I paused in the doorway. “Tell them, Eric.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and smiled at me, trying to look brave. “The night Jason was killed, I was with a student. A lover. The student’s father is a high-powered attorney from North Carolina and a ranking member of the Christian Coalition. What do you think he’ll do when he finds out?”
I looked down at his dusty carpet.
“Teaching’s all I know, Patrick. It is me. Without it, I disappear.”
I looked at him and he seemed to be disappearing as he said it, floating away to mist right in front of me.
“I stopped at The Black Emerald on my way over to the hospital, but it was closed. I looked up at Gerry’s apartment above it. The shades were drawn. I looked for Gerry’s Grand Torino, usually parked out in front of the bar. It wasn’t here.
If the killer had met me face to face since all this began, as Dolquist theorized, then it narrowed the field of suspects. Eric and Gerry were both considered suspects by the FBI. And Gerry was definitely physically strong.
But what possible motive could he have?
I’d known Gerry my entire life. Could he kill?
We’re all capable of murder, the voice in my head whispered. Every one of us.
“Mr. Kenzie.”
I turned, saw Agent Fields standing by the trunk of a dark Plymouth. He tossed recording equipment into the trunk. “Mr. Glynn’s in the clear.”
“How?”
“We had this place staked out last night. Glynn went up to his apartment at one, watched TV until three, and went to bed. We sat here all night, and he never left. He’s not our man, Mr. Kenzie. Sorry.”
I nodded, part of me relieved, part of me feeling guilty for suspecting Gerry in the first place.
Of course there was another part of me that was disappointed. Maybe I’d wanted it to be Glynn.
Just so it would finally be over.
“The bullet did a lot of damage,” Dr. Barnett told me. “It tore up her liver, knicked both kidneys, settled in her lower intestines. We almost lost her twice, Mr. Kenzie.”
“How is she now?”
“She’s not out of the woods,” he said. “Is she a strong person? Got a big heart?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then she’s got a better chance than some. That’s really all I can tell you right now.”
They brought her into ICU at eight-thirty after ninety minutes in post-op.
She looked like she’d lost fifty pounds and her body seemed adrift in the bed.
Phil and I stood over her as a nurse hooked up her IVs and switched on a life-support monitor.
“What’s that for?” Phil said. “She’s okay now. Right?”
“She hemorrhaged twice, Mr. Dimassi. We’re monitoring to make sure she doesn’t do it again.”
Phil took Angie’s hand and it looked so small in his.
“Ange?” he said.
“She’ll be asleep for most of the day,” the nurse said. “There’s very little you can do for her now, Mr. Dimassi.”
“I’m not leaving her,” Phil said.
The nurse looked at me and I gave her back nothing but a flat stare.
At ten, I came out of ICU and found Bubba sitting in the waiting room.
“How is she?”
“They think,” I said, “she’s going to be okay.”
He nodded.
“We’ll know more when she wakes up, I guess.”
“When’s that?”
“Late this afternoon,” I said. “Maybe the evening.”
“Anything I can do?”
I leaned over the fountain, gulped water like a man come in from a desert.
“I need to speak to Fat Freddy,” I said.
“Sure. Why?”
“I need to find Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy and ask them some questions.”
“I don’t think Freddy’ll have a problem with that.”
“If they don’t answer my questions,” I said, “I’ll need permission to shoot them until they do.”
Bubba leaned over the fountain, looked at me. “You’re serious?”
“You tell Freddy, Bubba, that if I don’t get his permission, I’ll do it anyway.”
“Now you’re talking,” he said.
Phil and I worked in shifts.
If one of us had to use the bathroom or get a drink, the other held Angie’s hand. All day, her hand was enclosed in one of ours.
At noon, Phil went looking for the cafeteria, and I lifted her hand to my lips and closed my eyes.
