“Climb on down now,” I said, “and let’s figure this thing out.”
“What’s to figure?” Emily said in a dreamy voice, looking at nothing. “Tied in the polls, momentum on Wilton’s side. Now a murder scandal involving Saginaw’s shadowy sister. Bert would lose by ten, by fifteen, by twenty.”
I said nothing. Took a short, quiet step to my left, toward her. Then stopped.
She said, “You know what would be lovely, though? You know what would swing the whole thing around?”
“What’s that?” Short sidestep. I was getting closer, and Emily was still staring at nothing.
“An outpouring of sympathy,” she said. “Such as that which follows an unspeakable tragedy.”
“Hush now, and come on down.” Sidestep. I was damn close now. I felt snow on the left side of my face. A lunge and a grasp would get her.
“A sister’s suicide,” she said. “Now there’s a tragedy. There’s a reason to vote Tinker-Saginaw.”
“It won’t do any good. I’ll have to tell what I know.”
“Why, though? And who would believe you?”
I lunged.
She skipped.
I missed.
The move lit a memory: Me and my mom, boarding a little pontoon boat to tour the Blue Earth River in Mankato. I’d been … twelve, maybe? It was after my father left but before I came east to live with him. The pontoon-boat outing was my mom’s last try at making us a real—broken, but real—family.
My mom had slipped while stepping from the dock to the boat. I grabbed at her wrist. I whiffed. She went in the drink. At home, we’d laughed about it.
Within a year of the aborted pontoon-boat ride, my mom had been pill-fuzzed and I’d been on a Trailways bus to find my father.
The things that stick in your head are funny.
“I love you, Bert,” Emily Saginaw said in a five-year-old’s voice. Wispy, lispy. Just beyond my reach.
She stepped through the busted window into snow and wind.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The snow had moved off the Atlantic fast and was pounding the city.
I’d slipped from the war room and made for the elevators, had been surprised as hell when nobody stopped me, or even looked up. Had made it to my truck. I would head to Framingham, wait out the snow, and figure out what to tell Wu when he finally hauled me in. Which he would.
It’s no secret people in Boston can’t drive for shit. But you’d think they could handle a couple inches of snow.
They couldn’t. Not in early November, anyway, on a Sunday afternoon. I crawled west on Memorial Drive, creeping around three fender benders before I even hit the bridge that would take me over the Charles River to the Mass Pike. The few people outside who weren’t back-ending their fellow motorists had decided it was a snow day. College-kid snowball fights, snow angels, one doofus trying out his cross-country skis. Like that.
Just getting on the Pike took a full half-hour, and my speedometer never topped 45 as I worked west. I passed the time listening to AM radio. When the news hit, they soft-pedaled it. First it was an accident at the Escutcheon. Then it was a possible tragedy. Then it was an unspecified tragedy plus Bert Saginaw halting a speech in Dedham and hustling to his hotel. When I parked in front of Floriano’s house, they still hadn’t named names.
I killed my truck, rubbed my eyes. I kept seeing Emily Saginaw step over my arm and flutter out the window-wall.
It was full dark with an honest three inches of snow on the ground.
Enough snow to cover footprints from an hour ago.
The house was warm inside. But quiet, which was unusual: No sign of Dozen or his sisters fighting and playing.
In the kitchen, Maria sat at a ladder-back chair, sipped coffee, and smoked a Kent. That was weird, too—had I ever seen her seated in the kitchen? Usually she was flitting around between stove and counter, cooking and cleaning at the same time.
“This snow,” I said after she nodded at me.
“Yes,” Maria said. “Such snow.” She looked up, to indicate snow or God or both.
“Floriano out plowing?”
“Yes, plowing.” Again with the eyes rolled toward heaven. Maybe she was poking fun at Floriano. With Maria it was hard to tell.
“I’m just waiting out the snow,” I said. “Got a drive to make, a long one.”
“You go to your room to pack?” she said. “Acima?”
“Sí.”
