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 c
an 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.
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