Moonlight Mile

Chapter Eighteen

The clouds hung low under a pale sky as we exited the Mass Pike and followed the line on the map toward Becket. The town lay twenty-five miles south of the New York border in the heart of the Berkshires. This time of year, the hills were sprinkled with snow and the damp roads were black and slick. Becket had a main road but no Main Street. It had no town center we could find, no one-block strip containing a general store, a hairdresser, a Laundromat, and the local Realtor. Neither, as Angie had noted, did it have a coffee shop. For any of that, you had to go to Stockbridge or Lenox. Becket had houses and hills and trees and more trees. An amoeba-shaped pond the color of cream soda. More trees, the tops of some half-hidden in the low clouds.

We drove around Becket and West Becket all morning-up, down, all four points of the compass, and back again. Most of the roads in the hills dead-ended, so we got several curious or hostile looks as we pulled up to someone’s property and then had to back out the way we’d come, wheels crunching gravel. But none of those curious or hostile faces belonged to Amanda.

After three hours of this, we broke for lunch. We found a diner a few miles away in Chester. I ordered a turkey club, no mayo. Angie ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke. I sipped my bottled water and pretended I didn’t really want her meal. Angie rarely watches what she eats and has the cholesterol issues of a newborn. I eat fish and chicken ninety percent of the time and have the high LDL levels of a retired sumo wrestler. Life, it’s so fair that way. There were eight other patrons in the place. We were the only people not wearing boots. Or plaid. The men all wore ball caps and jeans. A couple of the women wore the kind of sweaters you get at Christmas from elderly aunts. Parka vests were popular.

“How else to get the lay of the land?” I asked Angie.

“Local newspaper.”

I looked around for a newspaper but didn’t spy one, so I did my best to catch the counter girl’s attention.

She was about nineteen. A pretty face had been damaged by acne scars and she wore an extra forty pounds on her frame like a threat. Her eyes were dull with anger disguised as apathy. If she kept on her current path, she’d grow into the type of person who fed her kids Doritos for breakfast and purchased angry bumper stickers with lots of exclamation points. But right now, she was just another in a long line of pissed-off small-town girls with a shitty outlook. When I finally flagged her down and asked if there was a newspaper behind the counter, she said, “A what?”

“A newspaper.”

Blank stare.

“A newspaper,” I said. “It’s like a home page without a scroll button?”

Stone face.

“The front page usually has pictures on it and, you know, words below those pictures. And sometimes? Pie charts in the lower left corner.”

“We’re a restaurant,” she said, as if that explained everything. Then she went over and leaned against the counter by the coffeemaker and began texting on her cell.

I looked over at the guy nearest to me, but he was engrossed in his meat loaf. I looked at Angie. She shrugged. I swiveled my stool and spotted a wire rack by the door that held some kind of printed matter. I crossed to it and discovered the top rack offered a real estate monthly while the lower rack held brochures of the region. Nothing fancy on the outside-local ads mostly. When I opened it, though, we were greeted with a color map. The gas stations were labeled, as were the summer stock theaters and antique shops, the outlet mall in Lee and the glassworks in Lenox, places that sold Adirondack chairs and others that sold quilts and spools of yarn.

We found Becket and West Becket on the map easily enough. A school we’d passed on a hill this morning was, I learned, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance School, the pond we’d passed a few dozen times was apparently unnamed. Otherwise, the only attractions labeled in Becket were the Middlefield State Forest and McMillan Park, which contained, within its environs, Paw Prints Pet Park.

“Dog park,” Angie said just as I was noticing it. “Worth a stab in the dark.”

The counter girl plopped Angie’s cheeseburger on the counter and then placed the turkey club in front of me with a weary drop of her hand and disappeared into the back before I could mention that I’d asked for no mayo. While we’d been looking at the map, most of the patrons had cleared out. We were alone except for a middle-aged couple who sat by the window and stared out at the road rather than at each other. I walked two stools over and found myself a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin and I used the knife to scrape most of the mayo off my bread. Angie watched me, bemused, and then went back to her cheeseburger. As I bit into my sandwich, the short-order cook disappeared from behind the kitchen cut-in. A door opened somewhere out back and shortly thereafter I could smell cigarette smoke and hear him talking in low tones to the counter girl.

My sandwich sucked. Turkey so dry it was chalky. Rubbery bacon. Lettuce that browned as I watched. I dropped it on my plate.

“How’s your burger?”

Angie said, “Awful.”

“Why you still eating it?”

“Boredom.”

I looked at the check left behind by Miss Charm School Graduate-sixteen bucks for two crap lunches delivered by a crappier personality. I left a twenty under the plate.

“You are not tipping her,” Angie said.

“Of course I am.”

“But she doesn’t deserve it.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“So…?”

“All the years I waited tables before becoming a PI?” I said. “I’d tip Stalin.”

“Or his granddaughter, apparently.”

We left the money, took the map, and walked out.

McMillan Park contained a baseball field, three tennis courts, a large playground for school-age kids and a smaller, more brightly painted one for toddlers. Just past that were the two dog parks-the one for small dogs formed a fenced-in oval within the park for larger dogs. Someone had put a lot of thought into the park-it was strewn with tennis balls and had four water fountains that also fed large metal dog bowls at their bases. Several lengths of thick rope, the kind you’d use to tie off a boat, lay on the ground. It was good to be a dog in Becket.

It was the middle of the afternoon, so it wasn’t terribly populous. Two guys, one middle-aged woman, and an elderly couple tended to two Weimaraners, a Labradoodle, and a pretty yippy corgi who bossed the other three dogs around.

No one recognized Amanda from the photo we passed around. Or maybe no one wanted to recognize her in front of us. Private investigators don’t get much benefit of the doubt anymore. People often consider us just one more symbol of the End of All Privacy Age. And it’s hard to argue the point.

The two guys with the Weimaraners did note that Amanda looked a little like the girl in the Twilight movies, if not in the hair and the cheekbones, then in the nose and the forehead and the close-set eyes, but then they got into an argument over whether said actress was a Kristen or a Kirsten, and I wandered over to the middle-aged woman before it devolved into a Team Edward vs. Team Jacob imbroglio.

The middle-aged woman was smartly dressed but you could have stored loose change in the pockets under her eyes. The top third of the index and middle fingers of her right hand were yellowed by nicotine and she was the only one in the park who kept her dog, the Labradoodle, on a leash. Her teeth gritted every time he jerked against her hold, and the other three dogs taunted him.

“Even if I knew her,” the woman said, “why would I tell you? I don’t know you.”

“But if you did,” I assured her, “you’d think I was the cat’s pajamas.”

She gave me an unblinking stare that felt twice as hostile if only because there was nothing overtly hostile about it. “What’d this girl do?”

“Nothing,” Angie said. “She’s just missing from home. And she’s only sixteen.”

“I ran away at sixteen,” the woman said. “I came back after a month. To this day, I don’t know why I did. I could’ve stayed out there.”

When she said “out there,” she chin-gestured past the area where a group of mothers and toddlers gathered around the smaller playground, past the parking lot, and past the hills that rose and were subsumed into the great blue mass of the Berkshires. On the other side of that mountain range, the gesture seemed to say, a better life had waited.

Angie said, “This girl could very much regret running away. Harvard was waiting for her. Yale. Wherever she wanted to go.”

The woman yanked on her dog’s leash. “So she could, what, enter some cubicle at a slightly higher rate of pay? Hang her fucking Harvard diploma on the partition wall? She spends the next thirty-forty years learning how to short stock and steal people’s jobs and houses, their 401(k)s? But that’s okay because she went to Harvard . Sleeps like a baby at night, tells herself she’s not to blame, it’s the system. Then one day she finds a lump in her breast. And it’s not okay anymore, but nobody gives a shit, honey, because you made your fucking bed. So do us all a favor and fucking die.”

The woman’s eyes were red by the time she finished and her free hand shook as she reached into her purse and came back with a cigarette. The air in the park felt raw. Angie looked like she was in minor shock. I’d taken one step back from the woman and both the gay couple and the elderly couple were staring at us. The woman had never raised her voice, but the rage she’d expelled into the atmosphere had been so torn and pitiable it rattled us all. And it wasn’t rare. Quite the contrary. You asked a simple question lately or made an innocuous aside and suddenly you were the recipient of a howl of loss and fury. We no longer understood how we’d gotten here. We couldn’t grasp what had happened to us. We woke up one day and all the street signs had been stolen, all the navigation systems had shorted out. The car had no gas, the living room had no furniture, the imprint in the bed beside us had been smoothed over.

“I’m sorry” was all I could think of to say.

She put the shaky cigarette to her lips and lit it with a shaky Bic. “Don’t know what you’re sorry for.”

“I just am,” I said.

She nodded and gave me and then Angie a soft, helpless look. “It just sucks. You know? This whole raw deal they sell us.”

She bit her lower lip and dropped her eyes. Then she and her Labradoodle walked off toward the gate that led out the back of the park.

Angie lit her own cigarette as I approached the elderly couple with the photo of Amanda. The man gave it a glance, but the woman wouldn’t even meet my eyes.

I asked her husband if he recognized Amanda.

He gave the photograph another glance and then shook his head.

“Her name’s Amanda,” I said.

“We’re not much on names here,” he said. “It’s a dog park. That woman who just left? She’s Lucky’s Owner. We don’t know her name beyond that, but we know she had a husband once, a family, but she doesn’t have them anymore. Couldn’t tell you why exactly. Just that it’s sad. My wife and me? We’re Dahlia’s Owners. Those two gentlemen? They’re Linus’s and Schroeder’s Owners. You, though? You’re just the Two Ass-holes Who Made Lucky’s Owner Sadder. Good day to you.”

They all left. They walked out the side entrance to the park and congregated on the sidewalk. They opened their car doors and their dogs hopped in. We stood in the dog park without a dog, feeling ever the fools. There was nothing to say, so we just stood there as Angie smoked her cigarette.

“I guess we should go,” I said.

Angie nodded. “Let’s use that gate, though.”

She indicated the gate on the other side of the dog park and we turned toward it, because we didn’t want to exit past this group who suddenly despised us. The far gate led into the children’s area and then the sidewalk beyond, where we’d parked our car.

A different group congregated here-mothers and their children and their baby carriages and sippy cups and formula bottles and diaper bags. There were half a dozen women and one guy. The guy wore jogging clothes and stood by a jogging stroller slightly away from the group as he drank continuously from a water bottle the length of my leg. He seemed to be modeling for the women and they seemed to be enjoying it.

Except for one. She stood a few feet away, closest to the short fence that separated the children’s park from the dog park. She’d strapped her infant to her chest in a Björn, the baby’s back to her chest so the baby could look out at the world. The baby wasn’t interested in the world, though, she was interested in squalling. She calmed down for a second when the mother put a thumb in her mouth, but then, when she realized it wasn’t the nipple or the pacifier or the bottle she’d been looking for, the howling started again and her body shook like she was being electrocuted. I remembered when Gabby had behaved exactly the same way, how helpless I’d felt, how utterly useless.

The woman kept looking over her shoulder. I assumed she’d sent someone for the bottle or the pacifier and was wondering where the hell they were. She bounced on her feet and the baby bounced with her but not enough to stop screaming.

The mother’s eyes met mine and I was about to tell her it gets better, a lot better, but then her small eyes narrowed and mine did, too, both of our mouths opening. The hair on top of my head grew damp.

We hadn’t seen each other in twelve years, but there she stood.

Amanda.

And her baby.

Chapter Nineteen

She couldn’t run. Not with a baby strapped to her chest. Not with a stroller and a diaper bag to retrieve. Even if she had track-star speed and Angie and I had blown ACLs, she’d still have to get in the car, turn over the engine, and strap the baby in all at once.

“Hey, Amanda.”

She watched me come. She didn’t wear that hunted look worn by a lot of people who don’t want to be found. Her gaze was level and open. The baby sucked her thumb into her mouth, having decided, I guess, that it was better than nothing, and Amanda used her other hand to stroke the top of the baby’s head where thin wisps of light brown hair formed swirls.

“Hi, Patrick. Hi, Angie.”

Twelve years.

“How you doing?” We reached the fence between her and us.

“Oh, you know.”

I nodded at the baby. “Pretty girl.”

Amanda gave the baby a tender glance. “She is, right?”

Amanda was pretty herself, but not in the way of models or beauty pageant contestants-her face had too much character, her eyes too much knowledge. Her slightly crooked nose was in perfect symmetry with her slightly crooked mouth. She wore her long brown hair down and heat-straightened so that it framed her small face and made her seem even smaller than she was.

The baby squirmed a bit and groaned, but then she went back to sucking Amanda’s thumb.

“How old is she?” Angie asked.

“Almost four weeks. This is the first time she’s been outside for any real amount of time. She liked it up until she started screaming.”

“Yeah, they do a lot of screaming at that age.”

“You have one?” She kept her eyes on the baby, fed her a bit more of her thumb.

“A daughter, yeah. She’s four.”

“What’s her name?”

“Gabriella. Yours?”

The baby closed her eyes-from Armageddon to serenity in under two minutes. “Claire.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Yeah?” She gave me a smile that was wide and shy at the same time, which made it twice as charming. “You like it?”

“I do. It’s not trendy.”

“I hate that, right? Kids named Perceval or Colleton.”

“Or remember the Irish phase?” Angie asked.

A nod and a laugh. “All the kids named Deveraux and Fiona.”

“I know a couple, lived up off the Ave.?” I said. “Named their kid Bono.”

A great laugh, sharp enough to jostle the baby. “No, they didn’t.”

“No, they didn’t,” I admitted. “I keed.”

We were quiet for a moment, the smiles gradually dying on our faces. The mothers and the jogger paid us no attention, but I noticed a man standing in the park halfway between the playground and the road. His head was down and he walked in a slow circle, trying really hard, it appeared, not to look our way.

“That would be the daddy?” I said.

She looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “That would.”

Angie squinted. “Seems a bit old for you.”

“I was never interested in boys.”

“Ah,” I said. “What do you tell people-he’s your father?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes uncle. Sometimes older brother.” She shrugged. “Most times people assume what suits them and I don’t have to say anything.”

“He’s not missed back in the city?” Angie said.

“He had some vacation time coming.” She waved at him, and he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket and began trudging across the field toward us.

“What’ll you do when vacation time runs out?”

Another shrug. “Fall off that bridge when we come to it.”

“And this is what you want-to build a life up here in the Berkshires?”

She looked around. “It’s as good a place as any and better than most.”

“So you remember some of this place,” I said, “from when you were four?”

Those clear eyes pulsed. “I remember all of it.”

That would include the wailing, the crying, the arrest of two people who’d loved her deeply, the social worker who’d had to wrench Amanda from the arms of those people. Me standing there, the cause of it, watching.

All of it.

Her boyfriend reached us and handed her the pacifier.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem.” He turned to me. “Patrick. Angie.”

“How you doing, Dre?”

They lived just a mile from the dog park on the main road in a house we’d passed at least a dozen times that morning. It was a Craftsman Foursquare, the stucco painted a dark tan that contrasted nicely with the off-white trim and the copper-colored stone porch supports. It was set back off the road a few yards, a wide sidewalk bordering the houses along that stretch of road in such a way that it felt more small-town than country. Across the street was a strip of common grass and then a small access road and a white-steepled church with a brook running behind it.

“It’s so quiet here,” Amanda said as we exited our cars and met on the sidewalk, “that sometimes the gurgling of the brook keeps you up at night.”

“Yikes,” I said.

“Not a nature enthusiast, I take it,” Dre said.

“I like nature,” I said. “I just don’t like to touch it.”

Amanda lifted Claire out of her car seat and said, “Would you mind?” and handed her to me. She came back out with the diaper bag and Dre pulled the stroller out of the back of their Subaru and we headed up the walk to the house.

“I can take her,” Amanda said.

“I got her for a sec,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

“Sure.”

I’d forgotten how small a newborn was. She weighed, at most, eight and a half pounds. When the sun broke between two clouds and hit us, she scrunched up her face until it looked like a head of cabbage, her tight fists covering her eyes. Then her fists fell away and her face unscrunched and her eyes opened. They were the color of good scotch and they looked up at me with startled wonder. They didn’t just ask, Who are you? They asked, What are you? What is this? Where am I?

I remembered Gabby having that look. Everything was unknown and unnamed. There was no “normal,” no frame of reference. No language, no self-awareness. Even the concept of a concept was unknown.

The startled wonder turned to confusion as we crossed the threshold into the house and the light changed again and her face darkened with it. She had a gorgeous face. Heart-shaped, chubby-cheeked, those butter-toffee eyes, her mouth a rosebud. She looked like she’d grow into a stunner. Spin heads, halt hearts.

But as she began to fuss and Amanda took her from my arms, it also occurred to me that however she looked, she didn’t look anything like Amanda or Dre.

“So, Dre,” I said when we were all sitting in the living room by a hearth of smooth gray stone.

“So, Patrick.” He wore dark brown jeans, a pearl henley beneath a navy blue pullover with an upturned collar, and a dark gray fedora on his head. He fit in up in the Berkshires about as well as a fire. He pulled a pewter flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and took a small sip. Amanda watched him return the flask to his pocket with something that resembled disapproval. She sat on the other end of the couch and rocked the baby softly in her arms.

I said, “I’m just trying to imagine how you’ll go back to work for the Department of, uh, Children and Families when your family unit here is a bit, how do you say, fucking illegal.”

“Please don’t swear in front of the baby,” Amanda said.

“She’s three weeks old,” Dre said.

“I still don’t want anyone swearing in front of her. Did you swear in front of your baby, Patrick?”

“When she was a baby, yeah. Not now.”

“How’d Angie feel about it?”

I looked over at my wife and we exchanged a small smile. “It annoyed her actually. A bit.”

“It annoyed her greatly,” Angie said.

Amanda gave us a pulse of her eyes that said: Exactly.

“Fair enough,” I said. “I apologize. Won’t happen again.”

