Moonlight Mile

Chapter One

On a bright, unseasonably warm afternoon in early December, Brandon Trescott walked out of the spa at the Chatham Bars Inn on Cape Cod and got into a taxi. A pesky series of DUIs had cost him the right to operate a motor vehicle in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the next thirty-three months, so Brandon always took cabs. The twenty-five-year-old trust-fund baby of a superior court judge mother and a local media mogul father, Brandon wasn’t your run-of-the-mill rich kid asshole. He worked double shifts at it. By the time the state finally suspended his license, he was on his fourth DUI. The first two had been pled down to reckless driving, the third had brought him a stern warning, but the fourth had resulted in injury to someone besides Brandon, who escaped without a scratch.

This winter afternoon, with the temperature hanging just below forty degrees, Brandon wore a manufacturer-stained, manufacturer-faded hoodie that retailed for around $900 over a white silk T with a collar dragged down by a pair of $600 shades. His baggy shorts also had little rips in them, compliments of whichever nine-year-old Indonesian had been poorly paid to put them there. He wore flip-flops in December, and he sported an insouciant mop of blond surfer’s hair with an adorable habit of drooping helplessly over his eyes.

After drinking his weight in Crown Royal one night, he’d flipped his Dodge Viper coming back from Foxwoods with his girlfriend riding shotgun. She’d only been his girlfriend two weeks, but it was unlikely she’d be anyone’s girlfriend ever again. Her name was Ashten Mayles and she’d been in a persistent vegetative state ever since the top of the car compacted against the top of her skull. One of the last acts she’d attempted to perform while she’d still had use of her arms and legs was to try and take Brandon’s keys from him in the casino parking lot. According to witnesses, Brandon had rewarded her concern by flicking a lit cigarette at her.

In possibly the first brush with actual consequence that Brandon had ever known, Ashten’s parents, not wealthy but politically connected, had decided to do everything in their power to ensure that Brandon paid for his mistakes. Hence the Suffolk County DA ’s prosecution on DUI and reckless endangerment. Brandon spent the entire trial looking shocked and morally outraged that anyone could get away with expecting personal responsibility of him. In the end, he was convicted and served four months’ house arrest. In a really nice house.

During the subsequent civil trial, it was revealed that the trust-fund baby had no trust fund. He had no car, had no house. As far as anyone could tell, he didn’t own so much as an iPod. Nothing was in his name. Things had once been in his name, but he’d fortuitously signed them all over to his parents one day before the car accident. It was the before part that killed people, but no one could prove otherwise. When the jury in the civil trial awarded damages in the amount of $7.5 million to the Mayles family, Brandon Trescott emptied his pockets of the nothing that was in them and shrugged.

I had a list of all the things Brandon had once owned and was legally prohibited from using. Use of said items, it was deemed by the court, would constitute not just the appearance of ownership but the fact of it. The Trescotts protested the court’s definition of “ownership,” but the press beat the shit out of them, the public outcry was loud enough to lead ships ashore through night fog, and they ultimately signed off on the deal.

The next day, in a wonderful “fuck you” to both the Mayles family and those loud voices of the great unwashed, Layton and Susan Trescott purchased their son a condominium in Harwich Port, since the Mayles’ attorneys had not covered future earnings or future possessions in the agreement. And it was to Harwich Port that I followed Brandon early on a December afternoon.

The condo smelled of mold and rug beer and food left rotting in the sink on crusted plates. I knew this because I’d been in there twice to plant bugs and swipe all the passwords off his computer and generally do all the snoopy, sneaky shit clients pay top dollar to pretend they don’t know guys like me get up to. I’d gone through what little paperwork I could find and hadn’t found any bank accounts we didn’t know about or any stock reports that hadn’t been reported. I hacked his computer and found pretty much the same-nothing but his self-serving rants to ex-frat buddies and some pathetic, never sent, letter-to-the-editor screeds rife with misspellings. He visited a lot of porn sites and a lot of gaming sites and he read every article ever written about himself.

When the cab dropped him off, I pulled my digital recorder out of the glove compartment. The day I’d broken into his place and hacked his computer, I’d placed an audio transmitter the size of a grain of sea salt under his media console and another in his bedroom. I listened to him let out a bunch of small groans as he prepared for the shower, then the sound of him showering, drying off, changing into fresh clothes, pouring himself a drink, flicking on his flat screen, turning it to some soul-crushing reality show about stupid people, and settling onto the couch to scratch himself.

I slapped my own cheeks a couple times to stay awake and flipped through the newspaper on the car seat. Another spike in unemployment was predicted. A dog had rescued his owners from a fire in Randolph even though he’d just had hip surgery and his two hind legs were strapped to a doggie wheelchair. Our local Russian mob boss got charged with DUI after he stranded his Porsche on Tinean Beach at high tide. The Bruins won at a sport that made me sleepy when I watched it, and a Major League third baseman with a twenty-six-inch neck reacted with self-righteous fury when questioned about his alleged steroid use.

Brandon ’s cell rang. He talked to some guy he kept calling “bro,” except it came out “bra.” They talked about World of Warcraft and Fallout 4 on PS2 and Lil Wayne and T.I. and some chick they knew from the gym whose Facebook page mentioned how much extra working out she did on her Wii Fit even though she, like, lived across from a park, and I looked out the window and felt old. It was a feeling I had a lot lately, but not in a rueful way. If this was how twentysomethings spent their twenties these days, they could have their twenties. Their thirties, too. I tilted my seat back and closed my eyes. After a while, Brandon and his bra signed off with:

“So, a’ight, bra, you keep it tight.”

“You keep it tight, too, bra, you keep it real tight.”

“Hey, bra.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I forgot. Shit’s fucked up.”

“What?”

“Forgetting.”

“Yeah.”

“A’ight.”

“A’ight.”

And they hung up.

I searched for reasons not to blow my brains out. I came up with two or three dozen real fast, but I still wasn’t certain I could listen to many more conversations between Brandon and one of his “bras.”

Dominique was another issue entirely. Dominique was a blue-chip working girl who’d entered Brandon ’s life ten days earlier via Facebook. That first night, they’d IM’d back and forth for two hours. Since then, they’d Skyped three times. Dominique had remained fully clothed but wildly descriptive about what would happen should (a) she ever deign to sleep with him and (b) he came up with the sizable cash allotment necessary to make that happen. Two days ago, they’d traded cell phone numbers. And, God bless her, she called about thirty seconds after he clicked off with bra. This, by the way, was how the asshole answered a phone:

Brandon : Talk to me.

(Really. And people continued to contact him.)

Dominique: Hey.

Brandon :Oh, hey. Shit. Hey! You around?

Dominique: I will be.

Brandon :Well, come here.

Dominique: You forget we Skyped. I wouldn’t sleep with you there wearing a hazmat suit.

Brandon :So you’re thinking about sleeping with me finally. I never met a whore decided who she’d do it with.

Dominique: You ever meet one who looked like me?

Brandon :No. And you’re, like, near my mom’s age. And still. Shit. You’re the hottest chick I ever-

Dominique: How sweet. And let’s clarify something-I’m not a whore. I’m a carnal service provider.

Brandon :I don’t even know what that means.

Dominique: I’m totally unsurprised. Now go cash a bond or a check or whatever you do and meet me.

Brandon :When?

Dominique: Now.

Brandon :Now now?

Dominique: Now now. I’m in town this afternoon and this afternoon only. I won’t go to a hotel, so you better have another place, and I won’t wait long.

Brandon :What if it’s a real nice hotel?

Dominique: I’m hanging up now.

Brandon :You’re not hang-

She hung up.

Brandon cursed. He threw his remote into a wall. He kicked something. He said, “Only overpriced whore you’ll ever meet? You know what, bra? You can buy ten of her. And some blow. Go to Vegas.”

Yes, he actually called himself “bra.”

The phone rang. He must have tossed it along with the remote, because the ringtone was distant and I heard him scramble across the room to get to it. By the time he reached it, the ringtone had died.

“Fuck!” It was a loud scream. If I’d had my window rolled down, I could have heard it from the car.

It took him another thirty seconds before he prayed.

“Look, bra, I know I did some shit, but I promise, you get her to call back again? I’ll go to church and I’ll deposit a boatload of the green in one of those baskets. And I’ll be better. Just have her call back, bra.”

Yes, he actually called God “bra.”

Twice.

His ringtone had barely burped before he flipped his phone open. “Yeah?”

“You get one shot here.”

“I know it.”

“Give me an address.”

“Shit. I-”

“Okay, I’m hanging-”

“ Seven seventy-three Marlborough Street, between Dartmouth and Exeter.”

“Which unit?”

“No unit. I own the whole thing.”

“I’ll be there in ninety minutes.”

“I can’t get a cab that fast around here, and it’s rush hour soon.”

“Then get the power of flight. See you in ninety. Ninety-one? I’m gone.”

The car was a 2009 Aston Martin DB9. Retailed for two hundred thousand. Dollars. When Brandon pulled it out of the garage two town houses over, I checked it off the list on the seat beside me. I also snapped five photos of him in it while he waited for traffic to thin so he could enter it.

He hit the gas like he was launching an expedition to the Milky Way, and I didn’t even bother chasing him. The way he weaved in and out of traffic, even someone with the awareness of meat loaf, like Brandon, would see me riding his ass. I didn’t need to follow him anyway-I knew exactly where he was going and I knew a shortcut.

He arrived eighty-nine minutes after the phone call. He ran up the stairs and used a key on the door, and I caught it on film. He ran up the interior stairs, and I entered behind him. I followed him from fifteen feet away, and he was so wired that he didn’t even notice me for a good two minutes. In the kitchen on the second floor, as he opened the fridge, he turned when I snapped off a few shots on the SLR and he fell back against the tall window behind him.

“Who the fuck’re you?”

“Doesn’t much matter,” I said.

“You paparazzi?”

“Why would paparazzi give a shit about you?” I snapped a few more shots.

He leaned back to get a good look at me. He grew past the fear of a stranger popping up in his kitchen and moved on to threat-assessment. “You’re not that big.” He cocked his surfer’s head. “I could kick your bitch ass out of here.”

“I’m not that big,” I agreed, “but you definitely couldn’t kick my bitch ass out of anywhere.” I lowered the camera. “Seriously. Just look in my eyes.”

He did.

“Know what I’m saying?”

He half-nodded.

I slung the camera onto my shoulder and gave him a wave. “I’m leaving anyway. So, hey, have a good one, and try not to brain-damage any more people.”

“What’re you going to do with the pictures?”

I said the words that broke my heart. “Pretty much nothing.”

He looked confused, which was hardly uncommon for him. “You work for the Mayles family. Right?”

My heart broke just a tiny bit more. “No. I do not.” I sighed. “I work for Duhamel-Standiford.”

“A law firm?”

I shook my head. “Security. Investigations.”

He stared back at me, mouth open, eyes narrowed.

“Your parents hired us, you dumb shit. They figured you’d eventually do something moronic because, well, you’re a moron, Brandon. This little incident today should confirm all their fears.”

“I’m not a moron,” he said. “I went to BC.”

In place of a dozen comebacks, a shiver of exhaustion rippled through me.

This was my life these days. This.

I left the kitchen. “Best of luck, Brandon.” Halfway down the stairs, I stopped. “By the way, Dominique’s not coming.” I turned back toward the top of the stairs and leaned my elbow on the railing. “And, oh yeah, her name’s not Dominique.”

His flip-flops made a sloppy-wet-kiss noise as he crossed the floorboards and appeared in the doorway above me. “How do you know?”

“Because she works for me, dumbass.”

Chapter Two

After I left Brandon, I met Dominique at the Neptune Oyster in the North End.

When I sat down, she said, “That was fun,” her eyes a bit wider than usual. “Tell me everything that happened when you got to his house.”

“Can we order first?”

“Drinks are already on their way. Dish, dish.”

I told her. Our drinks came, and we found time to scan the menu and decide on lobster rolls. She drank a light beer. I drank sparkling water. I reminded myself it was better for me than beer, particularly in the afternoon. But part of me still felt like a sellout. What I was selling out was less clear to me, but I felt it all the same.

When I finished recounting the tale of my encounter with Brandon Flip-Flops, she clapped her hands and said, “Did you really call him a moron?”

“Called him a few other things, too. Most weren’t complimentary.”

As our lobster rolls arrived, I removed my suit jacket, folded it, and laid it over the arm of the chair to my left.

“I’ll never get used to it,” she said. “You, all dressed up.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like the old days.” I bit into my lobster roll. Maybe the best lobster roll in Boston, which made it, arguably, the best lobster roll in the world. “It’s not the dressing-up I have a hard time with. It’s the hair care.”