The day I met her, she was missing both front teeth and her hair was cut so short and so badly that I thought she was another boy. We were in the gym at the Little House Recreation Center on East Cottage, and it was a free-for-all for six-year-olds. This was back before there was much official after-school care in my neighborhood, but parents could drop their kids at the Little House for three hours for five dollars a week, and the staff pretty much gave us free rein as long as we didn’t break anything.
That day, the floor of the gym was littered with maroon dodgeballs and orange Nerfs and hard plastic footballs and floor hockey sticks and pucks and basketballs and maybe twenty-five uncoordinated six-year-olds running around and screaming like maniacs.
The pucks were in short supply, and after I picked up a hockey stick I honed in on the short kid with the bad haircut as she pushed one awkwardly around the edge of the gym. I snuck up behind her, lifted her stick off the floor with my own, and stole the puck.
And she tackled me, punched me in the head, and stole it back.
With her hand to my face in the ICU unit, I could remember that day as vividly as any in my life.
I leaned in and placed my cheek against hers, pressed her hand tightly to my chest, closed my eyes.
When Phil came back, I bummed a cigarette off him and went out to the parking lot to smoke it.
I hadn’t smoked in seven years, but the tobacco smelled like perfume as I lit it and the smoke that filled my lungs felt clean and pure in the frigid air.
“That Porsche,” someone on my right said, “is one nice ride. Sixty-six?”
“Sixty-three,” I said and turned to look at him.
Pine wore a camel hair topcoat and burgundy twill trousers and a black cashmere sweater. His black gloves looked like a second skin over his hands.
“How’d you afford it?” he said.
“I pretty much bought a body only,” I said. “Acquired parts over several years.”
“You one of those guys who loves his car more than his wife or friends?”
I held up the keys. “It’s chrome and metal and rubber, Pine, and it couldn’t mean less to me right now. You want it, take it.”
He shook his head. “Far too ostentatious for my tastes. Drive an Acura myself.”
I took my second drag on the cigarette and immediately felt light-headed. The air danced in front of my eyes.
“Shooting Vincent Patriso’s only granddaughter,” he said, “was an extremely uncool thing for someone to do.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Constantine has been informed that two people he ordered to cooperate with your investigation did not.”
“That’s correct.”
“And now Ms. Gennaro lies in ICU.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Constantine wants you to know that he had nothing to do with this.”
“I know.”
“Mr. Constantine also wants you to know that you have carte blanche when it comes to whatever you have to do to identify and apprehend the man who shot Ms. Gennaro.”
“Carte blanche?”
“Carte blanche, Mr. Kenzie. If Mr. Hurlihy and Mr. Rouse were never seen again, Mr. Constantine assures you that neither he nor his associates would have any desire to look for them. Understood?”
I nodded.
He handed me a card. Scribbled on one side was an address—411 South Street, 4th floor. Scribbled on the other side was a phone number I recognized as Bubba�
��s cell phone.
“Meet Mr. Rogowski there as soon as you can.”
“Thanks.”
He shrugged, looked at my cigarette. “Shouldn’t smoke those things, Mr. Kenzie.”
He walked off into the parking lot and I stubbed out the cigarette and went back inside.
“Angie opened her eyes at two forty-five.
“Honey?” Phil said.
She blinked and tried to speak but her mouth was too dry.
As instructed earlier by the nurse, we gave her some chips of ice but no water, and she nodded gratefully.
“Don’t call me honey,” she croaked. “How many times do I have to tell you, Phillip?”
Phil laughed and kissed her forehead and I kissed her cheek and she slapped feebly at both of us.
We sat back.
“How do you feel?” I said.
“Real stupid question,” she said.
Dr. Barnett dropped his stethoscope and penlight back into his pockets and told Angie, “You’re going to be in ICU until tomorrow, just so we can keep a close eye on you, but it looks like you’re coming along well.”
“Hurts like hell,” she said.
He smiled. “I’d expect so. That bullet took a particularly nasty course, Ms. Gennaro. And later we’ll discuss some of the damage. I can promise you that there’s a whole lot of foods you’ll never be able to eat again. Just about any liquid besides water is going to be out of the question for a while too.”
