I said, “Ow.”
Vernon hit the gas.
We picked up speed quick.
Or maybe it just felt that way when you had a steel wheel in your hands, a man’s teeth buried in your shoulder, and a slick plastic running board under your boots.
We were moving fast now. I had maybe four seconds to figure this mess out.
I did the easy part first: Let go of the goddamn steel wheel, which dropped into the passenger seat. Then I glanced through the windshield and grabbed the steering wheel, wondering if I had room to turn us around.
No way, not with a Ford Expedition’s turning radius. If I yanked the wheel, I’d just pull us into the wall on my side. And I didn’t want to do that.
Yet.
Vernon’s teeth in my shoulder were getting to be an annoyance. I wriggle-shrugged hard, trying to elbow his face while I did. It worked, although it felt like I left a chunk of shoulder in his mouth. He made an animal sound, an outraged growl.
Dead ahead, the low concrete wall was coming at us. With my head jammed in the steering wheel, I had a close-up of the speedometer. It said 28. Man, had I screwed up: I realized Vernon’s plan was to ram the wall, busting my head against the steering wheel, maybe deploying the airbag against my temple as a bonus.
I needed to stop us.
I slapped at the column shifter, heard the engine scream with revs as I knocked us into neutral. It was a start.
I squeezed my torso between Vernon’s legs, eeling toward the floor, blindly reaching around in the driver’s footwell. We had to be damn close to that wall. My left hand reached, grasped, stabbed.
Got it. I’d found the SUV’s emergency brake. I shoved as hard as I could, felt us brake brake brake, the rear wheels locking …
… we nosed into the wall, and even though my ear slammed the brake pedal, I got very lucky: We tapped just hard enough to blow the airbags. I could tell because one of them hit my hip, hurting like hell.
The Expedition automatically shut down when the bags deployed.
It was quiet the way it’s quiet right after it’s loud.
But only for a moment: Vernon made his angry-bear noise again, fired the SUV, and popped it in reverse. Then he buried his foot in the throttle. While gassing us backward, fast, with his right foot, he tried to kick my head with his left.
A tiny part of my brain gave Vernon some credit: He was tough as hell. There weren’t many who could take an airbag in the face, growl like a bear, and keep right on driving.
Moving ass-backward now, really cooking. Vernon’s left shoe clipped my ear hard, and I faced facts: I was losing here. Upside down, shoulder-bit, kicked in the head, airbagged in the hip. I was on my way out.
One chance. Whatever was going to happen needed to happen now, while we were in reverse. I wriggled and pushed, eeling again but backward this time, needing to pull my head from the damn footwell where Vernon was kicking it.
A second or two before I would have grayed out, I made it: Got myself right-side up. Shook my head to clear it, elbow-smashed Vernon’s face and chest a few times. Looked out the passenger window: Holy shit, we were flying. I had to get out, and it was going to hurt.
Wait wait wait, don’t give him a chance to brake …
There! One final elbow-shot, then I propelled myself out the driver’s window. I had a fifth of a second to tell myself to curl into a ball and land well.
Yeah, right. I flopped to concrete like a sack of suet. I hurt everywhere …
… but not for long, because I looked up in time to watch the green Expedition smash through concrete and drop five stories, a five-thousand-pound anvil.
I rose. I hobbled to the edge. I looked down.
Five stories. A gradual hillside rose to meet this side of the garage, but still: Call it a forty-five-foot drop into weeds and dirt. The SUV had hit ass-first, had continued over onto its roof. Impact had shortened it a full three feet.
The front tires spun slowly.
“For Moe,” I said. “For Blaine. For Savannah.”
No time to think more, no time to do more. Framingham Police HQ was three minutes away. Time to split.
I didn’t allow myself to hurt, didn’t allow myself to shake, until I was in my truck and gone three miles.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Avenged.
It’s a cheesy word, a comic book word.
Avenged in cold blood.
The red mist had let me down. It hadn’t been there for me to credit, to blame. I’d avenged Savannah Kane, and I’d done it in cold blood. I was a full-grown man; it was all on my shoulders, in my belly.