“It’s a nice suit, though.” She touched the sleeve. “Very nice.” She bit into her roll and appraised the rest of me. “Nice tie, too. Your mom pick it out?”

“My wife, actually.”

“That’s right, you’re married,” she said. “Shame.”

“Why’s it a shame?”

“Well, maybe not for you.”

“Or my wife.”

“Or your wife,” she acknowledged. “But some of us remember when you were a lot more, um, playful, Patrick. ’Member those days?”

“I do.”

“And?”

“They seem a lot more fun to remember than they were to live.”

“I don’t know.” She raised one soft eyebrow and took a sip of beer. “I remember you living them pretty well.”

I drank some water. Drained the glass, actually. I refilled it from the overpriced blue bottle they’d left on the table. Not for the first time, I wondered why it was socially acceptable to leave a bottle of water or wine on the table but not a bottle of whiskey or gin.

She said, “You’re not a very polished staller.”

“I wasn’t aware I was stalling.”

“Trust me, you were.”

It’s odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy’s mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.

I reached into the inside pocket of my suit jacket. I pulled out an envelope and handed it across the table. “Your payment. Duhamel-Standiford already took out taxes.”

“Thoughtful of them.” She placed it in her purse.

“I don’t know if it’s thoughtful. They’re sticklers for the rules, though.”

“You never were,” she said.

“Things change.”

She considered that and her dark eyes grew darker, sadder. Then her face lit up. She reached into her purse and pulled the check back out. She laid it on the table between us. “I have an idea.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Sure I do. Let’s flip a coin. Heads-you pay for lunch.”

“I’m already paying for lunch.”

“Tails…” She tapped a fingernail on the side of her pilsner glass. “Tails-I cash this check and we walk over to the Millennium, get a room, and blow the rest of the afternoon damaging the structural integrity of a box spring.”

I took another drink of water. “I don’t have any change.”

She frowned. “Me, either.”

“Oh, well.”

“Excuse me,” she said to our waiter. “Would you have a quarter we could borrow? Give it right back.”

He handed it to her, a tiny tremor in his fingers for a woman almost twice his age. She could do that, though, unsettle a guy of most any age.

When he walked away, she said, “He was kinda cute.”

“For a zygote.”

“Now now.” She perched the coin on her thumbnail and spring-loaded the thumb against the tip of her index finger. “Call it.”

“I’m not playing,” I said.

“Come on. Call it.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“Play hooky. They won’t know the difference.”

“I’ll know the difference.”

“Integrity,” she said. “How overrated.”

She flicked her thumb and the quarter tumbled toward the ceiling, then tumbled back to the table. It landed on the paycheck, equidistant between my water and her beer.

Heads.

“Shit,” she said.

When the waiter passed, I gave him his quarter back and asked for the check. While he rang up the bill, we didn’t say a word. She finished her light beer. I finished my water. The waiter ran my credit card and I did the math for a good tip. The next time he passed, I handed him the bill.

I looked across the table into her large, almond eyes. Her lips were parted; if you knew where to look you would see a small chip at the bottom of her upper left incisor.

“Let’s do it anyway,” I said.

“The room.”

“Yes.”

“The box spring.”

“Si.”

“Sheets so wrinkled they’ll never be ironed out.”

“Let’s not set the bar too high.”

She flipped open her cell and called the hotel. After a few moments, she said to me, “They have a room.”

“Book it.”

“This is so decadent.”

“It was your idea.”

My wife spoke into the phone. “We’ll take that one if it’s available now.” She gave me another giddy look, as if we were sixteen and borrowing her father’s car without his knowledge. She tilted her jaw back toward the phone. “Last name is Kenzie.” She spelled it out. “Yes. K as in ‘kangaroo.’ First name is Angie.”

In the room, I said, “Would you prefer I call you Angie? Or Dominique?”

“The question is which one do you prefer?”

“I like ’em both.”

“Both it is.”

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“How can we wreck the sheets from over here on the dresser?”

“Good point. You got me?”

“I got you.”

After we’d dozed to the distant honks and beeps of rush-hour traffic ten stories below, Angie propped herself up on her elbow and said, “This was crazy.”

“It was.”

“Can we afford it?”

She knew the answer, but I said it anyway. “Probably not.”

“Shit.” She looked down at the white sheets with their high thread count.

I touched her shoulder. “Every now and then, we should get to live a little. D-S pretty much assured me they’d hire me on permanent after this job.”

She looked up at me, then back at the sheets. “ ‘Pretty much’ isn’t ironclad.”

“I know that.”

“They’ve been dangling this fucking permanence in front of you for-”

“I know.”

“-too long. It’s not right.”

“I know it’s not. But what am I going to do?”

She scowled. “What if they don’t make a real offer?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“We’re almost out of money.”

“I know.”

“And we have an insurance bill coming up.”

“I know.”

“Is that all you can say? ‘I know’?”

I realized my teeth were gritted hard enough to snap. “I’m sucking it up, Ange, and doing jobs I don’t like for a company I’m not terribly in love with so that eventually I can get hired permanent and we can get insurance and benefits and a paid vacation. I don’t like it any more than you do but until you finish school and get a job again, I don’t know what else I can do or fucking say that will change things.”

We each took a breath, our faces a little too red, the walls a little too close.

“I’m just talking about it,” she said softly.

I looked out the window for a minute, felt all the black fear and stress of the last couple of years crowding my skull and revving my heart.

Eventually, I said, “This is the best option I see on the table right now. If Duhamel-Standiford keeps playing carrot-on-a-stick, then, yeah, we’ll have to reconsider what I’m doing. Let’s hope they don’t.”

“Okay,” she said and it came out riding a long, slow exhalation.

“Look at it this way,” I said, “the debt’s so big and we’re so financially fucked that the bonus money we just blew on the hotel room wouldn’t have made a dent.”

She tapped her fingers lightly on my chest. “Ain’t you sweet to say?”

“Oh, I’m a helluva guy. You didn’t know?”

“I knew.” She hooked a leg over mine.

“Pshaw,” I said.

Outside, the horns grew more insistent. I pictured the strangled traffic. Nothing moving, nothing even appearing to.

I said, “We leave now or we leave an hour from now, we’ll get home the same time.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Shameful, shameful things.”

She rolled on top of me. “We have the sitter till seven-thirty.”

“Ample time.”

She lowered her head until our foreheads touched. I kissed her. It was the kind of kiss we’d taken for granted a few years ago-deep and unhurried. When we broke it, she took a slow breath and then leaned back in and we tried another one.

Angie said, “Let’s have a few dozen more of those…”

“Okay.”

“And then a bit more of that thing we tried an hour ago…”

“That was interesting, wasn’t it?”

“And then a long hot shower…”

“I’m sold.”

“And then go home and see our daughter.”

“Deal.”

Chapter Three

The phone call came at three the next morning.

“You remember me?” A woman’s voice.

“What?” I was still half-asleep. I checked the caller ID: PRIVATE NUMBER.

“You found her once. Find her again.”

“Who is this?”

Her words slushed through the phone line. “You owe me.”

“Sleep it off,” I said. “I’m hanging up.”

“You owe me.” She hung up.

The next morning, I wondered if I’d dreamed the call. If I hadn’t, I already had trouble remembering if it was last night or the night before. By tomorrow, I assumed, I’d forget the whole thing. On the walk to the subway, I drank my cup of Dunkin’s under a low, clay sky and ragged clouds. Brittle gray leaves stirred in the gutter, waiting to fossilize in the first snow. The trees were bare along Crescent Avenue, and cold air off the ocean hunted the gaps in my clothes. Between the end of Crescent Avenue and the harbor itself was JFK/UMass Station and the parking lot beyond. The stairs leading up to the subway station were already thick with commuters.

Even so, a face appeared at the top of the stairs that I couldn’t help but be drawn to. A face I’d hoped never to see again. The weary, embattled face of a woman who’d been passed by when life was handing out luck. As I drew close to her, she tried a hesitant smile and raised a hand.

Beatrice McCready.

“Hey, Patrick.” The breeze was sharper up top and she dealt with it by burrowing into a flimsy jean jacket, the collar pulled up to her earlobes.

“Hi, Beatrice.”

“I’m sorry about the call last night. I…” She gave a helpless shrug and looked at the commuters for a moment.

“Don’t mention it.”

People jostled us as they headed for the turnstiles. Beatrice and I stepped off to the side, close to a white metal wall with a six-by-six subway map painted on it.

“You look good,” she said.

“You, too.”

“It’s nice of you to lie,” she said.

“I wasn’t,” I lied.

I did some quick math and guessed she was about fifty. These days, fifty might be the new forty, but in her case it was the new sixty. Her once-strawberry hair was white. The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in. She had the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap.

A long time ago-a lifetime ago-her niece had been kidnapped. I’d found her and returned her to the home she shared with her mother, Bea’s sister-in-law, Helene, even though Helene was not what you’d call a natural-born mother.

“How’re the kids?”

“Kids?” she said. “I only have one.”

Jesus.

I searched my memory. A boy. I remembered that. He’d been five or six, shit, maybe seven, at the time. Mark. No. Matt. No. Martin. Definitely Martin.

I considered rolling the dice again, saying his name, but I’d already let the silence drag on too long.

“Matt,” she said, careful eyes on me, “is eighteen now. He’s a senior up the Monument.”

Monument High was the kind of school where kids studied math by counting their shell casings.

“Oh,” I said. “He like it?”

“He’s… under the circumstances, he’s a, ya know, he needs direction sometimes, but he turned out better than a lot of kids would.”

“That’s great.” I regretted the word as soon as it left my mouth. It was such a bullshit, knee-jerk modifier to use.

Her green eyes flashed for just a second, like she wanted to explain in precise detail just how fucking great her life had been since I’d had a hand in sending her husband to prison. His name was Lionel and he was a decent man who’d done a bad thing for good reasons and flailed helplessly while it all transformed into carnage around him. I’d liked him a lot. It was one of the more cutting ironies of the Amanda McCready case that I’d liked the bad guys a hell of a lot more than the good ones. One exception had been Beatrice. She and Amanda had been the only blameless players in the entire clusterfuck.

She stared at me now, as if searching for a me behind the me I projected. A more worthy, more authentic me.

A group of teenage boys came through the turnstiles wearing letter jackets-varsity athletes heading to BC High a ten-minute walk down Morrissey Boulevard.

“Amanda was, what, four when you found her?” Bea said.

“Yeah.”

“She’s sixteen now. Almost seventeen.” Her chin tipped at the athletes as they descended the stairs toward Morrissey Boulevard. “Their age.”

That stung. Somehow I’d lived in denial that Amanda McCready had aged. That she was anything but the same four-year-old I’d last seen in her mother’s apartment, staring at a TV as a dog-food commercial played in the cathode rays bathing her face.

“Sixteen,” I said.

“You believe it?” Beatrice smiled. “Where’s it go, the time?”

“Into somebody else’s gas tank.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Another group of athletes and a few studious-looking kids came toward us.

“You said on the phone she was gone again.”

“Yeah.”

“Runaway?”

“With Helene for a mother, you can’t rule it out.”

“Any reason to think it’s more, I dunno, dire than that?”

“Well, for one, Helene won’t admit she’s gone.”

“You call the cops?”

She nodded. “Of course. They asked Helene about her. Helene said Amanda was fine. The cops left it at that.”

“Why would they leave it at that?”

“ Why? It was city employees who took Amanda in ’98. Helene’s lawyer sued the cops, sued their union, sued the city. He got three million. He pocketed a million, and two million went into a trust for Amanda. The cops are terrified of Helene, Amanda, the whole thing. If Helene looks them in the eye and says, ‘My kid’s fine, now go away,’ guess what they do?”

“You talk to anybody in the media?”

“Sure,” she said. “They didn’t want to touch it either.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “Bigger fish, I guess.”

That didn’t make sense. I couldn’t imagine what it was but she wasn’t telling me something.

“What do you think I can do here, Beatrice?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What can you do?”

The softening breeze moved her white hair around. There was zero doubt that she blamed me for her husband getting shot and being charged with a grocery list of crimes while he lay in his hospital bed. He’d left his house to meet me at a bar in South Boston. From there, the hospital. From the hospital, jail. From jail, prison. He’d walked out of his house one Thursday afternoon and never walked back in.

Beatrice kept looking at me the way nuns used to look at me in grammar school. I hadn’t liked it then, I didn’t like it now.

“Beatrice?” I said. “I’m real sorry your husband kidnapped his niece because he thought his sister was a shitty parent.”

“Thought?”