“Thank you.”

“So, Dre.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You’re asking how I plan to go back to work at DCF when I’m shacked up with a teenager.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

He leaned forward and clasped his hands together. “Who says anyone has to know?”

I gave that a big smile. “Let me give you a picture of what the inside of my head looks like right now, Dre. I’ve got a four-year-old daughter. I’m imagining her in twelve years, shacked up, as you say, with a scumbag DCF worker twice her age who has the moral compass of a reality TV producer and hits the flask before noon.”

“It’s past noon,” he said.

“But that’s not your yardstick, is it, Dre?”

Before he could answer, Amanda said, “The bottle should be warm by now. It’s in the bowl in the sink.”

Dre got off the couch and went into the kitchen.

Amanda said, “Moral outrage isn’t going to play well here, Patrick. I think we’re all a little past that right now.”

“We’re above morality, are we, Amanda? At the ripe old age of sixteen?”

“I didn’t say I was above morality. I said I was above expressions of moral outrage that are a bit self-serving given the histories of the people in this room. In other words, if you think you get some sort of second chance to save my honor twelve years after you handed me back to a mother you knew was incompetent, you don’t. You want absolution, find a priest. One with a clear conscience of his own, if there are any of those left.”

Angie gave me a look that said: You walked into that one.

Dre returned with the bottle of formula and Amanda gave him a sweet, weary smile as she took it from him and slipped the nipple into Claire’s mouth. Claire immediately started sucking, and Amanda gave her cheek a soft caress. I wondered who were the adults and who the children in the room.

“So when’d you find out you were pregnant?” Angie said.

“May,” Amanda said as Dre took his seat on the couch, closer to her and the baby now.

“Three months along,” Angie said.

“Uh-huh.”

I said to Dre, “Must have been a shock for you.”

“Just a bit,” he said.

I turned my eyes to Amanda. “Thank God you’ve got a neglectful mother, right?”

“I don’t follow.”

“It must have been a lot of help hiding the pregnancy,” I said.

“It’s done all the time.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “I knew two girls who pulled it off in high school. One was overweight in the first place, so, you know, but the other, she just bought larger-size clothes and kept eating junk food in front of everyone and nobody picked up on it. She gave birth in a bathroom stall during fifth period, junior year. School janitor walked in on it, ran back out screaming, fainted in the hallway. True story.” I leaned forward. “So, I know it’s done all the time.”

“Okay, then.”

“But, Amanda, you don’t have an extra pound on you.”

“I work out.” She looked over at Angie. “How much did you gain?”

“Enough,” Angie said.

“She loves Pilates,” Dre said.

I nodded as if that made perfect sense. “And you don’t want me swearing around the baby, but you feed her formula?”

“Sure. What’s wrong with formula?”

“For a lot of women? Nothing. But you? You’re a tiger. I can see it in your eyes-someone looks at that kid wrong, you’d slash their throat.”

She nodded without hesitation.

“You’re not the type of woman gives a baby formula when she knows how much healthier breast milk is.”

She rolled her eyes. “Maybe-”

“And that baby-no offense?-looks nothing like you. Or him.”

Dre came off the couch. “Time to go, dude.”

“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not. Sit down.” I looked at him. “Dude.”

Amanda said, “Claire is mine.”

“We don’t doubt that,” Angie said. “But she didn’t start that way, did she?”

“Sit down, Dre.” Amanda shifted the baby against her chest and adjusted the bottle. She looked at Angie and then me. “What do you think is going on here?”

Dre took his seat. He took another hit off his flask, got another contemptuous flick of the eyes from Amanda.

“Well, you’ve got a bunch of lunatic Russians on your tail for a reason,” Angie said.

“Ah,” Amanda said, “you’ve met them?”

Angie shook her head and pointed at me.

“I met two of them,” I said.

“Let me guess-Yefim and Pavel.”

I nodded and noted the muscles tightening in Dre’s face. Amanda, on the other hand, looked as calm as ever.

“And you know who they work for.”

“Kirill Borzakov.”

“The Borscht Butcher,” Amanda said, caressing Claire’s face again. “That’s one of his nicknames.”

“How old are you?” I said.

“Kirill’s wife, you know about her?”

“Violeta? I’ve heard stories.”

“Her father heads a Mexican drug cartel. She believes in some arcane religion that practices animal sacrifice and, if you believe the rumors, worse. She was diagnosed with severe mental problems-in Mexico. Her family dealt with it by killing the doctor. And she’s married to Kirill, not just because their marriage gives Kirill’s gang an unbreakable drug supply but because the only person crazier than Violeta is Kirill and they love each other for it.”

“And you stole their baby,” Angie said, and the moment the words left her mouth we both knew she was right.

The bottle slipped from Claire’s mouth.

“I… what?”

“You have the Russian mob after you and it isn’t because you’re so great at identity theft they can’t afford to lose you. Yefim took Sophie.”

“He what?”

“Took her,” I said. “And when he did, he said, ‘Maybe we have her make us another one.’ ” I cocked my head, got a good look at Claire. That’s where I’d seen those lips before, that hair. “That’s Sophie’s baby, not yours.”

“She’s mine,” Amanda said. “Sophie didn’t want her. Sophie was giving her up.”

I turned to Dre. “And who would’ve helped facilitate that process?”

“Better than aborting them.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure they have a great life. Claire’s is certainly starting off wonderfully-you two on the run, a bunch of scary gangsters breathing down your necks, a small matter of identity theft and crank production being your primary sources of income up to this point. Oh, and illegal baby-brokering, I assume. Yeah, Dre? That’s the confidential part of your job-you specialize in unwed mothers, I’ll bet. How warm am I?”

He gave me an embarrassed smirk. “Blazing.”

“Sounds like you guys got this all figured out.”

“How am I any different,” Dre said, “from any legal adoption agency? I find parents for women who don’t want their babies.”

“With zero oversight,” Angie said. “You telling us you’re able to investigate the people the Russian mob sells babies to? Are you serious?”

“Well, not all the time, sure, but-”

“Amanda,” Angie said, “of all the babies you could have stolen, why steal the one who was supposed to go to two of the craziest sociopaths in the city?”

“Your answer is the question.” Claire was asleep against her breast. She placed the bottle on the coffee table and stood. “I can only assume most times where the babies Dre brokers end up. And no”-another damaging glance at Dre-“I don’t normally assume it’s a great place they go to.” She placed Claire in a dark rattan bassinet by the hearth. “But in this case? I knew she’d end up in a bad place. Sophie’s a crank-head. She stopped doing it while she was pregnant, mostly because I had her move in with me and I stayed on her ass. But she went right back to it when Claire was born.”

“Well, she had a reason,” Dre said.

“Shut up, Dre.” She turned back to me. “Sophie wasn’t going to be raising Claire anyway-Kirill and his certifiably insane wife were.” She came over by me and sat on the edge of the coffee table so that our knees were almost touching. “They want that child. And, yeah, the easy thing would be to give her back. I sure don’t want to imagine what’s going to happen when Yefim and Pavel get me in a room alone. Yefim keeps an acetylene torch in the back of his truck. The kind they use on construction sites, with the hood and everything?” She nodded. “That’s Yefim. And he’s the sanest one of that pack. So am I scared? I am petrified. And was taking Claire away from them borderline suicidal? Probably. But you two have a daughter. Would you want her growing up with Kirill and Violeta Borzakov?”

“Of course not,” Angie said.

“Well, then?”

“It’s not simply a case of the baby grows up with the Borzakovs or you kidnap her. There were other options.”

“No,” she said, “there weren’t.”

“Why?”

“You had to be there.”

“Where?”

She shook her head and walked back to the bassinet and stood looking down into it, her arms crossed. “Angie, would you look at something for me?”

“Sure.” Angie joined her by the bassinet and they both looked in at Claire.

“See those red marks on her leg? Are those bites?”

Angie bent at the waist, peered in.

“I don’t think so. I think it’s just a rash. Why don’t you ask Dre. He was a doctor.”

“Not a very good one,” Amanda said, and Dre closed his eyes and lowered his head. “A rash?”

“Yeah,” Angie said, “babies get rashes. A lot.”

“Well, what do you do?”

“It doesn’t look really serious, but I understand how you feel. When are you seeing her pediatrician next?”

She looked almost vulnerable for a moment. “Her one-month checkup is tomorrow, so, I mean, do you think it can wait till then?”

Angie gave her a soft smile and touched her shoulder. “Definitely.”

We heard a sharp noise behind us and we all jumped in place, but it was just the mail being pushed through the brass slot in the door. It fell to the floor-two circulars, a few envelopes.

Amanda and I moved toward it at the same time, but I was closer. I scooped up three envelopes, all addressed to Maureen Stanley. One was from National Grid, a second was from American Express, and the third was from the U.S. Social Security Administration.

“Miss Stanley, I presume.” I handed the mail to Amanda and she snatched it from my fingers.

We walked back over to the baby as Dre slid his flask back into his jacket.

Angie stood over the bassinet, looking in at the baby, her features softening until she looked ten years younger. She turned from the bassinet and her face grew harder. She looked at Dre and Amanda. “On the top of the list of things that don’t add up about all the BS and half-truths you guys have been selling us since we walked through this door is this-why are you still here?”

“Here, as in Planet Earth?” Amanda said.

“No, here as in New England.”

“It’s my home. It’s where I’m from.”

“Yeah, but you’re an identity-theft master,” I said.

“I’m adequate.”

“You got Russians with blowtorches on your ass and you decide to hide out ninety miles away? You could be in Belize by now. Kenya. But you stayed. I’m with my wife on this one-why is that?”

Claire fussed and suddenly let out a wail.

“Now look,” Amanda said, “you woke the baby.”

Chapter Twenty

She took the baby into a bedroom off the living room and for a minute we could hear them in there-Amanda cooing, the baby crying-and then Amanda closed the door.

“When do they stop crying?” Dre asked us.

Angie and I both laughed.

“You’re a doctor.”

“I just deliver them. Once they leave the womb, they leave my sight.”

“You didn’t study child development in med school?”

“Sure, but that was a few years ago. And it was academic then. Now it’s a bit more immediate.”

I shrugged. “Every kid’s different. Some start sleeping regular by the fifth or sixth week.”

“Yours?”

“She went four and a half months before her sleep got dependable.”

“Four and a half months? Shit.”

“Yeah,” Angie said, “and then she started teething not long after that. You think you know what screaming sounds like now. But you don’t. You don’t have a clue. And don’t even get me started on ear infections.”

I said, “ ’Member when she got infections in both ears and a tooth coming in?”

“Now you’re just fucking with me,” Dre said.

Angie and I looked over at him and shook our heads slowly.

“How come they’re never like this in TV shows and movies?” he said.

“Right? They always conveniently go away when the main characters don’t need them around.”

“I was watching this one show the other night, right? The father’s an FBI agent, mother’s a surgeon, and they got, like, a six-year-old? One episode opens, they’re on vacation together, no kid. I figure, okay, the kid’s with the nanny, but the next scene they show the nanny moonlighting at the mother’s hospital. The kid? Driving stick-shift to get groceries, I guess. Playing hopscotch on the interstate.”

“It’s that Hollywood logic,” Angie said, “the same way in the movies there’s always a parking space right outside hospitals and city halls.”

“But what do you care?” I asked him. “She’s not yours.”

“Yeah, but…”

“But what? Let me ask you now that we’ve gotten past the kid-is-yours bullshit-you sleeping with Amanda?”

He leaned back, propped his right ankle up on his left knee. “If I was?”

“We already went down that road. I’m asking if you’re not.”

“Why would you-?”

“You don’t seem her type, man.”

“She’s seventeen years ol-”

“Sixteen.”

“She turns seventeen next week.”

“Then next week I’ll say she’s seventeen.”

“My point is, what type could she possibly have at this age?”

“And my point is, not you.” I spread my hands. “Sorry, man, but I just don’t see it. I see the way you look at her and, yeah, I see a guy waiting for that seventeenth birthday so his conscience can let him off the hook. But I don’t see anything like that when she looks at you.”

“People change.”

“Sure,” Angie said, “but attraction doesn’t.”

“Oh, man,” he said, and he suddenly looked forlorn and cast-off. “Man, I dunno, I dunno.”

“What don’t you know?” Angie asked.

When he looked at her, his hair was damper, his eyes had picked up a milky film. “I don’t know why I keep fucking myself up . I do something like this every few years just to make absolutely positive I’ll never have a normal life. And my shrink would say, sure, I engage in compulsive behaviors and I’m trying to replay patterns that go all the way back to my parents’ divorce and somehow get a different result. And I understand that, I do, but I just want someone to tell me how to stop fucking doing dumb fucking things. I mean, you know how I ended up losing my medical license and owing the Russians?”

We shook our heads. “Drugs?” I offered.

“Well, sort of. I wasn’t addicted to them or anything. It wasn’t that. I met a girl. Russian girl. Well, Georgian. Svetlana. She was, whew, she was everything. Crazy in bed, crazy out of it, too. So beautiful you wanted to eat your hand just looking at her. She…” He dropped his right foot back on the floor, sat there looking down at it. “One day she asks me to write her a scrip for Dilaudid. I say, Of course not. I quote the Hippocratic oath, the Massachusetts statutes prohibiting doctors from writing scrips for anything but diagnosed medical conditions, blah, blah, blah. Cut to the chase, she wears me down in less than a week. Why? I don’t know. Because I’ve got no center. Whatever. But she wears me down. Three weeks after that, I’m writing her OxyCon scrips and scrips for fucking fentanyl, for Christ’s sake, and pretty much anything else she wants. When that starts leaving too much of a paper trail, I start clipping the shit outright from the hospital pharmacy. I even took a moonlighting job at the Faulkner so I could do it there, too. I didn’t know it, but they were already investigating me by that point. Svetlana, God love her, she’d noticed how much I liked playing blackjack at Foxwoods the couple times we went, so she hooked me into this game over in Allston. They played it out of the back of a Ukrainian bakery. First time I played, I cleaned up. Good, fun guys, great-looking women hanging around, all of them probably stoned on my shit. Next time I go, I win again. A lot less, but I win. By the time I start losing, they’re all nice about it-they’ll accept more OxyCon in lieu of actual money, which is good, because Svetlana’s pretty much cleaned me out of money. They give me a grocery list-Vicodin HP, Palladone, Fentora, Actiq, boring old Percodan, you name it. By the time the state medical board has me arrested and files charges, I’m already in the hole twenty-six grand to Kirill’s sharks. But twenty-six grand is like tip-jar money at a coffee shop compared to what’s on the horizon. Because unless I want to do three-to-six at Cedar Junction, I got to come up with money for good lawyers. Another two hundred fifty grand in the hole to pay Dewey, Screwum and Howe, but at least I only get my license revoked, no jail time, no criminal finding. Kirill slides up to me at one of his restaurants a couple weeks later, tells me that the ‘no criminal finding’? That was his doing. And that costs another quarter-million. I can’t prove he didn’t influence the judge, and even if I could, if Kirill Borzakov says you owe him five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars, guess what you owe Kirill Borzakov?”

“Five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars,” I said.

“Exactly.”

My cell phone vibrated and I took it out, looked at the screen, saw a number I didn’t recognize. I put it back in my pocket.

“Pretty soon, one of Kirill’s guys-Pavel; I think you two met-he comes to me and says I should apply for a job opening at the Department of Children and Families. Turns out they got a guy in HR working off his own debt. So I apply and he waives the CORI check, and I get the job that I’m eminently overqualified for. A few weeks later, after a particularly attractive fourteen-year-old pregnant girl leaves my office, my phone rings and they tell me I have to present her with an offer.”

“What do you get per baby?” Angie’s voice was weary with contempt.

“One thousand off my debt.”

“So you’ve got to get them five hundred and twenty-six babies before you’re off the hook?”

He gave that a resigned nod.

“How close are you?”

“Not close enough.”

My phone vibrated again. I looked at it. Same number. I put it back in my pocket.

My wife said, “You know even if you got them five hundred and twenty-six babies to sell on the black market…”

He finished the sentence. “They’ll never be done with me.”

“No.”

My cell vibrated a third time. I had a text message. I flipped the phone open.

Hey guy. Anser your

fucking phone. Sincerely

Yefim.

Dre took another hit from his flask. “You’re like a fifteen-year-old girl with that thing.”

“Yeah, well, you’d know all about that.”

My phone rang again. I got off the couch and walked out to the front porch. Amanda was right-from here, you could hear the brook gurgle.

“Hello.”

“Hello, my good guy. What you do with the Hummer?”

“I drove it over to the stadium and left it there.”

“Ha. That’s a good one. Maybe I see Belichick driving it one day in his hoodie.”

In spite of myself, I smiled.

“What’s up, Yefim?”

“Where you at, my friend?”

“Around. Why?”

“I thought maybe we could talk. Maybe we could help each other out here.”

“How’d you get my phone number?”

He laughed, a deep, long belly chuckle. “You know what day it is?”

“It’s Thursday.”

“It is Thursday, yes, my friend. And Friday is a big day.”

“Because you wanted Kenny and Helene to find you something by Friday.”

I could hear the snort through the phone. “Kenny and Helene couldn’t find a chicken in the chicken soup, my man. But you? I look in your eyes after I shoot that faggot car and I see you’re afraid-you’d be one icy fucker if you weren’t-but I also see you’re curious. You sitting there thinking, If this crazy Mordovian don’t pull this trigger, I’ve got to know why he points it at me in the first place. I see that in your eyes, man. I see it. You a type.”

“Yeah, what type?”

“The type keep coming. What’s that saying about size of the dog?”

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s-”

“The size of the fight in the little dog. Yeah.”

“Close enough.”

“So, I’ve got to figure you already know where this crazy Amanda is.”

“What makes you think she’s crazy?”

“She stole from us. That makes her fucking cuckoo clock, man. And if you don’t know where she is, I bet a bag of mice you’re close.”

“A bag of mice?”

