by Ray Daniel
“Screw this. Talk to him yourself.” Muffled murmuring told me that Jerry was explaining the situation.
A new voice introduced itself. “Max Black, City editor.”
“So Jerry explained the situation to you?” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Tucker.”
“And?”
“Fuck you.”
The phone went dead.
Twenty-Five
If there is a hell, it will not be fire or ice. It will be a disheveled bed in a dark room lit by a digital clock that says 3:30 a.m.
I don’t know what it is about 3:30 a.m. Perhaps it’s got something to do with circadian rhythms getting mangled by alcohol, or some deeply hidden instinct that remembers when the saber-toothed tigers started hunting. Perhaps it’s coincidence, or maybe black magic. All I know is that whenever I’m about to head into a bout of alcohol-induced insomnia, I wake up, turn to my digital clock, and see the numbers 3-3-0.
I lay on my back, stared at the dark ceiling, and focused on my breath, trying to keep a simmering pot of thoughts from boiling over. Once the lid cracked, once the first thought slipped out, sleep would be gone.
What will Bobby say?
Aww crap, here come the regrets.
I played the scene with Rittenhauser over in my mind, looking for different things I could have said that would have delivered a different result. It wasn’t hard. It started with not calling Bobby or asking him to text me the picture of the ransom note. It progressed to not asking Rittenhauser for his email address, or typing in the email address correctly, or pressing send.
Perhaps it started earlier. Perhaps it really started with not calling Rittenhauser, not getting upset with his article, not reading the newspaper. Well—at the limit, not buying Maria a sled.
But where would that have gotten me? So I didn’t buy a sled, that meant that Maria would have been home with Sophia when the murderer came. Would they have found two bodies, Sophia and Maria strangled side-by-side? Would Maria have called 911? Would Sal have been home?
Was Sal at home?
I pushed the thought away. Sal did not kill Sophia. If he had, he would not have blamed me for my part in Sophia’s murder. Wouldn’t have guessed that I was selling him out for some guy, this David Anderson.
I climbed out of bed, used the bathroom, took some Advil for the hangover, drank some water, stared at a sleeping Click and Clack. Listened to nothing. The city was quiet, not even any sirens. Activity was out there, though. Beyond my street, someone was bundling freshly printed newspapers. Throwing them into trucks, carrying the dead-tree edition of the Boston Globe to street corners. Meanwhile the electronic edition was coalescing into the bits that would fly to laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The picture was probably already on the web, probably already had comments.
I considered firing up my computer, heading over to the website, seeing my handiwork. Decided against it. Once I touched a mouse, sleep would never return. I’d be done. I went back to my bedroom. Lay down.
The clock glowed 4:30 a.m.
Maybe I was overreacting to the thing with Bobby. Hell, I’d probably be dead tomorrow, shot by some Mafia vigilante. That would show Bobby. I’m fighting for my life out here doing his job and he’s got the nerve to be angry because I shared a friggin’ ransom note? Screw him.
And screw David Anderson, whoever the hell he is. And screw Jarrod Cooper for calling me up and asking me to work on his startup. Why do I even bother? I don’t need the money. I just needed to do some work. I didn’t even do much for Jarrod. A little architecture work, a little debugging.
Debugging was my favorite part, finding out what was wrong and working your way back to the cause. At least that’s how the good debuggers work. The bad ones just try random shit. Well, to be fair, the good ones do too when they’re stumped. They come up with improbable theories and take desperate action just to see what happens.
Like I did with Rittenhauser. I tossed him the picture because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t even know about the gang war then. Hadn’t met Pistol. Would I have given Rittenhauser the picture after Pistol tried to give me a beating?
I rolled my head toward the clock: 5:00 a.m. Must have dozed.
In the summer I’d be completely screwed by now. The sun would be rising and I’d give up on sleep. But it was winter; there’d be no sun for hours. It was time to break out my secret weapon.
I padded into the living room, fired up my Internet TV, and found a documentary about astronomy. I lay on the couch, closed my eyes, and let a sonorous voice tell me things I already knew.
The narrator droned: “Out beyond the edge of the solar system. Beyond mighty Jupiter, beyond Saturn, with its gossamer rings, beyond Uranus, rolling along its orbit, beyond mysterious Neptune, beyond even Pluto, the ex-planet, lies the Kuiper Belt—”
I woke to my television’s logo bouncing around the screen. Gray light filtered through my windows. Sunlight. I had managed to sleep, and in sleeping had come to a decision. I climbed to my feet, making an old-man noise as my back complained about the lumpy couch. Stumbled to my cell phone. Bobby must not have seen the paper yet. He’d call soon enough.
I dialed the phone. Called a guy who I knew would be on a elliptical trainer at this time of day. The guy answered.
“Jarrod,” I said. “We need to talk.”
Twenty-Six
I sat across from Jarrod Cooper in Zaftigs Delicatessen on Harvard Street, staring in horrified fascination at a large portrait of the deli’s logo: an obese woman in a red nightgown posing seductively, one hand behind her beehive hairdo, the other caressing a meaty thigh.