It felt awful.
Thinking all this as I rolled a slow, counterclockwise loop through Framingham, waiting for the shakes to settle.
That took a while.
Tired. Feeling like somebody’d let the air out of me.
I drove.
When my knuckles finally stopped shaking on the steering wheel, I saw they were flayed. Looked in the mirror.
Didn’t look any better than I felt.
Inventory: the flayed knucks. My left hip hurt from the Expedition’s airbag. But not as much as my deep-bit shoulder. Add in scrapes and aches all over from jumping to concrete at speed. Face it: I was a wreck.
The kind of wreck cops take a hard look at.
So get off the roads.
Three minutes later, I pulled to the curb outside Floriano’s house. I was feeling beneath the porch stairs for his spare key when I heard the front door. Looked up. Maria, wearing the black slacks and white shirt that meant she was catering that day.
“I thought everybody’d be off working,” I said when she turned, spotted me, and jumped an inch.
“I leave now.” She put a hand over her chest, settling herself—then made a hiss-intake when she got a look at me. “Connie!”
“Four ibus and a shower,” I said. “That’s all I need.”
“Boolsheet,” Maria said.
And she took my upper arm and walked me into the house, into the kitchen. She sat me in a ladder-back chair and spoke rapid-fire Portuguese while she ran warm water and fetched a first-aid kit. I’m pretty sure she was telling me I was an asshole.
I didn’t have much to say to that.
In any language.
* * *
“I call it good.”
I said it out loud. My voice: loud, ragged.
I was in Floriano’s basement—my new home—forty minutes after Maria had spotted me. She’d done her thing with a washcloth, antiseptic, and gauze. Then she’d tapped her watch and left. I apologized for making her late, but the front door closed before I finished.
Then I undid much of Maria’s work by taking the hottest shower I could stand.
Savvy Kane, Moe Coover, Blaine Lee, now Vernon.
I tried to shower them all off.
The hot water quit before I made it.
But when I stepped out and toweled off, it was over. It was goddamn over. A mess, a train wreck, the ugliest thing I’d been a part of—which was saying something—but it was over.
Thinking that, convincing myself, was when I call it good hit me. It was a line from my father, Fast Freddy Sax. He used to say it whenever he jerry-rigged something: a bread-bag tie used as a throttle linkage, a leaky pipe wrapped in ten feet of duct tape, a section of cardboard filling a busted windowpane. Fred would step back, look over his hillbilly repair like a master craftsman, and finally say: “I call it good.”
By the time I realized Fred was making fun of himself, he was long gone and it was just me and mom in Mankato.
I call it good.
The phrase kept coming back at me, and my belly was hollow. But why? I thought it through, teased it out.
Reason one: post-revenge letdown, a feeling I’m not proud to say I know well. You get your revenge. You want it to make everything right. It never does.
But there was a second reason for the emptiness, I thought as I began to dress. What is it what is it what is it?
<
br /> Had one leg in my jeans when it hit me.
“You ignored yourself,” I said out loud. “You ignored your own damn rule.”
Figure out the blackmail, figure out who killed Savvy.
I’d figured out who killed Savvy, all right. Maybe not in a way a jury would’ve bought, or Wu for that matter. But I’d proved it to myself. Vernon had killed Blaine. Vernon had tried to smother Moe. Savvy had been tailing Vernon an hour before she had her neck snapped. Therefore Vernon had killed Savvy. Good enough for me.
But I hadn’t figured out the goddamn blackmail.
I sat hard on the cot, still with a single leg in the blue jeans.
Doubt led to doubt. Questions, including two big ones. Who the hell was the red-dot woman sporting around in bed with Bert Saginaw? And how had Savvy come across the pics in the first place?
Randall. Boy, did I need to talk with Randall.
Finished dressing, went upstairs, put on a few Band-Aids. Checked my cell, which had been on silent all morning. It was red-hot with texts and voice mails. From Krall and Emily Saginaw, mostly.
