“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—”
“Ama
nda,” 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 be
haviors 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?”
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