“Old Mordovian expression.”

“Ah.”

“So where’s she at, my friend?”

“Let me ask you something first.”

“Shoot straight away.”

“What does she have that you want so bad?”

“You playing with me, guy?”

“No.”

“Making fun of Yefim?”

“Definitely not.”

“Then why you ask such a asshole-stupid question like that? You know what we want.”

“I honestly do not. I know you want Amanda and I know-”

“We don’t want Amanda, man. We want what she took. Kirill looks bad, man. He looks like he can’t find one little girl stole his property? The Chechens up the block? They’re starting to laugh, guy. We probably have to kill a few just to close their mouths, not have to look at their rotting fucking teeth.”

“So, what-?”

“The fucking baby! And the fucking cross! I need both. If that stupid card-junkie piece-of-shit doctor goes back to work and can find me another baby, I’ll give that one to Kirill, he won’t know the difference. But if I don’t have that cross and some baby by this weekend? It’s going to be a fucking bloodbath, guy.”

“And you’ll give me Sophie in exchange?”

“No, I won’t fucking give you Sophie. We’re not let’s-make-it-a-deal here. Yefim say he wants the baby and the cross, you bring me the baby and the cross. Otherwise, they sell this soup in the little towns along the Black Sea? Only get it in these little towns. It comes in a red can. Parts of you will be in those cans. Parts of your family too, guy.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute. The heel of my hand had turned dark red from clenching the phone and my pinkie had gone numb.

“You still there, my main man?”

“Go fuck yourself, Yefim.”

He gave that a low, soft laugh. “No. I fuck you, man. I fuck you and your wife and your little girl in Savannah.”

I looked out on the road. The tar was very black. It matched the tree trunks by the church. The clouds had dropped down the mountain and hovered just above the telephone wires that stretched the length of the road. The air was damp.

“You don’t think we watch you?” Yefim said. “You don’t think we have friends in Savannah? We have friends everywhere, guy. And, yeah, you got that big crazy Polack protecting your little girl so we lose a couple of guys taking them out. But that’s okay-we get more guys.”

I stood on the porch looking out on the road. When I spoke, the words came out clipped and harder than I intended. “Tell me about this cross.”

“The cross,” Yefim said, “is the Belarus Cross. It go back a thousand years, man. Some people call it the Varangian Cross, other people, they call it the Yaroslav Cross, but I always like Belarus Cross. No price on this thing, man. Prince Yaroslav, he pay the Varangians with this cross to kill his brother Boris in the unification war back in, like, 1010 or 1011. But then he miss the cross so much, after he become ruler of all Kievan Rus, he send some other Varangians against the first Varangians, and they kill them, bring the cross back to him. It was in the czar’s pocket back in ’17 when they put him against that basement wall and, boom, blow his brains out. Trotsky had it in Mexico with him when they ice-axed his head. That cross get around, man. Now Kirill get it, and he’s showing it off at party on Saturday. All the big fish be there, man. Real gangsta. And he need that cross.”

I finally trusted myself to speak. “And you think-”

“No think. I know. That little girl has it. Or that fucking card-junkie doctor. Oh, you tell him to get back to work. You tell him we need him so much we won’t take a finger. We take a toe. He don’t need a toe as much and he need his finger. So, yeah, he’ll limp. People limp. Get me that cross, get me that baby, man. I’ll-”

“No deal.”

“I just told-”

“I know what you just told me, you fucking hump. You threaten my wife? You threaten my daughter? One thing happens to them, or my friend calls and says he saw one of you Stallone-in- Nighthawks -looking motherfuckers at the strip mall? I’ll burn your whole fucking organization to the ground. I’ll-”

He was laughing so hard I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

“Ho-kay,” he said finally, still chugging out a trail of soft giggles. “Ho-okay, Meester Kenzie. You funny guy, my main friend. Funny, funny guy. You know where my cross is?”

“I might. You know where Sophie is?”

“Not anymore, but I can find her plenty fast.” He chuckled again. “Where you come up with ‘hump,’ man? I never hear that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Old tape, I guess.”

“I like it. I can use it?”

“Help yourself.”

“Say to some guy, ‘You pay me money or else, you, you hump.’ Ha.”

“All yours.”

“I find Sophie. You find cross. I’ll call you later.”

He laughed once more and hung up.

I was still shaking when I got back into the house, the adrenaline swirling at the base of my skull so badly I got a headache.

“Tell me about the Belarus Cross.”

Dre looked like he’d hit the flask a few more times while I was out on the porch. Angie sat in the armchair closest to the hearth. She looked so small, for some reason, so lost. She gave me a look I couldn’t quite read but it was pained, even forlorn. Amanda sat at the far end of the couch, a video baby-monitor on the end table beside her. She’d been reading Last Night at the Lobster and she put it on the coffee table, spine bent, and looked at me.

“Who were you talking to?”

“The Belarus Cross,” I said.

“You were talking to a cross?”

“Amanda.”

She shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The what?”

I didn’t have time for this. Which left me with two options-threat or promise.

“They’ll let you keep the baby.”

She sat up. “What?”

“You heard me. If this genius over here”-I nodded at Dre-“can come up with another baby pronto, they’ll let you keep Claire.”

She turned on the couch. “Can you?”

“It’s possible.”

“Fucking Dre,” she said, “can you or not?”

“I don’t know. There’s one girl who’s close. I mean, she could be in early labor or it could just be false labor. With the equipment I have at my disposal, it’s an inexact science.”

Amanda’s jaw clenched and unclenched. She used both hands to pull her hair behind her head. She slowly twirled it into a ponytail and took a band off the side table and tied it off.

“So you talked to Yefim.”

I nodded.

“And he was explicit.”

“Couldn’t have been clearer-give them the cross and a baby, and they forget all about you.”

She’d pulled into herself, her knees up to her chest, bare feet clutching the couch cushion. Pulling the hair off her face should have made her features sharper and less vulnerable, but it managed to have the opposite effect. She looked like a child again. A petrified child.

“Did you believe him?”

I said, “I believe he believed it. Whether he can float it past Kirill and his wife, that’s another issue.”

“This all started because Kirill saw a picture of Sophie. That’s one of the”-she looked down the couch-“services Dre provides, the pictures. Kirill and Violeta saw Sophie, and I guess she looked like Violeta’s younger sister or something and, from that point, they wanted Sophie’s baby, no one else’s.”

“So it might be more complicated than Yefim lets on.”

“It’s always more complicated,” she said. “How old are you ?”

I gave that a small smile.

Amanda looked down the couch at Dre, who sat there like a dog waiting for her to say “park” or “supper.”

“Even if he could supply another baby, wouldn’t we be doing the same thing-giving a child over to two psychopaths?”

I nodded.

“Can you live with that?”

I said, “I came here to find you and get Sophie out of their hands. That’s as far as I’ve thought.”

“How nice for you.”

“Hey, Amanda? People who live in glass houses with kidnapped babies shouldn’t throw stones.”

“I know, it’s just that it sounds so much like the kind of logic that sent me back to Helene twelve years ago.”

“I’m not playing this record right now. You want to hash all that shit out at some quieter time, I’ll be your Huckleberry. But right now we need to get them this Belarus Cross and, if possible, convince them we’ll get them another baby.”

“And if we can’t?”

“Get them another baby?”

She nodded.

“I don’t have a clue, but I do know the cross will buy us time. It’s supposed to be on display in Kirill’s house by Saturday night. If it’s not there, I have no doubt they’ll kill all of us, my family included. We get it to them, though, it’ll buy us another couple of days on the baby issue.”

Angie’s eyes had widened and she glared at me.

“Sounds good to me,” Dre said.

“I’m sure it does,” Amanda said. She turned back to me. “What if they renege? All Yefim has to do is figure out where I am, and there’s not too many places for me to hide. You found us in one morning. What’s to stop him from getting the cross and then coming right up the road for the baby?”

“His word that he wouldn’t is all I got to go on.”

“And you’d take it-the word of an assassin who goes all the way back to the Solntsevskaya Bratva in Moscow?”

“I don’t even know what that is,” I said.

“A gang,” she said, “a brotherhood. Think the Crips or the Bloods with military discipline and connections going all the way to the top of the Russian oil conglomerates.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. That’s where Yefim got his start. And you’ll take his word?”

“No,” I said. “I won’t. But what’s our alternative?”

After a couple of tentative yelps, the baby started crying full-force. We could hear her on the monitor and we could hear her through the door. Amanda slid off the couch and slipped on her flats. She took the monitor with her into the bedroom.

Dre took another drink from his flask. “Fuck-ing Russians.”

“Why don’t you slow down?” I said.

“You were right.” He took another drink. “Earlier.”

“About what?”

He ground the back of his head into the couch, his eyes rolling back toward the bedroom door. “Her. She doesn’t like me very much, I don’t think.”

“Why’s she with you, then?” Angie asked.

He exhaled up toward his own eyes. “Even Amanda, cool as she is, needs help with a newborn. Those first couple weeks? You’re going to the supermarket every five minutes-diapers, formula, more diapers, more formula. The kid’s up every ninety minutes, wailing. Ain’t much in the way of sleep or freedom.”

“You’re saying she needed a gofer.”

He nodded. “But she’s got the hang of it now.” He let loose a soft and bitter chuckle. “I thought when we first met, you know, here’s my shot-an innocent girl, untouched, uncorrupted, of blazing intelligence. I mean, she can quote Shaw, she can quote Stephen Hawking, she’s so cool she can quote Young Frankenstein, get into a debate with you on quantum physics and the lyrics to ‘Monkey Man’ on the same night. She likes Rimbaud and Axl Rose, Lucinda Williams and-”

“This going to go on for a while?” Angie said.

“Huh?”

I said, “It sounds like you thought you could mold Amanda into your very own Nexus 6 model of every chick who dumped on you in high school.”

“No, it wasn’t like that.”

“It was exactly like that. This version wouldn’t take a shit on you, she’d adore you. And you could sit up all night and give her your rap about Sigur Rós or the metaphorical significance of the rabbit in Donnie Darko . And she’d just bat her eyes and ask where you’d been all her life.”

He looked down at his lap. “Hey, fuck you,” he whispered.

“Fair enough.”

I could see the child I’d found after seven months, playing on a porch not far from here with an openhearted woman who’d adored her, and a bulldog named Larry. If I’d left her there, who would she be now? Maybe she’d be a basket case who remembered just enough of her life before she’d been snatched from a neglectful mother to know that her life here with Jack and Patricia Doyle was a lie. Or maybe she’d have very little memory of her time with a white-trash alcoholic in a three-decker apartment in Dorchester that smelled of carpet funk and Newports, so little that she’d live a well-adjusted life in small-town America and all she’d know of identity theft and credit card fraud and Russian killers from the Solntsevskaya Bratva would be things she picked up watching 60 Minutes . Even if Amanda had never been kidnapped in the first place, with Helene for a mother, her chances of growing up a healthy, well-adjusted child were somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred million to one. So the kidnapping had, in some demented way, exposed her to the knowledge that another way of life existed. One that wasn’t her mother’s life of fast food and full ashtrays. Of collection notices and ex-con boyfriends. After she’d glimpsed the world of this tiny mountain town, she’d decided to will her way back to it. And maybe, from that point on, will became her defining character trait.

“They won’t just let this go,” Dre said, “no matter what Yefim told you.”

“Why not?”

“For starters?” he said. “Somebody’s got to pay for Timur.”

“Who’s Timur?” Angie asked, coming over to the couch.

“He was a Russian.”

“Yeah? What happened to him?”

“We kinda killed him.”

Chapter Twenty-One

So you kinda killed a Russian named Timur to get the Belarus Cross.”

“No,” he said.

“No you didn’t kill him?”

“Well, yes, but we didn’t do it to get the Belarus Cross. We didn’t know shit about the Belarus Cross until we opened the suitcase.”

“What suitcase?” Angie sat on the edge of the couch.

“The one handcuffed to Timur’s wrist.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”

Dre considered his flask but returned it to his pocket. He played with a key chain instead, swinging the keys absently around a hard plastic fob, which encased a picture of Claire. “You heard of Zippo?”

“Sophie’s boyfriend,” Angie said.

“Yeah. Notice how no one’s seen him around in a while?”

“It did come to our attention.”

He lay back on the couch like he was in a shrink’s office. He dangled the key chain above his head so that the picture of Claire swung back and forth over his face, the shadow passing over his nose. “There’s an old movie memorabilia warehouse in Brighton, right along the Mass Pike. You go in there, you’d see an entire floor devoted to posters, half of them oversize European ones. Second floor is props and costumes; you want the NYU philosophy degree that Swayze had on his wall in Roadhouse, they got it there, not in L.A. Russians got all sorts of weird shit there-Sharon Stone’s chaps from The Quick and the Dead, one of Harry’s fur suits from Harry and the Hendersons . They also have a third floor no one goes to, because that’s where the delivery and postdelivery rooms are.” He wiggled his fingers. “I’m a doctor, lest we forget, and these babies can’t be documented at a hospital. The moment they enter the system, they’re traceable. So we deliver them at a movie memorabilia warehouse in Brighton and they’re usually on a plane out of town three days later. Some special cases, they’re out the door as soon as the cord is cut.”

“Which was the case with Claire.” Angie leaned forward, chin on her hand.

He held up one finger. “Which was supposed to be the case with Claire. But it wasn’t just me and Sophie in the delivery room. Amanda was there and so was Zippo. I’d advised strongly against it. It was going to be hard enough to give the baby up without actually seeing her be born. But Amanda overruled me, as Amanda is wont to do. And we were all in there when Sophie gave birth.” He sighed. “It was an incredible birth. So smooth. Sometimes it goes that way with young mothers. Normally it doesn’t, but sometimes…” He shrugged. “This was one of those times. So we’re all standing there, passing this baby around, laughing, crying, hugging-I actually hugged Zippo, though I couldn’t stand the kid in real life-and the door opens and there’s Timur standing there. Timur was a giant, a bald, big-eared, face-only-a-blind-mother-could-love Chernobyl baby. You think I’m kidding but, no, he was literally born in Chernobyl in the mid-eighties. A mutant freak, Timur. And a drunk and a crank addict. All the positives. He comes through the door for the pickup. He’s early, he’s fucked up, and he’s got a suitcase cuffed to his wrist.”

I started seeing it now-five people walk into a room, two die, but four walk out. “So he’s not taking no for an answer.”

“Not taking ‘no’?” Dre sat up and put the key chain in his jeans. “Timur crashes into the room, says, ‘I take baby,’ and goes to cut the umbilical cord. I swear to Christ-I never saw anything like it. He grabs the surgical shears, starts coming toward me with them, I’m holding the baby, we’ve all just been laughing and hugging and crying and here’s this Chernobyl mutant coming at me with surgical shears. He’s got them open and he’s heading right for the umbilical cord, one eye closed ’cause he’s so fucked up he’s seeing double, and that’s when Zippo jumps on his back and cuts his throat with the scalpel. I mean, just opens it from one side to the other.” He covered his face in both hands for a moment. “It was the worst fucking thing I ever saw and I did my ER internship in Gary, Indiana.”

I hadn’t heard anything from the back bedroom in a while. I stood.

Dre didn’t even notice. “Here’s the best part. Timur the Chernobyl Mutant? Even with his throat cut, he flips Zippo off his back and as soon as Zippo hits the ground, Timur shoots him three times in the chest.”

I stood by the bedroom door, listening.

“So now we’ve got this freak of nature with a cut throat pointing a gun at us, and we’re all going to die, right? But then his eyes roll back to whites and he drops toward the floor and he’s already gone by the time he lands.”

I knocked softly on the bedroom door.

“We don’t know what to do at first, but then we realize no matter what happens, they’ll probably kill us. Kirill loved Timur. Treated him like his favorite dog. Which, when you think of it, he was.”

I knocked softly again. I tried the door. It was open. I pushed it inward and looked in at an empty bedroom. No baby. No Amanda.

I looked back at Dre. He didn’t seem surprised. “She gone?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s gone.”

“She does that a lot,” he said to Angie.

We stood out back, looking at a small yard and a strip of gravel that ran along the edge of the yard in a downward slope and ended at a thin dirt alley. Across the alley was another yard, much bigger, and a white Victorian with green trim.

“So, you had another car back here,” I said.

“You’re the private investigators. Aren’t you supposed to check for stuff like that?” He took a snort of the clean mountain air. “It’s a stick.”

“Huh?”

“Amanda’s car. A little Honda thing. She just dropped the emergency brake and rolled to the alley, took a right.” He pointed. “She made the road in about ten seconds from there, would be my guess, and then she turned the engine over, popped it into first.” He whistled through his lower teeth. “And a-way she went.”

“Nice,” I said.

“She does it a lot, like I said. She’s half-jackrabbit. Anything bothers her, she just leaves. She’ll be back.”

“What if she doesn’t come back?” I said.

He plopped down on the couch again. “Where’s she going to go?”

“She’s the Teenage Great Impostor. She can go anywhere.”

He held up an index finger. “Correct. But she doesn’t. This whole time on the run, I’m like you-I’ve been advocating foreign countries, islands. Amanda won’t go for it. This is where she was happy once, this is where she wants to stay.”

“It’s a nice sentiment,” Angie said, “but no one’s that sentimental with their life on the line, and Amanda strikes me as far less sentimental than most.”

“Yet”-he raised his hands to the sky-“here we are.” He hugged his arms. “I’m cold. Heading back in.”

He went back inside. I started to follow, but Angie said, “Hang on a sec.”

She lit a cigarette and her hands shook. “Yefim threatened our daughter?”

“It’s what they do to rattle you.”

“But it’s what he did. Yes?”

After a moment, I nodded.

“Well, it worked. I’m rattled.” She took a few quick puffs off her cigarette, and for a time she wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You gave your word to Beatrice you’d find Amanda and bring her home. And you… baby, you’d break yourself in half before you’d break your word, which is what I probably love most about you. You know that?”

“I do.”

