Boys and Whopper Jrs. and-uh, Cokes.”

Ryerson covered a smile with a wipe of his hand. “All the good stuff.”

Matt smiled up at him. “Yeah.”

“Well, you keep at it,” he said. “It’s coming along nice.”

Matt nodded and turned the pad back toward himself. “I’m putting buildings in next. It needs buildings.”

And as if we’d been part of a dream, he picked up a pencil and turned back to the pad with such complete concentration, I’m sure we and everything else vanished from the room.

“Mr. Ryerson,” Beatrice said. “I’m afraid we haven’t met.”

Her small hand disappeared in his long one. “Neal Ryerson, ma’am. I’m with the Justice Department.”

Beatrice glanced at Matt, lowered her voice. “So this is about Amanda?”

Ryerson shrugged. “We wanted to check a few things with your husband.”

“What things?”

Ryerson had been clear before we left the diner that the last thing we wanted to do was spook Lionel or Beatrice. If Beatrice notified her husband that he was under suspicion, he could disappear for good, and Amanda’s whereabouts might just go with him.

“Be honest with you, ma’am. The Justice Department has what’s called the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. We do a lot of follow-up work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Nation’s Missing Children Organization, and their databases. General stuff.”

“So this isn’t a break in the case?” Beatrice kneaded her shirttail between her fingers and the heel of her palm, looked up into Ryerson’s face.

“No, ma’am, I wish it were. As I said, it’s just some basic follow-up questions for the database. And because your husband was first on the scene the night your niece disappeared, I wanted to go over it with him again, see if there was anything he might have noticed-a small thing here or there, say-which might produce a fresh way of looking at this.”

She nodded, and I almost winced to see how easily she bought Ryerson’s lies.

“Lionel helps a friend of his who sells antiques. Ted Kenneally. He and Lionel have been friends since grade school. Ted owns Kenneally Antiques in Southie. Every month or so, they drive to North Carolina and drop some off in a town called Wilson.”

Ryerson nodded. “The antiques center of North America, yes, ma’am.” He smiled. “I’m from those parts.”

“Oh. Is there anything I could help you with? Lionel will be back tomorrow afternoon.”

“Well, sure, you could help. Mind if I ask you a bunch of boring questions I’m sure you’ve been asked a thousand times already?”

She shook her head quickly. “No. Not at all. If it can help, I’ll answer questions all night. Why don’t I make some tea?”

“That’d be great, Mrs. McCready.”

While Matt continued to color, we drank tea and Ryerson asked Beatrice a string of questions that had long ago been answered: about the night Amanda disappeared, about Helene’s mothering skills, about those early crazy days after Amanda had first disappeared, when Beatrice organized searches, established herself as media contact, plastered the streets with her niece’s picture.

Every now and then Matt would show us his progress on the picture, the skyscrapers with rows of misaligned window squares, the clouds and dogs he’d added to the paper.

I began to regret coming here. I was a spy in their home, a traitor, hoping to gather evidence that would send Beatrice’s husband and Matt’s father to prison. Just before we left, Matt asked Angie if he could sign her cast. When she said of course, his eyes lit up and he took an extra thirty seconds finding just the right pen. As he knelt by the cast and signed his full name very carefully, I felt an ache creep behind my eyes, a boulder of melancholia settle in my chest at the thought of what this kid’s life would be like if we were right about his father, and the law stepped in and blew this family apart.

But still, the overriding concern remained strong enough to stanch even my shame.

Where was she?

Goddammit. Where was she?

Once we’d left, we stopped at Ryerson’s Suburban as he peeled the cellophane from another thin cigar, used a sterling silver cutter to snip the end. He looked back at the house as he lit it.

“She’s a nice lady.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Great kid.”

“He’s a great kid, yeah,” I agreed.

“This sucks,” he said, and puffed at the cigar as he held the flame to it.

“Yes, it does.”

“I’m going to go stake out Ted Kenneally’s store. It’s, what, like a mile from here?”

Angie said, “More like three.”

“I didn’t ask her the address. Shit.”

“There’s only a few antique stores in Southie,” I said. “Kenneally’s is on Broadway, right across from a restaurant called Amrheins.”

He nodded. “Care to join me? Could be the safest place for both of you right now with Broussard out there on the loose.”

Angie said, “Sure.”

Ryerson looked at me. “Mr. Kenzie?”

I looked back at Beatrice’s house, the yellow squares of light in the living room windows, thought of the occupants on the other side of those squares, the tornado they weren’t even aware of circling their lives, gathering strength, blowing and blowing.

“I’ll meet you guys.”

Angie gave me a look. “What’s up?”

“I’ll meet you,” I said. “I got to do something.”

“What?”

“Nothing big.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “I’ll meet you. Okay? Please. Give me some room here.”

After a long look in my eyes, she nodded. She didn’t like it, but she understands my stubbornness as she understands her own. And she knows how useless it is to argue with me at certain times, the same way I recognize those moments in her.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Ryerson said.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not me.”

It was a long shot, but it paid off.

At two in the morning, Broussard, Pasquale, and a few other members of the DoRights football squad left the Boyne. By the way they hugged in the parking lot, I could tell they’d heard about Poole’s death, and their pain was genuine. Cops, as a rule, don’t hug, unless one of them has gone down in the line.

Pasquale and Broussard talked for a bit in the parking lot after the others drove off, and then Pasquale gave Broussard a last hard hug, rapped his fists on the big man’s back, and they separated.

Pasquale drove off in a Bronco, and Broussard made his way with the careful, self-conscious steps of a drunk to a Volvo station wagon, backed out onto Western Avenue, and headed east. I stayed way back on the mostly empty avenue, and almost missed him when his taillights disappeared at the Charles River.

I speeded up because he could have turned onto Storrow Drive, cut over to North Beacon, or gone either east or west on the Mass Pike at that juncture.

From the avenue, as I craned my head, I picked up the Volvo as it slipped under a wash of light heading for the westbound tollbooths on the pike.

I forced myself to slow down and passed through the toll about a minute after he had. After about two miles, I picked up the Volvo again. It traveled in the left lane, doing about sixty, and I hung back a hundred yards and matched its speed.

Boston cops are required to live in the greater metro area, but several I know get around that by subletting their Boston apartments to friends or relatives while they live farther out.

Broussard, I discovered, lived way out. After over an hour and a departure from the turnpike onto a series of small dark country roads, we ended up in the town of Sutton, nestled in the shadows of the Purgatory Chasm Reservation and far closer to both the Rhode Island and Connecticut borders than it was to Boston.

When Broussard turned off into a steep, sloping driveway that led up to a small brown Cape, its windows obscured by shrubs and small trees, I kept going, drove until I’d reached a crossroad where the road ended at a towering forest of pine. I turned around, my lights arcing through the deep dark, so much blacker than city dark, each beam of light seeming to promise sudden revelations of creatures foraging through the night, stopping my heart with glowing green eyes.

I turned back and found the house again, drove another eighty yards until my lights illuminated a shuttered home. I pulled down a drive littered with the mulch of last autumn’s leaves, buried the Crown Victoria behind a stand of trees, and sat in it for a bit, as the crickets and the wind rustling the trees made the only sounds in what seemed the heart of the heart of pure stillness.

I woke the next morning to two gorgeous brown eyes staring in at me. They were soft and sad and deep as shafts in a copper mine. They didn’t blink.

I jumped a bit in my seat as the long white-and-brown nose tilted toward my window, and my movement startled the curious animal. Before I was even sure I’d seen it, the deer hopped over the lawn and into the trees, and its white tail flashed once between two trunks and was gone.

“Jesus,” I said aloud.

Another flash of color caught my eye, this one on the other side of the trees directly in front of my windshield. It was a rush of tan, and as I looked through the opening to my right, Broussard’s Volvo sped past on the road. I had no idea if he was heading down the road for milk or all the way back to Boston, but in either case, I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

I took a set of lock picks from the glove compartment, slung my camera over my shoulder, shook the cobwebs from my head, and left the car. I walked up the road, staying close to the soft shoulder, the first warm day of the year beaming down on me from a sky so blue with oxygen and free of smog I had a hard time believing I was still in Massachusetts.

As I neared Broussard’s driveway, a tall, slim woman with long brown hair holding a child by the hand stepped out at the bottom from around a corner of thick pine. She bent with the child as he picked up the newspaper at the base of the drive and handed it to her.

I was too close to stop, and she looked up and covered her eyes against the sun, smiled uncertainly at me. The child holding her hand was maybe three, and his bright blond hair and pale white skin didn’t seem a match for either the woman or Broussard.

“Hi.” The woman rose and took the child with her, perched him on her hip as he sucked his thumb.

“Hi.”

She was a striking woman. Her wide mouth cut unevenly across her face, rose a bit on the left side, and there was something sensual in the skew, the hint of a grin that had discarded all illusions. A cursory glance at her mouth and cheekbones, the sunrise glow of her skin, and I could have easily mistook her for a former model, some financier’s trophy wife. Then I looked in her eyes. The hard, naked intelligence there unsettled me. This was not a woman who’d allow herself to be put on a man’s arm for show. In fact, I was certain this woman didn’t allow herself to be put anywhere.

She noticed the camera. “Birds?”

I looked at it, shook my head. “Just nature in general. Don’t see much of it where I’m from.”

“Boston?”

I shook my head. “Providence.”

She nodded, glanced at the paper, shook off the dew. “They used to wrap them in plastic to keep the moisture off,” she said. “Now I have to hang it in the bathroom for an hour just to read the front page.”

The boy on her hip placed his face sleepily to her breast, stared at me with eyes as open and blue as the sky.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” She kissed his head. “Tired?” She stroked his slightly chubby face, and the love in her eyes was a palpable, daunting thing.

When she looked back over at me, the love cleared, and for a moment I sensed either fear or suspicion. “There’s a forest.” She pointed down the road. “Right down there. It’s part of the Purgatory Chasm Reservation. Get some beautiful pictures there, I bet.”

I nodded. “Sounds great. Thanks for the advice.”

Maybe the child sensed something. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe just because he was a little kid and that’s what little kids do, he suddenly opened his mouth and howled.

“Oh-ho.” She smiled and kissed his head again, bounced him on her hip. “It’s okay, Nicky. It’s okay. Come on. Mommy’ll get you something to drink.”

She turned up the sloping driveway, bouncing the boy on her hip, caressing his face, her slim body moving like a dancer’s in her red-and-black lumberjack shirt and blue jeans.