Jarrod looked over his shoulder at the portrait. “Looks like my mother,” he said.
“Is your mother Jewish?” I asked.
“No. She’s fat.”
High-tech people love to tell stories about turning down opportunities at startups that hit it big: “I was employee 13 at Microsoft, but I quit.” “I had an offer at Facebook, but Zuckerberg pissed me off.” “I told Jeff Bezos that Amazon would never make it.” These stories have the double allure that the teller gets to describe a brush with greatness, while the listener enjoys the schadenfreude of knowing people who have missed out on high-tech riches.
My story with Jarrod was more typical. A dewy-eyed entrepreneur came to me with nothing but a dream and a term sheet. I told him that it was a bad idea, but he persisted, chugging along like The Little Engine That Could—except that he couldn’t.
The check arrived. Jarrod reached for it, but I grabbed it first.
“Didn’t you lose all your money in PassHack?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Jarrod. “Thanks for the reminder.”
I pulled out my credit card, threw it on the check. “Let me get this.”
“Well, not all of my money,” Jarrod said. “I can still afford an omelet.”
“Tell you what: let’s pretend I’m spending the money you paid me.”
Jarrod popped an egg-encrusted mushroom into his mouth. “Yeah, you were a cash drain.”
“Hey. I helped you debug your code. You needed me.”
“Turned out that I needed cash more.”
I chewed some bagel, letting the whitefish’s vinegary goodness waft through my nose.
“Who is David Anderson?” I asked.
Jarrod said, “If you know to ask, then you know who he is.”
I considered another angle to this conversation, but I had no idea what I wanted to ask. The guy at the table next to ours took off and left the Boston Globe behind. I grabbed the paper. Maria’s ransom note took up the center of the paper above the fold.
Rittenhauser had done good work on the story. He wrote about Maria, but he also covered the power struggle in Sal’s territory. He said the odds-on succession favorite was Hugh Graxton. Rittenhauser listed off Marco Esposito, Joey Pupo, and Pistol Salvucci as
victims of an internecine Mafia war. He wrote of knife fights, jilted courtesans, stolen iPhones, prostitution, and drug dealing. Apparently Sal had done it all, and now Hugh wanted to do it in his place.
I showed the paper to Jarrod. “You know about this?”
“What? Mobsters are killing each other or something?”
I pointed at the picture. “That’s my cousin’s daughter.”
Jarrod read the caption. “Your cousin is Sal Rizzo?”
“Yeah. How do you know Sal?”
“Hah! The paper used your first name, Aloysius.”
“You said that you know Sal?”
Jarrod read from the article. “‘I’m just trying to find Maria,’ said Aloysius Tucker, who has since been questioned by the police.”
“Yeah. I know what it says.”
“Questioned by the police? That’s not good.”
“It happens when you find a body. What is this about you and Sal?”
“Man, you are a tire biter. Once you grab that tire you just ride the rim.” Jarrod dug into his omelet, brought egg to his lips.
I slapped my hand on the table. Egg splashed as Jarrod jumped, knocking his fork to the floor.
Jarrod said, “Jesus, Tucker. Calm down.”
A waitress brought Jarrod another fork and gave me the bill with my credit card. “Is there a problem?” she asked.
“No,” I said, scribbling a 50 percent tip onto the sheet. “Sorry. Won’t happen again.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Jarrod asked.
“What’s wrong is that when Sal heard that I had worked for you at PassHack, he accused me of killing his wife for David Anderson.”
“Worked for me? You consulted for two weeks.”
“Sal isn’t good at subtlety. He just hears that I worked there.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s not the point. The point is that something happened at PassHack. Something that has him enraged.”
Jarrod spread his hands. “What can I tell you? We went belly up. Ran out of cash.”
“His cash?”
“Yeah. Some of it must have been his. Sal took David and me out to dinner in the North End when we started up. We walked right past the line at Giacomo’s. It was pretty cool.”
“So then what happened?”
“You know what happened. We wrote software, got some customers, and started hacking passwords.”
“And you went out of business because you couldn’t hack them?”
“Shit, no. We went out of business because it was so easy. You can download all the hacking software you want right off the web. Between that and the stuff we wrote, we were cracking passwords like nobody’s business.”
“Scared the shit out of people, didn’t you?”
“Hell, yeah. That’s when they all started canceling their contracts. One guy told me that he felt like he had invited the devil into his bank vault.”
“I told you that would happen.”
“I told you that would happen,” Jarrod mimicked. He picked at his omelet.
I took another bite of my bagel. “What about the end?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” asked Jarrod.
“How did the company shut down? Did you go to work and find the doors locked?”
“What are you, a ghoul?”
“It’s a simple question. Did you have to sell off the computers?”
“We shut the thing down and called it a day. What does it matter about the computers?”
“I’m just trying to figure out if Sal got anything back.”
Jarrod poked at his omelet. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
I drank some coffee. “Fine, let’s change the subject.”