“But he did, in fact, kidnap her.”

“For her own good.”

“Okay. So we should just let anybody decide what’s good for a kid who doesn’t belong to them. I mean, why not? Every kid with an asshole parent, line up at the nearest subway station. We’ll ship you all to Wonkaville where you’ll live happily ever after.”

“You through?”

“No, I’m not.” I could feel a rage building in me that got closer to the surface of my skin every year. “I’ve eaten a lot of shit over the years for doing my job with Amanda. That’s what I did, Bea, what I was hired to do.”

“Poor guy,” she said. “All misunderstood.”

“What you hired me to do. You said, ‘Find my niece.’ And I found her. So you want to give me the arched eyebrow of guilt for the next ten years, knock yourself out. I did my job.”

“And a lot of people got hurt.”

“ I didn’t hurt ’em, though. I just found her and brought her back.”

“That’s how you live with it?”

I leaned back against the wall and exhaled a long burst of air and frustration. I reached into my coat and pulled out my Charlie Card to slide through the turnstile. “I gotta go to work, Bea. A pleasure seeing you. Sorry I can’t help.”

She said, “Is it about money?”

“What?”

“I know we never paid your bill from the first time you found her, but-”

“What? No,” I said. “It has nothing to do with money.”

“Then what?”

“Look,” I said as softly as I could, “I’m hurting just as bad as anyone in this economy. It’s not about the money, no, but I can’t afford to take on any job that doesn’t pay, either. And I’m about to go in for an interview with someone who might give me a permanent job, so I couldn’t take side cases anyway. Do you understand?”

“Helene’s got this boyfriend,” she said. “Her latest? Been in prison, of course. Guess what for.”

I shook my head in frustration and tried to wave her off.

“Sex crimes.”

Twelve years ago, Amanda McCready had been kidnapped by her uncle Lionel and some rogue cops who’d had no interest in ransoming or hurting her. What they’d wanted was to put that child in a home with a mother who didn’t drink like she owned stock in London gin or pick her boy toys from the Sex Freaks Shopping Network. When I found Amanda, she was living with a couple who loved her. They’d been determined to give her health, stability, and happiness. Instead, they’d gone to prison, and Amanda had been returned to Helene’s home. By me.

“You owe, Patrick.”

“What?”

“I said you owe.”

I could feel the rage again, a tick-tick turning into a tom-tom beat. I had done the right thing. I knew it. I had no doubt. What I had in place of doubt, though, was this rage-murky and illogical and growing deeper every day of the last twelve years. I put my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t punch the wall with the white subway map on it. “I don’t owe anyone anything. I don’t owe you, I don’t owe Helene, I don’t owe Lionel.”

“What about Amanda? You don’t think you owe her?” She held her thumb and index finger a whisker from touching. “Just a little bit?”

“No,” I said. “Take care, Bea.” I walked toward the turnstiles.

“You never asked about him.”

I stopped. I dug my hands deeper into my pockets. I sighed. I turned back to her.

She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right. “Lionel. He should have been out by now, you know, a normal guy like him. The lawyer told us when we pled guilty that he’d be sentenced to twelve years but only do six. Well, that was the sentence. They told the truth about that.” She took a step toward me. She stopped. She took two steps back. The crowd streamed between us, a few people giving us looks. “He gets beat up a lot in there. Worse things, too, but he won’t talk about that. He isn’t meant for a place like that. He’s just a sweetie, you know?” She took another step back. “He got in a fight, some guy trying to take whatever my husband didn’t want to give? And Lionel, he’s a big guy, and he hurt this guy. So now he has to do the full twelve and he’s almost done. But they’re talking about new charges maybe unless he turns rat. Helps the feds with some gang that’s running drugs and things in and out of there? They say if Lionel doesn’t help them, they’ll mess with his sentence. We thought he’d get out in six years .” Her lips got caught between a broken smile and a hopeless frown. “I don’t know sometimes anymore, you know? I don’t.”

There was no place for me to hide. I held her eyes as best I could but I eventually dropped my gaze to the black rubber flooring.

Another group of students walked behind her. They were laughing about something, oblivious. Beatrice watched them go and their happiness shrank her. She looked light enough for the breeze to toss her down the stairs.

I held out my hands. “I don’t do independent work anymore.”

She nodded at my left hand. “You’re married, uh?”

“Yeah.” I took a step back in her direction. “Bea, look-”

She held up a hard hand. “Kids?”

I stopped. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find the words suddenly.

“You don’t have to answer. I’m sorry. I am. I was stupid to come. I just thought, I dunno, I just…” She glanced off to her right for a moment. “You’re good at it I bet.”

“Huh?”

“I bet you’re a real good father.” She gave me a wadded-up smile. “I always thought you would be.”

She turned into the crowd exiting the station and vanished from my view. I went through the turnstile and down the stairs to the subway platform. From there I could see the parking lot that led out to Morrissey Boulevard. The crowd streamed from the stairwell onto the asphalt, and for a moment, I saw Bea again, but just for a moment. Then I lost sight of her. The crowd was thick with high school kids, and most were taller than her.

Chapter Four

My commute was only four stops on the Red Line. Still, when you’re crammed into a moving can with a hundred other people, four stops can wrinkle a suit pretty good. I exited South Station and shook my arms and legs in a futile attempt to restore luster to my suit and topcoat, and then I walked over to Two International Place, a skyscraper as sleek and heartless as an ice pick. Here, on the twenty-eighth floor, sat the offices of Duhamel-Standiford Global.

Duhamel-Standiford didn’t tweet. They didn’t have a blog or pop up on the right side of a Google screen when someone typed in “private investigation greater boston.” Not to be found in the Yellow Pages, on the back of Security and You magazine, or begging for your business at two A.M. between commercials for Thighmaster 6000 and 888-GALPALS. Most of the city had never heard of them. Their advertising budget amounted to the same number every quarter: 0.

And they’d been in business for 170 years.

They occupied half of the twenty-eighth floor of Two International. The windows facing east overlooked the harbor. Those facing north peered down on the city. None of the windows had blinds. All doors and cubicles were constructed of frosted glass. Sometimes, in the dead of summer, it made you want to put your coat on. The typeface on the glass entrance door was smaller than the door handle:

Duhamel-Standiford

Suffolk County , MA

Estab. 1840

After I was buzzed through that door, I entered a wide anteroom with ice-white walls. The only things hanging on the walls were squares and rectangles of frosted glass, none more than a foot wide or tall and most in the seven-by-nine range. It was impossible to sit or stand in that room and not suspect you were being watched.

Behind the sole desk in that vast anteroom sat a man who’d outlived everyone who could remember a time when he hadn’t sat there. His name was Bertrand Wilbraham. He was of indefinable age-could have been a weathered fifty-five or a sprightly eighty. His flesh reminded me of the brown bar soap my father used to keep in the basement washroom and, except for two very thin and very black eyebrows, his head was hairless. He never even sported a five-o’clock shadow. All male employees and subcontractors of Duhamel-Standiford were required to wear a suit and tie. The style of said suit and tie was up to you-although pastels and floral prints were frowned upon-but the shirt had to be white. Pure white, no pinstripes, however subtle. Bertrand Wilbraham, however, always wore a light gray shirt. His suits and ties changed, hard as it might have been to tell, from solid grays to solid blacks to solid navies, but the gray, protocol-busting shirts remained the same, as if to say, The revolution will be dour.

Mr. Wilbraham did not seem terribly fond of me, but I took comfort in knowing he didn’t seem terribly fond of anyone. As soon as he buzzed me in that morning, he raised a small pink phone memo from his immaculate desktop.

“Mr. Dent requests your presence in his office as soon as you’ve arrived.”

“I’ve arrived.”

“Duly noted.” Mr. Wilbraham opened his fingers. The pink sheet of paper dropped from his hand and floated into the wastebasket.

He buzzed me through the next set of doors and I went down a hallway with a dove-gray carpet. Halfway down, there was an office used by subcontractors like me when we had to log office hours on behalf of the company. It was empty this morning, which meant I had squatter’s rights. I entered and allowed myself the brief fantasy that it would be mine, permanently, by day’s end. I cleared the thought from my head and dropped my bags on the desk. The gym bag held my camera and most of my surveillance equipment from the Trescott job. The laptop bag held a laptop and a photo of my daughter. I unholstered my gun and placed it in my desk drawer. It would stay there until day’s end, because I like carrying a gun about as much as I like eating kale.

I left the glass box and walked the dove-gray hallway up to Jeremy Dent’s office. Dent was vice president of labor relations and the man who’d first subbed work out to me two years ago. Before that, I’d worked independently. I’d had a rent-free office stuffed in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church. It was a thoroughly illegal arrangement between me and Father Drummond, the pastor. When the Archdiocese of Boston had to start paying the piper for decades of covering up child rape by sick priests, they sent an appraiser to St. Bart’s. Whereupon my rent-free office vanished as completely as the bell that had once resided in the belfry but hadn’t been seen since the Carter presidency.

Dent came from a long line of Virginia gentlemen soldiers and had graduated third in his class at West Point. Vietnam, War College, and a quick climb up the armed forces career ladder had ensued. He drew command duty in Lebanon in the mid-eighties, came back home, and pulled the plug. Walked away from the whole deal at thirty-six and the rank of lieutenant colonel, for reasons never fully understood. He crossed paths with old family friends in Boston, the kind whose ancestors had carved their names in the galley planks of the Mayflower, and they mentioned an opening in a firm that few in their circle ever mentioned until things got dire.

Twenty-five years later, Dent was a full partner. He had the white colonial in Dover and the summer place in Vineyard Haven. He had the beautiful wife as well as the firm-jawed son, two willowy daughters, and four grandkids who looked like they spent after-school time posing for Abercrombie ads. And yet he carried whatever had chased him out of the service like a nail in the back of his neck. Charming as he was, you never felt fully comfortable with the guy, because he never seemed fully comfortable with himself.

“Come on in, Patrick,” he said after his secretary deposited me at his door.

I entered and shook his hand. The Custom House peeked over his right shoulder while a Logan runway jutted out from under his left elbow.

“Have a seat, have a seat.”

I did, and Jeremy Dent sat back in his, looked out at the city for a minute from his corner office chair. “ Layton and Susan Trescott called me last night. They said you took care of the Brandon thing. Got him to show his hand and all that.”

I nodded. “Wasn’t hard.”

He raised a glass of water to that, took a sip. “They said they were thinking of sending him to Europe.”

“That’d go over well with his probation officer.”

He raised his eyebrows to his own reflection. “That’s what I said. And his mother a judge, too. She seemed genuinely surprised. Parenting, Jesus-a million ways to fuck it up, about three ways to do it right. And that’s for the mothers. As a father, I always felt the best I could hope for was to rise to the level of the eunuch with the biggest sac.” He finished his water, and his feet came off the edge of his desk. “Want a juice or something? I can’t drink coffee anymore.”

“Sure.”

He went to the bar beneath a flat-screen TV and pulled out a bottle of cranberry juice, went fishing for some ice. He brought the glasses over, clinked his off mine, and we both drank cranberry juice from heavy Waterford crystal. He returned his ass to his chair, his heels to the desk, and his gaze to the city.

“So you’re probably wondering about your status around here.”

I gave him a soft raise of the eyebrows. I hoped it conveyed I was interested but not pushy.

“You’ve done great work for us, and I did say we’d revisit the idea of bringing you on full-time after you wrapped up the Trescott case.”

“I do recall that, yeah.”

He smiled, took another drink. “How do you think that went?”

“With Brandon Trescott?”

He nodded.

“About as good as we could hope. I mean, we got the kid to tip his hand to us before he could tip it to some tabloid journalist posing as a stripper. I’m sure the Trescotts have already begun re-hiding the assets.”

He chuckled. “They started around five o’clock last night.”

“So, okay, then. I’d say the whole thing went pretty well.”

He nodded. “It did. You saved them a ton of dough and made us look good.”

I waited for the “but.”

“But,” he said, “Brandon Trescott also told his parents you threatened him in his kitchen and cursed him.”

“I called him a moron, if I remember right.”

He lifted a piece of paper off his desk, consulted it. “And a dumbass. And a dumb shit. And joked about his giving people brain damage.”

“He put that girl in a wheelchair,” I said. “For life.”

He shrugged. “We’re not paid to care about her or her family. We’re paid to keep them from taking our clients to the cleaners. The victim? Not our concern.”

“I never said she was.”

“You just said, I quote, ‘He put that girl in a wheelchair.’ ”

“For which I harbor him no ill will. Like you said, it’s a job. And I did it.”

“But you insulted him, Patrick.”

I tried each word out. “I. Insulted. Him.”