“Good luck with nature,” she called over her shoulder.

“Thanks.”

She turned a bend in the driveway and I lost sight of her and the child behind the same thicket that obscured most of the house from the road.

But I could still hear her.

“Don’t cry, Nicky. Mommy loves you. Mommy’s going to make everything all right.”

“So he has a son,” Ryerson said. “So what?”

“First I heard of it,” I said.

“Me, too,” Angie said, “and we spent a lot of time with him back in October.”

“I have a dog,” Ryerson said. “First time you’ve heard about it. Right?”

“We’ve known you less than a day,” Angie said. “And a dog isn’t a child. You have a son and you spend a lot of time on stakeouts with people, you’re going to mention him. He mentioned his wife a lot. Nothing big, just ‘Got to call my wife.’ ‘My wife is going to kill me for missing another dinner.’ Et cetera. But never, not once, did he mention a child.”

Ryerson looked in his rearview at me. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s odd. Can I use your phone?”

He handed it back to me and I dialed, looked out at Ted Kenneally’s antiques store, the CLOSED sign hanging in the window.

“Detective Sergeant Lee.”

“Oscar,” I said.

“Hey, Walter Payton! How’s the body?”

“Hurts,” I said. “Like hell.”

His voice changed. “How’s that other thing?”

“Well, I got a question for you.”

“A rat-out-my-own-people sort of question?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Shoot. I’ll decide if I like it.”

“Broussard’s married, right?”

“To Rachel, yeah.”

“Tall brunette?” I said. “Very pretty?”

“That’s her.”

“And they have a kid?”

“’Scuse me?”

“Does Broussard have a son?”

“No.”

I felt a lightness eddy in my skull, and the throbbing aches from yesterday’s football game disappeared.

“You’re sure?”

“’Course I’m sure. He can’t.”

“He can’t or he decided not to?”

Oscar’s voice became slightly muffled, and I realized he’d cupped the phone with his hand. His voice was a whisper. “Rachel can’t conceive. It was a big problem for them. They wanted kids.”

“Why not adopt?”

“Who’s gonna let an ex-hooker adopt kids?”

“She was in the life?”

“Yeah, that’s how he met her. He was on Homicide track until then, man, just like me. It killed his career, got him buried in Narco until Doyle bailed him out. But he loves her. She’s a good woman, too. A great woman.”

“But no kid.”

His hand left the phone. “How many times I got to tell you, Kenzie? No friggin’ kid.”

I said thanks and goodbye, hung up, and handed the phone back to Ryerson.

“He doesn’t have a son,” Ryerson said. “Does he?”

“He has a son,” I said. “He definitely has a son.”

“Then where’d he get him?”

It all fell into place then, as I sat in Ryerson’s Suburban and looked out at Kenneally’s Antiques.

“How much you want to bet,” I said, “that whoever Nicholas Broussard’s natural parents are, they probably weren’t real good at the job?”

“Holy shit,” Angie said.

Ryerson leaned over the steering wheel, stared out through the windshield with a blank, stunned look on his lean face. “Holy shit.”

I saw the blond boy riding Rachel Broussard’s hip, the adoration she’d poured on his tiny face as she’d caressed it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Holy shit.”

32

At the end of an April day, after the sun has descended but before night has fallen, the city turns a hushed, unsettled gray. Another day has died, always more quickly than expected. Muted yellow or orange lights appear in window squares and shaft from car grilles, and the coming dark promises a deepening chill. Children have disappeared from the streets to wash up for dinner, to turn on TVs. The supermarkets and liquor stores are half empty and listless. The florists and banks are closed. The honk of horns is sporadic; a storefront grate rattles as it drops. And if you look closely in the faces of pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights, you can see the weight of the morning’s unfulfilled promise in the numb sag of their faces. Then they pass, trudging toward home, whatever its incarnation.

Lionel and Ted Kenneally had arrived back late, close to five, and something broke in Lionel’s face as he saw us approach. When Ryerson flashed his badge and said, “Like to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. McCready,” that broken thing in Lionel’s face broke even further.

He nodded several times, more to himself than to us, and said, “There’s a bar up the street. Why don’t we go there? I don’t want to do this at my home.”

The Edmund Fitzgerald was about as small as a bar could get without becoming a shoeshine stand. When we first walked in, a small area opened up on our left with a counter running along the only window and enough space for maybe four tables. Unfortunately they’d stuck a jukebox in there, too, so only two tables fit, and both were empty when the four of us entered. The bar itself could sit seven people, eight tops, and six tables took up the wall across from it. The room opened up a bit again in back, where two darts players tossed their missiles over a pool table wedged so close to the walls that from three of four possible sides, the shooter would have to use a short stick. Or a pencil.

As we sat down at a table in the center of the place, Lionel said, “Hurt your leg, Miss Gennaro?”

Angie said, “It’ll heal,” and fished in her bag for her cigarettes.

Lionel looked at me, and when I looked away, that constant sag in his shoulders deepened. The rocks that normally sat up there had been joined by cinder blocks.

Ryerson flipped a notepad open on the table, uncapped a pen. “I’m Special Agent Neal Ryerson, Mr. McCready. I’m with the Justice Department.”

Lionel said, “Sir?”

Ryerson gave him a quick flick of the eyes. “That’s right, Mr. McCready. Federal government. You have some explaining to do. Wouldn’t you say?”

“About what?” Lionel looked over his shoulder, then around the bar.

“Your niece,” I said. “Look, Lionel, bullshit time is over.”

He glanced to his right, toward the bar, as if someone there might be waiting to help him out.

“Mr. McCready,” Ryerson said, “we can spend half an hour playing No-I-Didn’t/Yes-You-Did, but that would be a waste of everyone’s time. We know you were involved in your niece’s disappearance and that you were working with Remy Broussard. He’s going to take a hard fall, by the way, hard as hard gets. You? I’m offering you a chance to clear the air, maybe get some leniency down the road.” He tapped the pen on the table to the cadence of a ticking clock. “But if you bullshit me, I’ll walk out of here and we’ll do it the rough way. And you’ll drop into prison for so long your grandkids will have driving licenses by the time you get out.”

The waitress approached and took our order of two Cokes, a mineral water for Ryerson, and a double scotch for Lionel.

While we waited for her return, no one spoke. Ryerson continued to use his pen like a metronome, tapping it steadily against the edge of the table, his level, dispassionate gaze locked on Lionel.

Lionel didn’t seem to notice. He looked at the coaster in front of him, but I don’t think he saw it; he was looking much deeper, much farther away than a table or this bar, his lips and chin picking up a sheen of sweat. I had the sense that what he saw at the end of his long inward gaze was the shoddy finale of his own unraveling, the waste of his life. He saw prison. He saw divorce papers delivered to his cell and letters to his son returned unopened. He saw decades stretching into decades in which he was alone with his shame, or his guilt, or merely the folly of a man who’d done a dumb thing society had stripped naked under klieg lights, exposed for public consumption. His picture would be in the paper, his name associated with kidnapping, his life the fodder for talk shows and tabloids and sneering jokes remembered long after the comics who’d told them were forgotten.

The waitress brought our drinks, and Lionel said, “Eleven years ago, I was in a bar downtown with some friends. A bachelor party came in. They were all real drunk. One of them was looking for a fight. He picked me. I hit him. Once. But he cracked his skull on the floor. Thing is, I didn’t hit him with my fist. I had a pool stick in my hand.”

“Assault with a deadly weapon,” Angie said.

He nodded. “Actually, it was worse than that. The guy had been shoving me, and I’d said-I don’t remember saying it, but I guess I did-I’d said, ‘Back off or I’ll kill you.’”

“Attempted murder,” I said.

Another nod. “I go to trial. And it’s my friends’ words against this guy’s friends’ words. And I know I’m going to jail, because the guy I hit, he was a college student, and after I hit him, he claims he can’t study anymore, can’t concentrate. He’s got doctors claiming brain damage. I can tell by the way the judge looks at me that I’m done. But a guy who was in the bar that night, a stranger to both parties, testifies that it was the guy I hit who said he was going to kill me, and that he’d thrown the first punch, et cetera. I walk, because the stranger was a cop.”

“Broussard.”

He gave me a bitter smile and sipped his scotch. “Yeah. Broussard. And you know what? He lied up there on the stand. I might not be able to remember everything the guy I hit said, but I know for sure I hit him first. Don’t know why, really. He was bugging me, in my face, and I got angry.” He shrugged. “I was different then.”

“So Broussard lied and you walked, and you felt you owed him.”

He lifted his scotch glass, changed his mind, and set it back on the coaster. “I guess. He never brought it up, and we became friends over the years. We’d run into each other, he’d give me a call every now and then. It was only looking back that I realized he was keeping tabs on me. He’s like that. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good guy, but he’s always watching people, studying them, seeing if someday they’ll be useful to him.”

“Lotta cops like that,” Ryerson said, and drank some mineral water.

“You?”

Ryerson gave it some thought. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

Lionel took another sip of scotch, wiped his lips with the cocktail napkin. “Last July, my sister and Dottie took Amanda to the beach. It was a really hot day, no clouds, and Helene and Dottie meet some guys who, I dunno, had a bag of pot or whatever.” He looked away from us, took a long pull on the scotch, and his face and voice were haunted when he spoke again. “Amanda fell asleep on the beach, and they…they left her there, alone and unwatched, for hours. She roasted, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. She suffered deep burns to her back and legs, one stage less than third degree. One side of her face was so swollen it looked like she’d been attacked by bees. My fucking slut whore junkie douche-bag piece-of-shit waste of a sister allowed her daughter’s flesh to burn. They brought her home, and Helene calls me because Amanda, and I quote, ‘Is being a bitch.’ She wouldn’t stop crying. She was keeping Helene up. I go over there and my niece, this tiny four-year-old baby, is burned. She’s in pain. She’s screaming, it’s so bad. And you know what my sister had done for her?”

We waited while he gripped his scotch glass, lowered his head, took in a few shallow breaths.

