The brute hefted the screaming man over his head and ran harder, straining as he aimed his burden at the sliding glass doors that led to the balcony and the best view in town.
He roared again as he threw Revrund Robbie through the air. The doors were tempered glass. They were designed to withstand a solid impact without shattering. That didn’t stop Rob from flying through them in a shower of broken shards or the chorus of screams from mother and daughter alike.
Rob screamed as he cleared the porch and sailed through the air toward the distant river. Gravity got to him before he could reach the Hudson. The trees and shrubs caught him on his way down. They were not gentle.
He watched the man fall and felt a grin spread across his face. The two women ran past him, forgetting him as they looked toward where the woods below had swallowed Robbie.
Joe pulled his mind from the other one. A few moments later he saw the dark shape of the brute as he left the building. Joe stood perfectly still and merely watched. Not time yet to introduce himself but soon, very soon. He had to get everyone where he wanted them—now that he knew he could.
Chapter Seventeen
Tina Carlotti
“MRS. RAMIREZ? HI, THIS is Tina Carlotti. I used to live next door to you. I—I was hoping maybe you’d remember me and my mom.” Tina licked her lips nervously. She’d called almost everyone she could think of, but mostly what she’d gotten for her trouble was answering machines, busy signals or no answer at all. She couldn’t leave a message. She didn’t want anyone calling her back. She didn’t have any close friends and money was tight and what if they called the wrong people and reported where she could be found? Maybe she hadn’t done anything. Maybe Tony Parmiatto was just fine and she could go home, but any way she looked at it, she had crazy loads of money in her possession, and that sort of cash had to belong to someone. It sure as hell wasn’t hers, but she was holding on to it.
She’d almost completely run out of phone numbers that she could remember and the lady who’d finally answered was one of the few where she would have felt safe leaving a phone message.
Lucille Ramirez was close to sixty years old, and there had been a time when the woman had watched her while her mom worked. Back before her mom fell for the wrong guy and got hooked on smack.
“Oh my!” The woman’s voice shook. It almost always shook. Her voice was like a mouse, small and shaky and maybe a little scared of everything. “Oh, Tina, sweetie, I was so sorry to hear about your momma.”
“My mom?” Her stomach tried to shrink down to nothing and Tina licked her lips again. “That’s why I’m calling. I haven’t been able to get her on the phone. I—do you know where she is?”
“Tina, honey. Oh, sweetheart, I heard it on the news. Your mother’s dead, honey. They pulled her body out of the river three days ago. They just now identified her.”
“I—what?” She had to have heard that wrong. That was all. There was a mistake.
“Honey, the police, they’ve been trying to find you. They wanted to let you know, and now they’ve been worried that something happened to you too. But your mother, she’s dead, baby. I’m so sorry.”
The phone fell out of her fingers. Suddenly it weighed too much to hold. She watched it bounce across the cheap carpeted floor and flop to the side.
“Mama?” Her voice was tiny, so much smaller than Mrs. Ramirez’s that she could have been a flea in comparison to the woman’s mouse. “My mama’s dead?”
She fell back on the bed, the nice old lady who used to watch her completely forgotten.
They pulled her body out of the river three days ago.
They just now identified her.
Somewhere out there, Tony and his friends were maybe looking for their money. Tony and his mob friends. How much damage would they do for two million dollars? They’d killed for a lot less. She knew that, even when she tried to pretend that part didn’t matter. They’d killed people and tortured people and sometimes they’d gone after the loved ones of people that did them wrong because for them it was more important to have what they wanted than it was to be good people.
Did they find my mama instead?
“Oh no. Oh, Mama. Mommy. No . . . ” Her lips kept moving, but there were no words. There were only tears. Tears, and that feeling like her whole universe was falling apart.
Chapter Eighteen
Cody Laurel
CODY WAS IN A new office with a different doctor. Dr. Amelia Powell was in her early thirties if he had to guess, with strawberry blonde hair that she kept pulled back in a severe bun. The idea, according to what his parents had told him, was to get to the root of his problems. According to the last doctor, Dr. Keene, Cody was seeking attention. Not really sick, just a whiny brat, in layman’s terms.
The thought made Cody want to kick the man in his family jewels. He wasn’t looking for attention. He hadn’t run away from home and he didn’t disappear as a cry for help. No one wanted to understand that part.
The session had been going on for around ten minutes, and so far Cody liked the new headshrinker. At least she was fun to look at.
“Why do you think you’re here, Cody?” Dr. Powell looked at him and smiled. He smiled back. It was hard not to when she had a body that belonged in one of the porn sites he liked to surf when the folks were out. There weren’t a lot of girls looking at him on the average day. Mostly they just pretended he didn’t exist.
“Um. Because somebody decided I’m crazy.”
“No. You’re here because your parents wanted you to talk to somebody who can help you understand why you ran away from home.”
And there it was again.
“I didn’t run away from home.” Cute or not, she was already working fast toward pissing him off.
“Well, then why don’t you tell me what happened?” She smiled. He didn’t smile back this time. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. In the long run, you’re just another doctor working for my folks.