“You know how much I love you?”

I nodded. “Of course. Gets me through more than you know, believe me.”

“Back at ya.” She gave me a shaky smile and took another shaky toke off her shaky cigarette. “So you have to honor your word. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

I saw where this was going. “But you don’t have to.”

“Exactly. ‘It’s who you give your word to.’ ” She smiled, her eyes filling.

“You know how hot it is that you can quote The Wild Bunch ?”

She gave me a faux curtsy, but then her face returned to something serious and addled.

“I don’t care about these people,” she said. “I mean, did you listen to that story in there? That turd isn’t just a turd, he’s a monster turd. He sells babies. In a just world, he would be getting raped in prison, not sitting in a warm living room in a pretty little town. And now my daughter’s in danger ? Because of them?” She pointed at the house. “It’s not an acceptable risk-versus-reward equation for me.”

“I know.”

“Knowing that they know she’s in Savannah? She’s not going to sleep tonight without me.”

I told her that I’d alerted Bubba and that he’d let me in on the backup he’d brought down South with him, but it didn’t seem to do much to allay her fears.

“That’s nice,” she said. “It is. He’s Bubba and he’d die protecting her. I don’t doubt that. But, baby? I’m her mother . And I need to get to her. Tonight. No matter what it takes.”

“Which is what I love most about you.” I took her free hand. “You’re her mom. And she needs her mom.”

She laughed, but it was a torn, wet laugh, and she ran the heel of her hand under each eye. “Her mom needs her.”

She draped her arms over my shoulders and we kissed in the bright cold, which made the smooth warmth of her tongue even warmer, even smoother.

When we broke the kiss, she said, “There’s a bus station in Lenox.”

I shook my head. “Don’t be ridiculous. Take the Jeep and drive like, well, me. Leave the car in long-term parking at the airport. If I need it, I’ll come get it.”

“How will you get home?”

I put my hand on her cheek for a moment, thinking how outrageously lucky I was to have met her and married her and become a parent with her. “Have you ever, in your life, known me to have a problem getting where I need to get?”

“You are a marvel of self-sufficiency.” She shook her head, the tears coming now. “But we’re breaking you of that, you know, your daughter and me.”

“Oh, I noticed.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

Her hug was crushing, her hands gripping the back of my head and neck like it was all that kept her from drowning in the Atlantic.

We walked around the front of the house to the Jeep. I handed her the keys. She got in and we traded another full minute of inappropriate public affection before I stepped back from the driver’s window.

Angie put the Jeep in drive, looked out the window at me. “How come they can find our daughter in Georgia but they can’t find one sixteen-year-old girl in Massachusetts?”

“A fair question.”

“A sixteen-year-old girl toting a baby around a town with a population of, at best, two thousand?”

“Sometimes hiding in plain sight is the best cover.”

“And sometimes if something smells it’s because it’s rotten, babe.”

I nodded.

She blew me a kiss.

“As soon as you see our daughter,” I said, “shoot me a photo of her.”

“Love to.” She looked back at the house. “I don’t know how I did this for fifteen years. I don’t know how you do it now.”

“I don’t think about it.”

She smiled. “Sure you do.”

I let myself back into the HOUSE and found Dre plopped on the couch watching The View, Babs and the girls chatting about global warming with Al Gore. The nitwit blonde with the concentration-camp collarbones asked him to explain a study she’d read that linked global warming to cow flatulence. Al smiled and looked like he’d rather be getting a colonoscopy during a root canal. My cell phone vibrated-the restricted number again.

“It’s Yefim,” I said.

Dre sat up. “I have it.”

“What?”

“The cross.” He grinned like a little boy. He reached under the collars of his pullover and the henley beneath it. He pulled out a leather cord hung around his neck. A cross dangled from it, thick and black. “I gots it, baby. You tell Yefim-”

I held up a finger to him and answered the phone.

“Hello, Patrick, you hump.”

I smiled. “Hello, Yefim.”

“You like? I used ‘hump’ for you.”

“I like.”

“You got my cross, man?”

It hung against Dre’s upper chest. It was black and the size of my hand.

“I have your cross.”

Dre gave me a double thumbs-up and another idiotic grin.

“We meet, then. Go to Great Woods.”

“What?”

“Great Woods, man. The Tweeter Center. Oh, hang on.” I heard him place his hand over the phone and speak to someone. “I been told it’s not called Great Woods or the Tweeter Center no more. It’s called-what? Hang on, Patrick.”

“The Comcast Center,” I said.

“It’s called the Comcast Center,” Yefim said. “You know it, right?”

“I know it. It’s closed now. Off-season.”

“Which is why nobody will be around to bother us, man. Go to the east gate. You’ll find a way in. Meet me by the main stage.”

“When?”

“Four hours. You bring the cross.”

“You bring Sophie.”

“You bring baby, too?”

“Right now all’s I got is the cross.”

“That’s a sucky deal, man.”

“It’s the only deal I got if you want that cross in Kirill’s house by Saturday night.”

“Bring the doctor, then.”

I glanced at Dre, who stared at me with wide eyes and a childlike giddiness that I assumed was pharmaceutically generated.

“Who says I even know where he is?”

Yefim sighed. “You too smart not to know we know more than we say we know.”

It took me a second to catch up to that sentence. “We?”

“Me,” he said. “Pavel. We. You part of something, my friend, something you not supposed to understand yet.”

“Really?”

“True. I’m playing her game, you play mine. Bring doctor.”

“Why?”

“I want to deliver message to him in person.”

“Mmmm,” I said. “Not so sure I like that.”

“Don’t worry, guy, I’m not going to hurt him. I need him. I just want to tell him personally how much I would like to see him back on the job. You bring him.”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Ho-kay,” Yefim said. “I see you soon.” He hung up.

Dre returned the cross to its hiding place beneath his pullover but not before I got a look at it. If I’d passed it in an antique shop, I would have guessed the price at fifty dollars, no more. It was black onyx, fashioned in the Russian Orthodox style, with Latin inscriptions carved into the top and bottom of the face. In the center was etched another cross along with a spear and a sponge above a small rise that I presumed represented Golgotha.

“Doesn’t seem worth a bunch of dead people through the ages, does it?” Dre said before slipping it under his collar.

“Most of the things that people kill for don’t.”

“To the assholes doing the killing they do.”

I held out my hand. “Why don’t you give it to me?”

He gave me a smile that was all teeth. “Fuck you.”

“No, really.”

“No, really.” He bugged his eyes at me.

“Seriously,” I said. “I’ll take it and I’ll do the swap. No need for you to risk your ass out there with these kinds of people. It’s not your thing, Dre.”

His smile widened. “You might have everyone else buying your good-guy bullshit, but you’re no different than anyone else. You get a chance to hold this in your hand? This artifact worth, I dunno, what van Goghs are worth? You’ll think about doing the right thing, but then you’ll just keep driving until you can find someone to fence it.”

“So, why don’t you?”

“What?”

“Steal it and fence it?”

“Because I don’t know any fences, man. I’m a pill-popping degenerate gambler, I’m not fucking Val Kilmer in Heat . The first person I trusted to help me move this would shoot me in the back of the head as soon as I turned my back. You, though, you do know fences, I bet, and you do know people you can trust in the criminal world. You’d be halfway to Mexico with this thing if you could.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Your aw-shucks shtick doesn’t fool me.”

“Apparently not,” I said. “Darn. Let me ask you-why does Yefim seem to know everything about us right now but yet he somehow can’t find us?”

“What does he know about us?”

“He knows we’re together. He even made a reference to this being Amanda’s game, and all of us caught playing it.”

“And you doubt that?”

An hour later, we set out for the Comcast Center at Great Woods in Mansfield. As we walked out to Dre’s Saab, he removed the key from his key chain and handed it to me.

“It’s your car,” I said.

“Given my substance abuse issues, do you really want me behind the wheel?”

I drove the Saab. Dre rode shotgun and stared dreamily out the window.

“You’re not on just booze,” I said.

He turned his head. “I took a couple Xanax. You know…” He looked back out the window.

“A couple? Or three?”

“Three, actually, yeah. And a Paxil.”

“So pills and liquor, that’s your prescription for dealing with the Russian mob.”

“It’s brought me this far,” he said and dangled the photo fob of Claire in front of his blurry eyes.

“Why the hell do you have a picture of the kid?” I said.

He looked over at me. “Because I love her, man.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “Or something like love.”

Half a minute later, he was snoring.

It’s rare you deal with any KIND of illegal swap where the party with the power doesn’t change the meeting place at the last minute. It tends to root out the threat of law enforcement surveillance, because it’s hard to set up audio bugs on the fly, and teams of black-clad federal agents weighted down with boom mikes, recorder bags, and infrared telephoto lenses are easier to spot when they’re scrambling around in the background.

So, I assumed Yefim would call to change the meet at the last minute, but I still wanted to get a lay of the land in case he didn’t. I’d been to the Comcast Center at least two dozen times in my life. It was an outdoor amphitheater cut into the woods of Mansfield, Massachusetts. I’d seen Bowie open for Nine Inch Nails there. I’d seen Springsteen and Radiohead. A year back, I saw the National open for Green Day and thought I’d died and gone to alt-rock heaven. Which is to say, I knew the layout pretty well. The amphitheater was a bowl with a long, high slope running down to it, and lower, wider slopes curving around in gradual swirls, so that if you continued to walk in a circle one way, you would eventually run out of road at the amphitheater itself. And if you walked in a circle the other way, you would eventually reach the parking lot. They set up the T-shirt kiosks on these slopes alongside the beer booths and the booths for cotton candy, baked pretzels, and foot-long hot dogs.

Dre and I walked around for a bit as a hesitant snow fell in the gathering dusk. Flakes appeared in the darkening air like fireflies, then melted on contact with whatever they touched-a wooden booth, the ground, my nose. At one of the wooden booths near a stand of turnstiles, I looked right and left and realized Dre was no longer with me. I turned back and walked up one slope and then down another, following my faint footsteps on the dampening pavement. I saw where his broke off and I used the last one I could make out as an arrow. I was walking past the VIP box seats toward the stage when my phone rang.

“Hello.”

It was Amanda. “Where are you guys?”

“One could ask you the same thing.”

“ My location doesn’t matter right now. I just got a call that they’ve changed the location of your meeting. What meeting is that, by the way?”

“We’re at the Comcast Center. Who called?”

“A guy with a thick Russian accent. Any other stupid questions? He said Yefim is having trouble getting through to your cell.”

“How’d the Russians get your number?”

“How’d they get yours ?”

I didn’t have an answer for that one.

“The meeting’s changed to a train station,” she said.

“Which one?”

“Dodgeville.”

“Dodgeville?” I repeated. I vaguely remembered seeing the name on packages when I’d loaded trucks in college but I couldn’t have pointed it out on a map. “Where the hell’s that?”

“According to a map I’m looking at, go to 152 and head south. Not far. They said only one of you can leave the car with the cross. So you have the cross, I take it.”

“Dre does, yeah.”

“They said bring the cross or they’ll kill Sophie in front of you. Then they’ll kill you.”

“Where are-?”

She’d hung up.

I came to the bottom of the aisle, found Dre sitting on the edge of the stage, looking out at the seats.

“Meeting location’s been changed.”

He didn’t seem surprised. “That’s what you predicted.”

I shrugged.

“Must be great,” he said, “being right all the time.”

“That’s how I come off, uh?”

He stared at me. “People like you wear your self-righteousness like-”

“Don’t blame me because you fucked your life up. I don’t judge you for any of that.”

“Then what do you judge me for?”

“Trying to get into the pants of a sixteen-year-old.”

“In many cultures that’s considered normal.”

“Then move to one of those cultures. Here, it just means you’re a douche bag. You don’t like yourself? Don’t put it on me. You don’t like the way your life turned out? Welcome to the club.”

He looked out at the seats, suddenly wistful. “I played a pretty mean bass in this band I had in high school.”

I managed not to roll my eyes.

“All these things we could have been,” he said. “You know? But you gotta choose a path, so you choose it, and you find yourself exiting med school knowing only one thing for certain-that you’re going to be a subpar doctor. How do you embrace your own mediocrity? How do you accept that in any race, for the rest of your life, you’ll arrive with the back of the pack?”

I leaned against the stage with him and said nothing. It was quite the view-all those seats. Beyond it, the great lawn of general seating rising into the dark sky under gently falling snow. Most nights in July, it would be full. Twenty thousand people chanting and screaming and swaying, pumping their fists toward the sky. Who wouldn’t want to stand onstage and have that view?

On some minor level, I felt bad for Dre. He’d been told by someone-a mother, I assumed-that he was special. Probably told it every day of his life, even as the evidence mounted that it was a lie, however well-intentioned. And now here he was, first career in shambles, second career about to be, and probably unable to remember the last time he’d made it through a day without substance abuse.

“You know why I never had any qualms about brokering baby sales?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Because nobody knows nothing.” He looked over at me. “You think the state knows any better about placing kids? You think anyone does? We don’t know shit. And by we, I mean all of us. We all showed up at the same shitty semiformal and we hope that somehow everyone will buy that we are what we dressed up as. A few decades of this, and what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens. We learn nothing, we don’t change, and then we die. And the next generation of fakers takes our place. And that? That’s all there is.”

I clapped him on the back. “I see a future in self-help for you, Dre. We got to motor.”

“Where?”

“Railway station. Dodgeville.”

He hopped off the stage and followed me up the aisle.

“Quick question, Patrick.”

“What’s that?”

“Where the fuck’s Dodgeville?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Dodgeville, as it turned out, was one of those towns so small I’d always thought it was just an extension of another town-in this case, South Attleboro. As far as I could tell, it didn’t even have a traffic light, just one stop sign about six miles from the Rhode Island border. Idling there, I saw an RR sign to my left. So I turned left off Route 152, and after a few hundred yards, the train station appeared, as if dropped there, in an otherwise uninterrupted stretch of woodlands. The tracks ran straight into the forest-just a hard line that vanished into cowls of red maple. We pulled into the parking lot. Other than the tracks and the platform, there wasn’t much to see-no stationhouse to protect against December’s bite, no Coke machines or bathrooms. A couple of newspaper stands by the entrance stairs. Deep woods on the far side of the tracks. On the near side, the platform on the same level as the rails, and the parking lot we’d pulled into, which was lit with sallow white light, the snow spinning like moths under the bulbs.

My phone vibrated. I opened the text:

One of you bring cross to platform. One of you stay in car.

Dre had craned his head to look at the message. Before I could reach for my door, he’d reached for his and was out of the car.

“I got this,” he said. “I got this.”

“No, you-”

But he walked away from the car and out of the parking lot. He climbed the short steps to the platform and stood in the center. From where he stood, a strip of hard black rubber fringed in bright yellow paint extended across the track.

He stood there for a bit as the snow fell harder. He took two or three steps to the right, then four or five to the left, then back to the right again.

I saw the light before he did. It was a circle of yellow bouncing in the woods, a flashlight beam. It rose, then fell and rose halfway back up again before it slid left, then right. It made the same movement a second time-the sign of the cross-and this time Dre’s head turned toward it and locked on. He raised one hand. He waved. The light stopped moving. Just hovered in the woods directly across from Dre, waiting.

I rolled down my window.

I heard Dre say, “No worries,” and cross the tracks. The snow grew thicker, some of the flakes starting to resemble bolls of cotton.

Dre entered the woods. I lost sight of him. The flashlight beam vanished.

I reached for my door, but my cell vibrated again.

Stay in the car.

I kept the phone open on my lap and waited. It wouldn’t be much of a task to simply hit Dre over the head, take the cross, and disappear into the woods with Sophie, the cross, and my peace of mind. My left hand clenched the door handle. I flexed the fingers, relaxed. Ten seconds later, I found myself clenching the handle again.

The cell phone screen lit up:

Patience, patience.

In the woods, the yellow light reappeared. It hovered, steady, about three feet off the ground.

My cell vibrated, but it wasn’t a text this time, it was an incoming call from a restricted number.

“Hello.”

“Hey, my…” Yefim’s voice dropped out for a second. “… you at?”

“What?”

“I said where…?”

The phone went dead in my ear.

I heard something thunk into the gravel on the near side of the platform. I peered out the windshield, but I couldn’t see anything, with the hood of the Saab in the way. I kept looking anyway, because that’s what you do. I gave the wipers a quick flick on and off and sloughed off the snow. A few seconds later, Dre appeared at the same spot in the woods where he’d vanished. He was moving fast. He was alone.

My phone vibrated. I heard a horn. I looked down and saw RESTRICTED NUMBER on my screen.

“Hello?”

“Where you?”

“Yefim?”

The windshield vanished behind a cloak of mud. The Saab shook so hard the dashboard rattled. The seat shimmied beneath me. An empty coffee cup tipped out of the cup holder and fell to the floor mat on the passenger side.

“Patrick?… you go… I no… stage.”

I flicked on the wipers. The mud swept right and left, thinner than mud, I realized, as an Acela blew through the station. “Yefim? You keep dropping out.”

“Can… hear… guy?”

I got out of the car because I couldn’t see Dre anymore, noticed my hood was speckled with whatever had hit my windshield.

“I can hear you now. Can you hear me?”

Dre wasn’t on the platform.

He was nowhere.

“I… fuck…”

The connection died. I flipped my phone closed, looked left and right down the platform. No Dre.

I turned back around and looked down the line of cars beside my own. There were six of them, spread out, but I saw the same liquid splashed across their hoods and windshields under the weak white lights. The Acela had vanished into the trees, going the kind of fast you thought only jets could go. The wet cars and wet platform glistened with something besides melting snow.

I turned my head, looked at the platform, turned again, looked at the cars.

Dre wasn’t anywhere.

Because Dre was everywhere.

I found a flashlight and two plastic supermarket bags in the trunk of Dre’s car. I put the bags over my shoes and used the handles to tie knots around my ankles. Then I walked through the blood to the platform. I found one of his shoes down the track, tucked into the inside of the rail. I found what could have been an ear a few feet farther down on the platform. Or it could have been part of a nose. Apparently, an Acela going top-speed didn’t run you over; it blew you up.