He raised his head. “She’d put beer on Amanda’s burns. Beer. To cool her down. No aloe, no lidocaine, didn’t even think about a trip to the hospital. No. She put beer on her, sent her to bed, and had the TV turned way up so she wouldn’t have to listen to her.” He held a large fist up by his ear, as if prepared to strike the table, crack it in half. “I could have killed my sister that night. Instead, I took Amanda to the emergency room. I covered for Helene. I said she’d been exhausted and both she and Amanda had fallen asleep on the beach. I pleaded with the doctor, and I convinced her, finally, not to call Child Welfare and report it as a neglect case. I don’t know why, I just knew they’d take Amanda away. I just…” He swallowed. “I covered for Helene. Like I been covering my whole life. And that night I took Amanda back to my house and she slept with me and Beatrice. The doctor had given her something to help her sleep, but I stayed awake. I kept holding my hand over her back and feeling the heat coming off it. It was-this is the only way I can put it-it was like holding your hand over meat you just pulled from the oven. And I watched her sleep and I thought, This can’t go on. This has to end.”

“But, Lionel,” Angie said, “what if you had reported Helene to Chile Welfare? If you’d done it enough times, I’m sure you could have petitioned the courts to allow you and Beatrice to adopt Amanda.”

Lionel laughed, and Ryerson shook his head slowly at Angie.

“What?” she said.

Ryerson snipped the end of a cigar. “Miss Gennaro, unless the birth mother is a lesbian in states like Utah or Alabama, it is all but impossible to remove parental rights.” He lit the cigar and shook his head. “Let me amend that: It is impossible.”

“How can that be,” Angie said, “if the parent has proven herself consistently negligent?”

Another sad shake of the head from Ryerson. “This year in Washington, D.C., a birth mother was given full custody of a child she’s barely seen. The child has been living with foster parents since he was born. The birth mother is a convicted felon who gave birth to the child while she was on probation for murdering another of her children, who had reached the ripe old age of six weeks and was crying from hunger when the mother decided enough was enough and smothered her, tossed her in a trash bin, and went to a barbecue. Now this woman has two other kids, one of whom is being raised by the father’s parents, the other of whom is in foster care. All four kids were fathered by different men, and the mother, who served only a couple of years for killing her daughter, is now-responsibly, I’m sure-raising the child she took back from the loving foster parents who’d petitioned the courts for custody. This,” Ryerson said, “is a true story. Look it up.”

“That’s bullshit,” Angie said.

“No, it’s true,” Ryerson said.

“How can…?” Angie dropped her hands from the table, stared off into space.

“This is America,” Ryerson said, “where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young.”

Angie had the look of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, then slapped in the face as she’d doubled over.

Lionel rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Agent Ryerson is right, Miss Gennaro. There’s nothing you can do if an awful parent wants to hold on to her child.”

“That doesn’t get you off the hook, Mr. McCready.” Ryerson pointed his cigar at him. “Where’s your niece?”

Lionel stared into Ryerson’s cigar ash, then eventually shook his head.

Ryerson nodded and jotted something in his notebook. Then he reached behind his back, produced a set of handcuffs, and tossed them on the table.

Lionel pushed his chair back.

“Stay seated, Mr. McCready, or the next thing I put on the table is my gun.”

Lionel gripped the arms of the chair but didn’t move.

I said, “So you were angry at Helene about Amanda’s burns. What happened next?”

I met Ryerson’s eyes and he blinked softly, gave me a small nod. Going straight at the question of Amanda’s whereabouts wasn’t working. Lionel could just clam up, take the whole fall, and she’d stay gone. But if we could get him talking again…

“My UPS route,” he said eventually, “covers Broussard’s precinct. That’s how we stayed in touch so easily over the years. Anyway…”

The week after Amanda’s sunburn, Lionel and Broussard had gone out for a drink. Broussard had listened to Lionel pour out his concern for his niece, his hatred of his sister, his conviction that Amanda’s chances to grow up to be anything but a mirror of her mother were slipping away day by day.

Broussard had bought all the drinks. He’d been generous with them, too, and near the end of the night, when Lionel was drunk, he’d put his arm around him and said, “What if there were a solution?”

“There’s no solution,” Lionel had said. “The courts, the-”

“Fuck the courts,” Broussard had said. “Fuck everything you’ve considered. What if there were a way to guarantee Amanda a loving home and loving parents?”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is: No one can ever know what happened to her. Not her mother, not your wife, not your son. No one. She vanishes.”

And Broussard had snapped his fingers.

“Poof. Like she never existed.”

It took a few months for Lionel to go for it. In that time, he’d twice visited his sister’s house to find the door unlocked and Helene gone over to Dottie’s, her daughter sleeping alone in the apartment. In August, Helene dropped by a barbecue in Lionel and Beatrice’s backyard. She’d been driving around with Amanda in a friend’s car and she was fucked up on schnapps, so fucked up that while pushing Amanda and Matt on the swings, she accidentally pushed her daughter off the seat and fell across it herself. She lay there, laughing, as her daughter got up off the ground, wiped the dirt from her knees, checked herself for cuts.

Over the course of the summer, Amanda’s skin had blistered and scarred permanently in places because Helene occasionally forgot to apply the medicine prescribed by the emergency room doctor.

And then, in September, Helene talked about leaving the state.

“What?” I said. “I never heard this.”

Lionel shrugged. “Looking back, it was probably just another of her stupid ideas. She had a friend who’d moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, got a job at a T-shirt shop, told Helene how it was sunny all the time, drinks were flowing, no more snow, no more cold. Just sit on the beach and occasionally sell T-shirts. For a week or so, it was all Helene talked about. Most times, I’d have brushed it off. She was always talking about living somewhere else, just like she was sure she’d hit for the lottery someday. But this time, I dunno, I panicked. All I could think was: She’ll take Amanda. She’ll leave her alone on beaches and in unlocked apartments and she won’t have me or Beatrice around to pick up the slack. I just…I lost it. I called Broussard. I met the people who wanted to take care of Amanda.”

“And their names were?” Ryerson’s pen hovered over the pad.

Lionel ignored him. “They were great. Perfect. Beautiful home. Loved kids. Had already raised one perfectly, and now she’d moved out, they felt empty. They’re great with her,” he said quietly.

“So you’ve seen her,” I said.

He nodded. “She’s happy. She really does smile now.” Something caught in his throat, and he swallowed against it. “She doesn’t know I see her. Broussard’s first rule was that her whole past life had to be wiped out. She’s four. She’ll forget, given time. Actually,” he said slowly, “She’s five now. Isn’t she?”

The realization that Amanda had celebrated a birthday he hadn’t witnessed slid softly across his face. He shook his head quickly. “Anyway, I’ve snuck up there, watched her with her new parents, and she looks great. She looks…” He cleared his throat, looked away from us. “She looks loved.”

“What happened the night she disappeared?” Ryerson said.

“I came in from the back of the house. I took her out. I told her it was a game. She liked games. Maybe because Helene’s idea was a trip down to the bar, play with the Pac-Man machine, honey.” He sucked ice from his glass and crushed it between his teeth. “Broussard was parked on the street. I waited in the doorway to the porch, told Amanda to be real, real quiet. The only neighbor who could have seen us was Mrs. Driscoll, across the street. She was sitting on her stoop, had a direct line on the house. She left the stoop for a second, went back in the house for another cup of tea or something, and Broussard gave me an all-clear signal. I carried Amanda to Broussard’s car, and we drove away.”

“And no one saw a thing,” I said.

“None of the neighbors. We found out later, though, that Chris Mullen did. He was parked on the street, staking out the house. He was waiting for Helene to come back so he could find out where she’d hid the money she stole. He recognized Broussard. Cheese Olamon used it to blackmail Broussard into retrieving the missing money. He was also supposed to steal some drugs from evidence lockup, give them to Mullen that night at the quarry.”

“Back to the night Amanda disappeared,” I said.

He took a second cube of ice from the glass with his thick fingers, chewed it. “I told Amanda my friend was going to take her to see some nice people. Told her I’d see her in a few hours. She just nodded. She was used to being dropped off with strangers. I got out a few blocks away and walked home. It was ten-thirty. It took my sister almost twelve hours to notice her daughter was gone. That tell you anything?”

For a while we were so quiet, I could hear the thump of darts hitting cork near the back of the bar.

“When the time was right,” Lionel said, “I figured I’d tell Beatrice, and she’d understand. Not right away. A few years down the road, maybe. I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that through. Beatrice hates Helene, and she loves Amanda, but something like this…See, she believes in the law, all the rules. She’d never have gone along with something like this. But I hoped, maybe, once enough time had passed…” He looked up at the ceiling, gave a small shake of his head. “When she decided to call you two, I got in contact with Broussard and he said try and dissuade her, but not too hard. Let her do it if she has to. He told me the next day that if push came to shove, he had some things on you two. Something about a murdered pimp.”

Ryerson gave me a raised eyebrow and a cold, curious smile.

I shrugged and looked away, and that’s when I saw the guy in the Popeye mask. He came in through the back fire exit, his right arm extended, a.45 automatic pointed at chest level.

His partner brandished a shotgun and also wore a plastic Halloween mask. Casper the Friendly Ghost’s moony white face stared out as he came through the front door and shouted, “Hands on the table! Everyone! Now!”

Popeye herded the two darts players in front of him, and I turned my head in time to see Casper throw the bolt lock on the front door.

“You!” Popeye screamed at me. “You deaf? Hands on the fucking table.”

I put my hands on the table.

The bartender said, “Oh, shit. Come on.”

Casper pulled a string by the window and a heavy black curtain fell across it.

Beside me, Lionel’s breathing was very shallow. His hands, flat on the table, were completely still. One of Ryerson’s hands dropped below the table, and one of Angie’s did as well.

Popeye hit one of the darts throwers on the back of the spine with his fist. “Down! On the floor. Hands behind your head. Do it. Do it. Do it now!”

Both men dropped to their knees and began locking their hands behind their necks. Popeye looked at them, his head cocked. It was an awful moment, filled with the worst sort of possibility. Whatever Popeye decided, he could do. Shoot them, shoot us, cut their throats. Whatever.

He kicked the older of the two in the base of the spine.

“Not on your knees. On your stomachs. Now.”

The men dropped to their stomachs by my feet.

Popeye turned his head very slowly, stopped on our table.

“Hands on the damn table,” he whispered. “Or you fucking die.”

Ryerson withdrew his hand from under the table, held both empty palms to the air, then placed them flat on the wood. Angie did the same.

Casper came up to the bar across from us. He leveled the shotgun at the bartender.

Two middle-aged women, office workers or secretaries by the looks of their clothes, sat in the middle of the bar directly in front of Casper. When he extended the shotgun, it brushed the hair of one of the women. Her shoulders tensed and her head jerked to the left. Her companion moaned.

The first woman said, “Oh, God. Oh, no.”

