Молчаливая ночь [with w_cat]

15

[516] State Trooper Chris McNally tuned out as Deidre Lenihan droned on about just seeing a St. Christopher medal, and how her father was named after St. Christopher. She was a well-meaning young woman, but every time he stopped for coffee at this McDonald’s, she seemed to be on duty and always wanted to talk.

[517] Tonight Chris was too preoccupied with thoughts of getting home. He wanted to get at least some sleep before his kids got up to open all their Christmas presents. He also had been thinking about the Toyota he had just seen pull out in front of him. He’d been thinking of buying one himself, although he knew his wife wouldn’t want a brown one. A new car meant montly payments to worry about. He noticed the remnant of a bumper sticker on the Toyota, a single word, inheritance. He knew the sticker had originally said, “We’re spending our grandchildren’s inheritance.” We could use an inheritance, he thought.

“And my father said…”

[518] Chris forced himself to refocus. Deidre’s nice, he thought, but she talks too much. He reached for the bag she was dangling in her hand, but it was clear she was not going to relinquish it yet, not until she had told how her dad said it was too bad that her mother hadn’t been named Philomena.

[519] Still she wasn’t finished. “Years ago my aunt worked in Southampton and belonged to St. Philomena’s parish. When they had to rename it, the pastor had a contest to decide which saint they should choose and why. My aunt suggested St. Dymphna because she said she was the saint of the insane and most of the people in the parish were nuts.”

[520] “Well, I was named after St. Christopher myself,” Chris said, managing to snare the bag. “Merry Christmas, Deidre.”

[521] And it will be Christmas before I get a bite out of this Big Mac, he thought as he drove back onto the Thruway. With one hand, he deftly opened the bag, freed the burger, and gratefully took a large bite. The coffee would have to wait until he got back to his post.

[522] He’d be off duty at midnight, and then, he thought, smiling to himself, it would be time to grab a little shut-eye. Eileen would try to keep the kids in bed till six, but lots of luck. It hadn’t happened last year and it wouldn’t happen this year if he knew his sons.

[523] He was approaching exit 40 and drove the car to the official turnaround, from which he could observe errant drivers. Christmas Eve was nothing like New Year’s Eve for nabbing drinkers, but Chris was determined that no one who was speeding or weaving on the road was going to get past him. He’d witnessed a couple of accidents where some drunk turned the holiday into a nightmare for innocent people. Not tonight if he could help it. And the snow had made driving that much more treacherous.

[524] As Chris opened the lid on his coffee, he frowned. A Corvette doing at least eighty was racing up the service lane. He snapped on his dome lights and siren, shifted into gear, and the squad car leaped in pursuit.

[525] Chief of Detectives Bud Folney listened with no expression other than quiet attentiveness as a trembling Cally Hunter told Mort Levy about finding the wallet on Fifth Avenue. She had waived her Miranda warning, saying impatiently, “This can’t wait any longer.”

[526] Folney knew the basics of her case: older sister of Jimmy Siddons, had served time because a judge had not believed her story that she thought she was helping her brother get away from a rival gang bent on killing him. Levy had told him that Hunter seemed to be one of the hard-luck people of this world-raised by an elderly grandmother, who died, leaving her to try to straighten out her louse of a younger brother when she was only a kid herself; then her husband killed by a hit-and-run driver when she was pregnant.

[527] About thirty, Folney thought, and could be pretty with a little meat on her. She still had the pale, haunted expression he had seen on other women who had been imprisoned and carried with them the horror that someday they might be sent back.

[528] He looked around. The neat apartment, the sunny, yellow paint on the cracked walls, the bravely decorated but skimpy Christmas tree, the new coverlet on the battered doll carriage, they all told him something about Cally Hunter.

[529] Folney knew that, like himself, Mort Levy was desperate to know what connection Hunter could give them between Siddons and the missing Dornan child. He approved of Mort’s gentle approach. Cally Hunter had to tell it her way. It’s a good thing we didn’t bring in the raging bull, Folney thought. Jack Shore was a good detective, but his aggressiveness often got on Folney’s nerves.