“I don’t remember what happened. I was at the ball game and then I was in a jail cell. Why is this so hard for people to understand?” He tried to keep the edge out of his voice, but it wasn’t easy.
“Well, then why don’t we try to get to the bottom of that problem, okay?”
Before he could respond, the phone on her desk beeped shrilly and the secretary’s voice came through the speaker. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Dr. Powell, but there’s a phone call for Cody. The man said it’s an emergency.”
Dr. Powell stared at him for a moment and then pointed toward the phone. “It’s for you. Go ahead if you want.”
He nodded his head and walked over to the phone. His head buzzed with each step and he had a moment of weird double vision. Not double vision exactly, more like he was seeing the world in an unfamiliar way—but then it was gone.
“Hello?” Cody listened, expecting to hear his mother’s or his father’s voice. What he got instead was a complete stranger talking in his ear.
“Hi, Cody.” The voice was deep but pleasant. “We haven’t met, but we really should.”
“Dude, I’m in the middle of a meeting right now.”
“Yeah, with the hot shrink. I know.” Cody looked around the room, pausing for that look at the cleavage he was trying not to stare at. He frowned at the doctor, but she wasn’t actually looking at him so he didn’t think she was setting him up with some crazy little test. There was one window, but all that was outside that window was blue skies. He doubted anyone was out there and looking in from a helicopter.
“Excuse me?”
“Hot shrink. I know where you are. She’s hot. Maybe you can come back and see her soon, but between now and then, you need to get to Boston, Massachusetts.”
“What?” His voice was shrill enough to get the doctor’s attention and she looked his way with a puzzled expression.
“Listen to me, Cody. You need to get to Boston. There are answers for you there.”
“Yeah? I’ll get right on it.” He ma
de sure the sarcasm in his voice was obvious.
“I would if I were you. When you get there, you can finally find out why you woke up in a jail cell.”
“Who is this?”
“Call me Joe Bronx. I’m your new best friend.”
“I don’t need a new best friend,” he answered.
“Oh, but you do. Trust me, the cute doctor isn’t on your side. By the time this call is done, she’s going to decide to tell your parents all about it and they’ll probably have a fit.”
“Seriously, who are you?”
“Joe Bronx. We discussed that. Get to Boston.”
“It’s a big place. Where?”
“Find a pen and paper. Write down the number I give you.”
The good news about office desks is that there’s almost always a pen and paper. He wrote down the number.
“What if I don’t?”
“You’ll get there. Whether you want to or not. I’m just trying to give you a chance to run your own life for a change.”
“What do you mean?”
“Who decided you need to see the hot shrink? You? Or your parents?” The voice was calm, rational, not picking at all.
“My parents.”
“There’s your answer. Decide for yourself. When you get to Boston, call the number. We’ll meet, and I’ll explain everything.” The conversation was severed. Cody looked at the phone for a few seconds and finally set it carefully back into its cradle.
“Who was that?” Dr. Powell had stood up and moved behind him. He could smell her perfume, soft and sweet and inviting. He could practically feel the heat from her body. Hell, he could turn fast enough and probably their bodies would be close to the same height and he could kiss that mouth before she had a chance to react.
Yeah. Right. Never gonna happen.
Instead of fighting it, he decided to tell the doctor the truth. He turned to face her, but slowly. Sure enough, they were close to the same height and she was just almost close enough to steal a kiss from. “A guy named Joe Bronx, who said if I go to Boston, he’ll tell me why I was arrested.”
“Really?” She looked at him, and he stared at her eyes. They were green but shot with hazel and what looked like gold. He could have stared into her eyes for hours. “What do you think about that?”
“I think someone’s having fun with me. I don’t like it.”
“How did he know to call you here?”
“He said he could see me. He knew where I was.”
She looked at him for a while and slowly nodded, smiled. The look made his knees weak. It also made his brain want to panic. Joe Bronx was right. She’d be reporting to his folks very soon. She wasn’t to be trusted.
He’d have to trust Joe. There had to be an answer that didn’t involve him being crazy, and Joe was offering at least a chance of that.
Chapter Nineteen
Gene Rothstein
THE PHONE CALL AT three in the morning was the first sign that something had gone wrong. Really wrong, as in, even the news of his adoption was considered insignificant by comparison.
Uncle Robbie had been attacked. Gene’s parents were at the hospital while Gene, the oldest at fifteen, was left at home in charge of getting his siblings off to school. He was about to go back to bed for the few remaining hours before sunrise when the phone rang again. “Hello?”
“Gene? It’s Dad.”
“How’s Uncle Robbie?” Gene would never admit it to anyone, but he had felt gleeful when he first heard the news of Robbie’s misfortune. But he knew it was wrong. He was a part of the family, after all, even if it wasn’t by blood. Even if people like Revrund Robbie could preach sermons to him about how lucky he was to be loved by people who took him in from the cold. He tried to let go of his earlier anger.