Casper said, “Stay calm, ladies. This will all be over in a minute or two.” He pulled a green trash bag from the pocket of his leather bombardier’s jacket and tossed it on the bar in front of the bartender. “Fill it up. And don’t forget the money from the safe.”

“There’s not much,” the bartender said.

“Just get what there is,” Casper said.

Popeye, the crowd control, stood with his legs spread apart by roughly a foot and a half and bent slightly at the knees, his.45 steadily moving in an arc from left to right, right to left, and back again. He was about twelve feet from me, and I could hear his breathing from behind the mask, even and steady.

Casper stood in an identical stance, shotgun trained on the bartender, but his eyes scanned the mirror behind the bar.

These guys were pros. All the way.

Besides Casper and Popeye, there were twelve people in the bar: the bartender and waitress behind the bar, the two guys on the floor, Lionel, Angie, Ryerson, and me, the two secretaries, and two guys at the end of the bar closest to the entrance, teamsters by the look of them. One wore a green Celtics jacket, the other a canvas and denim thing, old and thickly lined. Both were mid-forties and beefy. A bottle of Old Thompson sat between two shot glasses on the bar in front of them.

“Take your time,” Casper said to the bartender, as the bartender knelt behind the bar and fiddled with what I assumed was the safe. “Just go slow, like nothing’s happening, and you won’t spin past the numbers.”

“Please don’t hurt us,” one of the men on the floor said. “We got families.”

“Shut up,” Popeye said.

“No one’s getting hurt,” Casper said. “As long as you keep quiet. Just keep quiet. Very simple.”

“You know whose fucking bar this is?” the guy in the Celtics jacket said.

“What?” Popeye said.

“You fucking heard me. You know whose bar this is?”

“Please, please,” one of the secretaries said. “Be quiet.”

Casper turned his head. “A hero.”

“A hero,” Popeye said, and looked over at the idiot.

Without moving his mouth it seemed, Ryerson whispered, “Where’s your piece?”

“Spine,” I said. “Yours?”

“My lap.” His right hand moved three inches to the edge of the table.

“Don’t,” I whispered, as Popeye’s head and gun turned back in our direction.

“You guys are fucking dead,” the teamster said.

“Why are you talking?” the secretary said, her eyes on the bar top.

“Good question,” Casper said.

“Dead. Got it? You fucking punks. You fucking humps. You fucking-”

Casper took four steps and punched the teamster in the center of the face.

The teamster dropped off the back of his stool and hit his head so hard on the floor that you could hear the crack when the back of his skull split.

“Any comment?” Casper asked the guy’s friend.

“No,” the guy said, and looked down at the bar.

“Anyone else?” Casper said.

The bartender came up from behind the bar and placed the trash bag on top.

The bar was as silent as a church before a baptism.

“What?” Popeye said, and took three steps toward our table.

It took me a moment to realize he was talking to us, another moment to know with a complete certainty that this was all about to go terribly wrong terribly fast.

None of us moved.

“What did you just say?” Popeye pointed the gun at Lionel’s head, and his eyes behind the mask skittered uncertainly over Ryerson’s calm face, then came back to Lionel’s.

“Another hero?” Casper took the bag off the bar, came over to our table with his shotgun pointed at my neck.

“He’s a talker,” Popeye said. “He’s talking shit.”

“You got something to say?” Casper said, and turned his shotgun on Lionel. “Huh? Speak up.” He turned to Popeye. “Cover the other three.”

Popeye’s.45 turned toward me and the black eye stared into my own.

Casper took another step closer to Lionel. “Just yapping away. Huh?”

“Why do you keep antagonizing them? They have guns,” one of the secretaries said.

“Just be quiet,” her companion hissed.

Lionel looked up into the mask, his lips shut tight, his fingertips digging into the tabletop.

Casper said, “Go for it, big man. Go for it. Just keep talking.”

“I don’t have to listen to this shit,” Popeye said.

Casper rested the tip of the shotgun against the bridge of Lionel’s nose. “Shut up!”

Lionel’s fingers shook and he blinked against the sweat in his eyes.

“He just don’t want to listen,” Popeye said. “Just wants to keep talking trash.”

“Is that it?” Casper said.

“Everyone stay calm,” the bartender said, his hands held straight up in the air.

Lionel said nothing.

But every witness in the bar, deep in states of panic, sure they were going to die, would remember it the way the shooters wanted them to-that Lionel had been talking. That all of us at the table had. That we’d antagonized some dangerous men, and they’d killed us for it.

Casper racked the slide on the shotgun and the noise was like a cannon going off. “Got to be a big man. Is that it?”

Lionel opened his mouth. He said, “Please.”

I said, “Wait.”

The shotgun swung my way, its dark, dark eyes the last thing I’d see. I was sure of it.

“Detective Remy Broussard!” I yelled, so the whole bar could hear me. “Everyone got that name? Remy Broussard!” I looked through the mask at the deep blue eyes, saw the fear in there, the confusion.

“Don’t do it, Broussard,” Angie said.

“Shut the fuck up!” It was Popeye this time, and his cool was slipping. The tendons in his forearm clenched as he tried to cover the table.

“It’s over, Broussard. It’s over. We know you took Amanda McCready.” I craned my neck out to the bar. “You hear that name? Amanda McCready?”

When I turned my head back, the cold metal bores of the shotgun dug into my forehead, and my eyes met the curl of a red finger on the other side of the trigger guard. This close, the finger looked like an insect or a red and white worm. It looked like it had a mind of its own.

“Close your eyes,” Casper said. “Close ’em tight.”

“Mr. Broussard,” Lionel said. “Please don’t do this. Please.”

“Pull the fucking trigger!” Popeye turned toward his companion. “Do it!”

Angie said, “Broussard-”

“Stop saying that fucking name!” Popeye kicked a chair into the wall.

I kept my eyes open, felt the curve of metal against my flesh, smelled the cleaning oil and old gunpowder, watched the finger twitch against the trigger.

“It’s over,” I said again, and it came out in a croak through my arid throat and mouth. “It’s over.”

For a long, long time, no one said anything. In that hard hush of silence, I could hear the whole world creak on its axis.

Casper’s face tilted as Broussard cocked his head and I saw that look in his eyes that I’d seen yesterday at the football game, the one that was hard, that danced and burned.

Then a clear, resigned defeat replaced it and shuddered softly through his body, and his finger slipped from the trigger as he lowered the gun from my head.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Over.”

“Are you dicking me?” his partner said. “We have to do this. We have to do this, man. We have orders. Do it! Now!”

Broussard shook his head, the moony face and child’s smile of the Casper mask swaying with it. “This is done. Let’s go.”

“Fuck you, this is done! You can’t cap these fuckers? Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can!”

Popeye raised his arm and pointed his gun in the center of Lionel’s face as Ryerson’s hand dropped into his lap and the first gunshot was muffled by the top of the table as it tore through the flesh of Popeye’s left thigh.

His gun went off as he jerked backward, and Lionel screamed, grabbed the side of his head, and toppled from his chair.

Ryerson’s gun cleared the tabletop, and he shot Popeye twice in the chest.

When Broussard pulled the trigger of the shotgun, I distinctly heard the pause-a microsecond’s worth of silence-between the trigger engaging the round and the blast that roared in my ears like an inferno.

Neal Ryerson’s left shoulder disappeared in a flash of fire and blood and bone, just melted and exploded and evaporated all at the same time in a sonic boom of noise. A splatter of him hit the wall, and then his body toppled out of the chair as the shotgun rose through the smoke in Remy Broussard’s hand and the table toppled to the left with Ryerson. His.9 mm fell from his hand and bounced off a chair on the way to the floor.

Angie had cleared her gun, but she dove to her left as Broussard pivoted.

I drove my head into his stomach, wrapped my arms around him, and ran straight back for the bar. I rammed his spine against the rail, heard him grunt, and then he drove the stock of the shotgun down onto the back of my neck.

My knees hit the floor, my arms fell back from his body, and Angie screamed, “Broussard!” and fired her.38.

He threw the shotgun at her as I reached for my.45, and it hit her in the chest, knocked her to the floor.

He vaulted the two darts players and sprinted for the front door like a born athlete.

I closed my left eye and sighted down the barrel and fired twice as Broussard reached the front of the bar. I saw his right leg jerk and skitter away from him before he turned the corner, threw the bolt lock, and burst out into the night.

“Angie!”

I turned as she sat up amid a pile of overturned chairs. “I’m fine.”

Ryerson shouted, “Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance!”

I looked down at Lionel. He rolled on the floor, moaning, his head in his hands, blood pouring through the fingers.

I looked at the bartender. “The ambulance!”

He picked up the phone and dialed.

Ryerson leaned back against the wall, most of his shoulder gone, and screamed up at the ceiling, his body convulsing wildly.

“He’s going into shock,” I said to Angie.

“I got him.” She crawled toward Ryerson. “I need all the towels from the bar, and I need ’em now!”

One of the secretaries hopped over the bar.

“Beatrice,” Lionel moaned. “Beatrice.”

The rubber band holding Popeye’s mask to his head had snapped when he dropped down the bar, Ryerson’s bullets popping through his sternum. I looked down at the face of John Pasquale. He was dead, and he’d been right yesterday, after the football game: Luck always ran out.

I met Angie’s eyes as she caught a towel the secretary tossed across the room to her. “Get Broussard, Patrick. Get him.”

I nodded as the secretary rushed past me and dropped down by Lionel, placed a towel to the side of his head.

I checked my pocket for a second clip, found it, and left the bar.

33

I followed Broussard’s trail across Broadway and up C Street, where it wound into the trucking and warehouse district along East Second. It wasn’t a hard trail to follow. He’d discarded the Casper mask as soon as he left the bar, and it lay looking up at me as I stepped out, holes for eyes, a toothless smile. Drops of blood, so fresh they shone under street lamps, pointed out their owner’s path in a jagged line. They grew thicker and wider in diameter the farther they led into the scantily lit, cracked-cobblestone blocks of dark depots, empty loading docks, and cubbyhole teamster bars with curtains drawn and small neon signs missing half the bulbs. Semis headed for Buffalo or Trenton rolled and heaved and bumped down the cracked streets, and their headlights flashed across the end of the trail, the place where Broussard had stopped long enough to jimmy a door. The blood dropping from a hole in his body had formed a puddle, splattered the door in thin streaks. I hadn’t thought a leg could bleed like that, but maybe my bullet had blown apart the femur or savaged crucial arteries.

