“Certain people in my circle have been impressed with your company’s work. They are all of the impression that you are a capable, smart, and professional young man.”
I was getting the dick-around. So far, I hadn’t given him any evidence of being capable, smart, or professional. “Why us?”
“Because those men tell me that you understand when to use your discretion.”
“In other words, I can put my foot up the right asses and keep my mouth shut about on whose behalf I’m inserting it.”
The corner of Donnelly’s mouth curled, and he sucked his canine tooth. “Can I have one of your cigarettes, Mr. Malone?”
“I didn’t know you guys smoked anything but hundred-dollar cigars.”
“And we light them with checks stolen from welfare mothers. Are you going to give me one, or am I going to have to have Danny shoot you in the back of the head?”
I wasn’t sure whether he was kidding, so I reached into my pocket and popped a Parliament up in the pack with my index finger.
He took the cigarette. I lit it with my Zippo and he inhaled deeply, his eyes closed. “I haven’t smoked since my wife was pregnant. Congratulations. You’ve driven me back to it.”
“I drive most people to drink. Nice to know I can diversify.” I said it like I didn’t care, but I thought it was odd my attitude had a stronger effect than the stress over his missing daughter.
“Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? My daughter is a little bit spoiled and a lot of teenager. A hell-on-wheels combination no matter what the circumstances, and hers have been particularly rough. My wife, her mother, passed away three years ago and that hit us both hard.” He paused, his eyes going elsewhere for a moment, the loss of his wife still very much a surface wound. “I’m not going to win Father of the Year anytime soon, but I love my daughter very much. You commented before that I ‘misplaced’ Cassandra. I didn’t correct you. I did misplace her, as far as my priorities were concerned. When Cassandra’s mother died, I buried myself in my work, effectively losing my daughter in the process. I’ve made mistakes with her, and I realize this.” He coughed into his hand. “I need you to find her.”
“And do so before the papers catch on.”
“That would be optimal, yes.”
I shook my head, still trying to grasp it all. I’m paranoid by nature, but something still smelled like ass about the whole deal. “I hate to pick up the dead horse and carry it around the room, but I still can’t figure out the why and the us.”
Donnelly blew a short stream of smoke from his nostrils. “You have access that neither I nor my associates have. True?”
“True.” This was ground we’d already covered. I had the sudden impression that I’d walked into something pointy, face-first.
“I have access that you don’t.”
“What are you talking about?” A sick feeling began slithering around my gut. All of a sudden, the hand I’d been playing didn’t seem so hot.
“I may not be able to find my own daughter, but my office has access to information and people you don’t. State records and such. Records you might find valuable.”
The sick feeling started to spread. “Make your point.”
“Plain and simple. I can find somebody you can’t.”
Bang.
The fucker pulled an ace.
An emotion I’d thought long forgotten ricocheted painfully off my ribcage. He clearly saw me react, despite my best efforts to keep my expression neutral. Not only did I fail at neutrality, I just about puked on his very expensive-looking shoes.
His stare bore down into me. He had me by the short and curlies and damn well knew it.
“Can I count on your help, Mr. Malone?”
“Sure,” I mumbled through numb lips.
“Excellent. I’ll make sure Ms. Reese gives you all the information you’ll need.” He turned to go, then stopped, his back to me. He said, “When you saw her, how did she seem?”
I thought about that curious light in her eyes. “She seemed fine.” It felt like a lie.
He nodded slowly, then walked out. I started breathing again when headlight beams swirled in the windows as one of the sedans made a U-turn and then was gone.
My knees went out from under me, and I slid against a concrete pillar to the floor. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing slowly.
In the nose.
Out the mouth.
I didn’t puke, even though I still felt like I might.
I guess we were on the job.
I guess I didn’t have much of a choice.
If I could find Cassandra, he could find Emily.
This wasn’t about money. This wasn’t about my particular style of brawn. It was about information. He knew he could use that information to make me do the job.
He knew he could use me.
He could find Emily.
The possibility terrified me.
I was pissed at him for pulling that card. I was pissed at myself for not being able to tell him to shove that card up his ass. I should have. Why wasn’t I able to?
I lifted myself off the floor and walked out. The sedan that delivered me was still idling. Kelly stood by the open car door. She stormed over when she saw me, fury still burning in her eyes. “How dare you!” she yelled.
“Back off,” I croaked, my self-control thinner than a piece of floss.
She stepped up, right in my face. “I am not some piece of… of… ass!” She was so enraged, I wasn’t sure whether she was finishing her sentence or calling me an ass.
The floss snapped.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I yelled right back in her face. “You were used, babe. Face it. You’re a tool, just like I am, to be exploited by these fuckers as they see fit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Of all the people who work for Donnelly, you think you were sent into the lion’s den because of your people skills?”
“No… What? What do you mean, you’re about to be used?”
I though of the carrot Donnelly had dangled in front of my nose. “Until your boss decides to share that tidbit with you, sweetheart, file it under ‘none of your fucking business.’”