On my walk back up the tracks, I spotted a shoulder between the track and the woods. That was the last of Dre I ever saw.

I went to the spot where he’d entered and exited the woods. I shone my flashlight in there, but all I could see were dark trees with clumps of leaves pooled at their bases. I could have gone in farther, but (a) I don’t like woods; and (b) I was running out of time. The Acela passed through Mansfield station, three miles up, and there was a chance someone would spot blood on the front of it or along the side.

Yefim, I could assume, had long since left and taken Sophie and the cross with him.

I walked back across the tracks and at first I didn’t compute what I saw there. Part of me understood it enough to hold the flashlight beam in place, but the other half of me couldn’t make sense of it.

I bent by the gravel between the tracks and the fence that rimmed the parking lot. I’d heard a thunk as it landed, as someone, for who knew what reason, tossed it from the woods to the other side of the tracks. And Dre had come rushing out after it and stepped into the path of over six hundred tons of steel traveling 160 miles an hour.

The Belarus Cross.

I pinched the top left corner of it and lifted it out of the gravel. It was speckled with evaporating snow that revealed it was as bloody as the windshields in the parking lot, as bloody as the platform and the trees and the stairs I descended to Dre’s car. I popped the trunk and sat on the edge and removed the plastic bags and placed them in a third plastic bag. I found a rag in the trunk, and I used it to wipe off the cross as best I could. I tossed the rag into the plastic bag and tied off the handles. I took the bag and the cross up front with me and placed them on the passenger seat and got the hell out of Dodgeville.

Chapter Twenty-Three

There was only one pediatrician in a fifteen-mile radius of Becket, a Dr. Chimilewski, two towns over in Huntington. When Amanda pulled up in front of the office at ten the next morning, I stayed where I was and let her go inside and keep her appointment. I sat in Dre’s car and replayed the conversation I’d had with Yefim on my way out of Dodgeville. He’d called me minutes after I left the train station and nothing we’d discussed made any sense yet.

When Amanda came out twenty minutes later, I was waiting with a cardboard cup of coffee that I offered to her. “I guessed cream, no sugar.”

“I can’t drink coffee,” she said. “It aggravates my ulcer. But thanks for the thought.”

She clicked the remote on her car to unlock the doors and came around me with the baby in the car seat. I opened the door for her.

“You can’t have an ulcer. You’re sixteen years old.”

She snapped the car seat into its base in the backseat. “Tell that to my ulcer. I’ve had it since I was thirteen.”

I stepped back as she closed the door on Claire.

“She okay?”

She looked through the window at the baby. “Yeah. She’s just got that rash. No cause. They said it’ll go away, just like Angie said. They said babies get rashes.”

“Hard, though, right? All these things that could be real health scares turn out to be absolutely nothing, but you never know so you got to get it checked out.”

She gave me a small and weary smile. “I keep thinking they’re going to throw me out next time.”

“They don’t throw you out for being too careful about your child.”

“No, but they tell jokes about you, I’m sure.”

“Let ’em tell jokes.”

She walked around to the driver’s side, looked over the roof at me. “You can follow or just meet me back at the house. I’m not running anywhere.”

“I’ve noticed.”

I turned to walk toward Dre’s Saab.

“Where’s Dre?”

I turned back to her, met her eyes. “He didn’t make it.”

“He…” She cocked her head slightly. “The Russians?”

I said nothing. I held her gaze. I looked for something in her eyes that would tell me, one way or another, which side she was playing in this. Or was it all sides?

“Patrick?” she said.

“I’ll see you back at the house.”

In the kitchen, she made green tea for herself and brought the cup and small pot out to the dining room with her. Claire sat in her car seat in the center of the dining-room table. She’d fallen into a deep sleep in the car and Amanda told me she’d learned no good came from pulling her out of the car seat and moving her to the bassinet once they were inside. It was just as easy and just as safe to leave her where she slept.

“Angie get back all right?”

“Yeah. She arrived in Savannah at midnight. Got to her mother’s by half-past.”

“She doesn’t strike me as someone from the South.”

“She’s not. Her mother remarried in her sixties. Her husband lived in Savannah. He passed about ten years ago. By then, her mother was in love with the place.”

She placed her teapot on a coaster and sat at the table. “So what happened at the train station?”

I sat across from her. “First tell me how we ended up at the train station.”

“What? I got a call and they said the meeting site was changed.”

“Who called you?”

“It could have been Pavel, could have been this other one they call Spartak. Actually, now that I think of it, it did sound more like him. He’s got a higher voice than the others. But then what do I know for sure?” She shrugged. “They all sound pretty much the same.”

“And Spartak or whoever said…”

“He said something like, ‘We no like Comcast Center. Tell them meet at Dodgeville Station, half hour.’ ”

“But why call you?”

She sipped her tea. “I don’t know. Maybe Yefim lost your-”

I shook my head. “Yefim never made that call.”

“He had Spartak make it.”

“No, he didn’t. Yefim was waiting at the Comcast Center when Dre got himself vaporized by an Acela.”

The teacup froze halfway to her mouth. “You want to repeat that one?”

“Dre got hit by a train going so fast that it liquefied him. There’s probably a forensics team out there right now, bagging up the Dre scraps. But they’re little scraps, I assure you.”

“Why would he step in front of a…?”

“Because he was chasing this.” I placed the Belarus Cross on the table.

It sat between us for about twenty seconds before either of us spoke.

“Chasing it?” Amanda said. “That makes no sense. He had it with him when he left the house, didn’t he?”

“And I assume he handed it over to someone, and then that someone threw it back over the tracks.”

“So you think…?” She closed her eyes tight and shook her head. “I don’t even know what you think.”

“I don’t either. Here’s what I know-Dre crossed the tracks into the woods and then someone threw this cross out of the woods and over the tracks. Dre came running out after it and ran into a really fast train. Yefim, meanwhile, claims he was never at the train station and that he never changed the original meeting place. Whether he’s lying or not, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance either way, that’s his claim. We don’t have Sophie, they don’t have the Belarus Cross, and it’s Christmas Eve. Friday. Dre was the last chance Yefim had of scoring another baby to give to Kirill and Violeta. So now Yefim wants the original deal back in place-that cross”-I looked down the table-“and that baby for Sophie’s life, my life, the life of my family, and your life.”

She fingered the cross a couple of times, pushing it up the table a few inches.

“What do the inscriptions mean, do you know? I can’t read Russian.”

“Even if you could,” I said, “they’re not in Russian. That’s Latin.”

“Fair enough. You know any Latin?”

“I took four years of it in high school but all I retained is about enough to read a building foundation.”

“So, no idea?”

I held it in my hand. “A little. The one up top reads Jesus, Son of God, defeats .”

She frowned.

I shrugged and racked my brain a bit. “No, wait. Not defeats . Crushes. No. Wait. Conquers. That’s it. Jesus, Son of God, conquers. ”

“What about the bottom one?”

“Something about a skull and paradise.”

“That’s the best you can do?”

“I took my last Latin class ten years before you were born, kid. My best ain’t bad.”

She poured herself more tea. She held the cup in both hands and blew on it. She took a tentative sip and then placed the cup back down on the table. She sat back in her chair, her eyes on me, as calm as ever, this serious child, this marvel of self-possession.

“It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

“It’s the history that gives it its worth. Or maybe just someone deciding it’s worth something, like gold.”

“I never understood that mentality,” she said.

“Me, either.”

“I can tell you, though, that Kirill’s already lost too much face over this to let any of us live. Certainly not me.”

“You been reading the papers lately?”

She looked over the teacup at me and shook her head.

“Kirill’s hitting his own product too much. Or he’s just having a full-on mental breakdown. He might wrap one of his cars around a pole at a hundred miles an hour before he ever gets around to you.”

“So, I’ll just wait for that day.” She grimaced at me. “And even if, let’s say, everything goes according to this fairy-tale scenario that Yefim-Yefim, yes?-outlined for you?”

“Yefim, yeah.”

“So, okay. We live, Sophie lives, your family lives. What about her?” She pointed down the table where Claire sat, strapped in her car seat, wearing a tiny pink knit hoodie and matching pink sweatpants, her eyes closed to slits. “They take her into their home, Kirill and Violeta, and pretty soon she’s not just the idea of a baby. She’s an actual baby. She cries at inconvenient times, she screams, she howls when her diaper’s wet, and she shrieks-I mean, like an electrified banshee-when you change her top because she hates having anything covering her face and you can’t remove a top without covering her face, at least not the ones I have on hand. So they take her, these psychotic children in middle-aged bodies, and let’s say they get past all the inconveniences and total lack of sleep that go with having a baby in the house, twenty-four-seven. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t think Kirill, who’s now lost massive face, power, and respect because he got his own black-market baby stolen from him and he couldn’t get her back-you’re telling me he’s not going to resent that child? Kirill, who, as you said, is having some sort of psychotic meltdown lately? He’s not going to come home some night, amped up on Polish vodka and Mexican cocaine, and bludgeon that baby when she has the temerity to cry because she’s hungry?” Amanda threw back her entire cup of tea like it was a shot of whiskey. “Do you really think I’m giving my baby back to them ?”

“It’s not your baby.”

“That social security card you saw yesterday? That wasn’t mine. That was hers. I already have one with the same last name. She’s mine.”

“You kidnapped her.”

“And you kidnapped me.”

She’d never raised her voice, but the walls seemed to shake just the same. Her lips trembled, her eyes grew red, tremors raced through her hands. Outside of highly controlled fury, I’d never seen her show emotion.

I shook my head.

“Yes, you did, Patrick. Yes, you did.” She sucked wet air through her nostrils and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Who were you to say where my home was? Dorchester was just where I was born. I was Helene’s spawn, but I was Jack and Tricia Doyle’s child. You know what I remember about that time when I was so-called kidnapped ? For seven perfect months, I didn’t feel nervous or anxious. I didn’t have nightmares. I wasn’t sick, because when you leave a house where your mother never cleans and there’s roaches and roach bacteria everywhere and rotten food fermenting in the sink-when you leave a place like that, you tend to feel better. I ate three times a day. I played with Tricia and our dog. After dinner, every night, they dressed me for bed and then brought me to a chair by the fireplace-seven o’clock on the dot-and they read to me.” She looked down at the table for a moment, nodding to herself in such a way I doubted she knew she was doing it. She looked up. “And then you came. Two weeks after you returned me to Dorchester, and a DSS caseworker had cleared Helene to raise me, you know what happened at seven o’clock?”

I said nothing.

“Helene had spent the day drinking because she got stood up on a date the night before. She put me to bed at five o’clock because she was too far in the bag to deal with me anymore. And then at seven o’clock-on the dot-she came into my bedroom to apologize for being such a bad mother, feeling all sorry for herself and confusing that with empathy for another human being. And while she was apologizing, she puked all over me.”

Amanda reached out and pulled the small teapot to her. She poured the rest of it into her cup. She didn’t have to blow on it as much this time.

“I’m-”

“Don’t dare say you’re sorry, Patrick. Spare me that, please.”

A long, dead minute passed.

“You ever see them anymore?” I asked eventually. “The Doyles?”

“They’re prohibited from having any contact with me. It’s a provision of their probation.”

“But you know where they are.”

She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Tricia did one year in jail and got another fifteen probation. Jack got out two years ago, after ten years in prison for reading me bedtime stories and giving me proper nutrition. They’re still together. You believe that? She waited for him.” She looked at me with shiny, defiant eyes. “They live in North Carolina now, just outside Chapel Hill.” She pulled her hair from its ponytail and shook it violently until it hung straight down beside her face again. From back in its shroud, her eyes found me again. “Why’d you do it?”

“Bring you home?”

“Bring me back.”

“It was a case of situational ethics versus societal ones, I guess. I took society’s side.”

“Lucky me.”

“I don’t know that I’d do any differently now,” I said. “You want me to feel guilty and I do, but that doesn’t mean I was wrong. If you keep Claire, trust me, you’ll do things that make her hate you, but you’ll do them because you’ll believe it’s for her own good. Every time you say no to her, for example. And sometimes you’ll feel bad about it. But that’s an emotional response, not a rational one. Rationally, I know damn well I don’t want to live in a world where people can just pluck a child out of a family they deem bad and raise a stolen child as they see fit.”

“Why not? That’s what the Department of Children and Families does. That’s what the government does all the time when they take kids away from bad parents.”

“After due process, though. After checks and balances and diligent investigation of the charges. You, on the other hand? One day your uncle Lionel snapped when your mother left you in the sun all afternoon because she was drunk. She took you home when she should have taken you to an emergency room, and Lionel came up to deal with your cries. He called a cop who was known for kidnapping kids he felt lived in unsafe environments, and they kidnapped you. No due process for your mother-”

“Don’t call her my mother, if you please.”

“Fine. No due process for Helene. No representation of her side of the story. Nothing.”

“My uncle Lionel had watched Helene ‘raise’ me, for lack of a better word, for four years. I’d say she was the beneficiary of four years of due process and due diligence on his watch.”

“Then he should have filed charges with DCF and asked a court for the right to raise you. It worked for Kurt Cobain’s sister, and she went up against a celebrity with money.”

She nodded. “Nice. When it comes to-what’d you call it?-societal ethics versus situational ones, Patrick Kenzie invokes the memory of Kurt Cobain to represent the interests of the state.”

Ouch. Direct hit.

Amanda leaned forward. “Because here’s what I heard about you many years later-I heard that the child molester you killed while you were looking for me? What was his name?”

“Corwin Earle.”

“Right. I heard-from impeccable sources-that he didn’t have a weapon when you shot him. That he posed no direct threat to you.” She sipped her tea. “And you shot him dead. Shot him in the back, wasn’t it?”

“The back of the neck, actually. And his hand was touching a weapon, technically speaking.”

“Technically speaking. So, you come upon a child molester who poses no direct threat to you, at least not by the state’s definition if they had investigated very hard, and you deal with this by firing one hell of a situational ethic into the back of his head.” She raised her cup to me. “Well done. I’d clap, but I don’t want to wake the baby.”

We sat in silence for a bit and she never took her eyes off me. Her self-possession was, quite frankly, a bit scary. It definitely didn’t fill me with feelings of warmth. And yet, I liked her. I liked that the world had given her a raw deal and she’d dealt with it by playing the world’s game right up to the point where she raised her middle finger to it and walked away from the whole sham. I liked that she refused to wallow in self-pity. I liked that she seemed incapable of asking for anyone’s approval.

“You’ll never give that baby up, will you?”

“They could break every bone in my body, and I’d continue fighting them with whatever muscle I got left. Cut out my tongue or I’ll never stop screaming with it. And if they lose sight of me for one second, I’ll sink my teeth into their eyes.”

“Like I said, you’ll never give up that baby, will you, Amanda?”

“And you?” She smiled. “You would never let me fight the fight alone, would you, Patrick?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But I’m not leaving Sophie out there to die or be shipped to the basement harem of some emir in Dubai.”

“Okay.”

“But Yefim’s going to want a baby.”

“We might be able to stall him on that if he gets the cross.”

“Yeah, but he won’t give us Sophie. He’ll just let us live another day.”

“That twit.”

“Who?”

“Sophie. You know I sent her to Vancouver right after, well, after-”

“Dre told me all about the bloodbath with Timur in the birthing room.”

“Ah. Yeah, so after that, I send Sophie to Vancouver with impeccable paperwork. I mean, flawless. The kind people pay six figures for. I rebirthed her.”

“But the new birth canal led right back to the Russian mob.”

“Yeah.”

I watched her for a bit, looking for some kind of uncertainty, even a hair of it, to creep into those placid eyes. But it never happened.

“Are you ready-I mean, really ready-to give up all you’re giving up here?”

“What am I giving up?” she asked. “You mean, like, Harvard and all that?”

“For starters.”

She widened her eyes at me. “I’ve got five ironclad identities. One of them, by the way, is already enrolled in Harvard next year. And one is enrolled in Brown. I haven’t decided which one I want yet. A real degree from either of those schools, or any school for that matter, is no better than a fake one. And in some cases, it’s worse because it’s less malleable. There’s an eighth continent now, Patrick. It’s accessed by a keyboard. You can paint the sky, rewrite the rules of travel, do whatever you want. No boundaries and no border wars because very few people even know how to find this continent. I do. Some other people I’ve met do. The rest of you remain here.” She leaned forward. “So, yes, playing by your rules, I’m Amanda McCready, an about-to-turn-seventeen high school dropout. According to my rules, though, Amanda McCready is just one card in a thick deck. Look at it like-”

She pushed back her chair, her eyes on the window that faced the street. She grabbed the bag at her feet and tossed it onto the table. I followed her gaze and saw a car out front, one that hadn’t been there a minute before.

“Who is it?”

She didn’t answer. She dumped her leather bag on the dining-room table and pulled out of the pile two sets of the weirdest-looking handcuffs I’d ever seen. There was no chain between the cuffs. The base of each cuff met the base of the other. They were encased in hard black plastic. One cuff was standard size. On the other end, it was tiny. Small enough to cuff a bird maybe.

Or a baby.

“What the fuck are those?” I crossed the dining room and threw the lock on the front door.

“Don’t curse in front of the baby.”

The top of someone’s head passed beneath the dining-room window.

“Fine. What the heck are those?”

“High-security rigid handcuffs.” Amanda struggled into her Björn. “They use them to transport terrorists on planes. I had these modified. They kick ass, right?”

“They’re cool,” I said. “How many doors into the house?”

“Three if you count the cellar.” She unstrapped Claire from the car seat. The baby groaned and then huffed out several unhappy grunts. Amanda fit her legs into the holes of the Björn, slipped one flap over her shoulder, and buckled it as someone kicked in the back door.

Amanda snapped one cuff over her own left wrist, one over her right.