I looked up at the building. It was seven stories tall and built of the chocolate-brown brick they’d used at the turn of the century. Weeds rose to the windowsills on the first level, and the boards over the windows themselves were cracked and defaced by graffiti. It was wide enough to have served as storage for large objects or the manufacture and assembly of machines.

Assembly, I decided as I entered. The first thing I noticed was the silhouette of an assembly belt, pulleys and chains dropping from the rafters twenty feet above it. The belt itself and the rollers that had once been beneath it were gone, but the main frame remained, bolted to the floor, and hooks curled out from the ends of the chains like beckoning fingers. The rest of the floor was empty, everything of value either stolen by vagrants and kids or stripped by the final owners and sold.

To the right, a cast-iron staircase led to the next floor, and I climbed it slowly, unable to follow the trail of blood anymore in the darkness, peering through the black for holes rusted through the steps, gingerly reaching out for the rail before each step, hoping to press against metal and not the body of some angry, hungry rat.

My eyes adjusted somewhat to the dark as I reached the second floor, saw nothing but an empty loft space, the shapes of a few overturned pallets, the glow from dim streetlights pressing through lead windows shattered by rocks. The staircases were stacked one on top of each other at identical points on each floor, so that to reach the next, I had to turn left at the wall and follow it back about fifteen feet until I found the opening, looked up the stack of thick iron risers until I saw the rectangular hole up top.

As I stood there, I heard a heavy metallic groan from several levels up, the thump of a thick steel door as it fell back on its hinges and banged into cement.

I took the steps two at a time, stumbling a few times, turned the corner on the third floor, and jogged around to the next staircase. I went up a little faster, my feet beginning to pick up a rhythm, a sense where each riser rose through the dark.

The floors were all empty, and with each level the harbor and downtown skyline cast more light under the arches of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The staircases remained dark save for the rectangular openings at their tops, and as I reached the last one, bathed in moonlight and stretching to an open sky, Broussard called down to me from the roof.

“Hey, Patrick, I’d stay down there.”

I called back up. “Why’s that?”

He coughed. “Because I got a gun pointed at the opening. Stick your head through, I’ll take a chunk out of it.”

“Oh.” I leaned against the banister, smelled the harbor channel and the fresh cool night wafting through the opening. “What’re you planning to do up there, call for helicopter evac?”

He chuckled. “Once in a lifetime’s enough of that. No, I just thought I’d sit here for a bit, look at the stars. Fuck, man, you’re a shitty shot,” he hissed.

I looked through the square of moonlight. From the sound of his voice, I was pretty sure he was to the left of the opening.

“Good enough to shoot you,” I said.

“It was a friggin’ ricochet,” he said. “I’m pulling tile out of my ankle.”

“You’re saying I hit the floor and the floor hit you?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Who was that guy?”

“Which?”

“The guy in the bar with you.”

“The one you shot?”

“That guy, yeah.”

“Justice Department.”

“No shit? I figured him for some sort of spook. He was way too fucking calm. Put three shots in Pasquale like it was target practice. Like it was nothing. I saw him sitting at that table, I knew the shit was going to turn bad.”

He coughed again, and I listened. I closed my eyes as he hacked uncontrollably for about twenty seconds, and I was certain by the time he finished that he was left of the opening by about ten yards.

“Remy?”

“Yo.”

“I’m coming up.”

“I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His pistol snapped at the night air, and the bullet hit the steel staircase support clamped to the wall. The metal sparked like someone had struck a kitchen match off it, and I dropped flat against the stairs as the bullet clanged overhead, ricocheted off another piece of metal, and embedded itself with a soft hiss into the wall on my left.

I lay there for a bit, my heart squeezed into my esophagus and not too happy about the relocation, banging against the walls, scrambling to get back out.

“Patrick?”

“Yeah?”

“You hit?”

I pushed off the steps, straightened to my knees. “No.”

“I told you I’d shoot.”

“Thanks for the warning. You’re swell.”

Another round of hacking coughs, then a loud gurgle as he sucked it back into his lungs and spit.

“That didn’t sound real healthy,” I said.

He gave a hoarse laugh. “Didn’t look too healthy, either. Your partner, man, she’s the shooter in the family.”

“She tagged you?”

“Oh, yeah. Quick cure for smoking, what she did.”

I placed my back against the banister, pointed my gun up at the roof, and inched up the staircase.

“Personally,” Broussard said, “I don’t think I could have shot her. You, maybe. But her? I don’t know. Shooting women, you know, it’s just not something you want in your obit. ‘Twice decorated officer of the Boston Police Department, loving husband and father, carried a two-fifty-two bowling average, and could shoot the hell out of women.’ You know? Sounds…bad, really.”

I crouched on the fifth step from the top, kept my head below the opening, took a few breaths.

“I know what you’re thinking: But, Remy, you shot Roberta Trett in the back. True. But Roberta wasn’t no woman. You know? She was…” He sighed and then coughed. “Well, I don’t know what she was. But ‘woman’ seems too limiting a term.”

I raised my body through the opening, gun extended, and stared down the barrel at Broussard.

He wasn’t even looking my way. He sat with his back against an industrial cooling vent, his head tilted back, the downtown skyline spread out before us in a sweep of yellow and blue and white against a cobalt sky.

“Remy.”

He turned his head and stretched his arm out, pointed his Glock at me.

We stood there for quite a while that way, neither of us sure how this was going to go, if one wrong look, one involuntary twitch or tremor of adrenaline and fear would jerk a finger, punch a bullet through a flash of fire at the end of a muzzle. Broussard blinked several times, sucked at the pain, as what looked like the oversized bulb of a bright red rose gradually spread on his shirt, blooming, it seemed, opening its petals with steady, irrevocable grace.

Keeping his gun hand steady and his finger curled around the trigger, he said, “Feel like you’re suddenly in a John Woo movie?”

“I hate John Woo movies.”

“Me, too,” he said. “I thought I was the only one.”

I shook my head slightly. “Warmed-over Peckinpah with none of the emotional subtext.”

“What’re you, a film critic?”

I smiled tightly.

“I like chick movies,” he said.

“What?”

“True.” On the other side of his gun, his eyes rolled. “Sounds goofy, I know. And maybe it’s ’cause I’m a cop, I watch those action movies, I keep saying, ‘Oh, bullshit.’ You know? But, yep, you toss Out of Africa or All About Eve in the VCR? I’m there, man.”

“You’re a ton of surprises, Broussard.”

“That’s me.”

It was tiring to hold a gun extended and pointed all this time. If we were going to shoot, we’d have probably done it by now. Of course, maybe that’s what a lot of guys think just before they get shot. I noticed the advancing winter gray in Broussard’s flesh, the sweat obscuring the silver along his temples. He couldn’t last much longer. As tiring as it was for me, I didn’t have a bullet in my chest and shards of floor in my ankle.

“I’m going to lower my gun,” I said.

“Your choice.”

I watched his eyes, and maybe because he knew I was watching them, he gave me nothing but an opaque, even gaze.

I raised my gun and slipped my finger off the trigger, held it up in my palm and climbed up the last few steps. I stood on the light gravel dusting the rooftop and looked down at him, cocked an eyebrow.

He smiled.

He lowered his gun to his lap and leaned his head against the vent.

“You paid Ray Likanski to draw Helene out of the house,” I said. “Right?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t have to pay him. Promised to let him off the hook on some bust somewhere up the road. That was all it took.”

I crossed until I was in front of him. From there I could see the dark circle in his upper chest, the place where the rose petals grew. It was just right of center, and it still pumped brightly but slowly.

“Lung?” I said.

“Nicked it, I think.” He nodded. “Fucking Mullen. Mullen wasn’t there that night, it would have gone without a hitch. Dumb-ass Likanski doesn’t tell me he ripped Olamon off. That would have changed things, I knew that. Believe me.” He shifted slightly and groaned from the effort. “Forces me-me, for Christ’s sake-to get into bed with a mutt like Cheese. Even though I was setting him up, man, that hurt the ego, I’ll tell you.”

“Where is Likanski?” I said.

He tilted his head up toward me. “Look over your shoulder and down to your right a bit.”

I tilted my head. The Fort Point Channel broke away from a white and dusty lip of land, rolled under bridges and Summer and Congress streets, stretched toward the skyline and the piers and the dark blue release of Boston Harbor.

“Ray sleeps with the fishes?” I said.

Broussard gave me a lazy smile. “’Fraid so.”

“How long?”

“I found him that night in October, right after you two came on to the case. He was packing. I interrogated him about the scam he ran on Cheese. Got to hand it to him, he never gave up the location of the money. Never thought he’d have that kind of spine, but two hundred grand gives some people balls, I guess. Anyway, he’s planning to leave. I didn’t want him to. Things got physical.”

He coughed violently, arching forward, and pressed a hand over the hole in his chest, gripped his gun tightly in his lap.

“We need to get you off this roof.”

He looked up at me, wiped at his mouth with the back of his gun hand. “I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere.”

“Come on. There’s no point in dying.”

He gave me that wonderful, boyish grin of his. “Funny, I’d argue the opposite about now. You got a cell phone to call for an ambulance?”

“No.”

He placed his gun on his lap and reached into his leather jacket, removed a slim Nokia. “I do,” he said, and he turned and tossed if off the roof.

I heard it shatter distantly as it hit the pavement seven stories below.

“Don’t worry.” He chuckled. “Fucker comes with a hell of a warranty.”

I sighed and sat down on the small tar riser at the edge of the roof, faced him.

“Determined to die on this roof,” I said.

“Determined not to go to jail. A trial?” He shook his head. “Not for me, pal.”

“Then tell me who has her, Remy. Go out right.”

His eyes widened. “So you can go get her? Bring her back to that fucking thing society calls her mother? Kiss my ass, man. Amanda stays gone. You got that? She stays happy. She stays well-fed and clean and looked after. She has a few fucking laughs in her life and she grows up with a chance. You need brain surgery, you think I’m going to tell you where she is, Kenzie.”

“The people who have her are kidnappers.”

“Ah, no. Wrong answer. I’m a kidnapper. They’re people who took a child in.” He blinked several times at the sweat bathing his face on a cool night, sucked in a long breath that rattled in his chest. “You were at my house this morning. My wife called me.”

I nodded. “She made the ransom call to Lionel, didn’t she?”

He shrugged, looked off at the skyline. “You at my house,” he said. “Christ, that pissed me off.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “You see my son?”

“He’s not yours.”

He blinked. “You see my son?”

