“I'll wait outside,” said Megan. Her voice seemed flat and hard.
Michael had no idea what caused Megan's behavior. Or, for that matter, why Moon was staring so hard at the door she'd gone out of.
“Pretty woman,” he said. “She local?”
“From Woods Hole. How are you feeling?”
“Been better. How long you known her?”
“Moon . . . will you stop about Megan?”
“Just glad you found a friend, that's all. You look real good, by the way.”
“Thank you. Where the hell have you been?”
“Just wandering . . . healing.”
“But not a whole lot of calling.”
Moon cleared his throat. “Listen, Michael. I need you to do an errand for me.”
He told Michael that he had Jake's car. It's a maroon Buick, Florida plates. Being on the road so much, he also had a gun. When he got sick, over near Lighthouse Beach, and feared he might pass out, he thought he'd better not get found with a gun on him. He buried it at the base of a No Clamming sign along with his car keys and wallet. Didn't want the car impounded while they checked to see if he stole it.
“I'll take care of it,” Michael told him. “Moon, why didn't you tell me you were here?”
“Doc did it for me. I was too woozy.”
“The doctor said he found my name. He didn't say you gave it to him.”
Moon rubbed his face. “Hard to think. Guess I'm still in a fog.”
Michael wanted to say, “Bullshit.” He'd seen Moon's eyes when they narrowed at Megan. He'd heard the crispness with which he said go get his keys and gun. Now all of a sudden he's a sick old man. It didn't fly. If Moon showed up here, armed, and wasn't going to tell him he was on this island, that could only mean . . .
“Moon . . . is someone after me?”
“You? Why should anyone—”
“Okay, after you.”
“Michael ... I just missed you, that's all.”
“Screw this. I'll go call Doyle.”
The eyes again. The eyes didn't like that idea.
“If I tell Doyle you're here”—Fallon folded his arms— “and that you told me everything, what will he say, Moon? Will he ask me what the hell I'm talking about?”
Moon chewed his lip.
“It's Jake, isn't it? You found who killed Jake.”
Moon let out a breath. It was more of a sigh. “Sit down, Michael. Tell me more about Megan.”
He threw up his hands. “I'm calling Doyle.”
”I said sit.”
“For the last time, Moon. Who killed him?”
“Hobbs was part of it. Now sit.”
For the first ten minutes, he only felt rage. He saw the Baron, Franz Rast, in his mind. Michael had sat with him in meetings, and in private dining rooms, and had shaken his hand.
He'd had, in his grip, the evil old bastard who had broken his father's spirit, torn his parents apart, and made his mother so crazy that all she could think to do was run. He'd had his hands on the man who would soon order Jake Fallon's murder. And Moon's. And his own. He was also the man who had caused poor Bronwyn's death.
And that was still not all of it. Hobbs ... Childress . . . Bellows . . . Parker. They had played him like a harp. He had been part of a criminal organization and he'd been too blind or stupid to see it. Or he didn't want to see it.
Moon was still talking. He was asking again about Megan. Fallon, at first, couldn't answer. It was all so much, so overwhelming, that a numbness had begun to set in. But he told Moon some part of what little he knew. He spoke as if he were sleepwalking. At last, he excused himself and stepped out into the corridor where Megan had been waiting. She sat on a bench, her knees drawn up to her chin. She too seemed off in a world of her own.
“Megan . . . listen,” he said, approaching her. He felt for his car keys, remembered that she had them. “Moon and I ... have a lot to catch up on. I want you to go back. I'll call a cab when I—”
“I'm staying, Michael.” She stared straight ahead.
A weary breath. How much she'd picked up of what Moon had just told him, or sensed, or intuited, or simply heard with her ear to the door, he really didn't care right now.
He gestured toward the nurses station. ”I have a call to make and I need to talk to the doctor. Please take my car. Let me call you later.”
“Michael ... I'll wait,” she said firmly.
The doctor was an internist named Berman. The duty nurse paged him. Fallon waited by her station. He came along in about five minutes, tall and thin, about Michael's age, wore glasses low on his nose. The nurse waved a folder at him.
“Just came in,” she said.
Berman raised a staying hand to Michael. “His records from Florida,” he said. “Give me a second.” He leafed quickly through several fax pages while sucking on his lip. He nodded a few times, then closed the folder.
“He's a friend of yours?”
“He's family.”
“Family what? Employee? Bodyguard?”
The question angered Fallon. “You're asking can he pay his bill? Black man in a wrinkled suit?”
The doctor peered over his glasses. A hard stare. “I'm a doctor, Fallon. I don't give a shit if he's Magic Johnson. But two scars from bullet wounds make me wonder about his medical history.”
Michael blinked. “He's been shot?”
“Not lately. They're old or I'd have called the cops.”
Fallon was surprised and he wasn't. The wonder, if anything, was that Moon lived this long getting shot only twice.