I pulled my.45, pointed it at the dining-room portico.

Amanda snapped one of the smaller cuffs over Claire’s left wrist.

A window broke in the living room, followed a second or two later by the sounds of someone climbing through it. I kept my eye on the portico, but now I knew they could flank me.

“A little help?” Amanda said.

I came over to her and she held her right arm up so that the smaller cuff hovered beside Claire’s left wrist.

“You bring game, sister.” I snapped the cuff closed over Claire’s wrist.

“In for a penny, in for a pound.”

Kenny came through the portico at the end of the room with a shotgun leveled at us.

I pointed my.45 at his head, but it was a hollow gesture; if he pulled that trigger from this distance, he’d kill all three of us.

I heard the racking of another shotgun, to my left. I glanced over. Tadeo stood where the living room met the dining room at the base of the staircase.

“You just ejected a shell trying to make a cool sound,” I told him.

He turned a bit red. “Still got one to put in your chest.”

“Dang,” I said, “that gun’s almost as big as you.”

“Big enough to cut you in half, homes.”

“But the recoil will blow your ass into the front yard.”

Kenny said, “Put your gun down, Patrick.”

I kept my gun where it was. “You Mexican, Tadeo?”

He nestled the shotgun stock into his shoulder. “You damn right I am.”

“I never had a Mexican standoff with an actual Mexican. There’s something cool about that, don’t you think?”

“Sounds racist to me, homes.”

“What’s racist about it? You’re Mexican, this is a Mexican standoff. It’d be like going Dutch with someone from Amsterdam. Now if, because I’m Irish, you accused me of having a small dick and being a drunk, that’s racist, but describing a standoff as a Mexican standoff as opposed to a plain old, you know, standoff, that seems a pretty victimless racial modification to me.”

“You’re stalling,” Kenny said.

“I’m giving everyone time to calm down.”

Helene came through the portico behind Kenny. She saw the three guns and took a big swallow, but kept coming into the dining room.

“Honey,” she said in a syrupy voice, “we just want the baby.”

“Don’t call me honey,” Amanda said.

“What should I call you?”

“Estranged.”

Kenny said to Helene, “Just get the baby.”

“Okay.”

Amanda raised her wrists so Kenny and Helene saw the cuffs. “Claire and me? We’re a package.”

Kenny’s face grew long and defeated. “Where are the keys?”

“Behind you in the handcuff-key jar.” Amanda rolled her eyes. “Really, Ken?”

“I can kill you,” Kenny said, “and just cut those cuffs off with a hacksaw.”

“If it was 1968 and this was Cool Hand Luke, maybe,” Amanda said. “You see any length of chain on these? You see anything you could cut?”

“Hey!” Helene yelled as if she were the voice of reason. “No one’s killing anyone.”

“Gosh, Moms,” Amanda said, “what exactly do you think Kirill Borzakov is going to do to me?”

“He won’t kill you,” Helene said, patting the air for effect. “He promised.”

“Oh, well, then,” I said to Amanda, “you’re fine.”

“Right?”

“Patrick,” Kenny said.

“Yeah?”

“You can’t win this. I mean, you’ve got to know that.”

“We just want the baby,” Helene said again.

“And that cross on the table,” Kenny said, noticing it for the first time. “Damn. Helene, pick that thing up, would ya?”

“Which?”

“The only Russian cross on the dining-room table.”

“Oh.”

As Helene reached for the cross, I noticed something odd in the pile of things Amanda had dumped from her leather bag-Dre’s key chain. I experienced what Bubba likes to call a disturbance in the Force, and I was so baffled I almost said something to Amanda right then, but Kenny snapped my attention back the other way by tapping the barrel of the shotgun against the wall.

“Lower your gun, Patrick. Seriously, man.”

I looked at Amanda, looked at the baby strapped to her chest and cuffed to her wrists. Claire hadn’t made a peep since the second cuff went on her. She just stared up at Amanda with what, in a self-aware being, could have been considered awe.

“The gun’s making me nervous too,” Amanda whispered. “And I don’t see how it helps us.”

I flicked the safety on and raised my hand, the gun dangling from my thumb.

“Take his gun, Helene.”

Helene came over and I handed her the gun and she placed it awkwardly in her handbag. She looked past me at Claire.

“Oh, she’s so pretty.” She looked back over her shoulder at Kenny. “You should see her, Ken. She’s got my eyes.”

No one said anything for a few seconds.

“How is it,” Kenny asked, “you’re allowed to vote and operate machinery?”

“ ’Cuz,” Helene said proudly, “this is America.”

Kenny closed and opened his eyes.

“Can I touch her?” Helene asked Amanda.

“I’d kinda prefer you didn’t.”

Helene reached out anyway and squeezed Claire’s cheek.

Claire began to cry.

“Great,” Kenny said. “We gotta listen to that all the way back to Boston.”

Amanda said, “Helene?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you do me a huge solid and grab that diaper bag and the little cooler of formula?”

“What’re you going to do with me?” I asked Kenny. “Tie me to a chair or shoot me?”

Kenny gave me a confused look. “Neither. The Russians want all of you.” He used three fingers to point at us. “And they’re paying by the pound.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The only trailer park inside Boston city limits is on the West Roxbury-Dedham border, squeezed in between a restaurant and a car dealership on a strip of Route 1 that is otherwise zoned for commercial or industrial use. And yet, after decades of fighting off developers and buyout offers from the car dealership, the little trailer park that could remains pressed hard against a sluggish brown stretch of the Charles River. I’d always rooted for the place, taken a vicarious pride in the residents’ resilience to yet more commercial sprawl. It would break my heart someday to drive past it and see a McDonald’s or an Outback in its place. Then again, I doubted someone would take me to a McDonald’s to kill me, but it looked highly likely that I might breathe my last in a trailer park.

Kenny pulled off Route 1 onto the entrance roadway and drove us due east toward the river. He was, I’d learned, still pissed about his Hummer. He ranted about it for half the drive. How the cops had it impounded over in Southie and wouldn’t believe his story that it was stolen and he was probably going to have his parole revoked over it if they could prove he’d been anywhere near it that morning, but most of all, what really killed him, was that he’d loved that car.

“One,” I said, “I don’t know how anyone could love a Hummer.”

“Oh, I loved it, bitch.”

“Two,” I said, “why you beefing with me? I didn’t shoot your stupid-looking car. Yefim did.”

“You stole it, though.”

“But it’s not like I said, ‘Let me take it through the bullet wash.’ I was trying to find out where they were taking Sophie, and Yefim shot the shit out of your ugly car.”

“It’s not an ugly car.”

“It’s a hideous car,” Amanda said.

“It’s a pretty gay-looking car,” Tadeo chimed in. “You man enough to get away with it, though, Ken.”

Helene touched his arm. “I love it, honey.”

“All of you, please,” Kenny said, “shut the fuck up now.”

We drove in silence for the last forty minutes. Kenny was driving a late-’90s Chevy Suburban, which probably got the same mileage as the Hummer but somehow managed to be only half as ridiculous to behold. Amanda, the baby, and I sat in back with Tadeo between us. They’d tied my hands behind my back with a length of rope. It was a pretty uncomfortable way to sit for a two-hour drive, and I got a crick in my neck that worked its way down into my shoulders and would, I was sure, stay there for days. Sucks getting old.

We got off the Pike and drove south on 95 for ten miles before Kenny pulled off onto 109 and drove east another six miles, then turned right on Route 1, and took a right into the trailer park.

“How much they paying you for this?” I asked Kenny.

“How about my life? That’s a good one. Can you double it?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.” He looked in the rearview at her. “Amanda.”

“Yo, Ken.”

“I always thought you were a sweet kid, for what it’s worth.”

“I die fulfilled, then, Ken.”

Kenny snorted. “You’re what we’d call a pistol in my day.”

“I didn’t know they had pistols in your day.”

Tadeo laughed. “This bitch is cold.” He turned to her. “That’s a compliment.”

“Never had a doubt.”

We drove to the end of the main road. The trees and the river were the same light brown, and a riot of leaves salted with snow covered everything-the ground, the cars, the trailer roofs, the satellite dishes on top of the trailers, the tin carports. The sky was unblemished blue marble. A hawk flew in low over the river. The trailers sported wreaths and colored lights and the roof of one even sported a light display in the shape of Santa riding a golf cart, for some reason.

It was one of those days that, while cold, was so clear and bright that it nearly made up for the four more months of frigid gray we faced. The crisp air smelled like a cold apple. The sun was sharp and warm on my skin when Kenny stopped the Suburban and opened the back door and pulled me out.

Amanda, the baby, and Tadeo got out the other side and we all stood by a long double-wide trailer along the riverbank. It was empty back here. No cars in front of the few nearby trailers, everyone probably at work or last-minute Christmas shopping.

The door of the trailer opened and Yefim stood there, smiling while he chewed some food, a sub sandwich in one hand, a Springfield XD.40 cal in his waistband.

“Welcome, my friends. Come, come.” He waved us toward him and we all filed in.

When Amanda passed him, he raised an eyebrow at the cuffs. “Not bad.” Once we were inside, he closed the door behind us, and said to me, “How you doing, hump?”

“I’m all right. You?”

“Good, good.”

The inside of the trailer was a lot bigger than I’d imagined. On the back wall, in the center, was a sixty-inch TV screen. Two guys stood in front of it playing Wii Tennis, swinging their arms back and forth and jumping in place while their midget avatars ran back and forth across the screen. To the right of the TV was a sky-blue leather couch, two matching armchairs, and a glass coffee table. Past that, a thick black curtain was strung across the width of the room. On the sky-blue couch, Sophie sat with her mouth covered with electrical tape and her hands bound with a bungee cord. She glanced at all of us, but her eyes lit up when they fell on Amanda.

Amanda smiled back at her.

To our left was a kitchenette, and beyond that a small bathroom and a large bedroom. Cardboard boxes took up nearly every inch of free space-filling the shelves, stacked on the floors, crammed in the spaces above the kitchen cupboards. I could see them stacked in the bedroom and assumed they filled the space behind the black curtain-DVD players, Blu-Ray players, Wii, PlayStation, and Xbox players, Bose home theater systems, iPods, iPads, Kindles, and Garmin GPS systems.

We stood in the entranceway and watched the two men play virtual tennis for a moment with Sophie staring at us. She looked much better than she had the other day, like maybe they’d kept her meth-free and her body was starting to respond.

Yefim cocked his head at me. “Why you tied up, man?”

“Your friend Kenny.”

“He’s not my friend, man. Turn around.”

Kenny seemed hurt by the comment. He gave Helene a look like, You believe this shit ?

I gave Yefim my back and he cut the rope off my wrists, eating his sub the whole time, breathing through nostrils thick with hair.

“You look well, my friend. Healthy.”

“Thank you. You too.”

He slapped his heavy gut with his gun hand. “Ha ha. You a funny hump.” His voice suddenly boomed. “Pavel!”

Pavel turned in the middle of his backhand and looked back at Yefim as his avatar spun and then fell on the court and the tennis ball bounced past him.

“You on the clock. Take their weapons.”

Pavel sighed and tossed his remote onto a chair. His companion did the same. His companion was skinny as death, sunken cheeks and shaved head, Russian words tattooed on his neck. He wore a wife-beater that clung to his emaciated chest and black-and-yellow-striped sweatpants.

“Spartak,” Amanda whispered to me.

Spartak took Tadeo’s shotgun and Pavel took Kenny’s.

“Other guns,” Pavel said, snapping his fingers, his voice and gaze as flat as a dime. “Hurry.”

Kenny handed over a Taurus.38 and Tadeo forked over a FNP-9. Pavel put the two shotguns and two handguns in a black canvas bag on the floor.

Yefim finished his sandwich and wiped his hands with a napkin. He burped and we all got a nice blast of peppers and vinegar and what I think was ham.

“I got to get to the gym, Pavel.”

Pavel looked up from the bag as he zipped it closed. “You look fine, man.”

“I feel I lack discipline.”

Pavel took the bag over to the kitchen and placed it on the small countertop beside the stove. “You look fine, Yefim. All the ladies say so.”

Yefim smiled broadly at that, his eyebrows raised as he mock-primped his hair. “I’m George Clooney, eh? Ha ha.”

“You George Clooney with big Russian cock.”

“That’s the best George Clooney to be!” Yefim shouted, and he and Pavel and Spartak all roared with laughter.

The rest of us stood around looking at one another.

When Yefim stopped laughing, he wiped at his eyes and sighed and then clapped his hands together. “Let’s go see Kirill. Spartak, you stay with Sophie.”

Spartak nodded and pulled back the black curtain on another living room. This one was bigger than the one we were leaving, fifteen-by-twenty was my guess, and the walls were all mirrored. A long purple sectional formed a U. The sectional must have been custom-built, because its sides ran the length of the room. The center of the room was bare. Above our heads, and reflected in the mirrors, was a TV, this one playing a Mexican telenovela . Above the sectional were shelves, dozens of them, and all those shelves were filled with more Blu-Ray players and iPods and Kindles and laptops.

A thin man with a huge head sat beside a dark-haired woman in the center of the sectional. The woman had a kind of stricken madness in her face that drew you to her in helpless, morbid fascination. Violeta Concheza Borzakov had been beautiful once, but something had eaten away at her, and she was only thirty or thirty-two, tops. Her sunset skin was lightly dimpled all over, like the surface of a pond at the beginning of a light rain, and her hair was the blackest black I’d ever seen. She had eyes so dark they almost matched her hair, and something resided in them that was both frightened and frightening; a butchered soul lived back there, abandoned and agitated. She wore a charcoal newsboy cap, a black silk crewneck under a gray silk wrap, black leggings, and knee-high black boots. She watched us come like we were cuts at a steakhouse being wheeled to her on a cart.

Kirill Borzakov, meanwhile, wore a white silk sweatshirt under a white cashmere sportcoat, tan cargo pants, and white tennis shoes. His silver hair was cut tight to his huge skull and the pockets under his eyes came in layers of three. He smoked a cigarette with the kind of loud, liquid smacks that made you never want to smoke a cigarette, and flicked the ash in the vicinity of an overflowing ashtray by his right hand. Beside the ashtray was an open compact mirror that sported several small bumps of cocaine. His gaze was impersonal. It had been at least three decades since empathy had crawled in there and died. I got the feeling that if my chest burst open and Lenin himself stepped out of it, Kirill would continue smoking his cigarette and glancing up at the Mexican soap opera.

Yefim said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Kirill and Violeta Borzakov.”

Kirill stood and walked around us, inspecting his collection of chattel. He looked at Kenny and Helene and then over at Pavel.

Pavel took Kenny and Helene by the shoulders and sat them down at the foot of the sectional on the left side. Kirill cocked his head at Pavel again, and a second or two later, Tadeo was pushed onto the couch beside Helene.

Kirill walked around me in a slow circle. “Who are you?”

“I’m a private investigator,” I said.

A sucking noise as he took a drag off his cigarette and flicked the ash onto the faux-oak floor. “The private investigator who find the girl for me?”

“I didn’t find her for you.”

He nodded at that, as if I’d said something sage, and took my left hand in his. “You didn’t find her for me?”

“No.”

His grip was soft, almost delicate. “Who you find her for?”

“Her aunt.”

“But not for me?”

I shook my head. “Not for you.”

He gave me another nod as he wrapped his fingers around my wrist and ground his cigarette out in my palm.

I’m not sure how I managed not to scream. For half a minute, all I could feel was a fat ember burning through my flesh. I could smell it. My mind went black and then red and I flashed on an image of the nerves in my hand hanging like vines as smoke curled up them.

While he burned me, Kirill Borzakov looked into my eyes. There was nothing to see in his. No anger, no joy, no thrill that comes with violence or the elation of absolute power. Nothing. He had the eyes of a reptile sunning itself on a rock.

I grunted several times and exhaled through gritted teeth and tried to block images of what my hand must look like by now. I flashed on my daughter, and for a moment that calmed me, but then I realized I’d brought her into this moment, this polluted violence and sickness, and I tried to remove the image of her from my head, tried to will her away from this depravity, and the pain pulsed twice as strong. Then Kirill dropped my wrist and stepped back.

“See if this aunt can make your skin grow back.”

I flicked the dead cigarette butt from the center of my palm as Violeta Borzakov said, “Kirill, you’re blocking the TV.”

The coal was black now, on its way to ash, and the center of my palm looked like the top of a volcano-puckered and red, the burned flesh peeled back.

On the Mexican soap, the music swelled and a beautiful Latina in a white peasant top turned on her heel and stalked out of an earth-toned room as the lights went down. The next thing we saw was a commercial with Antonio Sabato Jr. hawking some kind of skin cream.

I would have paid a thousand dollars for that skin cream. I would have paid two thousand dollars for that skin cream and an ice cube.

Violeta took her eyes off the TV. “Why is the bambina still with the little girl?”

Amanda turned so they could see the handcuffs.

“What is this shit, Yefim?” Violeta sat up and leaned forward.

Yefim’s eyes widened. He seemed frightened by her. “Mrs. Borzakov, we bring her to you as promised.”

“As promised? You’re weeks late, pendejo . Weeks. And do you bring her, Yefim, or was it these people?” She waved in the general direction of Kenny, Helene, and Tadeo.

“It was us,” Kenny said from the couch. He gave Violeta a wave that she ignored. “All us.”

Kirill lit a fresh cigarette. “You have your baby now. Go get her and be done with this.”

Violeta slinked toward Amanda like a water snake. She peered at Claire and then sniffed her.

“Is she intelligent?”

Amanda said, “She’s four weeks old.”

“Does she talk?”

“She’s four weeks old.”

Violeta touched the baby’s forehead. “Say ‘Ma- ma .’ Say ‘Ma- ma .’ ”

Claire began to cry.

Violeta said, “Ssshhh.”

Claire cried louder.

Violeta sang, “Hush, little baby, don’t you fret. Momma’s gonna make you a…”

She looked around the room at us.

“Mockingbird?” I tried.