[530] Hunter was talking about seeing the wallet on the sidewalk. “I picked it up without thinking. I guessed it belonged to that woman, but I wasn’t sure. I honestly wasn’t sure,” she burst out, “and I thought if I tried to give it back to her, she might say something was missing from it. That happened to my grandmother. And then you’d send me back to prison and…”

[531] “Cally, take it easy,” Mort said. “What happened then?”

“When I got home…”

[532] She told them about finding Jimmy in the apartment, wearing her deceased husband’s clothes. She pointed to the big package under the tree. “The guard’s uniform and coat are in there,” she said. “It was the only place I could think to hide them in case you came back.”

[533] That’s it, Mort thought. When we looked around the apartment the second time, there was something different about the closet. The box on the shelf and the man’s jacket were missing.

Cally’s voice became ragged and uneven as she told them about Jimmy taking Brian Dornan and threatening to kill him if he spotted a cop chasing him.

[534] Levy asked, “Cally, do you think Jimmy can be trusted to let Brian go?”

[535] “I wanted to think so,” she said tonelessly. “That was what I told myself when I didn’t call you immediately. But I know he’s desperate. Jimmy will do anything to keep from going to prison again.”

[536] Folney finally asked a question. “Cally, why did you call us now?”

[537] “I saw Brian’s mother on television, and I knew that if Jimmy had taken Gigi, I’d want you to help me get her back.” Cally clasped her hands together. Her body swayed slightly forward then back in the ancient posture of grief. “The look on that little boy’s face, the way he put that medal around his neck and was holding on to it like it was a life preserver… if anything happens to him, it’s my fault.”

[538] The buzzer sounded. If that’s Shore… Folney thought as he jumped up to answer it.

[539] It was Aika Banks. When she entered the apartment, she looked at the policemen searchingly, then rushed to Cally and hugged her. “Baby, what is it? What’s wrong? Why do you need me to stay with Gigi? What do these people want?”

[540] Cally winced in pain.

[541] Aika peeled up her friend’s sleeve. The bruises caused by Jimmy’s fingers were now an ugly purple. Any doubts that Bud Folney had about Hunter’s possible cooperation with her brother disappeared. He squatted in front of her. “Cally, you’re not going to get into trouble. I promise you. I believe you found that wallet. I believe you didn’t know what was best for you to do. But now you’ve got to help us. Have you any idea where Jimmy might have gone?”

[542] Ten minutes later, when they left Cally’s apartment, Mort Levy was carrying the bulky gift-wrapped package that held the guard’s uniform.

[543] Shore joined them in the squad car and impatiently fired questions at Mort. As they were driven downtown, they agreed that the search for Jimmy Siddons would be based on the assumption that he might be trying to reach Canada.

[544] “He’s got to be in a car,” Folney said flatly. “There’s no way he’ll travel on public transportation with that child.”

[545] Cally had told them that from the time he was twelve years old, Jimmy could hot-wire and steal any car; she was sure he must have had one waiting near the apartment.

[546] “My guess is that Siddons would want to get out of New York State as soon as possible,” Folney said. “Which means he’d drive through New England to the border. But it’s only a guess. He could be on the Thruway, headed for I87. That’s the fastest route.”

And Siddon’s girlfriend was probably in Canada. It all fit together.

[547] They also accepted Cally’s absolute certainty that Jimmy Siddons would not be taken alive and that his final act of vengeance would be to kill his hostage.

[548] So they were faced with an escaped murderer with a child, possibly driving a car they could not describe, probably headed north in a snowstorm. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Siddons would be too smart to attract attention by speeding. The border was always mobbed with holiday traffic on Christmas Eve. He dictated a message to be sent to state police throughout New England as well as New York. “Has threatened to kill the hostage,” he emphasized.