“Either way,” he told Berman, ”I want him to have the best. Believe me, he can afford it.”
The doctor tossed a hand. “You want to talk money? Cashier's one flight up. You want to talk about the patient, call me when you're ready.”
“I'm ... a little upset.”
“As it happens, so am I. It's not a stroke. Not this time.”
“What, then?”
“If I had to put money? I'd say he's been poisoned.”
Moon heard her enter.
He opened his eyes. It took them a moment to focus. She had closed the door behind her but did not approach the bed. From the look on her face, thought Moon, she was not here to comfort the sick. The boat girl didn't like him one bit.
“Last night,” he said, “back by that ferry. That was you.”
She did not respond.
“Been talking to Michael. He says you're special. How special are you, Miss Cole?”
Still nothing.
Moon wasn't sure she was afraid of him, exactly. Some, maybe, when she first walked in with Michael. But now, right here, it was more like she hated that he'd come back into Michael's life.
“My grandma . . . back home . . . she was special, too,” he told her. “Women with the gift . . . they called them granny women back then.”
Her little chest rose and fell.
“Speak your mind, miss,” he said gently.
She ran her tongue across her lips. ”I want to touch you. Will you let me?”
Moon grunted. He wanted to say he'd been asked that friendlier. But his grandma wasn't much on small talk either.
“Will you?”
“Yes, Miss Cole. If that will ease you.”
He offered his left hand, the one free of tubes. She moved closer to the bed and took it. Then she cocked one ear like his grandma did except Grandma Lucy would hum and rock. What Grandma did not do, and this one did, was to take the hand and hold it flush against her heart.
Whatever she heard, it seemed to confuse her. She tried harder. She took to massaging the back of his hand, running fingertips up and down his arm unmindful, it seemed, that he was still attached to it. Moon wanted to pull away lest Michael walk in. But suddenly she broke off, took two steps back. In that second, the door slapped open and a nurse, not Michael, came in. Moon hadn't heard her coming. This girl had, though.
The nurse said, “How we doing?” She replaced the glucose with a plasma
bottle, checked the drip rate, then the tube in Moon's arm. The bruise around the needle, he saw, was still spreading. The nurse studied it for a moment, then she patted his thigh and left. The boat girl stood feeling her throat on the spot where his hand had touched her. She took another step back.
“You're not his friend,” she said quietly, glaring.
He took a breath. ”I think you know better.”
”I know you've lied to him. You've kept things from him.”
He nodded. ”A friend will do that sometimes.”
“And you've taken things from him. You took Bron—” She stopped herself.
Moon squinted. “Did you start to say Bronwyn?”
Her face showed confusion again. Whatever she was seeing, she seemed unsure of what it meant. Moon tried to regain the advantage.
“My turn, Miss Cole. You been in prison?”
A beat. Some color drained. She shook her head.
“People who've done time ... there's a look. You have that look.”
“The answer is no, Mr. Mullen.”
He shrugged and gave a nod as if satisfied. He wasn't. There's a yes, a no, and there's an in between. Of the three, the no seemed farthest from the truth. But now her chin was coming up. She knew that he had broken her rhythm and she's about to come charging right back.
“You murder people, don't you, Mr. Mullen?”
Moon wasn't quite ready for that one. Did she think, for some reason, he killed Bronwyn? Or had she been listening to stories.
“Something Michael told you?” he asked.
A small shrug. Defiant. He knew then that it hadn't come from Michael but she had him off balance. Pictures were coming into his head that he didn't want there now or ever.
The first was of the grave, the grave in Westchester that he'd dug for Rasmussen. He saw himself coming back to it, not that night but the next. He could smell a woman's hair through the bundle he was carrying. He could hear himself talking to her, saying he's sorry, saying everyone's so sorry, as he lowered Annie Fallon down.
He tried to wash the scene away before Megan could see it too. In its place he put other scenes, other dead men. The man in Doyle's office, the man in Palm Beach and the German, years ago, named Brunner. He showed her Brunner, sprawled out on a lawn, his eyes swollen shut, his jaw hanging crooked, his head half twisted off. Yes, I did that, he said in his mind. Yes, you could say I'm a murderer.
But the girl, he realized, was seeing none of what he tried to show her. Her eyes, like his grandma's when she saw deep inside, were shiny and full of pain. In that instant, he knew that she knew.
“Miss Cole . . . sometimes . . .” He began but couldn't finish.
She nodded, near to tears. The nod said he needn't explain.
Moon tried to say it all the same. He said, “Sometimes there's . . .”
She finished for him.
“There's an in-between. I know.”
“He's got blood in his urine,” said the internist named Berman, “some in his stomach and he's bruising badly. I think it's these.”