“Yeah. And his parents help keep the lights on around here.”

I placed my drink on his desk. “I confirmed for them what we all know-that their son is, functionally speaking, a sub-idiot. I left them all the information they need to go about protecting him from himself so he can keep the parents of a paraplegic from getting their greedy hands on his two-hundred-thousand-dollar car.”

His eyes widened for a sec. “That’s what that thing cost? The Aston Martin?”

I nodded.

“Two hundred thousand.” He whistled. “For a British car.”

We sat in silence for a bit. I left my drink where it was and eventually said, “So, no permanent job offer, I take it.”

“No.” He shook his head slowly. “You’re not comprehending the culture here yet, Patrick. You’re a great investigator. But this chip you’ve got on your shoulder-”

“What chip?”

“What…?” He chuckled and gave that a small toast of his glass. “You think you’re wearing that nice suit, but all I see you wearing is class rage. It’s draped over you. And our clients see it, too. Why do you think you’ve never met Big D?”

Big D was the companywide nickname for Morgan Duhamel, the seventy-year-old CEO. He was the last of the Duhamels-he had four daughters, all married to men whose names they’d taken-but he’d outlasted the Standifords. The last one of them hadn’t been seen since the mid-fifties. Morgan Duhamel’s office remained, along with those of several of the older partners, in the original headquarters of Duhamel-Standiford, a discreet chocolate bowfront tucked away on Acorn Street at the foot of Beacon Hill. The old-money clients were directed there to discuss cases; their offspring and the nouveaux riches came to International Place.

“I always assumed Big D didn’t take much interest in the subcontractors.”

Dent shook his head. “He’s got encyclopedic knowledge of this place. All its employees, all their spouses and relatives. And all the subcontractors. It was Duhamel who told me about your association with a weapons dealer.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “The old man doesn’t miss shit.”

“So he knows about me.”

“Mmm-hmm. And he likes what he sees. He’d love to hire you full-time. So would I. Put you on a partner track. But if, and only if, you lose the attitude. You think clients like sitting in a room with a guy they feel is judging them?”

“I don’t-”

“Remember last year? The CEO of Branch Federated came up here from headquarters in Houston, specifically to thank you. He’s never flown in to thank a partner and he flew in to thank a sub . You remember that?”

Not an easy one to forget. The bonus on that case paid for my family’s health insurance last year. Branch Federated owned a few hundred companies, and one of the most profitable was Downeast Lumber Incorporated. DLI operated out of Bangor and Sebago Lake, Maine, and was the country’s largest producer of TSCs, or temporary support columns, which construction crews used to stand in for support beams that were being restructured or built off-site. I’d been inserted into the Sebago Lake offices of Downeast Lumber. My job had been to get close to a woman with the wonderfully alliterative name of Peri Pyper. Branch Federated suspected her of selling trade secrets to competitors. Or so we’d been told. After I had worked with Peri Pyper for a month, it became apparent to me that she was gathering evidence to prove that Branch Federated was tampering with its mills’ pollution-monitoring equipment. By the time I got close to her, Peri Pyper had gathered clear evidence that Downeast Lumber and Branch Federated had knowingly violated both the Clean Air Act and the False Statement Act. She could prove Branch Federated had ordered its managers to miscalibrate pollution monitors in eight states, had lied to the department of health in four states, and had fabricated the results of its own quality-assurance testing in every single plant, bar none.

Peri Pyper knew she was being watched, so she couldn’t remove anything from the building or transfer it to her home computer. But Patrick Kendall, her drinking buddy and a lowly marketing accounts manager-he could. After two months, she finally asked for my help at a Chili’s in South Portland. I agreed. We toasted our pact with margaritas and ordered another Triple Dipper platter. The next night, I helped her right into the waiting arms of Branch Federated security.

She was sued for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary responsibility, and breach of her confidentiality agreement. She was prosecuted for grand theft and convicted. She lost her house. She also lost her husband, who bailed while she was under house arrest. Her daughter was bounced from private school. Her son was forced to drop out of college. Last I heard, Peri Pyper worked days answering phones at a used-car dealership in Lewiston, worked nights cleaning floors at a BJ’s Wholesale in nearby Auburn.

She’d thought I was her drinking buddy, her harmless flirtation, her political soul mate. As they’d placed the cuffs on her, she’d looked into my face and seen my duplicity. Her eyes widened. Her lips formed a perfect O.

“Wow, Patrick,” she said, just before they led her away, “you seemed so real.”

I’m pretty sure it’s the worst compliment I’ve ever received.

So when her boss, a doughy dickhead with a 7 handicap and an American flag painted on the tail fin of his Gulfstream, came to Boston to thank me personally, I shook his hand firmly enough to make his man boobs shake. I answered his questions and even had a drink with him. I had done all that was asked of me. Branch Federated and Downeast Lumber could continue shipping its TSCs to construction sites all over North America, Mexico, and Canada. And the groundwater and top soil in the communities in which its mills operated could continue to poison the dinner tables of everyone within a twenty-mile radius. When the meeting was over, I went back home and chased a Zantac 150 with liquid Maalox.

“I was perfectly polite to that guy,” I said.

“Polite the way I’m polite to my wife’s sister with the fucking herpes sore under her right nostril.”

“You swear a lot for a blue blood,” I said.

“You’re fucking right I do.” He held up a finger. “But only behind closed doors, Patrick. That’s the difference. I modulate my personality for the room I’m in. You do not.” He paced a circle around his desk. “Sure, we snuffed out a whistle-blower in DLC, and Branch Federated compensated us regally. But what about next time? Who’s going to get their business next time? Because it isn’t going to be us.”

I didn’t say anything. The view was nice. A sky caught between gray and blue. A thin film of cold mist turning the air pearl. Far off beyond the center of the city, I could see trees that were black and bare.

Jeremy Dent came around the desk and leaned against it, his ankles crossed.

“You fill out your 479s on the Trescott case?”

“No.”

“Well, take the sub office and do that. Fill out your expense reports and don’t forget to file your 692s as well. See Barnes in equipment so he can clear you on the gear you used-what’d you go with, the Canon and the Sony?”

I nodded. “I used those new Taranti bugs in the kid’s place, too.”

“I heard they were glitchy.”

I shook my head. “Worked like a charm.”

He finished his drink and leveled his gaze at me. “Look, we’ll find a new case for you. And if you can just get through that one without pissing anybody off, we’ll hire you permanent, okay? You can tell your wife I gave you my word.”

I nodded, a hole in my stomach.

Back in the empty office, I considered my options.

I didn’t have many. I was working one case and it was far from a cash cow. An old friend, Mike Colette, had asked me to help figure out which employee was embezzling from his freight company. It took me a few days with the paperwork to narrow it down to his night-shift supervisor and one or two of his short-haul truckers, but then I did some further digging and they didn’t look as right for it as I’d originally thought. So now I’d turned my attention to his accounts-payable manager, a woman he’d promised me was a trusted confidante, beyond reproach.

I could expect to bill another five, maybe six, hours for that job.

At day’s end, I’d walk out of Duhamel-Standiford and wait for their next call, their next trial. In the meantime, the bills arrived in the mailbox every day. The food in the fridge got eaten and the shelves didn’t miraculously fill back up. I had a Blue Cross Blue Shield bill due at the end of the month and not enough money to pay it.

I sat back in my chair. Welcome to adulthood.

I had half a dozen files to update and three Brandon Trescott reports to write, but I picked up the phone instead and called Richie Colgan, the Whitest Black Man in America.

He answered the phone, “ Tribune, Metro Desk.”

“Not an ounce of you sounds like a brother.”

“My people don’t have a sound, just a proud and royal legacy temporarily interrupted by racist crackers with whips.”

“You telling me if Dave Chappelle answers one phone and George Will answers the other, I’m gonna have trouble guessing which is the white guy?”

“No, but to discuss it in polite company is still verboten .”

“Now you’re German,” I said.

“Only on my French racist father’s side,” he said. “What up?”

“Remember Amanda McCready? Little girl went-”

“Missing, what, five years ago?”

“Twelve.”

“Shit. Years? How old are we?”

“ ’Member how we felt in college about old geezers who talked about, like, the Dave Clark Five and Buddy Holly?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s how kids today feel when we talk about Prince and Nirvana.”

“Naw.”

“Believe it, bitch. So anyway, Amanda McCready.”

“Yeah, yeah. You found her with the cop’s family, brought her back, everyone on the force hates your guts, you need a favor from me.”

“No.”

“You don’t need a favor?”

“Well, I do, but it’s directly connected to Amanda McCready. She went missing again.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. And her aunt says no one cares. Not the cops, not you guys.”

“Hard to believe. Twenty-four-hour news cycle and all? These days we can make a story out of anything.”

“Explains Paris Hilton.”

“Nothing explains that,” he said. “Point is-a girl disappears again twelve years after her first disappearance brought down a gang of cops and cost the city a few mil during a bad budget year? Shit, that’s news, white boy.”

“That’s what I thought. You almost sounded black there, by the way.”

“Racist. What’s the aunt’s name, uh, bitch?”

“Bea. Well, Beatrice McCready.”

“Aunt Bea, uh? Well, this ain’t Mayberry.”

He called me back twenty minutes later. “That was simple.”

“What happened?”

“I talked to the investigating officer, a Detective Chuck Hitchcock. He said they investigated the aunt’s claim, went to the mother’s house, poked around, and talked to the girl.”

“Talked to the girl? Amanda?”

“Yeah. It was all a hoax.”

“Why would Bea make up a-?”

“Oh, Bea’s a champ, what she is. You know Amanda’s mother-what’s it, Helene?-she’s had to take out a couple restraining orders on this woman. Ever since her kid died, she left the reser-”

“Wait, whose kid?”

“Beatrice McCready’s.”

“Her kid didn’t die. He’s at Monument High.”

“No,” Richie said slowly, “he’s not at Monument High. He’s dead. Him and a few other kids were in a car last year, none of them old enough to drive, none of them old enough to drink, but they did both anyway. They blew a stop sign at the bottom of that big-ass hill where St. Margaret’s Hospital used to be? Got pancaked by a bus on Stoughton Street. Two kids dead, two kids talking funny for the rest of their lives but not walking while they’re doing it. One of the dead was this Matthew McCready. I’m looking at it in our Web archives right now. June 15, last year. You want the link?”

Chapter Five

I exited JFK/UMass Station and headed for home, my head still buzzing. I’d hung up the phone and clicked on the link Richie sent me, and there it was-a page 4 story from last June about four boys who took a joyride in a stolen car and came flying down a hill stoked on pot and Jager. The bus driver never had time to hit his horn. Paralyzed from the waist down, Harold Endalis, 15. Paralyzed from the neck down, Stuart Burr-field, 15. Dead on arrival at the Carney ER, Mark McGrath, 16. Dead on scene, Matthew McCready, 16. I descended the station stairs and headed up Crescent Avenue toward home, thinking about all the stupid shit I’d done at sixteen, ten or twelve ways I could have died-probably should have died-before seventeen.

The first two houses on the south side of Crescent, a matching pair of small white Capes, were abandoned, victims of the wonderful mortgage crisis that had spread such cheer across the land of late. A homeless guy approached me in front of the second one.

“Yo, bro, you got a minute to hear me out? I’m not looking for a handout.”

He was a small guy, wiry and bearded. His baseball cap, cotton hoodie, and battered jeans were streaked with grime. The ripe odor coming off him told me it had been a while since he’d bathed. He didn’t have nut-bag eyes, though; there was no meanness in him, no crackhead edge.

I stopped. “What’s up?”

“I’m not a beggar.” He held out his hands to ward off my assumptions. “I want to make that clear.”

“Cool.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“But I got a kid, you know? And there ain’t no jobs. My old lady, she’s sick, and my baby boy he just needs some formula. Shit’s, like, seven bucks and I-”

I never saw his arm move, but he snatched my laptop bag off my shoulder just the same. He took off with it, tear-assing for the back of the nearest abandoned house. The bag held my case notes, my laptop, and a picture of my daughter.

“You dumb shit,” I said, not sure if I was talking to myself or to the homeless guy, maybe to both of us. Who knew the fucker had such long arms?

I pursued him down the side of the house through knee-high weeds and crushed beer cans, empty Styrofoam egg containers, and broken bottles. It was probably a squatters’ house these days. When I was a kid, it was the Cowans’ house, then the Ursinis’. A Vietnamese family bought it next and did a lot of rehab on it. Just before the father lost his job and then the mother lost hers, they’d begun remodeling the kitchen.