She took a step back from me, stunned at the venom I was spitting. “Whatever you think about this… you have no right to… I have to—”
“No. The only thing you have to do is wiggle your tight ass back into that car. I’ll call you when I’m good and goddamn ready. You got that?”
She pursed her lips, retreating back into Ice Queen mode. “That will be just fine.” She turned briskly and walked back to her waiting car. The car pulled away, leaving me without a target for my fury. When the taillights disappeared around the corner, I swung wild punches into the air, wanting something, someone to beat on.
Then I realized I’d just fucked-off my ride back.
I caught a little luck and was able to hop on one of the last inbound trains of the night. I got back to the bar close to midnight. Junior stood at the door, arms still crossed and attitude intact.
“Everything go okay?” I asked.
“Peachy. You?” He lifted his chin toward Commonwealth Avenue. “I see you didn’t get chauffeured back.”
“How did you know?”
“Bout a half-hour ago, Barnes rolled up and handed me an envelope. Said, ‘Give it to Malone when he gets here.’” Junior gruffed his voice and did a shuffling waddle. Not a bad impersonation. “I don’t think he’s too taken by your charms.”
“I’m an acquired taste. You look in the envelope?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I was going to, but a little brouhaha broke out in the bar and I had to regulate.” Junior absently sucked on a scraped and red knuckle. “I left it on the desk.” Junior checked the IDs of two girls and let them pass. “So what happened?”
I reached in my pocket and found some gum and smokes. I went with the cigarette, of course. “For starters, I called that Reese chick a piece of ass. She didn’t li
ke it too much.”
Junior barked a laugh. “Most girls would take that as a compliment.”
“Most girls we know, anyway.”
“So what’s up? Who’s the boss-man on this cluster fuck?”
I could see Junior was champing the bit, waiting for me to get back with some answers. I took another long drag, toying with his patience for my own enjoyment. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“In a good way, or a bad way?”
“Both. Jack Donnelly.”
He waited for more. “What about him?”
“That’s who’s doing the hiring.”
He stared at me blankly, waiting to see if I was fucking with him. “Great googly moogly! Big Jack Donnelly?”
“Shhh!” I waved at him to keep his voice down. “DL, stupid. DL. The whole reason we’re being asked is because we’re supposed to be able to keep a lid on things.”
“This is big, man. He’s a big man.”
“That’s why they don’t call him Little Jack Donnelly.”
Junior frowned. “Don’t be a dick. You know what I mean.” If Junior was a cartoon, little cash register tabs would have cha-chinged behind his eyes.
“Cassandra’s his runaway daughter. We’re going to find the poor lost lass amongst the social dreck of our peers.”
“I do so love it when you talk like a PBS fruit.” Junior grinned and bounced foot to foot like a kid on Christmas morning. “How much?”
I sat on the sidewalk and leaned against the brick. The sick feeling had doubled up on my train ride, when I really had time to think about what was being offered. “How much what?”
Junior squinted at me. “You okay?”
I took a long drag and exhaled the smoke out my nose. “He said he could find Emily.”
“He said that?”
“Not in so many words.”
“What words did he use?”
“He said he could find people, too. Who else could he mean?”
“But he didn’t say Emily, exactly—”
“No, but—”
“No, but my hairy ass. Before you get your panties all twisted, maybe he was talking bout the broad who gave you the clap in Oh-6. You always wondered who that was.”
I didn’t reply, just stared at the cigarette in my hand, brain slipping away toward memories of Emily.
“You want her found?” Junior asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, as much to myself as to him.
“Ain’t that a dick in the ass.”
“Yeah.”
Junior nudged me in the shin with the tip of his boot. “Enough about your sorry bullshit. Let’s talk about what really counts.”
“And what is that?”
“Me, jackass. Money. My moolah. How much money we getting to find the kid?”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“I forgot to ask.”
After Junior had himself a hissy fit and called me a couple of colorful names, I went up to the office to check out the envelope on the desk. Plain yellow manila with nothing written on it. I tore open the end and dumped the contents onto the desk.
A business card for Kelly Reese. Business line read: Donnelly for Mayor Committee. Chairperson under her name. It listed an office number, extension, and e-mail. If I’d owned a computer, I might have dropped her a note and apologized. Again.
Three pictures of Cassandra. The first one a school picture complete with forced smile. She was in a private school uniform with a coat of arms patch on her blazer. Surprisingly, her hair was a natural chestnut in the picture.
The second looked like a blow-up of a family photo, carefully cropped not to show anyone else in the picture. The third showed her on a beach, grinning. She was running into a wave and hugging herself from the cold. They were all solo shots of her. I pulled out the picture from my back pocket and looked at it again. Then the beach shot again, seeing the subtle but present signs of damage done.
What the hell happened to you, kid?
Chapter Six
In the dream, I was eating a huge Italian grinder. Really big. The size of a coffee table. Then the red peppers started to beep and I woke up. Even my subconscious was busting my balls.
Hardy-har. Biting off more than I could chew. Very subtle.
Goddamn brain.
I swept my hand across the nightstand, looking for my beeper, grumbling curses to the air. I knocked over a glass of water, my Harry Crews Reader, and an ashtray before my fingers found the beeper and turned it off. I squinted at the number. Didn’t recognize it. I shuffled over to my phone and dialed.