I headed for the front of the house and the basement stairs.
Then stopped.
I knew enough Portuguese to get around Framingham, to get around job sites where three-quarters of the workers wore green-and-yellow soccer jerseys.
Acima was upstairs.
Abaixo was downstairs.
Maria knew damn well my room was abaixo, not acima.
What the hell?
I stopped at the basement door. Shook my head, let go of the handle, stepped farther toward the front hall and the stair landing there.
Then two things happened at once:
Dozen hollered, “Conway look out look out look out!”
And something came diving down the stairs at me.
Someone.
Vernon Lee.
* * *
Maria hadn’t been looking to heaven or to God, and she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the snow. She’d been looking to where Vernon had his hands on her youngest son’s throat.
She was trying to warn you. She couldn’t say it because Vernon was listening. You get so goddamn stupid when you’re tired.
All this flashing through my head as he sailed downward and piled into me, busting us both through the railing at the foot of the stairs. We slammed to the front hall floor. He stood while I tried to get my wits and wind. Vernon Lee: alive as all hell, my size or close to it, greasy gray hair, gray stubble, sweaty face.
In his right fist: an eighteen-inch length of pipe with a 90-degree fitting at one end. The iron fitting would give the weapon some heft. It would make for a nice finish.
I stood as he came at me with a semicontrolled swing of the pipe. I ducked, felt the whoosh, planted my feet, torqued through my hips, hit him in the belly. Between my good stance and the initial adrenaline squirt, I got a lot on it.
Vernon grunted and stepped back, but he didn’t go down and he didn’t panic. He looked me over a little harder, and then he smiled.
Then he came again with the same swing. Fake! my head screamed. But the body does what it does—flinching is almost impossible to prevent. I ducked again just as Vernon pulled the pipe to a halt …
… and kneed my face, which was now conveniently low.
If he’d connected a little better—if my face or his kneecap had been a half-inch lower or higher—it would’ve ended there. I would have gone down, and he could have beaten me to death where I lay.
But it was mostly thigh that connected with my mouth and nose. Blood sprayed. My teeth made a distinct click, and warm blood in my mouth told me I’d bitten my tongue tip something fierce.
I didn’t go down. I rocked, staggered, spread my legs like a sumo wrestler—but didn’t go down.
Background noise: Maria screaming, Dozen screaming, too, and trying to help me but vised in a headlock by his mother, the headlock impossible to escape, Maria with adrenaline to spare, having been scared shitless a minute ago that Vernon the madman would kill her son.
I took advantage of Vernon’s surprise that I was still standing: lunged forward, ducked beneath his pipe, got him in a bear-hug. Held it. Squeezed.
He swung the pipe a few times, but his leverage was gone: The short-armed shots thumped into my back and kidneys, doing no real damage.
I squeezed. Buried my head in Vernon’s armpit, kept my chin down and my eyes shut to reduce vulnerability, and squeezed. We tottered back and forth, taking small steps here and there like the world’s worst box-stepping dancers, bunching the Oriental rug beneath us.
He wheezed. He squeaked.
I was
dead silent. I was focused.
I squeezed.
I heard, felt, the last bit of wind leave his lungs. I would squeeze Vernon Lee to death here in Floriano’s front hall. I would kill the motherfucker again.
He was a tough man. He was as tough as me. He had to be graying out, had to know he was about done. He had to know he had one last effort in him—if he was lucky.
Vernon had been holding the pipe like a jockey’s baton, and it hadn’t done him any good. But he was still thinking: He regripped it like a spike ready to be driven.
Then he began banging the back of my head with it. One two three times, quick little shots, bap-bap-bap.
I almost passed out.
Vernon felt me stagger. He liked his new plan. He banged my head again in the exact same spot. The strokes were short, but the fitting at the end of the pipe made for concentrated shots.
At the seventh or eighth impact, my eyes crossed and my grip must have loosened, because Vernon began squirming like a greased otter. He kept the pipe shots coming, always in the same spot at the back of my skull. Then I heard him draw the world’s biggest breath, which meant my bear-hug wasn’t doing the job anymore.