It was still missing the back wall there; some of the plastic tarps nailed to the framing flapped in the afternoon breeze. As I reached the backyard, the homeless guy was only a few feet ahead and about to be slowed by a chain-link fence. I sensed movement to my left. A plastic tarp parted and a dark-haired guy swung a length of pipe into the side of my face and I spun into the plastic and fell into the unfinished kitchen.

I’m not sure how long I lay there-long enough to notice, as the room shook behind watery waves of air, that all the copper had been stripped from beneath the sink and behind the walls. Long enough to feel reasonably certain my jaw wasn’t broken, though the left side of my face was simultaneously numb and on fire, and blood leaked steadily from it. I got to my knees and a nail bomb detonated in my skull. Everything that wasn’t directly in front of my nose vanished behind black cloaks. The floor shimmied.

Someone helped me to my feet and then pushed me into a wall, and someone else laughed. A third person, farther away, said, “Bring him in here.”

“I don’t think he can walk.”

“Lead him, then.”

Fingers vise-gripped the back of my neck and guided me into what had once been the living room. The black cloaks receded from view. I could make out a small fireplace, the mantel torn away and probably used as firewood. I’d been in this room once before, when a bunch of us sixteen-year-olds followed Brian Cowan in here to raid his father’s liquor cabinet. A couch had sat under the windows facing the street. A garden bench sat there now and a man sat on it, his eyes on me. I was dropped on the couch across from him, a ratty orange thing that smelled like the Dumpster behind a Red Lobster.

“You gonna puke?”

“Curious about that myself,” I said.

“I told him to trip you, not hit you with a pipe, but he got a little excited.”

I could see the guy with the pipe now-a slim, dark-haired Latino in khaki cargo pants and a wife-beater. He gave me a shrug as he tapped the pipe back and forth in his palm. “Oops.”

“Oops,” I said. “I’ll remember that.”

“You won’t remember shit, pendejo, I hit you again.”

Hard to argue with logic. I took my eyes off the help and considered the boss on the bench. I would have expected prison-lean and prison-mean, gin-pale eyes. Instead, the guy wore a yellow-and-green-plaid shirt under a black wool sweater and a pair of tan corduroys. On his feet were a pair of canvas Vans with a pattern of black and gold squares. His red hair was a little on the longish side and flyaway. He didn’t look gangsta; he looked like a science teacher at a prep school.

He said, “I know you got some rough friends and I know you’ve been in some serious scrapes, so you don’t scare easy.”

News to me. I was scared shitless. Pissed off, instinctively memorizing every detail I could about the two guys I could see, and thinking about ways to get the Latino’s pipe into my hands and straight up his ass-but scared out of my mind, just the same.

“Your first instinct is going to be to come after us, if we let you live.” He unwrapped a piece of bubble gum and popped it in his mouth.

If .

“Tadeo, give him a towel for his face.” The science teacher gave me a cocked eyebrow. “Yeah, I said his name. Know why, Patrick? Because you won’t come after us. You know why you won’t come after us?”

It would hurt too much to shake my head, so I simply said, “No.”

“Because we’re bad fucking guys and you’re a soft fucking guy. Maybe not once, but this isn’t ‘once.’ I hear your business went to shit because you started bailing on anything that smelled like a rough case. Understandable for a guy who got shot a bunch of times, almost bled out and shit. Still, the word’s out you don’t have the stones to do this at our level anymore. You’re not part of this life. And you don’t want to be.”

Tadeo came back from the kitchen area and put two paper towels in my hand. I fumbled for them, listing to my left, and he ran the end of the pipe along the side of my neck with a soft chuckle.

I snatched the pipe out of his hand and drove a foot into his knee at the same time. Tadeo fell backward and I came off the couch. The science teacher yelled, “Hey!” and pointed a pistol at me and I froze. Tadeo scrambled backward on his ass until he reached the wall. He stood, favoring his good leg. I remained frozen, the pipe in my hand, my arm cocked. Science Teacher lowered the gun as an indication I should lower the pipe. I gave him a tiny nod of agreement. Then I flicked my wrist. The pipe tomahawked across the room and hit Tadeo between his eyebrows. He let out a yelp and bounced off the wall. The gash above his nose opened and flooded his eyes. He took two steps toward the center of the room and then three more steps to the side. He took a few more steps and walked into the wall. He put his hands on the wall and gulped for air.

“Oops,” I said.

Science Teacher dug the gun barrel into my neck. “Sit,” he hissed, “the fuck down.”

The third guy came into the room now-huge, maybe six-four, three-eighty. He was breathing heavy, waddling.

“Take Tadeo upstairs,” the redhead said. “Put him in the shower, throw some cold water on him, see if he has a concussion.”

“How do I see if he has a concussion?” the big guy asked.

“Look into his eyes, I don’t fucking know. Ask him to count to ten.”

I asked, “Will you learn anything new if he can’t?”

“I told you to shut up.”

“No. You told me to sit the fuck down, and you’re already running out of options.”

The fat guy led Tadeo out of the room. Tadeo kept polishing the air in front of him, like a dog having a dream.

I lifted the paper towels off the floor. One side of them was clean, and I pressed that side to my face, came back with a red Rorschach test. “I’m going to need stitches.”

Science Teacher leaned forward on his bench, the gun pointed at my stomach. He had an open face with a light dusting of freckles the same color as his hair. His smile was bland and eager, like he was acting the community-theater role of someone who wanted to be helpful. “What makes you think you’re walking out of here?”

“Like I said, your option-clock is ticking down to nothing. There were people on the street when that guy boosted my bag. Someone’s already called the cops. The house next door isn’t occupied, but the house behind you is, you dumb shit, and there’s a good chance someone saw Tadeo pop me with the pipe. So whoever hired you to deliver whatever message you’re supposed to deliver, I’d get kinda peppy about delivering it.”

Science Teacher didn’t strike me as stupid. If he’d wanted to kill me, he would have put two in the back of my head when I’d been kneeling on the floor of the unfinished kitchen.

“Stay away from Helene McCready.” He squatted in front of me, the gun dangling between his thighs as he gazed up into my face. “You snoop around her or her kid, you ask any questions, I’ll bullet-fuck your entire life.”

“Gotcha,” I said with a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

“ You got a kid now, Patrick, a wife. A nice life. Go back to it and stay in it. And we’ll all forget this.”

He stood and stepped back as I made it to my feet. I walked into the kitchen and found the roll of paper towels on the floor. I pulled off a wad and pressed it to my face. He stood in the doorway, staring at me, the gun in his waistband. My own gun sat back in the desk at Duhamel-Standiford. Not that it would have done me any good after Tadeo hit me in the head with a pipe. Then they would have just taken the gun, and I’d be out a laptop, a laptop bag, and a gun.

I looked over at him. “I gotta go to an ER and get my face stitched up, but don’t worry, I don’t take it personally.”

“Gosh,” he said, “you promise?”

“You threatened my life, but I’m cool with that, too.”

“Darn white of you, too.” He blew a bubble and let it snap.

“But,” I said, “you stole my laptop and I really can’t afford to buy a new one. Don’t suppose you’d give that back to me?”

He shook his head. “Finders keepers.”

“I mean, that fucks me up, man, but I’m not going to turn it into something it ain’t. Because it’s just business. Right?”

“If it ain’t, ‘business’ will do until the right word shows up.”

I pulled the paper towels from my face. They were a mess. I folded them over and put the wad back to the side of my head for a minute, looked again at the redheaded science teacher standing in the doorway.

“So be it,” I said and dropped the red wad of paper towels on the floor, tore off a fresh batch, and let myself out of the house.

Chapter Six

When we sat down to eat, Angie looked across the table at me with the same controlled fury she’d been wearing since she got a good look at my face, heard about my trip to the health center, and ascertained that I was, in fact, not going to die tonight.

“So,” she said, “let’s start at the beginning.” She speared a few pieces of lettuce. “Beatrice McCready finds you at JFK Station.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And she tells you her smutty sister-in-law misplaced her daughter again.”

“Helene’s smutty?” I said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

My wife smiled. Not the nice smile. The other one.

“Daddy?”

I looked over at our daughter, Gabriella. “Yeah, honey?”

“What’s smutty?”

“It’s like kooky,” I said, “only it rhymes with slutty.”

“What’s slutty?”

“It’s like ooky,” I said, “except it doesn’t rhyme with kooky. Why aren’t you eating your carrots?”

“You look funny.”

“I wear big bandages on my face every Thursday.”

“No suh.” Gabriella’s eyes grew wide and solemn. She had her mother’s big brown eyes. She also had her olive skin and wide mouth and dark hair. From me she’d gotten curls, a thin nose, and a love of silliness and wordplay.

“Why aren’t you eating your carrots?” I asked again.

“I don’t like carrots.”

“You did last week.”

“No suh.”

“Uh-huh.”

Angie put her fork down. “Don’t start this, the both of you. Do not.”

“No suh.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No suh.”

“Uh-huh. I got pictures.”

“No suh.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll get my camera.”

Angie reached for her wineglass. “Please?” She fixed me with eyes as huge as our daughter’s. “For me?”

I looked back at Gabriella. “Eat your carrots.”

“Okay.” Gabby dug a fork into one and plopped it in her mouth, chewed. Her face lit up around the chewing.

I raised my eyebrows at her.

“It’s good,” she said.

“Right?”

She speared another one and munched away.

Angie said, “I’ve been watching it for four years and I still don’t know how you do that.”

“Ancient Chinese secret.” Very slowly, I chewed a tiny chunk of chicken breast. “By the way, not sure what you’ve heard, but it’s kinda hard eating when you can’t use the left side of your mouth.”

“You know what’s funny?” Angie asked in a voice that suggested something wasn’t.

“I do not,” I assured her.

“Most private investigators don’t get kidnapped and assaulted.”

“The practice is rumored to be trending upward, however.”

She frowned and I could feel both of us trapped inside ourselves, not sure what to do with today’s violence. There was a time we would have been experts at it. She would have tossed me an ice pack on her way to the gym, expected me to be raring to get back to work by the time she got back. Those days were long gone, though, and today’s return to easy bloodshed drove us into our protective shells. Her shell is made of quiet fury and wary disconnection. Mine is made of humor and sarcasm. Together we resemble a comedian failing an anger-management class.

“It looks awful,” she said with a tenderness that surprised me.

“It only feels four or five times as bad as it looks. Really. I’m fine.”

“That’s the Percocet.”

“And the beer.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to mix the two.”

“I refuse to bow to conventional wisdom. I’m a decider. And I’ve decided I want to feel no pain.”

“How’s that working out?”

I toasted her with my beer. “ Mission accomplished.”

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“I like trees.”

“I like trees, too, honey.”

“They’re tall.”

“They sure are.”

“Do you like all trees?”

“Every one.”

“Even short ones?”

“Sure, honey.”

“But why?” My daughter held her hands out, palms-up, a sign that she found this line of questioning of global importance and-lucky us-quite possibly endless.

Angie shot me a look that said: Welcome to my day.

For the last three years, I’d spent the days at work, or, as opportunities dwindled, trying to hustle up work. Three nights a week, I watched Gabby while Angie took classes. Christmas break was approaching, however, and Angie would take finals next week. After the New Year, she’d begin an internship with Blue Sky Learning Center, a nonprofit specializing in educating teens with Down syndrome. When that was finished, in May, she’d receive her master’s in applied sociology. But until then, we were a one-income family. More than one friend had suggested we move to the suburbs-homes were cheaper, schools were safer, property taxes and car insurance premiums were lower.

Angie and I grew up together in the city, though. We took to picket fences and split-level ranches like we took to shag carpeting and Ultimate Fighting. Which is to say, not so much. I once owned a nice car, but I’d sold it to start a college fund for Gabby, and now my beater Jeep sat in front of my house, without moving, for weeks at a time. I prefer subways-you pop down the hole on one side of the city, pop back up on the other side, and you never have to hit your horn, not once. I don’t like mowing lawns or trimming hedges or raking the mowed lawns or the hedge trimmings. I don’t like going to malls or eating in chain restaurants. In fact, the appeal of the suburban ideal-both in a general and a particular sense-escapes me.

I like the sound of jackhammers, the bleat of sirens in the night, twenty-four-hour diners, graffiti, coffee served in cardboard cups, steam exhaled through manhole covers, cobblestone, tabloid newspapers, the Citgo sign, someone yelling “Tax- i ” on a cold night, corner boys, sidewalk art, Irish pubs, and guys named Sal.

Not much of which I can find in the suburbs, at least not to the degree I’ve grown accustomed to. And Angie is, if anything, worse.