I looked up at the stars for a moment, a rarity in these parts, so clear on a cold night. “I saw your son,” I said.

“Great kid. Know where I found him?”

I shook my head.

“I’m talking to this snitch in the Somerville projects. I’m alone, and I hear this baby screaming. I mean screaming like he’s being bitten by dogs. And the snitch, the people walking down the corridor, they don’t hear it. They just don’t hear it. ’Cause they hear it every day. So I tell the snitch to beat it, I follow the sound, kick in the door of this shit-smelling apartment, and I find him in the back. The place is empty. My son-and he is my son, Kenzie, fuck you if you don’t think so-he’s starving. He’s lying in a crib, six months old, and he’s starving. You can see his ribs. He’s fucking handcuffed, Kenzie, and his diaper is so filled it’s leaking through the seams, and he’s stuck-he’s fucking stuck to the mattress, Kenzie!”

Broussard’s eyes bulged, and his whole body seemed to lunge against itself. He coughed blood onto his shirt, wiped it with his hand, and smeared it on his chin.

“A baby,” he said eventually, his voice almost a whisper now, “stuck to a mattress by his own bedsores and fecal matter. Left in a room for three days, crying his head off. And nobody cares.” He held out his bloody left hand, let it drop to the gravel. “Nobody cares,” he repeated softly.

I placed my gun on my lap, glanced over at the city skyline. Maybe Broussard was right. A whole city of Nobody Cares. A whole state. A whole country, maybe.

“So I took him home with me. I knew enough guys who’d forged fake identities in their time, and I paid one off. My son has a birth certificate with my surname on it. The records of my wife’s tubal ligation were destroyed and a new one was created, showing she consented to the procedure after the birth of our son, Nicholas. And all I had to do was get through these last few months and retire, and we’d move out of state and I’d get some lame security consultant job and raise my child. And I’d have been very, very happy.”

I hung my head for a moment, looked at my shoes on the gravel.

“She never even filed a missing person’s report,” Broussard said.

“Who?”

“The skaghead who gave birth to my son. She never even looked for him. I know who she is, and for a long time I thought of just blowing her head off for the fuck of it. But I didn’t. And she never looked for her child.”

I raised my head, looked into his face. It was proud and angry and profoundly saddened by the depths of the worlds he’d seen.

“I just want Amanda,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s my job, Remy. It’s what I was hired to do.”

“And I was hired to protect and serve, you dumb-ass. You know what that means? That’s an oath. To protect and serve. I’ve done that. I’ve protected several children. I’ve served them. I’ve given them good homes.”

“How many?” I asked. “How many have there been?”

He wagged a bloody finger at me. “No, no, no.”

His head shot back suddenly, and his whole body stiffened against the vent. His left heel kicked off the gravel and his mouth opened wide into a soundless scream.

I dropped to my knees by him, but all I could do was watch.

After a few moments, his body relaxed and his eyes drooped, and I could hear oxygen entering and leaving his body.

“Remy.”

He opened one weary eye. “Still here,” he slurred. He raised that finger to me. “You know you’re lucky, Kenzie. One lucky bastard.”

“Why’s that?”

He smiled. “You didn’t hear?”

“What?”

“Eugene Torrel died last week.”

“Who’s…?” I leaned back from him and his smile broadened as I realized: Eugene, the kid who’d seen us kill Marion Socia.

“Got himself stabbed in Brockton over a woman.” Broussard closed his eyes again and his grin softened, slid to the side of his face. “You’re very lucky. Got nothing on you now but a worthless deposition from a dead loser.”

“Remy.”

His eyes flickered open and the gun fell from his hand into the gravel. He tilted his head toward it, but left his hand on his lap.

“Come on, man. Do something right before you die. You got a lot of blood on your hands.”

“I know,” he slurred. “Kimmie and David. You didn’t even figure me for that one.”

“It was gnawing at the back of my brain the last twenty-four hours,” I said. “You and Poole?”

He gave his head a half shake against the vent. “Not Poole. Pasquale. Poole was never a shooter. That’s where he drew the line. Don’t debase his mem’ry.”

“But Pasquale wasn’t at the quarries that night.”

“He was nearby. Who do you think cranked Rogowski in Cunningham Park?”

“But that still wouldn’t have given Pasquale the time to reach the other side of the quarries and kill Mullen and Gutierrez.”

Broussard shrugged.

“Why didn’t Pasquale just kill Bubba by the way?”

Broussard frowned. “Man, we never killed anyone wasn’t a direct threat to us. Rogowski didn’t know shit, so we let him live. You, too. You think I couldn’t have hit you from the other side of the quarry that night? No, Mullen and Gutierrez were direct threats. So was Wee David, Likanski, and, unfortunately, Kimmie.”

“Let’s not forget Lionel.”

The frown deepened. “I never wanted to hit Lionel. I thought it was a bad play. Someone got scared.”

“Who?”

He gave me a short harsh laugh that left a fine spray of blood on his lips and closed his eyes tight against the pain. “Just remember-Poole wasn’t a shooter. Let the man’s death have dignity.”

He could have been bullshitting me, but I didn’t see the point, really. If Poole hadn’t killed Pharaoh Gutierrez and Chris Mullen, I’d have to refigure some things.

“The doll.” I tapped his hand and he opened one eye. “Amanda’s shirt fragment stuck to the quarry wall?”

“Me.” He smacked his lips, closed his eye. “Me, me, me. All me.”

“You’re not that good. Hell, you’re not that smart.”

He shook his head. “Really?”

“Really,” I said.

He snapped his eyes open, and there was a bright, hard awareness in them. “Move to your left, Kenzie. Let me see the city.”

I moved and he stared out at the skyline, smiled at the lights flickering in the squares, the red pulse of the weather beacons and radio transmitters.

“’S pretty,” he said. “You know something?”

“What?”

“I love children.” He said it so simply, so softly.

His right hand slid into mine and squeezed, and we looked off over the water to the heart of the city and its shimmer, the dark velvet promise that lived in those lights, the hint of glamorous lives, of sleek, well-fed, well-tended existences cushioned behind glass and privilege, behind redbrick and iron and steel, curving staircases, and moonlit views of water, always water, flowing gently around the islands and peninsulas that made up our metropolis, buffeted it against ugliness and pain.

“Wow,” Remy Broussard whispered, and then his hand fell from mine.

34

“…at which point the man later identified as Detective Pasquale responded, ‘We have to do this. We have orders. Do it now.’” Assistant District Attorney Lyn Campbell removed her glasses and pinched the flesh between her eyes. “Is that accurate, Mr. Kenzie?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“‘Ms. Campbell’ will do fine.”

“Yes, Ms. Campbell.”

She slid her glasses back up on her nose, looked through the thin ovals at me. “And you took that to mean what exactly?”

“I took that to mean that someone besides Detective Pasquale and Officer Broussard had given the order to assassinate Lionel McCready and possibly the rest of us in the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

She flipped through her notes, which-in the six hours I’d been in Interrogation Room 6A of the BPO’s District 6 station-had grown to take up half the notepad. The sound of her turning sheets of paper made brittle and curled inward by her furious scribbling with a sharp ballpoint reminded me of the late-autumn rustle of dead leaves against curbstone.

Besides myself and ADA Campbell, the room was occupied by two homicide detectives, Janet Harris and Joseph Centauro, neither of whom seemed to like me even a little bit, and my attorney, Cheswick Hartman.

Cheswick watched ADA Campbell turn the pages of her notes for a while, and then he said, “Ms. Campbell.”

She looked up. “Hmm?”

“I understand this is a high-pressure case with what I’m sure will be extensive press coverage. To that end, my client and I have been cooperative. But it’s been a long night, wouldn’t you say?”

She turned another crisp page. “The Commonwealth is not interested in your client’s lack of sleep, Mr. Hartman.”

“Well, that’s the Commonwealth’s problem, because I am.”

She dropped a hand to her notes, looked up at him. “What do you expect me to do here, Mr. Hartman?”

“I expect you to go outside that door and speak to District Attorney Prescott. I expect you to tell him that it’s patently obvious what occurred in the Edmund Fitzgerald, that my client acted as any reasonable person would, is not a suspect in either the death of Detective Pasquale or of Officer Broussard, and that it is time for him to be released. Note, too, Ms. Campbell, that our cooperation has been total up to this point and will continue to be so as long as you show us some common courtesy.”

“Fucking guy shot a cop,” Detective Centauro said. “We’re going to let him walk, counselor? I don’t think so.”

Cheswick crossed his hands on the table, ignored Centauro, and smiled at ADA Campbell. “We’re waiting, Ms. Campbell.”

She turned a few more pages of her notes, hoping to find something, anything, on which to hold me.

Cheswick was inside another five minutes checking on Angie as I waited on the front steps, getting enough glares from the cops coming in and out of the building to know I’d better not get pulled over for speeding for a while. Maybe for the rest of my life.

When Cheswick joined me, I said, “What’s the deal?”

He shrugged. “She’s not going anywhere for a while.”

“Why not?”

He looked at me like I needed a shot of Ritalin. “She killed a cop, Patrick. Self-defense or not, she killed a cop.”

“Well, shouldn’t you be-”

He cut me off with a wave of his hand. “You know who the best criminal lawyer in this city is?”

“You.”

He shook his head. “My junior partner, Floris Mansfield. And that’s who’s in there with Angie. Okay? So chill out. Floris rocks, Patrick. Understand? Angie’s going to be fine. But she’s still got a lot of hours ahead of her. And if we press too hard, the DA will say, ‘Fuck it,’ and push it to a grand jury just to show the cops he’s on their side. If we all play ball and make nice, everyone will begin to cool down and get tired and realize that the sooner this goes away the better.”

We walked up West Broadway at four in the morning, the icy fingers of dark April winds finding our collars.

“Where’s your car?” Cheswick said.

“G Street.”

He nodded. “Don’t go home. Half the press corps is there. And I don’t want you talking to them.”

“Why aren’t they here?” I looked back at the precinct house.

“Misinformation. The duty-desk sergeant purposefully let it leak that you were all being held at headquarters. The ruse’ll hold until sunup; then they’ll come back.”

“So where do I go?”

“That’s a really good question. You and Angie, intentionally or unintentionally, just gave the Boston Police Department its blackest eye since Charles Stuart and Willie Bennett. Personally, I’d move out of state.”

“I meant now, Cheswick.”

He shrugged and pressed the slim remote attached to his car keys, and his Lexus beeped once and the door locks slid open.