“Good.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Now? Now I’m ‘consulting.’” Jarrod punctuated the word with air quotes.
“You mean unempl—”
Jarrod’s eyes shot over my shoulder, looked up, widened.
I started to follow his gaze when a hand grabbed me by the shirt, pulled me up.
I was eye to eye with Bobby Miller in his FBI flak jacket.
Bobby said, “Let’s go.”
I grabbed my coat as he dragged me out of the restaurant.
Twenty-Seven
Bobby dragged me down the sidewalk and into a playground next to Zaftigs. Strangely, we were the only ones standing among spring-loaded rocking horses and a fire truck–shaped jungle gym all covered in a layer of snow.
I shrugged my arm free. “Get off me!” I pulled on my coat as Bobby waved the Globe at me.
“What the fuck is this?”
“It’s the Globe.”
Bobby wound up for a backhand with the newspaper. He threw it at my chest instead, pointed at the paper once it hit the ground. Maria looked up at us from the front-page picture. “I trusted you,” he said.
I looked down at Maria crying under the headline: MAFIA MARIA MISSING.
Bobby continued, “Then you gave the picture to that hack Rittenhauser.”
Mafia Maria? Seriously?
I said, “You don’t know I gave it to him.”
Bobby grabbed me by the front of my coat, cocked his fist. “Don’t you fucking lie to me. Not any more!”
I winced and waited for the punch, resigned to taking my beating. The punch never came. I opened one eye. “What was I supposed to do?”
Bobby released my jacket. “Supposed to do? You were supposed to go home. You were supposed to let the FBI handle it. You were supposed to keep the picture secret. It’s going to be a feeding frenzy. Everyone’s going to be after her.”
“I know,” I said. “Frank told me.”
“Frank?” said Bobby. “Cantrell?”
“Yeah, yeah. Cantrell told me what would happen. I called Rittenhauser and—”
“When were you talking to Frank?”
“Last night.”
“And he knew about the picture?”
“Yeah. He told me that you two decided to keep it secret.”
“He’s not even on the case.”
I said nothing. What did I know about FBI office politics?
Bobby looked down at the paper on the ground. “This hurt me, Tucker.”
“Politically?”
“No, personally. I trusted you with this picture. I told you to keep it to yourself.”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said. “Maria is out there, nobody knows where, and I’m the only one looking for her.”
“You’re not the only looking for her.”
“The FBI is ignoring Maria.”
“The FBI is not ignoring Maria. It’s my case. I’m looking for Maria.”
“You’re looking for her? Since when?”
“Since she was taken, you idiot. I’m an FBI agent. We handle kidnappings.”
“Okay, you’re looking for her. How?”
“I’m chasing down my leads.”
A schism rippled through my brain. Something was off, some set of facts that didn’t add up. Little errors hide big errors. Inconsistent behaviors mean something’s not working the way you think it should. I sifted and churned the information, panning for the piece that stuck out.
Bobby continued, “I’m looking for Maria and I wanted to keep this picture secret.”
Looked at Bobby standing in the park. I’d never seen him in Brookline before. I’d found gold in my clue pan.
Bobby pointed at the ransom note. “Those are some weird deman—”
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“What?”
“How did you find me? How did you know that I was in Zaftigs?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
I said, “You come
here all gussied up in your FBI gear and drag me out of Zaftigs—which reminds me, how did you know where to find me?”
Bobby bent over, picked up the newspaper. “This is going to—”
I said, “You tracked my credit card.”
Bobby looked at the sky.
“Or you’re tracking my phone.”
Nothing.
“Or both? You’re doing both?”
Bobby said, “Look, this is pointless.”
“You can’t track my phone without a warrant, right? You need a judge’s permission.”
“I was just mad over this.”
It all fell together. “You son of a bitch.”
“Look, Tucker—”
“You think I did it. You think I killed Pupo and took Maria.”
“No. Look. I don’t know—”
“That’s why I didn’t know you were looking for Maria, because you were really investigating me. You froze me out.”
Bobby’s eyes slithered, not meeting mine. “I can’t let—”
“Et tu, fatso?”
“Hey!”
I moved to walk past Bobby. He stepped to block me. I moved the other way. Blocked again.
“Are you arresting me?” I said.
“What?” Bobby said. “No.”
“Then get out of my way.”
“Calm down.”
“You drag me out of a restaurant, scream at me in the street, then tell me to calm down?”
“Let me explain.”
I took a step around Bobby. He moved to block. “Either arrest me or get out of the way,” I said.
Bobby relented.
I crunched through the snow back to the playground fence, turned, pointed at Bobby. “This is bullshit. I’ll find her without you.”
“No, wait!”
I was gone, down Harvard, back to the T. It was time to visit this David Anderson guy.
I pulled out my phone, called Jael. “I’m heading into the North End and I’m worried that someone will try to kill me.”
“Someone will try to kill you,” said Jael.
“I know. I know.”
“But still, you are going.”
“Want to come?”