I was slipping. All I saw was gray. Adrenaline seeped away. Fear seeped in.
I was in trouble. I felt my interlocked fingers slipping from one another, felt myself stagger. Maria and Dozen were still hollering, but they now sounded far away. And still, the short little shots from the pipe, always in the same spot: Bap! Bap! Bap! I needed to change things up. Now.
Took the deepest breath I could. Settled my feet, my stance. Willed myself to ignore the pipe-shots a few seconds, adjusted my grip on Vernon’s midsection …
… and threw us both out the stained-glass window.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
My ass shattered thirty thousand dollars’ worth of glass, and we landed hard on the front porch.
Bonus: During the wipeout, Vernon dropped the length of pipe.
We scrambled to our feet, wide-stanced, no more than a foot and a half apart, and I got my first real look at Vernon since the bear-hug.
He wasn’t in any better shape than I was. Breathing like a locomotive, sweat-slick everywhere, bleeding from an eye, an ear, a cheek.
“Moe Coover,” I said, and tossed a dumb-ass Sunday punch at him. It was a bad punch that never had a chance, but it was all I had left.
“Which one was that?” he said, blocking the punch with a forearm.
Rage flared at the idea he didn’t even know who Moe was. “The old man,” I said, panting. “The diaper.”
Vernon smiled. “What a way to go.”
And there it was: red mist, sweet hot fury.
I marshaled it. I controlled it.
I smiled.
“Savvy Kane,” I said.
Vernon panted. “That one I do recall, sir. A touch gullible, you ask me. Agreed to meet me in a goddamn vacant lot ’cause I said I was ready to leave old Bert Saginaw alone! Now why would a fella need an empty construction site for such a declaration?” He shook his head, disgusted.
I balled my fists.
“Not much of a flier, either,” Vernon said. “Dropped like a stone, landed all awkward-like. Hoo-eee, believe it.”
Then he bull-rushed and head-butted me. It was a good shot in the chest, and he pressed as I backpedaled. After three or four steps, I went back-first through Floriano’s porch railing, snapping my head to his driveway. My eyes crossed again with sheer, concentrated pain. One corner of my head was grateful for the cushioning snow that probably spared me a concussion. Another corner was sorry as hell about tearing up my friend’s house this way.
But those thoughts came and went as I shook my head to clear it, and I damn near smiled at what replaced them.
Red mist. The full, concentrated dose. No regrets, no reins.
Not much of a flier. Hoo-eee, believe it.
I made it to my feet, staggering some, saw Vernon had done the same. He’d scraped his chin badly in the dive from the porch. A flap of skin the size of three postage stamps dangled. Vernon crouched like a defensive lineman. With his back to the street, he looked like he was set to wise off again.
Until he saw my eyes.
Which were different.
Tunnel vision comes with the mist. Peripheral nonsense vanishes. Your world is dead ahead. Nothing else matters.
Vernon saw this, sensed it. His breath hitched and he straightened his legs a very small amount, raising his center of gravity.
That was when I charged him.
Wanted to get my shoulder into his midsection and lift, but he ducked just quickly enough to force me to grab whatever I could.
Which turned out to be his head.
Which would do just fine.
I got him in an old-fashioned headlock, cinched it tight, spun him. Floriano’s driveway dropped as it neared the street, and the snow made it impossible to even think about stopping.
So I ran us downhill. Vernon was along for the ride, his shoes slipping and slapping as he grabbed at me, trying anything and everything to stop my run.
I wouldn’t be stopped.
Red mist will do that.
Tunnel vision. Dead ahead ten yards in the strip of snow-covered grass between the sidewalk and the curb: an elm tree. Two feet around, four stories tall. The street used to be lined with them, but most had been cut down when their roots began busting the sidewalk.
Not this one. This was a good elm. This was an elm with some heft to it. This was an elm to aim at.