“The hell with it,” I said. “I’ll go to Devin’s.”

His head whipped around in my direction. “Amronklin? Are you crazy? You want to go to a cop’s house?”

“Into the belly of the beast.” I nodded.

At four in the morning, most people are asleep, but not Devin. He rarely sleeps more than three or four hours a day, and then it’s usually in the late hours of the morning. The rest of the time, he’s either working or drinking.

He opened the door to his apartment in Lower Mills, and the stench of bourbon that preceded him told me he hadn’t been working.

“Mr. Popularity,” he said, and turned his back to me.

I followed him into his living room, where a book of crossword puzzles sat open on the coffee table in between a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a half-full tumbler, and an ashtray. The TV was on, but muted, and Bobby Darin sang “The Good Life” from speakers set to whisper volume.

Devin wore a flannel robe over sweatpants and a Police Academy sweatshirt. He pulled the robe closed as he sat on the couch and lifted his glass, took a sip, and stared up at me with eyes that, while glassy, were as hard as the rest of him.

“Grab a glass from the kitchen.”

“I don’t feel much like drinking,” I said.

“I only drink alone when I’m alone, Patrick. Got it?”

I got the glass, brought it back, and he poured an overly generous drink into it. He raised his.

“To killing cops,” he said, and drank.

“I didn’t kill a cop.”

“Your partner did.”

“Devin,” I said, “you’re going to treat me like shit, I’ll leave.”

He raised his glass toward the hallway. “Door’s open.”

I tossed the glass on the coffee table, and some bourbon spilled out of it as I got out of the chair and headed for the door.

“Patrick.”

I turned back, my hand on the doorknob.

Neither of us said anything, and Bobby Darin’s silk vocal slid through the room. I stood in the doorway with all that had gone unspoken and unconfronted in my friendship with Devin hanging between us as Darin sang with a detached mourning for the unattainable, the gulf between what we wish for and what we get.

“Come on back in,” Devin said.

“Why?”

He looked down at the coffee table. He removed the pen from the crossword book, closed it. He placed his drink on top of it. He looked at the window, the dark cast of early morning.

He shrugged. “Outside of cops and my sisters, you and Ange are the only friends I got.”

I came back to the chair, wiped the spill of bourbon with my sleeve. “This isn’t over yet, Devin.”

He nodded.

“Someone ordered Broussard and Pasquale to do that hit.”

He poured himself some more Jack. “You think you know who, don’t you?”

I leaned back in the chair and took a very light sip from my glass, hard liquor never having been my drug of choice. “Broussard said Poole wasn’t a shooter. Ever. I’d always had Poole pegged for the guy who took the money out of the quarries, capped Mullen and Pharaoh, handed the money off to someone else. But I could never figure who that someone else was.”

“What money? What the hell are you talking about?”

I spent the next half hour running it down for him.

When I finished, he lit a cigarette and said, “Broussard kidnapped the kid; Mullen saw him. Olamon blackmails him into finding and returning the two hundred grand. Broussard runs a double-cross, has someone take out Mullen and Gutierrez, has Cheese whacked in prison. Yes?”

“Killing Mullen and Gutierrez was part of the deal with Cheese,” I said. “But otherwise, yes.”

“And you thought Poole was the shooter.”

“Until the roof with Broussard.”

“So who was it?”

“Well, it’s not just the shooting. Someone had to take the money from Poole and make it disappear in front of a hundred and fifty cops. No flatfoot could pull that off. Had to be high command. Someone above reproach.”

He held up a hand. “Ho, wait a minute. If you’re thinking-”

“Who allowed Poole and Broussard to breach protocol and proceed with the ransom drop without federal intervention? Who’s dedicated his life to helping kids, finding kids, saving kids? Who was in the hills that night,” I said, “roving, his whereabouts accountable only to himself?”

“Aw, fuck,” he said. He took a gulp from his glass, grimaced as he swallowed. “Jack Doyle? You think Jack Doyle’s in on this?”

“Yeah, Devin. I think Jack Doyle’s the guy.”

Devin said, “Aw, fuck,” again. Several times actually. And then there was nothing but silence and the sound of ice melting in our glasses for a long time.

35

“Before forming CAC,” Oscar said, “Doyle was Vice. He was Broussard and Pasquale’s sergeant. He approved their transfers to Narcotics, brought them on board with CAC a few years later when he made lieutenant. It was Doyle who kept Broussard from getting transferred to academy instructor after he married Rachel and the brass went nuts. They wanted Broussard busted down to nothing. They wanted him gone. Marrying a hooker is like saying you’re gay in this department.”

I stole one of Devin’s cigarettes and lit it, immediately got a head rush that sucked all the blood out of my legs.

Oscar puffed from his ratty old cigar, dropped it back in the ashtray, flipped another page in his steno pad. “All transfers, recommendations, decorations Broussard ever received were signed off by Doyle. He was Broussard’s rabbi. Pasquale’s, too.”

It was light outside by now, but you wouldn’t know it from Devin’s living room. The shades were drawn tight, and the room still bore that vaguely metallic air of deep night.

Devin got up from the couch, removed a Sinatra CD from the tray, and replaced it with Dean Martin’s Greatest Hits.

“Worst part of all this,” Oscar said, “is not that I might be helping bring down a cop. It’s that I might be helping bring down a cop while listening to this shit.” He looked over his shoulder at Devin as Devin slid the Sinatra CD back into the rack. “Man, play some Luther Allison, the Taj Mahal I gave you last Christmas, anything but this. Shit, I’d rather hear that crap Kenzie listens to, all those skinny suicidal white boys. Least they got some heart.”

“Where’s Doyle live?” Devin came over to the coffee table and lifted his mug of tea, having passed on the Jack Daniel’s shortly after he’d called Oscar.

Oscar frowned as Dino warbled “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.”

“Doyle?” Oscar said. “Has a house in Neponset. ’Bout half a mile from here. Though once I went to a surprise sixtieth birthday party for him at a second house in a little town called West Beckett.” He looked at me. “Kenzie, you really think he has that girl?”

I shook my head. “Not sure. But if he’s in on this, I bet he has someone’s kid up there.”

Angie was released at two in the afternoon, and I met her at the rear door and we skirted the mob of press out front, drove up onto Broadway, and pulled behind Devin and Oscar as they turned off their hazards and rolled across the bridge toward the Mass Pike.

“Ryerson’s going to pull through,” I said. “They’re still not sure if they can save his arm.”

She lit a cigarette, nodded. “Lionel?”

“Lost his right eye,” I said. “Still under sedation. And that teamster Broussard hit suffered a severe concussion, but he’ll recover.”

She cracked her window. “I liked him,” she said softly.

“Who?”

“Broussard,” she said. “I really liked him. I know he came to that bar to kill Lionel, and maybe us, too, and he had that shotgun swung my way when I fired…” She raised her hands but then dropped them back in her lap.

“You did the right thing.”

She nodded. “I know. I know I did.” She stared down at the cigarette shaking in her hand. “But I just…I wish it hadn’t gone down that way. I liked him. That’s all.”

I turned onto the Mass Pike. “I liked him, too.”

West Beckett was a Rockwell painting in the heart of the Berkshire Mountains. White steeples formed bookends to the town itself, and Main Street was bordered by red pine boardwalks and delicate antiques and quilt shops. The town lay in a small valley like a piece of china in a cupped hand, the dark green hills rising up around it, pocked with remnants of snow that hovered in all that green like clouds.

Jack Doyle’s house was, like Broussard’s, set back off the road and up on a slope, obscured by trees. His, however, was far deeper in the woods, at the end of a drive a quarter mile long, the nearest house a good five acres to the west and shuttered tight, its chimney cold.

We buried the cars twenty yards off the main road, about halfway up, and walked the rest of the way through the woods, slow and cautious, not only because we were neophytes in nature but because Angie’s crutches didn’t find purchase as easily as they would on level ground. We stopped about ten yards short of the clearing that circled Doyle’s lodge-style one-story and peered at the wraparound porch, the logs stacked under the kitchen window.

The driveway was empty, and the house appeared to be as well. We watched for fifteen minutes, and nothing moved past the windows. No smoke flowed from the chimney.

“I’ll go,” I said eventually.

“He’s in there,” Oscar said, “he’ll have the legal right to shoot you as soon as you step on his porch.”

I reached for my gun and remembered that it was in the custody of the police at the same moment my fingers touched an empty holster.

I turned to Devin and Oscar.

“No way,” Devin said. “Nobody’s shooting any more cops. Even in self-defense.”

“And if he draws on me?”

“Find the power of prayer,” Oscar said.

I shook my head, parted the small saplings in front of me, raised my knee to step forward, and Angie said, “Wait.”

I stopped and we listened, heard the engine as it purred toward us. We looked to our right in time to see an ancient Mercedes-Benz jeep with a small snowplow blade still attached to the front grille as it bumped up the road and pulled into the clearing. It parked by the steps, the driver’s side facing us, and the door opened and a round woman with a kind, open face stepped out. She took a sniff of the air and stared through the trees, seemed to be looking right at us. She had marvelous eyes-the clearest blue I’ve ever seen-and her face was strong and bright from mountain living.

“The wife,” Oscar whispered. “Tricia.”

She turned from the trees and reached back into the car, and at first I thought she’d come back with a bag of groceries, but then something leapt and died at the same time in my chest.

Amanda McCready’s chin fell to the woman’s shoulder, and she stared through the trees at me with sleepy eyes, one thumb in her mouth, a red and black hat with ear flaps covering her head.

“Somebody fell asleep on the ride home,” Tricia Doyle said. “Didn’t she?”

Amanda turned her head and nestled it into Mrs. Doyle’s neck. The woman removed Amanda’s hat and smoothed her hair, so bright-almost gold-under the green trees and bright sky.

“Want to help make lunch?”

I saw Amanda’s lips move but didn’t hear what she said. She tilted her chin again, and the shy smile on her lips was so content, so lovely, it opened my chest like an ax.

We watched them for another two hours.

They made grilled-cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, Mrs. Doyle over the frying pan and Amanda sitting up on the counter handing her cheese and bread. They ate at the table, and I climbed up a tree, feet on one branch, hands on another, and watched them.

They talked around their sandwiches and soup, leaned into one another, and gestured with their hands, laughed with food in their mouths.

After lunch, they did the dishes together, and then Tricia Doyle sat Amanda McCready up on the counter and dressed her again in coat and hat, watched with generous approval as Amanda placed her sneakers up on the counter and tied them.