The line picked up after one ring. “Call back later, dude. I’m waiting for a call.” It was Paul.
“It’s me, jackass. What’s up?” I was already dripping sweat. Another boiler of a day.
“Oh. Hey, Boo. I didn’t think you’d call back so fast.”
I yawned so hard my jaw cracked. “Yeah, well, I did. What do you want?”
“Did I wake you up?”
“Paul…”
“It’s eleven, dude. You’re missing the day.”
“Paul!”
“Okay, okay. You know The Pour House?”
“On Boylston?” Where the hell were my smokes?
“Yeah. I’m here now. I got some stuff to tell you.”
“What?” I picked my pants off the floor and rifled the pockets. Success! Lighter?
“I’ll tell you when you get here. Bring money. You’re buying me lunch. Ha-hah!” With that, he hung up on me. Little prick.
I lit my smoke and stumbled to the shower.
And yes, I can smoke in the shower. I have a technique.
I got to the restaurant a little after noon. When I walked in, the mingling smells of beer, hot sauce, and frying hamburger made my stomach croak frog-noises. The stupid dream had made me hungry, so I wasn’t all that upset at meeting at The Pour House. They made the best burger in town. Cheap too, thank God. When I found Paul in a table toward the back, he was finishing a plate of buffalo wings and a basket of mozzarella sticks.
“About time, man. My burger’s almost here.”
Before I could say anything, the young waitress came over for my order. For breakfast, I went with a double bacon cheeseburger and a Sam Adams. Paul watched her exit as she walked off with my order.
“I think she wants me. What do you think?” His lips were red with wing sauce. He popped another in his mouth. The kid ate like he hadn’t been within three feet of a meal in days. For all I knew, he hadn’t. I remembered that kind of hunger. The ghost of it echoed in my gut as I watched him tear into his food like he was worried somebody would take it from him.
I stifled a yawn. Probably should have ordered coffee instead of a beer. “What have you got?”
He held up his finger and pulled the bone from his mouth, meat sucked clean off. Jesus. Maybe the answer to Cassandra’s disappearance was because Paul ate her.
“Nothing,” he said through a mouth full of half-chewed chicken.
I stared at him. “You beeped me, called me here, to tell me you found nothing?”
He gave me look filled with indignant hurt that nobody over the age of sixteen can quite pull off. “Nothing is something.”
I continued to stare. “What the…” The waitress brought over my beer. I practiced Zen breathing. Slow and even. It wasn’t working. I tried rubbing the remaining sleep from my eyes. “What are you talking about, Paul?”
“It’s weird. I been asking everybody, real casual like, you know? Just like, ‘Hey, seen Cassie around?’ Nobody has.”
“It’s only been two days since you saw her at The Cellar.”
He looked at me like I was missing an obvious point. “Dude. It’s summer. We’re off from school. Only got a couple weeks left before school starts again. Somebody should have seen her somewhere. It’s not like she’s some computer nerd or one of those inside-kid weirdos reading Twilight and shit. She’s normally out and about. Hanging, you know?”
> “I know.” He was starting to make sense.
“I mean, she’s not at home, right?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Shit, man, I’m not eating a retard sandwich, here. If she was home, nobody would be looking for her, right?”
Super. Outwitted by a kid with less hair on his lip than Jennifer Lopez.
“Am I right?” He asked again, pleased by his rightness.
“Right.”
“So, if she’s not home, she’s got to be somewhere, right?”
“Right again, Watson.”
“Who’s Watson?”
“Never mind. Go on.” Goddamn public education system costing me a punch line.
“Anyway, if she was anywhere, somebody would have seen her there.”
Despite his roundabout reasoning, the logic was solid.
“I mean, there’s only a few places where we hang out. You know, where we can hang out. She hasn’t been at any of them. She’s not anywhere. She’s gone, man.”
After lunch, I went back to the office and gave Ms. Reese a call rather than head home and take the nap my body craved.
“Kelly Reese,” she answered.
“Hey. It’s me.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Malone?” Frost began forming on the earpiece.
“First of all, I’d like to apologize for last night. I was out of line.” Two apologies in a week. A personal best.
I knew it wasn’t her fault she was being used. I also had the impression she legitimately didn’t know the depth of what was going on. Either way, I needed an ally. Barnes sure as hell wasn’t going to be sending me a cookie basket anytime soon.
Silence.
“I laid some shit on you that I had no right to.”
More silence.
“Listen, this is going to be a lot easier if we can at least be civil to each other. I may be a fucking goon, but I’m owning up. At least give me that much credit.”
A sigh. “You’re right.”
“So you accept my apology?”
“No, I agree you’re a fucking goon, but I accept the apology. Now what can I do for you?”
“You my buddy?”
“Please.”
“Say it.”
“I’m your buddy.” Score one for my minimal charm. I thought I could hear a smile behind the words. “Now, if you’re through interrupting my work, what can I do for you?” Maybe it was clenched teeth.
The Hard Bounce Page 6