She thrust out her bottom lip in a gesture of acceptance. “And if that mockingbird don’t fly, Momma gonna buy you a…”

Another look for the room. Claire continued to wail.

“Corvette,” Tadeo said.

She frowned at him.

“Diamond ring,” Yefim said.

“That doesn’t rhyme.”

“And yet I am sure it is correct.”

Claire’s wailing hit a new pitch, the banshee-shrieking Amanda had mentioned.

Kirill, sitting on the couch, snorted a line of blow off the compact mirror and said, “Make her stop.”

Violeta said, “I’m trying.” She touched Claire’s head again. “Ssssshhhhh.” She hissed it, over and over-“Sssssshhhhhhhh! Ssssssshhhhhh!”

This did not make things better.

Kirill winced and snorted another line. He placed a hand to his ear and winced harder. “Shut her up.”

“Ssssssshhhhhhhh! Ssssssssshhhhhhh! I don’t know what the fuck to do. You said you would hire a nanny.”

“I hire the nanny. But I don’t bring her here. Shut her up.”

“Ssssssshhhhhh!”

By now Tadeo and Kenny both had their hands over their ears and Pavel and Yefim made various faces of discomfort. Only Helene seemed oblivious, her eyes on the DVD players and the iPods.

I said to Amanda, “Pacifier?”

“Right pocket.”

I held my hand by her pocket, looked at Yefim. “May I?”

“Shit, my friend, absolutely.”

I reached into Amanda’s pocket and pulled out the pacifier.

“Ssssssshhhhhhhhh!” Violeta was screaming it now.

I pulled the plastic cover off the pacifier, movement that drove a spike into my burned palm. My eyes watered and widened, but I reached over Amanda’s shoulder and plopped the pacifier into the baby’s mouth.

The volume in the room immediately plummeted. Claire sucked the pacifier back and forth against her lips.

“Better,” Kirill said.

Violeta ran both palms down her cheeks. “You have spoiled her.”

Amanda said, “Excuse me?”

“You have spoiled her. This is why she screams like this. She will learn not to do that.”

Amanda said, “She’s four weeks old, you fucking moron.”

“Don’t swear in front of the baby,” I reminded her.

She met my eyes and hers were bright and warm. “My bad.”

“What did you call me?” Violeta looked back at her husband. “Did you hear her?”

Kirill yawned into his fist.

Violeta stepped in close to Amanda and stared at her with those ravaged eyes of hers.

“Cut it off,” Violeta said.

“What?” Yefim said.

“Cut it off her.”

“You cannot cut those cuffs,” Yefim said. “Burn them off, maybe.”

Kirill lit a new cigarette with the butt of an old one, squinting around the smoke. “Then burn them off.”

“We’ll end up burning the girl.”

Violeta said, “Not if you cut off her hands.”

Yefim said, “Mrs. Borzakov?”

Violeta kept her eyes on Amanda, their faces so close their noses almost touched. “We’ll shoot her first. Then we cut off her hands. Then we find a way to take the handcuffs off the bambina .” She looked back at her husband. “Yes?”

Kirill was looking up at the TV. “What?”

“Escuche! Escuche!” Violeta slapped her own chest. “I’m here, Kirill.” She slapped her chest again, harder. “I exist.” One more slap. “I live in your life.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “What now?”

“We shoot the girl, cut off her hands.”

“Okay, darling.” Kirill waved toward the other end of the trailer. “Do it in the back bedroom.”

Yefim reached for Amanda, who didn’t so much as flinch.

“Let me,” Violeta said.

Yefim’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

“I want to do it,” Violeta said, her eyes never leaving Amanda’s face. “She would prefer a woman do it. I know her.”

“Let her do it,” Kirill said to Yefim and waved a tired hand.

Through the entire conversation about her own murder, Amanda didn’t make a sound. She didn’t shake, she didn’t blanch. She stared at the two of them, unblinking.

Helene said, “What? Wait a minute. What’s going on here?”

Helene’s bag was still at her feet. They’d never checked her for a weapon, and my.45 was in there. It would take me four steps to reach the bag. Then I’d have to reach in, thumb off the safety, and point it at someone. I figured that even in the most optimistic scenario, Pavel and Yefim would empty a good two dozen rounds into me before I cleared the gun from the bag.

I stayed where I was.

“What’s going on?” Helene said again, but no one listened to her.

Violeta kissed Amanda’s cheek and ran her hand over Claire’s head.

“Mrs. Borzakov?” Yefim said. “You ever fire this gun before?”

She went over to Yefim. “What gun?”

“This one,” he said. “It’s a forty-caliber automatic.”

“I like revolvers.”

“I don’t have a revolver right now.”

“Okay.” She sighed and brushed her hair back off her shoulders. “Show me this gun.”

Yefim put the gun in Violeta’s hands and showed her where the safety was. “It pulls a bit to the left,” he said. “In this space? It will be loud.”

Helene said to Kenny, “You promised no one would get hurt.”

Kenny said to Kirill, “Yeah, Mr. Borzakov. We had, like, a deal.”

“No deal with you.” Kirill waved his hand. “Pavel.”

Pavel pointed a Makarov pistol at Helene and Kenny. “Take them in back, too, Kirill?”

“Yes,” Kirill said. “What did you do with the other girl?”

Pavel gestured at the baby. “Baby’s mother?”

“Yeah.”

“She no bother, boss. She’s in the living room. Spartak take care of her, soon as I tell him.”

“Good, good.”

Yefim finished showing Violeta how to use the gun. “You got it now?”

“I got it.”

“Are you sure, Mrs. Borzakov?”

She let go of the gun. “I’m sure, I’m sure. You think I’m stupid, Yefim?”

“Tiny bit, yes.” Yefim tilted the muzzle up and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered Violeta’s head in the soft skin under the palate. It exited the top of her head and followed a starburst of blood and bone into the ceiling. Her newsboy hat disappeared behind the couch. Her knees buckled left, then right, and she fell on the sectional and slid from there to the floor.

Kirill started to get off the couch, but Yefim shot him in the stomach. Kirill let loose a sound I’d once heard a dog make when it was hit by a car.

Spartak came through the curtain with a revolver extended and Pavel shot him in the temple as Spartak was in mid-stride. Spartak took a half-step with his brains dripping pink and red down the mirrored wall, and then he fell face-forward on the floor by my foot, his mouth open and huffing.

After a few seconds, no more huffing.

Pavel swung his arm and pointed at Kenny’s chest.

“Wait,” Kenny said to Pavel. “Hold on.”

Pavel looked over at Yefim. Yefim flicked his eyes to Amanda. After a second or two, he looked back at Pavel and blinked once.

Pavel fired a round into Kenny’s chest and Kenny jerked in place like he’d been hit with a cattle prod.

Helene screamed.

Tadeo said, “No, no, no, no, no,” his eyes clenched.

Kenny raised an arm and looked around, his eyes wild and so terribly afraid. Pavel took one step forward and fired another round into Kenny’s forehead and Kenny stopped moving.

Helene curled into a fetal position on the sectional and screamed herself into silence, her mouth open and soaking wet, the spittle dripping off her chin, but no sound coming out as she looked at Kenny lying dead as dead got on the carpet beside Spartak. Pavel trained his gun on her but didn’t pull the trigger. Tadeo dropped off the couch and landed on his knees and started praying.

Kirill pawed the couch like he was trying to find the remote in the dark. He grunted, over and over, the blood slopping all over his white sweater and tan pants. He opened his mouth and gulped at the air, his eyes on the ceiling as Yefim put one knee on the couch beside him and pressed the muzzle of his Springfield XD against Kirill’s heart.

“I loved you like a father, but you go become a fucking embarrassment, man. Too much shit up your nose, I think. Too much vodka, eh?”

Kirill said, “Who will work with you if you kill your own boss? Who will trust you?”

Yefim smiled. “I got approval from everyone on this-the Chechens, the Georgians, even that crazy Muscovite there in Brighton Beach? One you said could never run the show? He runs the show, Kirill. And he agree-you got to go.”

Kirill held both hands over the hole in his abdomen and arched his back from the pain.

Yefim gritted his teeth and then sucked his lips in against them.

“Let me tell you, Yefim. I-”

Yefim pulled the trigger twice. Kirill’s eyes snapped back into his head. He exhaled, the sound impossibly high-pitched. His eyes remained back in his head, only the whites showing. When Yefim came off the couch, the smoke exited Kirill’s mouth and the hole in his chest at the same time.

Yefim walked over to Amanda. “We let your mother live?”

“Oh, God,” Helene shrieked from her fetal position on the couch.

Amanda looked at Helene for a long time.

“I guess. Don’t call her my mother, though.”

“What about little Spanish guy?”

“He probably needs a job.”

“Hey, little fellah,” Yefim said. “You want a job?”

“Nah, man,” Tadeo said. “I’m so fucking done with this shit. I just want to go work with my uncle.”

“What’s he do?”

Tadeo’s accent suddenly disappeared. “He sells, like, insurance?”

Yefim smiled. “That’s worse than what we do. Hey, Pavel?”

Pavel laughed. It was surprisingly high-pitched, a giggle.

“Ho-kay, little man. When you leave here, you go sell insurance. I think we done killing for the day, then. Pavel?”

Pavel nodded. “My fucking ears hurt, man.”

Yefim looked up at the ceiling. “Shit-ass construction, these things. Too much tin. Boom boom . Now that I’m king, Pavel? No more trailers for us.”

Pavel said, “George Clooney no king.”

Yefim clapped his hands together. “Ha! You right there. Fuck George Clooney, eh? Maybe someday he get to play a king, but he’ll never be a king like Yefim.”

“You know that is sure, boss.”

Yefim reached into his jacket pocket and came out with a small black key. He stepped up to Amanda and said, “Hold out your wrists.”

Amanda did.

Yefim unlocked Amanda’s right handcuff and then the baby’s. “Man, look at her. She’s sleeping.”

“She doesn’t seem to mind loud noises,” Amanda said. “This kid, I swear, every day’s a surprise.”

“You telling me.” Yefim unlocked the left cuffs. “You got her?”

“I got her.”

“Hold her tight.”

“I’m holding her. She’s in a Björn, Yefim.”

“Of course. I forget.” Yefim pinched the handcuffs at their centers and pulled them away from Amanda and the baby.

Amanda rubbed her wrists and looked around at the carnage. “Well…”

Yefim held out his hand. “Pleasure, Miss Amanda.”

“You’re no slouch yourself, Yefim.” She shook his hand. “Oh, the cross is in Helene’s purse.”

Yefim snapped his fingers. Pavel threw him the purse. Yefim pulled out the cross and smiled. “My family, before we end up in Mordovia two hundred years ago? We live in Kiev.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “True. My father, he tells me we’re descended from Prince Yaroslav himself. This is a family heirloom, man.”

“From a prince to a king,” Pavel said.

“Oh, you too kind, man.” He rummaged in the bag and then looked at me. “Whose gun?”

“That’s mine.”

“It was in the bag the whole time? Pavel!”

Pavel held up his hands. “Spartak supposed to check woman.”

They both looked down at Spartak as his blood ran under the sectional. After a few seconds they looked at each other and shrugged.

Yefim handed me my gun like he was handing me a can of soda, and I put it in the holster behind my back. Four people had just been killed in front of me, and I felt nothing. Zip. That’s what twenty years of swimming in shit had cost me.

“Oh, wait.” Yefim reached into his back pocket and pulled out a thick black wallet. He rummaged around in it for a bit and then handed me my driver’s license. “You ever need something, you call me.”

“I won’t,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You go sell insurance like the little man?”

“Not insurance.”

“What you do, then?”

“Going back to school,” I said and realized I meant it.

He raised his eyebrows at that and then nodded. “Good idea. This is no life for you anymore.”

“No.”

“You’re old.”

“Right.”

“You have kid, wife.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re old.”

“You said that already.”

He held the cross out for me to see. “Beautiful, eh? Every time someone die for it, it gets more beautiful, I think.”

I pointed at the Latin on the bottom. “What’s that mean?”

“What you think it means?”

“Something about heaven or paradise. Eden, maybe. I don’t know.”

Yefim looked at the bodies on the couch and on the floor by his feet. He chuckled. “You like this, man. It means, ‘The place of the skull has become paradise.’ ”

“Which means what?”

“I always thought, dying isn’t death. Where you see a skull, that guy? He already in paradise. Forever, my friend.” He scratched his temple with his gun sight and sighed. “You got Blu-Ray?”

“Huh?”

“You got Blu-Ray player?”

“No.”

“Oh, man, you crazy. Pavel, tell him.”

Pavel said, “You not watching movies unless you watch the Blu-Ray. It’s the pixels. Ten-eighty dpi, Dolby True HD sound? Change your life, man.”

Yefim waved his arms at the boxes stacked above Kirill’s corpse. “I like the Sony, but Pavel swears by JVC. You take two. You watch both with your wife and daughter, tell me which you like best. Hey?”

“Sure.”

“You want PlayStation 3?”

“No, I’m good.”

“iPod?”

“Got a couple, thanks.”

“How about a Kindle, my friend?”

“Nah.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He shook his head several times. “I can’t give those fucking things away.”

I held out my good hand. “Take care, Yefim.”

He clapped both my shoulders hard and kissed me on both cheeks. He still smelled of ham and vinegar. He hugged me and pounded his fists on my back. Only then did he shake my hand.

“You, too, my good friend, you hump.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

All in all, it was an interesting Christmas Eve.

We were delayed getting out of the trailer park, because both Helene and Tadeo soiled themselves when Yefim and Pavel shot four people to death in the time it took to light a cigarette. Then Tadeo fainted. It happened just after Yefim and I discussed Blu-Rays and Kindles. We exchanged our Russian man-hug and heard a thump and looked over to see Tadeo lying on the floor of the trailer, breathing like a fish that had ridden a wave into shore but forgot to ride it back out.

“You ask me,” Yefim said, “I’m not sure this little man can handle the insurance business.”

We stood by the Suburban for a minute-Amanda, the baby, Sophie, and me. Sophie shivered and smoked and looked at me apologetically, either for the smoking or the shaking, I couldn’t tell. Pavel had told us to stay put and then he’d gone back inside the trailer. When he returned, he carried two Blu-Ray players.

Inside, someone fired up a chain saw.

Pavel handed me the Blu-Ray players. “You enjoy. Do svidanya .”

“Do svidanya.”

I went to the back of the Suburban and then called to Pavel as he reached for the door of the trailer. “We don’t have the car keys.”

He looked back at me.

“Kenny had them. They’re still in one of his pockets.”

“Give me minute.”

“Hey, Pavel?”

He looked back, one hand on the door.

“You have any ice in there?” I held up my scorched palm.

“I take a look.” He went back into the trailer.

I put the Blu-Ray players on the ground at the back of the Suburban, and my phone rang. I read the caller ID: ANGIE CELL. I flipped the phone open as fast as I could and walked away from the Suburban toward the river.

“Hey, babe.”

“Hi,” she said. “How’s Boston?”

“It’s nice here right now. The weather.” I reached the river-bank, stood watching the brown Charles slosh along, ice chips surfing along the top every now and then. “Thirty-eight, maybe thirty-nine degrees. Blue sky. Feels more like Thanksgiving. How’s it there?”

“It’s about fifty-five. Gabby loves it, man. All the squares, the horse-drawn carriages, the trees. She can’t get enough.”

“So you’re going to stay?”

“Hell, no. It’s Christmas Eve. We’re at the airport. We board in an hour.”

“I never gave you an all-clear.”

“Yeah, but Bubba did.”

“Oh, really.”

“He said it was just as easy to shoot Russians in Boston.”

“A solid point. All right, then, come home.”

“You done?”

“I am done. Hold on.”

“What?”

“Hang on a sec.” I crooked the phone into the space between my ear and my shoulder, never as easy to do on a cell as it is on a home phone. I pulled my.45 Colt Commander out of the holster at my back. “You still there?”

“I’m here.”

I ejected the clip, then jacked the round out of the chamber. I pulled back on the slide and disengaged it from the grip. I tossed the slide in the water.

“What’re you doing?” Angie asked.

“I’m throwing my gun in the Charles.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I am.” I tossed the clip in, watched it sink beneath the sluggish current. I flicked my wrist and the grip followed. I was left with one bullet and the frame. I considered both.

“You just threw your gun away. The.45?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I tossed the frame up and out in an arc and got a respectable splash when it hit.

“Honey, you’re going to need that for work.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not doing this shit anymore. Mike Colette offered me a job in his freight company and I’m going to take him up on it.”

“You’re serious?”

“Know what it is, babe?” I looked back at the trailer. “When you start out doing this, you think it’s just the truly horrible shit that’s going to get you-that poor little boy in that bathtub back in ’98, what happened in Gerry Glynn’s bar, Christ, that bunker in Plymouth…” I took a breath, let it out slowly. “But it’s not those moments. It’s all the little ones. It’s not that people fuck each other over for a million dollars that depresses me, it’s that they do it for ten. I don’t give a shit anymore whether so-and-so’s wife is cheating on him, because he probably deserved it. And all those insurance companies? I help them prove a guy’s faking his neck injury, they turn around and drop coverage on half the neighborhood when the recession hits. The last three years, every time I sit on the corner of the mattress to put my shoes on in the morning, I want to crawl back into bed. I don’t want to go out there and do what I do.”

“But you’ve done a lot of good. You do know that, don’t you?”

I didn’t.

“You have,” she said. “Everyone I know lies, breaks their word, and has perfectly legitimate excuses for why they do. Except you. Haven’t you ever noticed that? Two times in twelve years, you said you’d find this girl no matter what. And you did. Why? Because you gave your word, babe. And that might not mean shit to the rest of the world, but it means everything to you. Whatever else happened today, you found her twice, Patrick. When no one else would even try.”

I looked at the river and wanted to pull it over me.

“So I understand why you can’t do it anymore,” my wife said, “but I won’t hear you say it didn’t matter.”