So we decided to raise our child in the city. We bought a small house on a decent street. It has a tiny yard and it’s a short walk to a playground (short walk to a pretty hairy housing project, too, but that’s another matter). We know most of our neighbors and Gabriella can already name five subway stops on the Red Line, in order, a feat which fills her old man with bottomless pride.

“She asleep?” Angie looked up from her textbook as I came into the living room. She’d changed into sweats and one of my T-shirts, a white one from The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive tour. It swam on her, and I worried she wasn’t eating enough.

“Our gabby Gabby took a breath during a discourse on trees-”

“Arghh.” Angie threw her head back against the couch cushion. “What’s with the trees?”

“-and promptly drifted off to sleep.” I dropped onto the couch beside her, took her hand in mine, gave it a kiss.

“Besides getting beat up,” she said, “did anything else happen today?”

“You mean with Duhamel-Standiford.”

“With them, yes.”

I took a deep breath. “I didn’t get a permanent job, no.”

“Shit!” She shouted it so loudly that I had to hold up a hand and she glanced in the direction of Gabby’s room and cringed.

“They said I shouldn’t have called Brandon Trescott names. They suggested I am uncouth and in need of an adjustment in my manners before I partake of their benefits program.”

“Shit,” she said, softer this time and with more despair than shock. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat there for a bit. There was nothing much to say. We were getting numb to it, the fear, the weight of worry.

“I’ll leave school.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yeah, I will. I can go back in-”

“You’re this close,” I said. “Finals next week, one internship, and then you’re bringing home the bacon by summer, at which point-”

“ If I can even find a job.”

“-at which point, I can afford to freelance. You’re not packing it in this close to the finish line. You’re top of your class. You’ll find a job no problem.” I gave her a smile of confidence I didn’t feel. “We’ll make it work.”

She leaned back a bit to study my face again.

“Okay,” I said to change the subject, “lay into me.”

“About what?” All mock-innocence.

“We made a pact when we married that we were done with this shit.”

“We did.”

“No more violence, no more-”

“Patrick.” She took my hands in hers. “Just tell me what happened.”

I did.

When I finished, Angie said, “So the upshot is that in addition to not getting the job with Duhamel-Standiford, the world’s worst mother lost her child again, you didn’t agree to help, but someone mugged you, threatened you, and beat the shit out of you anyway. You’re out a hospital co-pay and a really nice laptop.”

“I know, right? I loved that thing. Weighed less than your wineglass. A smiley face popped on-screen and said, ‘Hello,’ every time I opened it up, too.”

“You’re pissed.”

“Yeah, I’m pissed.”

“But you’re not going to go into crusade mode just because you lost a laptop, am I right?”

“Did I mention the smiley face?”

“You can get yourself another computer with another smiley face.”

“With what money?”

There was no answer for that.

We sat quietly for a bit, her legs on my lap. I’d left Gabby’s bedroom door slightly ajar, and in the silence we could hear her breathing, the exhalations carrying a tiny whistle at their backs. The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear-that something could happen to her at any moment, something I’d be helpless to stop-had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest.

“Do you remember much of the day you got shot?” Angie asked, throwing another fun topic into the ring.

I tipped my hand back and forth. “Bits and pieces. I remember the noise.”

“No kidding, uh?” She smiled, her eyes going back to it. “It was loud down there-all those guns, the cement walls. Man.”

“Yeah.” I let loose a soft sigh.

“Your blood,” she said, “it just splattered the walls. You were out when the EMTs got there and I just remember looking at it. That was your blood-that was you -and it wasn’t in your body, where it belonged. It was all over the floor and all over the walls. You weren’t the white of a ghost, you were light blue, like your eyes. You were lying there but you were gone, you know? It was like you were already halfway to Heaven with your foot on the gas.”

I closed my eyes and raised my hand. I hated hearing about that day and she knew it.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I just want us both to remember why we got out of the rough-stuff business. It wasn’t just because you got shot. It was because we were junkies to it. We loved it. We still love it.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I was not put on this earth just to read Goodnight, Moon three times a day and have fifteen-minute discussions about sippy cups.”

“I know,” I said.

And I did. No one was less built to be a stay-at-home mom than Angie. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good at it-she was-it was that she had no desire to define herself by the role. But then she went back to school and the money got tight and it made the most sense to save on day care for a few months, so she could go to school nights and watch Gabby days. And just like that-gradually and then suddenly, as the man said-we found ourselves here.

“I’m going crazy at this.” Her eyes indicated the coloring books and toys on our living-room floor.

“I gather.”

“Bat-shit fucking crazy.”

“That would be the approved medical terminology, sure. You’re great at it.”

She rolled her eyes in my direction. “You’re sweet. But, baby? I might be doing a great job faking it, but I am faking it.”

“Isn’t every parent?”

She cocked her head at me with a grimace.

“No,” I said. “Really. Who in their right mind wants to have fourteen conversations about trees? Ever? Never mind in one twenty-four-hour period. That little girl, I adore her, but she’s an anarchist. She wakes us up whenever she feels like it, she thinks high-energy at seven in the morning is a positive, sometimes she screams for no reason, she decides on a second-to-second basis which foods she’ll eat and which she’ll fight you over, she puts her hands and face into truly disgusting places, and she’s attached to our hips for at least another fourteen years, if we’re lucky enough for a college we can’t afford to take her off our hands.”

“But that old life was killing us.”

“It was.”

“I miss it so much,” she said. “That old life that was killing us.”

“Me, too. One thing I learned today, though, is that I’ve turned into a bit of a pussy.”

She smiled. “You have, uh?”

I nodded.

She cocked her head at me. “You were never that tough to begin with.”

“I know,” I said, “so imagine what a lightweight I am now.”

“Shit,” she said, “I just love the hell out of you sometimes.”

“Love you, too.”

She slid her legs back and forth across my thighs. “But you really want your laptop back, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“You’re going to go get it back, aren’t you?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

She nodded. “On one condition.”

I hadn’t expected her to agree with me. And the small part of me that had sure hadn’t expected it this quickly. I sat up, as attentive and obsequious as an Irish setter. “Name it.”

“Take Bubba.”

Bubba wasn’t only the ideal wingman on this because he was built like a bank-vault door and had not even a passing acquaintance with fear. (Truly. He once asked me what the emotion felt like. He was also baffled by the whole empathy concept.) No, what made him particularly ideal for this evening’s festivities was that he’d spent the last several years diversifying his business to include black-market health care. It started as a simple investment-he’d bankrolled a doctor who’d recently lost his license and wanted to set up a practice servicing the kind of people who couldn’t report their bullet wounds, knife wounds, head wounds, and broken bones to hospitals. One, of course, needs drugs for such patients, and Bubba was forced to find a supply for illegal “legal” drugs. This supply came from Canada, and even with all the post-9/11 noise about increased border control, Bubba got dozens of thirty-gallon bags of pills delivered every month. Thus far, he hadn’t lost a load. If an insurance company refused to cover a drug or if the pharmaceutical companies priced the drug out of wallet-range of working- and lower-class folk in the neighborhoods, street whispers usually led the patient to one of Bubba’s network of bartenders, florists, lunch-cart drivers, or corner-store cashiers. Pretty soon anyone living off the health-care grid or near the edge of it owed a debt to Bubba. He was no Robin Hood-he cleared a profit. But he was no Pfizer, either-his profit was in the fair range of 15 to 20 percent, not in the anal-rape range of 1,000 percent.

Using Bubba’s people in the homeless community, it took us about twenty minutes to identify a guy who matched the description of the guy who stole my laptop.

“You mean Webster?” the dishwasher at a soup kitchen in Fields Corner said.

“The little black kid from ’90s TV?” Bubba said. “Why would we be looking for him?”

“Nah, man, I most definitely do not mean the little black kid from ’90s TV. We in the oh-tens now, or ain’t you heard?” The dishwasher scowled. “Webster’s a white boy, on the small side, got a beard.”

I said, “That’s the Webster we’re looking for.”

“Don’t know if it’s his first name or last, but he cribbed up at a place on Sydney round-”

“No, he blew out of there today.”

Another scowl. For a dishwasher, he was kind of prickly. “Place on Sydney up by Savin Hill Ave.?”

“No, I was thinking of the other end, the place by Crescent.”

“You ain’t thinking then. You ain’t know shit. Clear? So just shush it, boy.”

“Yeah,” Bubba said, “just shush it, boy.”

I wasn’t close enough to kick him, so I shut up.

“Yeah, the place he staying is at the end of Sydney. Where it meet Bay Street? There. Second floor, yellow house, got one of them AC units in the window stopped working during Reagan, look like it gonna fall out on someone’s head.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Little black kid from ’90s TV,” he said to Bubba. “Man, if I wasn’t fifty-nine and a half years old? I’d profoundly whoop your ass over that shit.”

Chapter Seven

Where Sydney Street crosses Savin Hill Avenue, it becomes Bay Street and sits on top of a subway tunnel. About every five minutes, the whole block shudders as a train rumbles beneath it. Bubba and I had sat through five of these shudders so far, which meant we’d been sitting in Bubba’s Escalade for nearly half an hour.

Bubba does not do sitting still very well. It reminds him too much of group homes and orphanages and prisons, places he’s called home for roughly half his time on earth. He’d already fiddled with the GPS-punching in random addresses in random cities to see if Amarillo, Texas, had a Groin Street or Toronto sent tourists traipsing along Rogowski Avenue. When he exhausted the entertainment value of searching for nonexistent streets in cities he never intended to visit, he played with the satellite radio, rarely landing on a station for more than thirty seconds before he’d let loose a half-sigh, half-snort and change the channel. After a while, he dug a bottle of Polish potato vodka out from under the seat and took a swig.

He offered me the bottle. I declined. He shrugged and took another pull. “Let’s just kick the door in.”

“We don’t even know if he’s in there.”

“Let’s just do it anyway.”

“And if he comes home while we’re in there, sees his door kicked down and takes off running, what do we do then?”

“Shoot him from the window.”

I looked over at him. He peered up at the second story of the condemned three-decker where Webster allegedly lived. His deranged cherub’s face was serene, a look it usually got when it contemplated violence.

“We’re not shooting anyone. We’re not going to lay a glove on this guy.”

“He stole from you.”

“He’s harmless.”

“He stole from you.”

“He’s homeless.”

“Yeah, but he stole from you. You should set an example.”

“For who-all the other homeless guys lining up to steal my bag so I’ll chase them into a house where I’ll get the shit kicked out of me?”

“Them, yeah.” He took another swig of vodka. “And don’t give me this ‘He’s homeless’ shit.” He pointed the bottle at the condemned building across the street. “He’s living there, ain’t he?”

“He’s squatting.”

“Still a home,” Bubba said. “Can’t call someone homeless if they have, ya know, a fucking home.”

On some purely Bubba level, he had me there.

On the other side of Savin Hill Avenue, the door to Donovan’s bar opened. I nudged Bubba, pointed across the avenue as Webster crossed toward us.

“He’s homeless, but he’s in a bar. This guy has a better life than me. Probably has a fucking plasma and a Brazilian chick comes Tuesdays to clean and vacuum.”

Bubba threw open his door as Webster was about to pass the SUV. Webster paused and, in that second, forfeited any chance to escape. Bubba towered over him and I came around from the other side and Bubba said, “Remember him?”

Webster had adopted a position of half-cringe. When he recognized me, he closed his eyes to slits.

“I’m not going to hit you, man.”

“I will, though.” Bubba slapped Webster on the side of his head.

“Hey!” Webster said.

“I’ll do it again.”

“Webster,” I said, “where’s my bag?”

“What bag?”

I said, “Really?”

Webster looked at Bubba.

“My bag,” I said.

“I gave it back.”

“To who?”

“Max.”

“Who’s Max?”

“He’s Max. He’s the guy paid me to take your bag.”

“Red-haired dude?” I said.

“No. Dude’s got, like, black hair.”

Bubba slapped the side of Webster’s head again.

“What the hell you do that for?”

Bubba shrugged.

“He bores easily,” I said.

“I didn’t do nothing.”

“You didn’t what?” I pointed at my face.

“I didn’t know they were going to do that. They just told me to steal your bag.”

“Where’s the redheaded guy?” I said.

“I don’t know any redheaded guy.”

“Fine, where’s Max?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’d you take the bag? You wouldn’t take it back to the same house where I chased you.”

“No, man, I took it to a garage.”

“What kind of garage?”

“Huh? Like a place that fixes cars and shit. Has a few for sale out front.”

“Where?”

“On Dot Ave., just before Freeport, on the right.”

“I know that place,” Bubba said. “It’s, like, Castle Automotive or something.”

“Kestle. With a K,” Webster said.