He produced an amber-colored prescription bottle from his pocket. Michael read the label. The drug was Warfarin, a blood-thinner. It came from a pharmacy in Brooklyn.
“This is dated yesterday,” said Michael.
“Lucky him,” the doctor replied. “Warfarin's an anticoagulant. In stroke patients, it keeps the—”
”I know what it is. I was in the business.”
Berman raised an eyebrow. He thumbed the bottle open and sprinkled a few on his palm. “Do you know it when you see it?”
Michael looked. “You're saying those are fake?”
”I didn't. But it's interesting you'd ask.”
“I've just been hearing about fakes. What's wrong with these?”
“Color's off, for one. In this particular brand, a seven-and-a-half-milligram pill should be beige. These are closer to yellow. I'm having them analyzed but I know what we'll find because I've seen these before.”
Michael only half listened as Berman told him about Warfarin in general. That even well made, it's tricky stuff. That there are more ways for this drug to interact with other drugs, other physical conditions, with fatal hemorrhage a result, than almost any other drug on the market. Michael knew all that.
He was more attentive when Berman spoke of the last bad batch he had analyzed.
“In a given tablet,” he told Michael, “the amount of actual Warfarin was found to range from zero, which lets the clots happen, to twenty milligrams, which can kill you in another way. Worse, the pills in that batch were contaminated. Whoever made them ground up a lot of other cheap drugs, almost all of which interact badly with Warfarin. For a binder, they must have run out of French chalk. That batch used plaster of Paris. Whoever made it didn't even pretend to try.”
Michael stared at the bottle. He now understood what Megan had meant when she said she saw many people dead. People who were poisoned.
“Were they ever traced?” he asked Berman.
“Not so anyone could prove. Who'd you say you were with?”
“Was with. I ... did some work for AdChem.”
Berman almost sneered. “Small world, Mr. Fallon,” he said.
Michael still needed to call Doyle. But seeing the empty bench, he walked back to the treatment room to see whether Megan had left after all. She was in there with Moon. He saw odd looks on their faces and that Megan had been crying.
He asked Moon, with his eyes, how much he'd told her.
Moon shook his head. “Just getting acquainted.”
Megan shrugged in agreement.
Fine, thought Michael. Whatever that initial hostility was about, they seemed to have smoothed it over. He reached a hand to Megan's cheek. He wiped moisture away with the tips of his fingers. He told her that he's glad she stayed. He would go make his call and he'd try to make it quick.
Megan watched through the small glass window as Fallon disappeared down the corridor. She felt the spot where he touched her.
“How good a friend is this Doyle?” she asked.
Moon smiled. He was beginning to appreciate this girl.
“Real good. In his way.”
“What way is that?”
Moon considered how to answer. “Lawyers ... the bottom-feeding kind . . . run these ads on TV. They say, you got injured, you might be entitled to money damages.”
She didn't understand.
“Money damages,” he repeated. “That's Brendan Doyle's way. He's a friend in all the ways that count. But money damages is how he thinks.”
“And you don't?”
“No.”
“Will Michael?”
Moon shook his head. “It's why I'm glad we're talking. Can you keep him on this island?”
”I think so.”
“Keep him indoors until I'm on my feet?”
“How long after that?”
“Until I've finished it.”
“Yes.”
“Miss Cole . . : now tell me about you.”
She looked away.
”I know, don't I?” he said softly.
Her eyes flashed. ”I have not, damn it, been in prison.”
“No offense meant by that.” He wanted to say that there's all kinds of prisons. All kinds of injuries. But there was no need. He had a pretty good idea what kind.
”I need a favor from you,” he said. “Will you take my word that there's no harm to Michael in it?”
“Yes.”
“Just like that? Yes?”
“I'm wrong sometimes. I was wrong before. You'd never hurt Michael.”
“Thank you. And it's Moon.”
“Megan.”
He thanked her for that as well.
“When you two leave here, Megan, he's going to go pick up my car. In the trunk, there's an old sock with some cuff links, a watch, and a picture in a boxy little frame stuffed into it. Gettin' sick, I forgot it was there.”
“The picture's of Bronwyn?”
; Moon closed one eye. “You knew that from me or from Michael?”
“He told me. He said a burglar took his only photograph of her.”
“But a while ago, you knew that burglar was me.”
“I'm . . . not sure what I knew. I don't always know why I say things.”
And that's a comfort, thought Moon.
”I took those things when I doubted him. I'd as soon he didn't find that sock. I wish I'd dropped it off the ferry.”
“He doesn't need that picture.”
“I'm grateful to you.”
“He doesn't need another watch, either.”
Michael had started to dial when he heard his name paged.
He walked back to the nurses station where he was handed a message from Harold Lovelace. It said, “Man named John Giordano called, says he's a friend, says he's arriving by air, early evening. Where do we put him? Hope your other friend is okay.”
The Shadow Box Page 32