I kept looking at the river for a bit. “Some of it mattered.”

“Some of it did,” she said.

I looked at the bare trees and the slate sky that stretched behind them. “But I’m all the way out. You okay with that?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“Mike Colette’s having a good year. His distribution warehouse is thriving. He’s opening a new warehouse off Freeport next month.”

“And you, having worked your way through college in the freight business…” she said. “And that’s where you see yourself in ten years?”

“Huh? No, no, no. That where you see me?”

“Not at all.”

“I thought I’d get my master’s. I’m pretty sure I could secure some kind of financial aid, a grant, something. My grades were pretty stellar back in the day.”

“Stellar?” She chuckled. “You went to a state college.”

“Cold,” I said. “Still counts as stellar.”

“And what will my husband become in his second career?”

“I was thinking a teacher. History maybe.”

I waited for the sarcastic assessment, the playful dig. It didn’t come.

“You like that idea?” I asked her.

“I think you’d be great,” she said softly. “So what’ll you tell Duhamel-Standiford?”

“That this was my last lost cause.” A hawk glided low and fast over the water and never made a sound. “I’ll be waiting at the airport.”

“You just made my year,” she said.

“You made my life.”

After I hung up, I looked out at the river again. The light had changed while I’d been on the phone and now the water was copper. I perched the last remaining bullet on the end of my thumb. I peered at it for a bit, squinting until it looked like a tall tower built along the riverbank. Then I flicked my middle finger off the center of my thumb and fired it into the copper water.

“Merry Christmas,” Jeremy Dent said when his secretary put me through. “You done with your charity case?”

“I am,” I said.

“So we’ll see you the day after tomorrow.”

“Nah.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t want to work for you, Jeremy.”

“But you said you did.”

“Well, then, I guess I led you on,” I said. “Doesn’t feel good, does it?”

He was calling me a very bad name when I hung up on him.

At the southwestern tip of the trailer park, someone had arranged a few benches and potted plants to create a sitting area. I walked over to it and took a bench. It wasn’t the rear patio at The Breakers or anything, but it wasn’t bad. That’s where Amanda found me. She handed me the car keys and a small plastic bag filled with ice. “Pavel put your DVD players in the back.”

“That’s one considerate Mordovian hit man.” I placed the ice over the center of my palm.

Amanda sat on the bench to my right and looked out at the river.

I reached across and placed the Suburban keys on the bench beside her. “I’m not driving back to the Berkshires.”

“No? What about your Blu-Rays?”

“Keep ’em,” I said. “Have a high-def fest.”

She nodded. “Thanks. How’re you going to get home?”

“If memory serves,” I said, “there’s a bus station on Spring Street, the other side of Route 1. I’ll take it to Forest Hills, catch the T to Logan, meet my family.”

“That’s a sound plan.”

“You?”

“Me?” She shrugged. She looked out at the river again for a bit.

After the silence had gone on too long, I asked, “Where’s Claire?”

She cocked her head back toward the Suburban. “Sophie’s got her.”

“Helene and Tadeo?”

“Last I saw Yefim, he was trying to get Tadeo to fork over extra cash for a pair of Mavi jeans. Tadeo’s still shaking, he’s all, ‘Just give me the fucking Levi’s, man,’ but Yefim’s like, ‘Why you wear Levi’s, guy? I thought you were classy.’ ”

“Helene?”

“He gave her a sweet pair of Made Wells. Didn’t even charge her.”

“No, I meant-is she still puking?”

“She stopped about five minutes ago. Another ten minutes, she’ll be good for the car.”

I looked back over my shoulder at the trailer. It looked pale and innocuous against the brown water and the blue sky. Across the river stood an Irish restaurant. I could see patrons eating lunch, staring blankly out the windows, no idea what lay inside that trailer, awaiting the chain saw.

I said, “So, that was…”

She followed my gaze. Her eyes were wide with what I’d guess was residual shock. She might have thought she knew what it was going to be like in there, but she really hadn’t. A strange, fractured half-smile/half-frown tugged the corners of her mouth. “Yeah, right?”

“You ever see anyone die before?”

She nodded. “Timur and Zippo.”

“So you’re no stranger to violent death.”

“No expert, either, but I guess these young eyes have seen a few things.”

I zipped my coat up an inch and raised the collar as late December drifted off the river and snaked into the trailer park. “How’d those young eyes feel when they saw Dre blow up in front of them?”

She remained very still, bent forward just a bit, elbows resting on her knees. “It was the key chain, right?”

“It was the key chain, yeah.”

“The idea of him, dead or alive, carrying a picture of my daughter in his pocket? It just didn’t sit right with me.” She shrugged. “Oops.”

“And you knew the Acela’s schedule, I’m sure, when you threw the cross back over the tracks.”

She laughed. “Are you serious? Whatever you think happened in those woods, do you honestly believe people walk around all conscious of their motives all the time? Life’s a lot more sideways than that. I had an impulse. I threw the cross. His dumb ass chased it. He died.”

“But why did you throw the cross?”

“He was talking about quitting drinking so he could be the man I needed. It was gross. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I don’t need a man, so I just threw the damn cross.”

“Not bad for a story,” I said, “but it doesn’t answer the original question-why were we there in the first place? We weren’t trading anything for Sophie. Sophie wasn’t even in those woods that night.”

She remained unnaturally still. Eventually, she said, “Dre had to go. One way or the other, he’d served his purpose. If he’d just walked away, he’d still be alive.”

“You mean if he’d just walked away to anything but the path of a fucking Acela.”

“Yeah. That.”

“What if I’d been with Dre?”

“But you weren’t. That wasn’t accidental. Since the day Timur and Zippo died, and I ended up with Claire and the cross in my possession?” She shook her head slowly. “Nothing’s been accidental.”

“But if everything hadn’t gone according to plan?”

She turned her palms up on her knees. “But it did . Kirill never would have allowed himself to be led to a place like this if everything didn’t look perfectly logical in a very logically fucked-up way. Everybody had to play their parts to a T. In my experience, the only way that ever happens is when people don’t know they’re playing parts.”

“Like me.”

“Come on.” She chuckled. “You suspected . How many times did you ask why I’d made myself so easy to find? We had to make it easy-the combined intellect of Kenny, Helene, and Tadeo couldn’t solve a TV Guide crossword. I had to make sure the bread crumbs were croutons.”

“So how soon after Timur died did Yefim find you?”

“It took him about six hours.”

“And?”

“And I asked him how he felt about having a boss so sloppy he’d send a moron like Timur to pick up something as priceless as the Belarus Cross. That got the wheels turning pretty quick.”

“So the plan was always to make Kirill desperate enough and embarrassed enough that a palace coup would look inevitable from the outside.”

“We refined it as time wore on, but that was the general objective. I got the baby and Sophie, Yefim got everything else.”

“And what about Sophie? What happens next for her?”

“Well, rehab for starters. And then maybe we’ll go visit her mom.”

“You mean Elaine?”

She nodded. “That’s her mom. It’s all about nurture, Patrick, not nature.”

“And what about your nurturer?”

“Beatrice?” She smiled. “Of course, I’m going to see Bea. Not tomorrow, but soon. She’s got to meet her grandniece. Don’t you worry about Bea. She never has to worry about anything for the rest of her life. I’ve already got a lawyer working on Uncle Lionel’s early release.” She sat back. “They’re going to be fine.”

I watched her for a bit, this almost-seventeen-year-old going on, what, eighty?

“You feel remorse about any of this?”

“Would that help you sleep? To know I feel remorse?” Amanda pulled one leg up on the bench and propped her chin on her knee and peered across the space between us. “For the record, I don’t have a hard heart. I just have a hard heart for ass-holes. You want crocodile tears, I don’t have them. For who-for Kenny and his rape jacket? Dre and his baby mill? For Kirill and his psycho-bitch wife? For Timur and-”

“What about yourself?” I said.

“Huh?”

“Yourself,” I repeated.

She stared back at me, her jaw working, but no sound leaving her mouth. After a time, her jaw stopped moving. “You know what Helene’s mother was?”

I shook my head.

“A gin-soaked mess,” she said. “She went to the same bar for twenty years to smoke and drink herself into an early grave. When she died, no one from the bar went to her funeral. Not because they didn’t like her, but because they’d never learned her last name.” Her eyes clouded for a moment, or it could have been the reflection of the river. “ Her mother? Pretty much the same. Not a McCready woman I know of ever graduated high school. They all spent their lives dependent on men and bottles. So twenty-two years from now, when Claire’s going off to grad school, and we’re living in a house where roach-races aren’t our primary form of entertainment and the electric has never been shut off, and collection agencies don’t call every night at six? When that’s my life, then you can ask me how many regrets I have about my lost youth.” She pressed both palms together above her knee. Seen from a distance, she might have appeared to be praying. “Until then, though, if it’s okay with you? I’ll sleep like a baby.”

“Babies get up every couple hours and cry.”

Amanda gave me a gentle smile. “Then I’ll get up every couple hours and cry.”

We sat there for a few minutes with nothing to say to each other. We watched the river. We huddled into our separate coats. Then we both stood and walked back to the others.

Helene and Tadeo shifted in place by the front of the SUV, listless, in shock. Sophie held Claire and kept looking at Amanda like she was going to found a religion in her name.

Amanda took Claire from Sophie and looked at her motley crew. “Patrick is going to take off for public transportation. Say bye to him.”

I got three waves, Sophie’s accompanied by another apologetic smile.

Amanda said, “Tadeo, you said you’re over at Bromley-Heath, right?”

Tadeo said, “Yeah.”

“We’ll drop Tadeo first, then Helene. Sophie, you’re at the wheel. You’re sober, right?”

“I’m sober.”

“Okay, then. We’ve got to make one stop. There’s a Costco up Route 1 a couple miles. They got kids’ stuff.”

“This ain’t time to shop for toys,” Tadeo said. “Man, it’s Christmas Eve.”

She grimaced at him. “We’re not getting her toys. We’re getting her a car seat base and a car seat. Drive all the way back to the Berkshires without one? Damn, man.” She ran a hand over Claire’s fine brown hair. “What kind of mother do you think I am?”

I walked to the bus station. I took the bus to the subway. Took the subway to Logan Airport. I never saw Amanda again.

I met my wife and daughter in Terminal C of Logan. My daughter did not, as I’d always imagined she would at a moment such as this, run into my arms in slow motion. She hid behind her mother’s leg in one of her extremely rare shy moments and peeked at me. I came to her and kissed Angie until I felt a tug on my jeans and looked down to see Gabby peering up at me, her eyes still puffy from the nap she’d taken on the plane. She raised her arms.

“Up, Daddy?”

I picked her up. I kissed her cheek. She kissed mine. I kissed her other cheek and she kissed my other cheek. We leaned our foreheads together.

“Miss me?” I asked.

“I missed you, Daddy.”

“You said that with such formality. ‘I missed you, Daddy.’ Was your grandma teaching you how to be a proper lady?”

“She made me sit up straight.”

“Horrors.”

“All the time.”

“Even in bed?”

“Not in bed. Know why?”

“Why?”

“That would be silly.”

“It would,” I agreed.

“How long’s this cute-fest going to drag on?” Bubba appeared out of nowhere. He’s the size of a young rhino standing on its hind legs, so his gift for sneaking up on people never ceases to amaze me.

“Where were you?”

“I stashed something on the way in, so I had to pick it up on the way out.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t smuggle one through security.”

“Who says I didn’t?” He jerked his thumb at Angie. “This one has luggage issues.”

“One little bag,” Angie said, spreading her hands the length of a bread loaf. “And another little bag. I did some shopping yesterday.”

“To baggage claim,” I said.

It was Logan, so they changed the baggage carousel location twice, and we trekked back and forth through the claim area. Then we stood with a bunch of other people, everyone jostling to get closest to the belt, and watched as nothing happened. The belt didn’t move. The little siren light didn’t spin. The clarion bell that announced incoming luggage didn’t sound.

Gabby sat on my shoulders and tugged at my hair and occasionally my ears. Angie held my arm a little tighter than usual. Bubba wandered over to the newsstand and next thing we knew he was chatting up the cashier, leaning into the counter and actually smiling. The cashier was toffee-skinned and in her mid-thirties. She was small and thin but even from a distance she had the look of someone who could kick some major ass if pissed off. Under Bubba’s attentions, though, she lost five years in her face and began to match him smile for smile.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Angie said.

“Weaponry.”

“Speaking of which, you really threw it in the Charles?”

“I did.”

“That’s littering.”

I nodded. “But I’m a big recycler, so I’m allowed the occasional eco-sin.”

She squeezed my arm and put her head to my chest for a moment. I held her tight with one arm. The other was deployed keeping my daughter safe on my shoulders.

“You shouldn’t litter,” Gabby said, her upside-down face suddenly an inch from mine.

“No, I shouldn’t.”

“So, why did you?”

“Sometimes,” I said, “people make mistakes.”

That must have satisfied her, because her face rose back up from mine and she returned to playing with my hair.

“So what happened?” Angie said.

“After I talked to you? Not too much.”

“Where’s Amanda?”

“Beats me.”

“Boy,” she said, “you risk your life to find her and then you just let her go?”

“Pretty much.”

“Some detective.”

“Ex-detective,” I said. “Ex.”

On the ride back from the AIRPORT, the girls razzed Bubba about flirting with the cashier. Her name, we learned, was Anita, and she was from Ecuador. She lived in East Boston with two children, no husband, and a dog. Her mother lived with her.

“That’s scary,” I said.

“I dunno,” Bubba said, “those old Ecuadorans can cook, man.”

“You’re already thinking about dinner with the parents?” Angie said. “Dang. You name your first child yet?”

Gabby squealed at that. “Uncle Bubba’s getting married.”

“Uncle Bubba’s not getting married. Uncle Bubba just got some digits. That’s it.”

Angie said, “You’ll have somebody to play with, Gabby.”

“I’m not having a kid,” Bubba said.

“And dress up.”

“How many times do I-?”

“Can I babysit her, too?” Gabby said.

“Can she babysit her?” Angie asked Bubba. “Once she’s old enough, of course?”

Bubba caught my eyes in the rearview. “Make them stop.”

“You can’t make them stop, ” I said. “Man, have you guys met?”

We emerged from the Ted Williams Tunnel onto 93 South.

Angie sang, “Bub-ba and A-ni-ta sit-ting in a tree,” and my daughter joined in, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G…”

“If I gave you my piece,” Bubba asked, “would you shoot me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Hand it up.”

We came out of the dark of the tunnel into the late-afternoon traffic as the girls sang and clapped their hands to the beat. Traffic was light, because it was Christmas Eve and most people had either not gone to work or had left early. The sky was purple tin. A few flakes of snow fell, but not enough to accumulate. My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It’s not an attractive sound, that. It’s high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing.

Or maybe I will.

Maybe I do.

Driving south on 93, I realized, once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost, can’t be replaced.

I love my burdens.

For the first time in my life, I pitied my father. It was such a strange sensation that I allowed the car to drift over the white lines for a moment before I made a correction. My father was never lucky; his rage and hatred and all-consuming narcissism-all of it unfathomable, even now, twenty-five years after his death-had robbed him of his family. If I’d squealed like Gabriella in the back of a car, my father would have backhanded me. Twice. Or he would have pulled the car to the side of the road and climbed back there to give me a beating. Same with my sister. And when we weren’t around, my mother. Because of this, he died alone. He’d demeaned my mother into an early grave, my sister refused to return to Boston when he was terminally ill, and when, at the hour of his death, he’d reached across the hospital bed for me, I let his hand hang in the air until it fell to the sheets and his pupils turned to marble.

My father never loved his burdens because my father never loved anything.

I’m a deeply flawed man who loves a deeply flawed woman and we gave birth to a beautiful child who, I fear sometimes, may never stop talking. Or squealing. My best friend is a borderline psychotic who has more sins on his ledger than whole street gangs and some governments. And yet…

We left the expressway at Columbia Road as the day finished furling up into a sky which was now the color of plum skin. The snow kept falling weakly, as if it couldn’t commit. We turned left on Dot Avenue as lights came on in the three-deckers and the bars and the senior citizens’ home and the corner stores. I’d like to say I found a sublime beauty in it all, but I didn’t.

And yet.

And yet, this life we’d built filled our car.

I saw our street in the distance, and I didn’t want to pull up in front of our house and let this moment empty from the car. I wanted to keep driving. I wanted everything to stay exactly as it was right now.

But I did turn.

When we got out of the car, Gabby grabbed Bubba’s hand and led him toward the house so she could take him down to the cellar. Last year we’d answered her incessant queries about how Santa could enter a house with no chimney by assuring her that in Dorchester, he came through the cellar. So she’d enlisted Bubba to help her lay out the milk and cookies.

“Beer, too,” Bubba said as they reached the house. “He likes beer. And he doesn’t turn his nose up at vodka.”

“Watch that,” Angie called as we went to the back of the Jeep for the luggage. “That’s my child you’re corrupting.”

A snowflake fell on my cheekbone and instantly melted and Angie wiped at it with her finger. She kissed my nose. “Great to see you.”

“You too.”

She took my burned hand in hers, looked at the large Band-Aid I’d placed across the palm. “You okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Don’t I look okay?”

She peered into my eyes, this gorgeous, volatile, hyper-passionate woman I’ve been in love with since second grade. “You look great. You just look, I dunno, pensive.”

“Pensive.”

“Yeah.”

I pulled Angie’s bags out of the back. “Something occurred to me today while I was sitting by the river, throwing away a five-hundred-dollar gun.”

“What’s that?”

I closed the hatch. “My blessings outweigh my regrets.”

She cocked her head and gave me a crooked smile as the snow found her hair. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Then you won, babe.”

I sucked in a breath of snow and cold air. “For now.”

“Yeah.” She held my gaze. “For now.”

I slung one bag over my shoulder and lifted the other with my right hand. My injured left hand I closed over my wife’s and we walked up the small brick path to our home.