Bubba slapped him upside the head again.

“Ow. Shit.”

“You take anything out of the bag?” I said. “Anything?”

“Nah, man. Max told me not to, so I didn’t.”

“But you looked in there.”

“Yeah. No.” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah.”

“There was a picture of a little girl in there.”

“Yeah, I saw it.”

“You put it back?”

“Yeah, man, I promise.”

“If it ain’t there when I find the bag, we’ll come back, Webster. And we won’t be all sweet and shit.”

“You call this sweet?” Webster said.

Bubba slapped the side of his head a fourth time.

“Sweet as it’ll ever get,” I said.

Kestle Cars & Repair sat across from a Burger King in the part of my neighborhood the locals call Ho Chi Minh Trail, a seven-block section of Dorchester Avenue, where waves of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian immigrants settled. There were six cars on the lot, all in dubious condition, all with MAKE AN OFFER painted in yellow on their windshields. The garage bay doors were closed and the lights were off, but we could hear loud chatter from the back. There was a dark green door to the left of the bay doors. I stepped aside and looked at Bubba.

“What?”

“It’s locked.”

“You can’t pick a lock no more?”

“Sure, but I don’t carry a kit on me. Cops frown on that shit.”

He grimaced and pulled a small leather case from his pocket. He unrolled it and selected a pick. “Is there anything you can do anymore?”

“I cook a mean swordfish Provençal,” I said.

He gave that a mild shake of his head. “Last two times it was pretty dry.”

“I don’t make dry fish.”

He popped the lock. “Then a guy who looks like you does, and he served it last two times I was at your house.”

“Shit’s cold,” I said.

The back office smelled of trapped heat, burned motor oil, stale gusts of ganja and menthol cigarettes. We found four guys back there. Two I’d met before-the fat guy with the audible breathing and Tadeo, sporting a ridiculous bandage over his nose and forehead that made my own bandage look just a little less ridiculous. The fat guy stood to the far left side of the room. Tadeo stood directly in front of us, half his body behind a metal desk the color of eggshell. A third guy, in a mechanic’s overalls, was passing a joint when we walked in. He wasn’t yet drinking age and fear seized his face when Bubba entered behind me; unless the fear made him stupid ballsy (it happens), he’d be the least of our problems.

The fourth guy sat slightly to our right, behind the desk. He had dark hair. His skin was covered in a sheen of sweat, fresh droplets popping through the pores as we watched. He was about thirty-going-on-a-coronary, and you could smell the crank singeing his veins from Newfoundland. His left knee jackhammered under the desk, his right hand patted a steady bongo beat on the top. My laptop sat in front of him. He stared at us with bright eyes pinned to the rear wall of his skull. “This one of the guys?”

The fat guy pointed at me. “That’s the one fucked up Tadeo’s face.”

Tadeo said to me, “The re-up’s coming on that shit, homes. Believe it,” but there was a hollow catch in his voice that came from trying not to look at Bubba.

“I’m Max.” The tweeker behind my laptop gave me a broad smile. He sucked oxygen into his nostrils and gave me a wink. “I’m the IT guy up in this shit. Nice laptop.”

I nodded at the table. “My laptop.”

“Huh?” He look wildly confused. “This is my laptop.”

“Funny. Looks a lot like mine.”

“That’s called a model.” His eyes popped against their sockets. “If they all looked different, they’d be kind of hard to manufacture, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Tadeo said, “you fucking retarded and shit?”

I said, “I’m just a girl standing before a boy looking for his laptop.”

“I heard you’d got your head in the right place about this,” Max said. “We were never supposed to see you again. No harm, no foul. You want to bring us into your life, you don’t fucking understand how bad that will be.” He closed my laptop and placed it in the drawer to his right.

“Look,” I said, “I can’t afford a replacement.”

He rocked forward into the desk, his whole endoskeleton surging against his skin. “Call a fucking insurance company.”

“It’s not insured.”

“This fucking guy, bro,” he said to Bubba, then checked the position of his men. He looked back at me. “You’re out of this. Just let it go and you’ll stay out of it. Run back to your little life.”

“I’m going. I just want to take my laptop back with me. And the picture of my daughter that was in my bag. Bag’s yours.”

Tadeo moved all the way out from behind the desk. The fat guy stayed against the wall, breathing heavy. The kid mechanic was breathing heavy, too, and blinking like crazy.

“I know the bag’s mine.” Max got to his feet. “I know this office is mine, that ceiling, the O-ring in your ass, if I feel like it.”

“Uh, okay,” I said. “Hey, who hired you, by the way?”

“Man, you with the questions .” He flung his hands at me like he was auditioning for a Lil Weezy video and then scratched the back of his head furiously. “You don’t make demands. You go the fuck home.” He shooed me with his fingers. “Bro, I say one word and you’re fucking-”

Bubba’s shot spun him in place. Max let out a sharp shout and fell back into his chair. The chair slammed off the wall and dumped Max to the floor. He lay there for a bit with blood pouring from the vicinity of his waistline.

“What’s with all this ‘bro’ shit lately?” Bubba lowered his gun. It was his new favorite, a Steyr 9mm. Austrian. Hideous-looking.

“Ho, shit!” Tadeo said. “Holy fucking shit.”

Bubba pointed the Steyr at Tadeo and then the fat guy. Tadeo put his hands on his head. The fat guy did too. They both stood there shaking and awaiting further instruction.

Bubba didn’t even bother with the kid. He’d dropped to his knees and lowered his head to the floor and kept whispering, “Please, please.”

“You fucking shoot the guy?” I said. “A bit harsh, no?”

“Don’t bring me out on this shit if you’re going to leave your pair at home.” Bubba frowned. “Goddamn embarrassing what a civilian you’ve become, man.”

I got a closer look at Max as a burst of air left his mouth. He ground his forehead into the cement floor and pounded a fist on it.

“He’s fucked up,” I said.

“I barely hit him.”

“You blew one of his hips off.”

Bubba said, “He’s got two.”

Max began to shake. The shakes quickly turned to convulsions. Tadeo took a step toward him and Bubba took two steps toward Tadeo, the Steyr aimed at his chest.

“I’ll kill you just for being short,” Bubba said.

“I’m sorry.” Tadeo raised his hands as high as they could go.

Max flopped onto his back. Kettle hisses preceded his gulps of air.

“I’ll kill you for wearing that deodorant,” Bubba told Tadeo. “I’ll kill your friend for being your friend.”

Tadeo lowered his hands until they shook in front of his face. He closed his eyes.

His friend said, “We’re not friends. He gives me shit about my weight.”

Bubba raised an eyebrow. “You could lose a few but you’re not an orca or anything. Shit, man, just lay off the white bread and the cheese.”

“I’m thinking Atkins,” the guy said.

“I tried that.”

“Yeah?”

“You gotta give up alcohol for two weeks.” Bubba grimaced. “Two weeks .”

The guy nodded. “That’s what I told the wife.”

Max kicked the desk. The back of his head rattled off the floor. Then he was still.

“He dead?” Bubba asked.

“No,” I said. “But he’s heading there, he don’t get a doctor.”

Bubba produced a business card. He asked the big guy, “What’s your name?”

“Augustan.”

“Well… No, really?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Bubba looked over at me and shrugged before looking back at Augustan. He handed him the card. “Call this guy. He works for me. He’ll fix your friend up. The fixing’s free, but the drugs’ll cost you.”

“That’s fair.”

Bubba rolled his eyes at me and let loose a sigh. “Grab your laptop, would you?”

I did.

“Tadeo,” I said.

Tadeo lowered his shaking hands from his face.

“Who hired you?”

“What?” Tadeo blinked several times. “Uh, a friend of Max’s. Kenny.”

“Kenny?” Bubba said. “You got me out of bed so I could shoot some prick over a Kenny ? That’s fucking humiliating.”

I ignored him. “Redheaded guy from the house, Tadeo?”

“Kenny Hendricks, yeah. He said you knew his old lady. Said you found her kid once when she went missing.”

Helene. If it smelled of stupid, Helene just had to be somewhere nearby.

“Kenny,” Bubba repeated with a bitter sigh.

“Where’s my bag?” I said.

“Other drawer,” Tadeo said.

Augustan said to Bubba, “I can call your doc now?”

“Augustan always?” Bubba asked. “Never Gus?”

“Never Gus,” the big guy said.

Bubba gave that some thought, then nodded. “Go ahead. Call the number.”

Augustan flipped open a cell and dialed. I found my bag in the desk drawer, found Gabby’s picture and my case files, too. As Augustan told the doctor his buddy was losing a lot of blood, I put the laptop in my bag and walked to the door. Bubba pocketed his weapon and followed me out of the garage.

Chapter Eight

In my dream, Amanda McCready was ten, maybe eleven. She sat on the porch of a yellow bungalow with stone steps, a white bulldog snoring at her feet. Tall ancient trees sprouted from a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. We were somewhere down South, Charleston maybe. Spanish moss hung from the trees, and the house had a tin roof.

Jack and Tricia Doyle sat behind Amanda in wicker armchairs, a chess table between them. They hadn’t aged at all.

I came up the walk in my postal outfit, and the dog raised its head and stared at me with sad black eyes. Its left ear bore a spot the same black as its nose. It licked its nose and then rolled on its back.

Jack and Tricia Doyle looked up from their chess game and stared at me.

“I’m just delivering the mail,” I said. “I’m just the mailman.”

They stared. They didn’t say a word.

I handed Amanda the mail and stood waiting for my tip. She leafed through the envelopes, tossing them aside one by one. They landed in the bushes and turned yellow and wet.

She looked up at me, her hands empty. “You didn’t bring anything we can use.”

The next morning I could barely lift my head off the pillow. When I did, the bones near my left temple crunched. My cheekbones ached and my skull throbbed. While I’d slept, someone had seeded the folds of my brain with red pepper and glass.

And that wasn’t all-none of my limbs or joints were pleased when I rolled over, sat up, or breathed. In the shower, the water hurt. The soap hurt. When I tried to scrub my head with shampoo, I accidentally pressed my fingertips into the left side of my skull and produced a bolt of agony that nearly put me on my knees.

Drying off, I looked in the mirror. The upper left side of my face, one half of the eye included, was purple marble. The only part that wasn’t purple was the part that was covered in black sutures. Gray streaked my hair; it had even found my chest since the last time I’d paid attention. I ran a comb carefully over my head, then turned to reach for the razor and my swollen knee yelped. I’d barely moved-a minor shift of weight, nothing more-but my kneecap felt like I’d swung the claw end of a hammer into it.

I just fucking love aging.

When I entered the kitchen, my wife and daughter clasped their hands to their cheeks and shrieked, eyes wide. It was so perfectly timed, I knew it had been planned, and I gave them a big thumbs-up as I poured myself a cup of coffee. They exchanged a fist bump and then Angie opened her morning paper again and said, “That looks suspiciously like the laptop bag I got you last Christmas.”

I slung it over the back of my chair as I sat at the table. “One and the same.”

“And its contents?” She turned a page of the Herald .

“Fully recovered,” I said.

She raised appreciative eyebrows. Appreciative and maybe a little envious. She glanced at our daughter, who was temporarily fascinated by the pattern of her plastic place mat. “Was there any, um, collateral damage?”

“One gentleman may have a bit of difficulty entering a potato-sack race anytime soon. Or, I dunno”-I sipped some coffee-“strolling.”

“And this is because?”

“Bubba decided to speed the process along.”

At his name, Gabriella raised her head. The smile that spread across her face was her mother’s-so wide and warm it hugged your whole body. “Uncle Bubba?” she said. “You saw Uncle Bubba?”

“I did. He said to say hello to you and Mr. Lubble.”

“I’ll go get him.” She burst out of her chair and out of the room and the next sound we heard was her scrambling through the toys on the floor of her bedroom.

Mr. Lubble was a stuffed animal bigger than Gabby. Bubba had given it to her on her second birthday. Mr. Lubble was, as best we could figure, some kind of a cross between a chimpanzee and an orangutan, though it’s possible he represented a primate we were wholly unfamiliar with. For some reason, he was dressed in a lime-green tuxedo with a yellow tie and matching yellow tennis shoes. Gabby had given him the name Mr. Lubble, but none of us could recall why except to assume she’d been trying to say “Bubba,” but, at two, Lubble was the closest she could get.

“Mr. Lubble,” she called from her bedroom, “come out, come out.”

Angie lowered her paper and ran a hand over mine. She was a bit shocked at my second-day appearance, which was worse than my first-day appearance when I’d returned from the health center. “Should we worry about reprisals?”