I aimed. I picked up speed.
Five more yards.
Sound went away. Any sense of Vernon’s 230 or so pounds went away. Everything went away but the sweet hot fury and the chug of my legs, moving hard and well.
Vernon sensed what was coming, twisted like a cat falling toward a swimming pool, pinched my arm, tried everything, tried anything.
He was still twisting when I ran his head into the tree at waist level.
Two things happened at once then: Snow shivered from the elm’s branches, powdering my head and shoulders, and Vernon became dead weight.
I backed off a foot.
I rammed his head into the tree again.
Red mist. Sweet hot fury.
But it went away. All at once, the way it does. I became aware of Maria and Dozen pulling at me, pleading with me to stop.
I let go of Vernon. He dropped. I damn near did, too.
Then it was quiet, snow muffling everything but my breathing. I hated myself for the way Dozen was looking at me. He’d seen something no kid should see.
“Let’s get inside,” Maria said, looking up and down the street. No movement, no looky-loo neighbors, no porch lights. At the mouth of the road, a block west, a town snowplow scraped past. That was it.
I thought.
No way was I going inside. No way was I pulling Maria and Floriano into this.
“You two go in,” I said, then spoke to Dozen. “You’re the man of the house. There’s plywood and a circular saw in the basement. Rip a sheet of plywood and get that hole covered.” To Maria: “Anybody asks, the damage is from a fight. Your older boys got drunk, had a donnybrook. Okay?”
“Okay, but … what you saying, Conway? What you doing? Is dead body under your feet.”
“Go inside.”
I pulled my cell and made three calls.
They kept me from thinking about what I’d just done.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
We rolled up to the Blackstone Valley Salvage gate just after nine.
“This it?” Lacross said.
I nodded, climbed out.
He’d been my first call. Caller ID had told him it was me. “Talk to me about Emily Saginaw,” he said first thing.
So they were reporting it. They were naming names.
“Later,” I’d said. “What are you doing right now?”
“Same as any decent human being. Getting set to watch the Patriots kick the living snot out of the Jets.”
“No. What?”
“I’ll show you,” I’d said, and told him Floriano’s address.
Most storms roll into Massachusetts from the southwest. But this one had been an honest nor’easter, pounding in from the Atlantic. Here at Blackstone Valley Salvage, thirty miles from the coast, there was barely an inch of snow.
I stepped to the gray metal box Mikey Guttman had told me about.
He’d been my second call.
“Big favor,” I’d said. “Very big, and one you don’t want to know about. Think before you say anything. You hang up now, I don’t mind. Hanging up is your smartest move.”
Then I’d gritted my teeth and hoped. Because if Mikey didn’t come through, I was screwed.
“What is it?” he said.
“Access to your yard.”
“When?”
“Now. For an hour, maybe two. Like I said, best if you don’t know why.”
Another long wait.
“You got a good memory?” he finally said.
“Sure.”
Then Mikey Guttman had said an eight-digit code. He’d said it once, then hung up.
I punched the code into the keypad on the gray box. The gate rolled open. Lacross drove his Crown Vic inside, killed its headlights. I gestured wait a sec, found a fifty-five-gallon drum near the fence, stepped atop it, looked up and down the road. I made myself stand there a full five minutes.
Give Lacross credit: He’d stood over Vernon Lee’s dead body, which had still been warm enough to melt the snow that fell on it. He’d looked at the mess that used to be a head.
And all he’d said was, “What do you need?”
“How much do you like that car?” I nodded toward his Crown Vic.
“I paid six hundred and twenty-five bucks for it,” he said. “And got ripped off.”
That had been the right answer.
In my five minutes atop the drum, no cruiser showed up. Not even a casual swing-by. Everybody was watching the Pats on Sunday Night Football.
I jumped down, found the yard’s tool storage. Dug out a grinding wheel with a decent-looking blade, hooked it to the air compressor. Fired the compressor. It made a racket, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that.
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