[549] They calculated that if Siddons had left Cally Hunter’s apartment shortly after six, depending on driving conditions, he’d be between two and three hundred miles away. The alert that went out to the state police contained Cally’s final certainty: On a chain around his neck, the child may be wearing a bronze St. Christopher medal the size of a silver dollar.

[550] Pete Cruise watched as the detectives emerged from Cally Hunter’s building some twenty minutes after arriving there. He noted that Levy was carrying a bulky package. Shore immediately jumped out of the van and joined them.

[551] This time Pete got a good look at the third man, then whistled silently. It was Bud Folney, chief of detectives and in line to be the next police commissioner. Something was breaking. Something big.

[552] The squad car took off with its dome light flashing. A block away its siren was turned on. Pete sat for a moment, debating what to do. The cops in the van might stop him if he tried to go in to see Cally, but obviously something major was going down here, and he was determined to scoop everyone on this.

[553] As he was wondering about looking for a back entrance to the building, he saw the woman he knew to be Cally’s baby-sitter leave. In a flash he was out of the car and following her. He caught up with her when she turned the corner and they were out of sight of the cops in the van. “I’m Detective Cruise,” he said. “I’ve been instructed to see you safely home. How is Cally doing?”

[554] “Oh, that poor girl,” Aika began. “Officer, you people have to believe her. She thought she was doing the right thing when she didn’t phone you about her brother kidnapping that little boy…”

[555] Even though Brian was hungry, the hamburger was hard to swallow. His throat felt like there was something stuck in it. He knew that Jimmy was the reason for that. He took a giant swallow of Coke and tried to think about how Daddy would beat Jimmy up for being so mean to him.

[556] But now when he thought about Daddy it was hard to remember anything except all the plans they had made for Christmas Eve. Daddy had planned to come home early, and they were all going to trim the tree together. Then they were going to have dinner and go around their neighborhood singing Christmas carols with a bunch of their friends

[557] That was all he could think about now, because that was all he wanted, to be home and have Daddy and Mommy smiling a lot the way they always did when they were together. When they came to New York because Dad was sick, Mom had told him and Michael that their big presents, the ones they really wanted, would be waiting for them when they got back home. She said that Santa Claus would keep the presents on his sleigh until he knew they were in their own house again.

[558] Michael had said, “Yeah, really,” under his breath to Brian. But Brian believed in Santa Claus. Last year Dad had pointed out marks on the roof of the garage where Santa’s sleigh had landed and where the reindeer had stood. Michael told him he heard Mom tell Dad it was a good thing Dad hadn’t broken his neck sliding around on the icy roof and making tracks all over it, but Brian didn’t mind what Michael said, because he didn’t believe it. Just like he didn’t mind that Michael sometimes called him the Dork; he knew he wasn’t a dork.

[559] He knew things were bad when you wished your jerk brother, who could be such a pain in the neck, was there with you, and that was just how he felt now.

[560] As Brian swallowed over that feeling of something in his throat, the plastic container almost jumped out of his hand. He realized Jimmy had switched lanes fast.

[561] Jimmy Siddons swore silently. He had just passed a state trooper’s car stopped in back of a sports car. The sight of a trooper made him sweat all over, but he shouldn’t have switched lanes like that. He was getting jumpy.

[562] Sensing the animosity that bristled from Jimmy, Brian put the uneaten hamburger and the soda back in the bag and, moving slowly so Jimmy could see what he was doing, leaned down and put the bag on the floor. Then he straightened up, huddled against the back of the seat and hugged his arms against his sides. The fingers of his right hand groped until they closed around the St. Christopher medal, which he had laid on the seat next to him when he opened the package of food.

[563] With a sense of relief he closed his hand over it and mentally pictured the strong saint who carried the little kid across the dangerous river, who had taken care of his grandfather, who would make Dad get better and who… Brian closed his eyes… He didn’t finish the wish, but in his mind he could see himself on the shoulders of the saint.