It was a fair question. With any act of violence, you have to assume reprisal is a given. You hurt someone, most times they will try to hurt you back.

“I don’t think so,” I said, realizing it was true. “They’d mess with me, but not with Bubba. Plus, I didn’t take anything from them but what belonged to me.”

“In their minds, it didn’t belong to you anymore.”

“True.”

We shared a careful look.

“I’ve got that cute little Beretta,” she said. “Fits right in my pocket.”

“Been a while since you fired it.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes when I take those ‘Mommy time’ drives?”

“Yeah?”

“I go to the range on Freeport.”

I smiled. “You do?”

“Oh, I do.” She smiled back. “Some girls relieve stress with yoga. I prefer emptying a clip or two.”

“Well, you always were the better shot in the family.”

“Better?” She opened her paper again.

Truth was I couldn’t hit sand on a beach. “Fine. Only.”

Gabby came back in the room dragging Mr. Lubble by one lime-green arm. She placed him on the seat beside her and climbed up into her own.

“Did Uncle Bubba kiss Mr. Lubble good night?” she asked.

“He did.” I would have felt worse about lying to my child if I hadn’t already set the precedent with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

“Did he kiss me good night?”

“He did.”

“I remember.” Apparently the lying starts early and we call it creativity. “And he told me a story.”

“About what?”

“Trees.”

“Of course.”

“He also said Mr. Lubble should get more ice cream.”

“And chocolate?” Angie said.

“And chocolate?” Gabby considered the pros and cons. “Okay, I guess.”

“You guess, huh?” I chuckled, looked over at Angie. “That’s all you, by the way.”

Angie lowered her paper. She was pale suddenly, her jaw too loose.

“Mommy?” Even Gabby noticed. “What’s wrong?”

Angie gave her a weak smile and handed the paper to me. “Nothing, honey. Mommy’s just tired.”

“Too much reading,” our daughter said.

“No such thing as too much reading,” I said. I looked at the paper and then back at Ange, gave her a confused look.

“Lower-right-hand side of the page,” she said.

It was the Crime Blotter, an if-it-bleeds-it-leads section they served up on the last page of the metro section. The last item read: “Maine Woman Slain in Car-Jack.” I saw the lede then and put the paper down for a moment. Angie reached across the table and ran her warm palm along my forearm.

A mother of two was gunned down in an apparent carjacking in the early hours of Tuesday morning as she left work at BJ’s Wholesaler in Auburn. Peri Pyper, 34, of Lewiston, was approached by the suspect as she tried to start her 2008 Honda Accord. Witnesses reported hearing signs of a struggle followed by a gunshot. The suspect, Taylor Biggins, 22, of Auburn, was arrested a mile away after a police pursuit and surrendered without a struggle. Mrs. Pyper was flown by medevac to Maine Medical Center but was pronounced dead at 6:34 A.M., according to MMC spokesperson Pamela Dunn. Mrs. Pyper is survived by a son and a daughter.

Angie said, “It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything.”

“Patrick.”

“I don’t know anything,” I said again.

It was a three-hour drive to Auburn, Maine, and in that time, my attorney, Cheswick Hartman, arranged everything. I arrived at the law offices of Dufresne, Barrett and McGrath and was led into an office with James Mayfield, a junior partner in the firm, who handled most of their defense litigation.

James Mayfield was a black man with salt-and-pepper hair, a matching mustache, and considerable height and girth. He had a bear of a handshake and an easy way about him that seemed authentic and unforced.

“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Mayfield.”

“You can call me Coach, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Coach?”

“I coach baseball, basketball, golf, football, and soccer in this town. People call me Coach.”

“And why wouldn’t they?” I said. “Coach it is.”

“When an attorney of Cheswick Hartman’s stature calls me up and says he’ll cochair my litigation on a case, pro bono, I sit up in my seat.”

“Yes.”

“He said you are a man who never breaks his word.”

“That was kind of him.”

“Kind or not, I want your word in writing.”

“Understandable,” I said. “I brought my own pen.”

Coach Mayfield pushed a stack of papers across the desk and I began to sign. He picked up the phone. “Come on in now, Janice, and bring the stamp.”

When I was finished signing a page, Janice notarized it. By the time I was done, she’d notarized fourteen pages. The contract was, in its essence, quite simple-I agreed that I was working for the firm of Dufresne, Barrett and McGrath as an investigator on behalf of Taylor Biggins. In that capacity, anything Mr. Biggins said to me fell under attorney-client privilege. I could be charged, tried, and convicted if I ever discussed our conversation with anyone.

I rode out to the courthouse with Coach Mayfield. The sky had that milky blue cast it got sometimes before a nor’easter, but the air was mild. The town smelled of chimney smoke and wet asphalt.

The holding cells sat in the bowels of the courthouse. Coach Mayfield and I met Taylor Biggins on the other side of the bars, where the jailers had left a wooden bench for us.

“Yo, Coach,” Taylor Biggins said. He looked younger than twenty-two, a stringy black kid wearing an extra-large white T that draped his body like a dinner bell over a toothpick, and drooping jeans he kept pulling up over his bunched-up boxers, because they’d taken his belt.

“Bigs,” Coach Mayfield said and then to me: “Bigs played Pop Warner for me. Baseball and football.”

“Who’s this?”

Mayfield explained.

“And he can’t say nothing to nobody?”

“Not a word.”

“Throw his ass in a hole if he does?”

“Without a flashlight, Bigs.”

“A’ight, a’ight.” Bigs wandered around his cell for a minute, his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. “What you need to know?”

“Did someone pay you to kill the woman?” I asked.

“Nigger, what?”

“You heard me.”

Bigs cocked his head. “You saying, was I put up to this dumb shit?”

“Yeah.”

“Who the fuck would do what I did if they was thinking straight? I was high as a motherfucker, man. I been whaling on the clear for three days.”

“The clear?”

“The clear,” Bigs said. “Meth, cheese, crank, whatever you want to call it.”

“Oh,” I said. “So why’d you shoot her?”

“I wasn’t trying to shoot nobody. Ain’t you been listening? She just wouldn’t give up the keys. When she grab my arm- pop . And she stop grabbing my arm. I just wanted to take her car. I got a friend, Edward, he buy cars. That’s all it was.”

He looked out through the bars at me, already heading down a dark corridor’s worth of DTs, his skin shiny with sweat, eyes wider than his head, mouth taking quick, desperate breaths.

“Walk me through it,” I said.

He gave me an injured, incredulous look, like I was putting him out.

“Hey, Bigs,” I said, “besides Coach here, you’ve got one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country looking into your case because I asked him to. He’s capable of cutting your sentence in half. You understand?”

Bigs eventually nodded.

“So answer my questions, dickhead, or I’ll make him go away.”

He wrapped his arms around his abdomen and hissed several times. Once the cramps had subsided, he straightened and looked back through the bars at me. “Ain’t nothing to walk you through. I needed a car that’s easy to chop. A Honda or a Toyota, man. Those parts give for years-swap ’em out on a ’98 or an ’03, don’t matter. Shit’s interchangeable as a motherfuck. I’m in the parking lot, got me a black hoodie and these jeans, ain’t no one seeing me. She come out, go to the Accord. I run up, let her see my black face and my black nine? Should be enough. But she talks shit at me and she won’t let go them keys. She just keeps holding on, and then her hand slips and hits my arm? And, like I said, pop . She drops. I’m all, ‘Ho, shit !’ But I need my clear, so I grab the keys. I get in the car and punch it out of there but all these shields start blowing into the lot, cherry bars flashing. I didn’t even get a mile before they box my ass up.” He shrugged. “That’s it. Cold? I know it. If she’d just given up the keys, though…” He bit down on something and looked at the floor. When he looked back up, tears poured down his face.

I ignored them. “You said she talked shit. What’d she say?”

“Nothing, man.”

I came to the bars. I looked through them into his face. “What did she say?”

“Said she needed the car.” He looked down again and nodded several times to himself. “Said she needed that car. How’s anyone need a car that much?”

“You know any bus lines run at three in the morning, Bigs?”

He shook his head.

“The woman you killed? She worked two jobs. One in Lewiston, one in Auburn. Her shift in Lewiston ended half an hour before her shift in Auburn began. You seeing it now?”

He nodded, the tears coming off him in strings, shoulders quaking.

“Peri Pyper,” I said. “That was her name.”

He kept his head down.

I turned to Coach Mayfield. “I’m done.”

I stood by the door while Coach Mayfield conferred with his client for a few minutes, their voices never rising above whispers, and then he picked his briefcase up off the bench and headed toward me and the guard.

As the door opened, Bigs yelled, “It was just a fucking car .”

“Not to her.”

“I’m not going to give you a bunch of bleeding-heart bullshit about Bigs being a great kid and all,” Coach Mayfield said. “He was always high-strung, always shortsighted when it came to the big picture. Always had a hair-trigger temper and when he wanted something, he wanted it now. But he wasn’t this .” He waved out the window of his Chrysler 300 as we drove through the streets with their white-steeple churches, broad green commons, and quaint B &Bs. “You look behind the face this town puts up, you find a lot of cracks. Unemployment’s double-digits and those who are hiring ain’t paying shit. Benefits?” He laughed. “Not a chance. Insurance?” He shook his head. “All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That’s all gone around here, my friend.”

“Gone in Boston, too,” I said.

“Gone all over, I bet.”

We drove in silence for a bit. While we’d been inside the jail, the blue sky had turned gray. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees. The air felt like it was made of wet tin foil. No question-snow was coming.

“Bigs had a shot at going to Colby. They told him if he spent a year at community college getting his grades up just north of acceptable, they’d hold him a place on next year’s baseball team. So, he buckled down.” He looked over at me with eyebrows raised in confirmation. “He did. Went to school days, worked nights.”

“So what happened?”

“Company he worked for shitcanned everyone. Then after a month, they offered them their jobs back. It’s that cannery right over there.” As we rolled over a small bridge, he pointed to a beige brick building along the banks of the Androscoggin River. “Only the unskilled labor got the offer; the skilled labor just got dumped. But the company offered the unskilled their jobs back at half their previous hourly wage. No bennies, no insurance, no nothing. But plenty of overtime if they wanted it, long as they didn’t expect time and a half or any of that commie bullshit. So he takes the job back, Bigs. To make his rent and pay for school? He’s working seventy-hour weeks. And going to school full-time. So guess how he stays awake?”

“Crank.”

He nodded as he turned into the parking lot of his law firm. “The shit that cannery pulled? Companies pulling that all over town, all over the state. And the meth business? Well, that’s booming.”

We got out of his car and stood in the cold parking lot. I thanked him and he shrugged it off, a guy far more comfortable with criticism than praise.

“He did a piece-of-shit thing, Bigs did, but until he started tweeking, he was not a piece of shit.”

I nodded.

“Don’t make it right what he did,” he said, “but it didn’t come from a vacuum.”

I shook his hand. “I’m glad he’s got you looking out for him.”

He shrugged that compliment off, too. “Over a fucking car.”

“Over a fucking car,” I said and got into my own car and drove off.

At a rest stop just over the Massachusetts border, I stopped for something to eat and sat in my car with it and opened my laptop on the front seat. I tapped my keyboard to bring it out of sleep mode. A pleasant tingle coursed over my scalp. When I reached the home page for IntelSearchABS, I entered my user name and password and clicked my way to the Individual Search Records page. A little green box waited there for me. It asked for a name or alias. I clicked on NAME.

Angie would kill me. I was supposed to be done with this rogue shit. I’d gotten my laptop back. I’d gotten my laptop bag and my picture of Gabby. I’d gotten my answers about Peri Pyper. It was over and done with. I could walk away.

I remembered Peri and myself having drinks at the Chili’s in Lewiston and the T.G.I. Friday’s in Auburn. Less than a year ago. We’d traded childhood anecdotes, argued over sports teams, jabbed each other for our political differences, quoted movies we both loved. There was zero connection between her whistle-blowing and her getting shot by some dumb, fucked-up kid in a parking lot at three in the morning. No connection whatsoever.

But it’s all connected.

This should not be about that, a voice said. You’re just pissed off. And when you’re pissed off, you lash out.

I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes. I saw Beatrice McCready’s face-pained and prematurely aged and possibly crazed.

Another voice said, Don’t do this .

That voice sounded uncomfortably like my daughter’s.

Leave it be .

I opened my eyes. The voices were right.

I saw Amanda from my morning dream, the envelopes she’d tossed in the bushes.

It’s all connected.

No, it’s not .

What had I said in the dream?

I’m just the mailman .

I leaned forward to shut down my computer. Instead, I typed in the box:

Kenneth Hendricks

I hit RETURN and sat back.