The only text I bothered to read was from Randall: Arr BOS 3:30p, much to discuss.
I thought about texting him to take his time, Vernon was all done. Then realized how bad that could look in an interrogation room.
Or a courtroom.
The phone lit up while I was staring at it. Call from Emily Saginaw. What the hell. I picked up.
“Finally,” she said. “Where have you been all morning?”
“What do you want?”
“Bert would like a progress report.”
“Bert would like a lot of things.”
“Bert’s paying you a lot of money.”
I thought it through. I could tell Saginaw I’d found the pictures. He would think I was Sam Spade. Maybe he’d loosen up, or slip up, and I could learn something.
And until I learned whatever there was to know about these pictures, I couldn’t be sure Vernon had been working on his own. Couldn’t be sure I’d fully avenged Savvy.
I told Emily I’d be over soon.
* * *
“Hold the heavy bag,” Bert Saginaw said in his gym twenty minutes later.
“If you show me how,” I said.
“You never boxed? You look like you can handle yourself.”
“The fights I’ve been in,” I said, “you don’t get a chance to bob and weave and jab.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause you’re already dead if you do.”
He thought I was joking.
I wanted Saginaw happy and comfortable when I told him about the pictures. And I knew him well enough to understand what that meant: I had to act like a flunky. I held his sweat towel, his water bottle. I held the heavy bag while he punched and kicked it, trying to knock me on my ass and make it look easy.
He didn’t knock me on my ass. So maybe my prospects as a flunky weren’t so hot after all.
While he worked a military-press machine, I said, “About those pictures.”
He stopped. “The Jesus pictures?”
“The other ones, the ones you were so worried about.”
“Yeah?”
“I found them. I’ve got them.”
Saginaw rose so fast he whanged his head on a handgrip. “Well?”
“They’re what you said they were. You in the sack.”
“What about the, ah, the other party?”
“No way to tell who she is.” I explained how her face had been scratched and carved away. “So if what you said was true, if I’ve got the only copies and the camera and printer have been destroyed, you should be in the clear.”
“Who’d you show ’em to?”
“Nobody.” Except Randall and your ex-wife, who laughed at your Elvis lip-curl.
“Nobody? Nobody nobody?”
“Nobody.”
Bert Saginaw made the biggest grin I’d seen on him, waggled a finger at me. “Conway Sax,” he said, laughing some. “Conway Fucking Sax! You’re a gentleman and a scholar. Have Krall cut you a bonus check on your way out, and tell him I said make it a good one. And hey. When this election’s done, you want a permanent job, a good job, you come to me. Got it?”
“Why’d you think Tinker was behind the pics?”
“Never mind that,” he said, sitting and ripping off a set of military presses. “That, my friend, is now a moot point.”
Ten minutes later, fetching another water bottle, I spotted Emily outside the door. She tapped her watch.
“Your minders want us to wrap up,” I said to Saginaw.
“I’m wrapping, I’m wrapping. Never run for office, amigo.”
“You convinced me.”
“Home stretch,” he said while doing tricep pull-downs. “Nonstop campaign from here on in. Emily and Krall say I’m nuts to waste time in the gym. But it clears my head.”
I waited for him to ask for the dirty pics. On the drive over, I’d thought about feeding him bullshit, about claiming I’d burned them already. I wasn’t willing to let them go until I knew exactly how they’d come to be, and whether they tied in to Savvy’s death.
Saginaw didn’t even ask for them.
What a dope.
I looked at the door again. Emily: still there. Impatient. To take Saginaw’s mind off asking for his pics, I said, “Your sister’s giving us dirty looks.”
“She’s a tough cookie.”
“She sure is squared away,” I said. “Your secret weapon?”
“Settle down there,” he said, panting as he took giant steps around the room. He’d called them walking lunges. “Squared away? Sure, now. But Em’s had her ups and downs.”
“Like what?”