Tricia disappeared into the rear of the house for her own coat and shoes, I assumed, and Amanda remained on the counter. She looked out the window and a sense of agonized abandonment gradually filled her face, pulled at it. She stared out the window at something beyond those woods, beyond the mountains, and I was unsure whether it was the marrow-sapping neglect of her past or the crushing uncertainty of her future-one I’m sure she had yet to believe was truly real-that tore her features. In that moment, I recognized her as her mother’s daughter-Helene’s daughter-and I realized where I’d seen that look on her face before. It had been on Helene’s face the night she’d seen me in the bar and promised, if she ever had a second chance, that she’d never let Amanda out of her sight.

Tricia Doyle came back into the kitchen, and a cloud of confusion-of old and new hurts-drifted across Amanda’s face before being replaced by a hesitant, warily hopeful smile.

They came out on the porch as I climbed down from the tree and there was a squat English bulldog with them, its coat a patchwork of brindle and white that matched a swath of hillside behind them where the ground was open and bare save for a ridge of frozen snow anchored between two rocks.

Amanda rolled with the dog, shrieked as he got on top of her and a gob of drool dripped toward her cheek. She escaped him, and he followed her and jumped at her legs.

Tricia Doyle held him down and showed Amanda how to brush his coat, and she did so on her knees, gently, as if brushing her own hair.

“He doesn’t like it,” I heard her say.

It was the first time I’d heard her voice. It was curious, intelligent, clear.

“He likes when you do it better than me,” Tricia Doyle said. “You’re gentler than I am.”

“I am?” She looked up into Tricia Doyle’s face and continued brushing the dog’s coat with slow, even strokes.

“Oh, yes. Much gentler. My old woman’s hands, Amanda? I have to grip the brush so hard, I sometimes take it out on old Larry here.”

“How come you call him Larry?” Amanda’s voice turned musical on the name, riding up on the second syllable.

“I told you that story,” Tricia said.

“Again,” Amanda said. “Please?”

Tricia Doyle chuckled. “Mr. Doyle had an uncle when we were first married who looked like a bulldog. He had big, droopy jowls.”

Tricia Doyle used her free hand to grip her own cheeks and pull the skin down toward her chin.

Amanda laughed. “He looked like a dog?”

“He did, young lady. He even barked sometimes.”

Amanda laughed again. “No suh.”

“Oh, yes. Ruff!”

“Ruff!” Amanda said.

Then the dog got into it as Amanda placed the brush aside and Mrs. Doyle let Larry go and the three of them faced one another on their haunches and barked at each other.

In the trees, none of us moved or spoke for the rest of the afternoon. We watched them play with the dog and play with each other, build a mini-version of the house out of old numbered building blocks. We watched them sit on the bench set against the porch rails with an afghan pulled over them against the gathering cold and the dog at their feet, as Mrs. Doyle spoke with her chin on Amanda’s head and Amanda lay on her chest and spoke back.

I think we all felt dirty in those woods, petty and sterile. Childless. Proven, as of yet, inept and unable and unwilling to rise to the sacrifice of parenting. Bureaucrats in the wilderness.

They had gone back in the house, hand in hand, dog squirming between their legs, when Jack Doyle pulled into the clearing. He climbed out of his Ford Explorer with a box under his arm, and whatever was in it made both Tricia Doyle and Amanda shriek when he opened it in the house a few minutes later.

The three came back into the kitchen and Amanda perched on the counter again and talked nonstop, her hands pantomiming her brushing of Larry, her fingers gripping her cheeks as she aped Tricia’s description of distant Uncle Larry’s jowls. Jack Doyle threw back his head and laughed, smothered the small girl against his chest. When he raised himself up from the counter, she clung to him and rubbed her cheeks against his five o’clock shadow.

Devin reached into his pocket and removed a cell phone, dialed 411. When the operator answered, he said, “West Beckett Sheriff’s office, please.” He repeated the number under his breath as she gave it to him, then punched the numbers into his cell phone keypad.

Before he could press SEND, Angie put a hand on his wrist. “What are you doing, Devin?”

“What are you doing, Ange?” He looked at her hand.

“You’re going to arrest them?”

He looked up at the house, then back at her and scowled. “Yes, Angie, I’m going to arrest them.”

“You can’t.”

He pulled his hand away from her. “Oh, yes, I can.”

“No. She’s-” Angie pointed through the trees. “Haven’t you been watching? They’re good for her. They’re…Christ, Devin, they love her.”

“They kidnapped her,” he said. “Were you awake for that part?”

“Devin, no. She’s…” Angie lowered her head for a moment. “If we arrest them, they’ll give Amanda back to Helene. She’ll suck the life out of her.”

He stared down at her, peered into her face, a stunned disbelief in his eyes. “Angie, listen to me. That’s a cop in there. I don’t like busting cops. But in case you’ve forgotten, that cop engineered the deaths of Chris Mullen, Pharaoh Gutierrez, and Cheese Olamon, if not implicitly, then tacitly. He ordered Lionel McCready and the two of you probably to be murdered. He’s got Broussard’s blood on his hands. He’s got Pasquale’s blood on his hands. He’s a killer.”

“But…” She looked desperately toward the house.

“But what?” Devin’s features were screwed up into a mask of anger and confusion.

“They love that girl,” Angie said.

Devin followed her gaze to the house, to Jack and Tricia Doyle, each holding one of Amanda’s hands as they swung her back and forth in the kitchen.

Devin’s face softened as he watched, and I could feel an ache invade him as a cloud crossed his face and his eyes grew wide as if opened by a breeze.

“Helene McCready,” Angie said, “will destroy that life in there. She will. You know it. Patrick, you know it.”

I looked away.

Devin took a deep breath, and his head snapped to the side as if he’d taken a punch. Then he shook his head and his eyes grew small and he turned back from the house and pressed SEND on his phone.

“No,” Angie said. “No.”

We watched as Devin held the phone to his ear and the phone on the other end rang and rang. Eventually he lowered it from his ear and pressed END.

“No one there. Sheriff’s probably out delivering the mail, a town this size.”

Angie closed her eyes, sucked in a breath.

A hawk flew over the treetops, cut the cold air with its sharp call, a piercing sound that always makes me think of sudden outrage, reaction to a fresh wound.

Devin shoved the phone in his pocket and removed his badge. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

I turned toward the house and Angie grabbed my arm, turned me back. Her face was feral, torn, her hair falling in her eyes.

“Patrick, Patrick, no, no, no. Please, for God’s sake. No. Talk to him. We can’t do this. We can’t.”

“It’s the law, Ange.”

“It’s bullshit! It’s…it’s wrong. They love that child. Doyle’s no danger to anyone anymore.”

“Bullshit,” Oscar said.

“Who?” Angie said. “Who’s he a danger to? With Broussard dead, no one knows he was involved. He has nothing to protect. No one’s a threat to him.”

“We’re a threat!” Devin said. “You on fucking drugs?”

“Only if we do something about it,” Angie said. “If we leave this place now, never tell anyone what we know, it’s over.”

“He’s got someone else’s kid in there,” Devin said, his face an inch from hers.

She spun toward me. “Patrick, listen. Just listen. He…” She pushed at my chest. “Don’t do this. Please. Please!”

There was nothing resembling logic in her face, nothing reasonable. Just desperation and fear and wild longing. And pain. Rivers of it.

“Angie,” I said quietly, “that child does not belong to them. She belongs to Helene.”

“Helene is arsenic, Patrick. I told you that a long time ago. She’ll suck everything bright out of that girl. She’ll imprison her. She…” Tears poured down her cheeks and bubbled in the corners of her mouth, and she didn’t notice. “She’s death. You take that child out of that home, that’s what you’re sentencing her to. A long death.”

Devin looked at Oscar, then at me. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”

“Please!” The word came out of Angie at the pitch of a kettle’s whistle, and her whole face sank around it.

I put my hands on her arms. “Angie,” I said softly, “maybe you’re wrong about Helene. She’s learned. She knows she was a lousy parent. If you could have seen her the night I-”

“Fuck you,” she said, with a steel chill in her voice. She pulled her arms out of my hands and wiped the tears violently off her face. “Don’t give me that you-saw-her-and-she-looked-sad shit. Where’d you see her, Patrick? In a bar, wasn’t it? Fuck you and this ‘people learn’ bullshit. People don’t learn. People don’t change.”

She turned away from us, to fish in her bag for her cigarettes.

“It isn’t our right to judge,” I said. “It’s not-”

“Then whose right is it?” Angie said.

“Not theirs.” I pointed through the trees at the house. “Those people have chosen to judge certain people on whether they’re fit to raise children. Who gives Doyle the right to make that decision? What if he meets a kid and doesn’t like the religion he’s being raised in? What if he doesn’t like parents who are gay or black or have tattoos? Huh?”

A squall of icy anger darkened her face. “We’re not talking about that, and you know it. We’re talking about this particular case and this particular child. Don’t give me all that pampered classroom philosophizing the Jesuits taught you. You don’t have the balls to do what’s right, Patrick. None of you do. It’s that simple. You don’t have the balls.”

Oscar looked up into the trees. “Maybe we don’t.”

“Go,” she said. “Go arrest them. But I won’t watch you.” She lit the cigarette, and her back stiffened against her crutches. She placed the cigarette between her fingers and curled her hands around the grips of her crutches.

“I’ll hate all three of you for this.”

She swung the crutches forward, and we watched her back as she carried herself through the woods toward the car.

In all the time I’ve been a private detective, nothing has ever been quite so ugly or exhausting as the time I spent watching Oscar and Devin arrest Jack and Tricia Doyle in the kitchen of their home.

Jack didn’t even put up a fight. He sat in the chair by the kitchen table, shaking. He wept, and Tricia scratched at Oscar as he pulled Amanda from her arms, and Amanda screamed and batted Oscar with her fists and cried, “No, Grandma! No! Don’t let him take me! Don’t let him!”

The sheriff answered Devin’s second call and pulled up the drive a few minutes later. He walked into the kitchen with a confused look on his face as Amanda lay limp in Oscar’s arms and Tricia held Jack’s head to her abdomen, rocked him as he wept.

“Oh, my God,” Tricia Doyle whispered, her eyes open to the end of their life with Amanda, the end of freedom, the end of everything.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered again, and I found myself wondering if He heard her, if He heard Amanda whimper against Oscar’s chest, Devin reading Jack his rights; if He heard anything at all.