“He’s stable. They’ve got him out of surgery and it looks good.” He could hear the relief in his dad’s voice. Not relief for Robbie, but relief that Gene would even ask. His father understood how deeply Gene felt the betrayal. They had argued for much of the evening. He was probably secretly thrilled that Gene hadn’t sent a letter bomb to the hospital already. “He took a bad beating,” his dad continued, “but there isn’t any brain swelling, so he should pull through.”
He didn’t have to tell Gene about complications. The family of a doctor always understands about things like septic infections and unexpected blood clots. They came with the territory and with the occasional ghosts that lingered in his father’s eyes after a hard day in the emergency room. Marty Rothstein knew his son understood all about that sort of complication, and so he let it go.
“That’s good to hear.” The words sounded sincere but tasted like a lie.
“Gene, are we okay?” His father’s voice begged for a happy ending.
He closed his eyes and swallowed and tried to say something nice, something pleasant, when all he wanted to do was scream and cry and act like a bratty five-year-old. “Give me some time, Dad. Okay? I need to adjust to all of this.” He waved his arms to encompass the whole of the world as if his father could possibly see the gesture or understand how vast the world is when you discover your biological parents never wanted you.
“Just. Gene, please, just remember we love you. We’ve always loved you. We couldn’t love you any more if you were our flesh and blood. You’re our son in every way that matters.”
“I know, Dad. And I love you and Mom. But right now I need to think about everything.”
He knew his father wanted to say more. He also knew his father was at a loss for what to say. They hung up.
Gene thought about his savings account. Every year his parents—adoptive parents, he corrected himself—gave him money for his birthday and holidays, and he put it in the bank and never spent it. Would that money be enough to hire a detective who could find his real parents?
The knock at the door took him off guard. Gene moved in that direction without thinking. It seemed that thinking was almost impossible. All he could do was react to whatever came his way.
By the time he’d unlocked the door, the courier had left. All he found was a package.
He reached down, fully expecting it to be addressed to one of his parents. Instead he saw that the bundle was addressed to Mr. Eugene Rothstein, with a warning that the information inside was considered “personal and confidential.”
There was no return address.
He opened the package and pulled out the single sheet of paper.
It read:
Dear Gene,
I know you have questions. I know your life is conflicted right now. You want answers and I can help you find those answers, but before I do, you have to come to me.
Below that simple statement was a phone number and the handwritten message:
Call me as soon as possible.
Joe.
Gene looked at the paper for several minutes, his heart beating a little too fast and his mind refusing to think things through carefully.
When he finally dialed the number, the phone was picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?” The voice was deep and clipped, almost impatient sounding.
“Hi, is this Joe?”
“It is. To whom am I speaking?” Was it his imagination? It almost sounded like the man was smiling through the question.
“My name is Gene Rothstein.”
“Ah, Gene. I was hoping you’d call.” There was a pause and he thought hard about hanging up because whoever the man was, he sounded too cocky, too cheerful. “Listen, Gene, how’s that family friend today? How’s your uncle Rob?”
“I—how do you know about Robbie?”
He looked at the phone number he’d called. It wasn’t local or even one he recognized.
“Gene, I know a lot about you. More than you do, I’d wager. I know that you were adopted, and I know what happened to your uncle Rob last night and, oh, I know so much.”
Gene’s mouth tasted like a dirty penny. “How?”
“I’ll explain that when you get t
o Boston.”
“Boston?”
“We’re going to have a coming-out party, Gene. You do not want to miss this one.”
“A coming-out party?”
“You’ve really got to stop asking all these questions, Gene.” The voice chastised him, but lightly. “Come up to Boston. Get here just as fast as you can, Gene, and we’ll answer everything we can for you.”
“I—”
“Don’t think up any excuses. Just get here. Take a bus, take a plane, steal a car—I don’t care and you shouldn’t either. Get here. We have a lot to talk about.” There was a small pause. “Got a pen, Gene? I want to give you an address for when you get up here. Get up here quickly because there are other people waiting on you, okay?”
Gene listened and nodded. A moment later he wrote down the address.
“I’ll give you my cell number if there are problems, but the address is for the Stevenson Hotel, off Interstate 95. You get there, you call that number, and we get together. And then I answer some questions for you. Got it?”
“Got it.” He could barely feel his lips move as he talked.
“See you then.”
The phone went dead in his hand.
He didn’t have to think for very long. There were answers in Boston, and he needed those answers as surely as he needed the air in his lungs. Those answers were the only thing that was going to stop him from drowning inside himself.
His parents would have to understand, have to forgive, and maybe, maybe after they did, he could return the favor. But not until he found out what was waiting for him in Boston.
Chapter Twenty
Tina Carlotti
TINA WOKE UP TO the sound of someone knocking on the door. There was no moment of confusion for her. She simply opened her eyes and knew exactly where she was. The same hotel that had been her home for the last three days.
She couldn’t go home. There was still the matter of a mobster or two that she might have hurt and the two million dollars in her possession. That was enough money to guarantee that someone, somewhere, wanted her head on a silver platter. There was also the fact that her mother was dead. With her mother gone, there was nothing for her in Camden or, really, anywhere else.
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