“Early on she hooked up with a couple of losers,” he said. “Swore off men when she was twenty-six or so, and if you’d seen these dregs you wouldn’t blame her. Then she latched onto a cult, enviro-creeps in Oregon. Living in trees so the trees couldn’t be cut down, all that shit. She did the vegan thing, the India thing, the Holy Roller thing, all of them. Confidentially, she did the booze-and-pills thing.” He wrapped up the giant steps, panted, held out a hand.
“I’m guessing she did the AA thing too, then,” I said, handing him a towel.
“Threw herself into it like it was another cult, which in my opinion it is, no offense.”
“No offense.”
“Yeah, she was doing three, four meetings a day there,” he said, wiping his face. “Queen of the High Steppers, we called her. That was the name of her AA group. But it got old, the way everything does for her.”
Me: frozen.
“Earth to Conway,” Saginaw said, snapping his fingers. “You there, ace?”
“The High Steppers?”
“Sure,” Saginaw said. “The Sunday Morning High Steppers. Six thirty A.M. at a Unitarian church over in Natick.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
I damn near got out of the house. Three fast strides across marble and I would have made the front door, but …
“Yoo hoo!”
Looked over my shoulder.
It was Krall, half-running down the long hall, holding something above his head.
“You forgot your bonus,” he said, and I saw what it was: another big blue check. He turned it so I could read it.
It was for a whole lot of money, double Saginaw’s original check. Lower left, in the memo field: Consulting, Tinker for governor.
“How’d you know I was supposed to get a bonus?” I said.
“Bert just told me.” He tossed his head to indicate the gym behind him, far down the hall.
“Bullshit,” I said. “I left the gym twenty seconds ago.”
Krall smiled, held the check perfectly still.
“You bug the gym,” I said. “Hell, you probably bug the whole house.”
But I reached for the check. If Krall wanted to think I was bought and paid for, let him. I knew where the dough was really going.
He didn’t let go of the check. Inst
ead, he held up his cell with his other hand. “There’s something else you forgot.”
I squinted at his cell. Its screen said ICE ERO and a number with a 617 area code.
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Krall said, still smiling, finally letting go of the check. “Enforcement and Removal Operations. I know the head of the Boston office. We go back.”
Krall was right: I had forgotten. One hell of a lot had happened since he’d threatened to deport Maria Mendes.
Red mist. It hadn’t been there when I could have used it to kill Vernon Lee, but now it flooded. I stepped back, cocked my right fist, got set to break Krall’s jaw. Hoo boy, was I going to enjoy this …
“In fact, I already called him.” Krall said it barely in time to save his jaw. “If I don’t call him again, and soon, he unleashes the hounds.”
I dropped my fist. I shook. I looked down at the check, which I’d crumpled. “I’m done,” I said, knowing how whiny it sounded.
“You’re done when I say you’re done,” he said. “I’d still like to know who’s responsible for the pictures you dug up for Bert. Oh, and I’ll just take the pictures themselves. If you don’t mind.”
Maria Mendes. Four kids, four jobs. Letting me stay in her basement. Cleaning my wounds.
Krall thought he had me. He didn’t realize I wanted to stick around now. Had to. Had to dig out the truth about the blackmail pictures.
He also didn’t realize the pics were ten yards away in my truck. “They’re in a safe place,” I said. “I’ll get them to you later.”
“Soon.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
He squinted at the screen of his phone, which he still held at shoulder level.
He moved his thumb.
“Soon,” I said.
“Now you’re talking,” Krall said. He spun, pocketed the phone, walked away whistling.
* * *
Thirty minutes later I was just about at Betsy Tinker’s house.
I was glad I’d grilled Saginaw in the gym: While his muscles had broken down under the punishing workout, his guard had dropped, too. And old Chain Link Jesus had finally let something slip.
Emily Saginaw: former High Stepper out of Natick. Quiet, efficient, lived permanently in her brother’s shadow. Prone to cults, fads, obsessions. Was on the warpath over Bert’s running mate. What had she said, the only time I’d seen her lose control? Betsy Bite-My-Bag Tinker will be president over my dead fucking body.
The Whole Lie Page 19