“Damn,” she said.
“And there’ll be other restrictions to talk about, but—”
“What about…?” She looked at Phil and me and then away.
“Yes?” Barnett said.
“Well,” she said, “the bullet sort of rattled around down in my lower regions and…”
“It affected none of your reproductive organs, Ms. Gennaro.”
“Oh,” she said and caught me smiling, glared at me. “Don’t say a damn word, Patrick.”
The pain returned in force around five and they shot her up with enough Demerol to mellow out a Bengal tiger.
I touched my palm to her cheek as she blinked at the drug’s effect.
“The guy who shot me?” she said thickly.
“Yeah?”
“You identify him yet?”
“No.”
“But you will, won’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, then…”
“Yeah?”
“Go get him, Patrick,” she said. “Shut his ass down.”
36
Four eleven South Street was the only vacant building on a street of artist’s lofts and carpet makers, costumers, rag merchants, and by-appointment-only galleries. Boston’s two-block equivalent of SoHo.
Four eleven was four stories tall and had been a parking garage before the city actually needed one. It changed hands in the late forties and the new owner turned it into an entertainment complex for sailors. The first floor had been a bar and billiards parlor, the second a casino, and the third a whorehouse.
The place had been vacant most of my life, so I never knew what the fourth floor was used for until my Porsche rose up past the dark floors in an ancient car elevator and the doors opened onto a dank, musty bowling alley.
Light fixtures hung haphazardly from a section of caved-in ceiling and several alleys were nothing but corridors of rubble. Shattered bowling pins lay in heaps of white dust in the gutters and the hand dryers had long ago been ripped from the floors and presumably sold for parts. Several of the runway shelves still held bowling balls, though, and I could see target arrows through the dust and grime on a couple of alleys.
Bubba sat in a captain’s chair by the center alley as we left the car and exited the elevator. The chair still bore screws at the base from wherever he’d torn it up, and the leather was ripped in several places and spilling foam stuffing onto the floor by his feet.
“Who owns this place?” I said.
“Freddy.” He sipped from a bottle of Finlandia. His face was ruddy and his eyes slightly watery, and I knew that he was easily into his second bottle, never a good sign.
“Freddy keeps an abandoned building on his books for fun?”
He shook his head. “The second and third floor only look like shit from the elevator. They’re actually pretty nice. Freddy and his boys use them for functions sometimes, shit like that.” He looked at Phil and there was nothing friendly in his glance. “Fuck you doing here, pussy?”
Phil took a step back, but still did better than most people facing Bubba in full psychotic tilt.
“I’m in this now, Bubba. All the way.”
Bubba smiled and the darkness that covered the entire rear of the alleys seemed to rise up behind him. “Well, now,” he said. “How nice for you. Pissed off someone put Angie in the hospital and it wasn’t you this time? Someone stepping into your area of expertise, faggot?”
Phil shifted toward me a step. “This has nothing to do with the bad blood between us, Bubba.”
Bubba raised his eyebrows at me. “He grow some balls or’s he just stupid?”
I’d seen Bubba like this only a few times before, and it was always a case of being far too close to the demon for my liking. By my amended estimate, he had to be three bottles of vodka in, and there was no telling if he’d allow his blacker instincts to be reined in.
Bubba cared about exactly two people in the world—me and Angie. And Phil had spent too much time hurting Angie over the years for Bubba to feel anything for him but pure hate. Being the object of another’s hate is relative. If the person who hates you is an advertising exec whose Infiniti you cut off in traffic, you’re probably not going to worry much. If Bubba hates you, though, putting a couple of continents between the two of you is not a bad idea.
“Bubba,” I said.
He turned his head slowly to look up at me and his gaze was muddy.
“Phil is on our side for this one. That’s all you need to know right now. He wants to be in on whatever we do.”
He showed no reaction, just turned his head back toward Phil, fixed that muddy gaze on him.
Phil held the look for as long as he could, long after sweat had slid down by his ears, but eventually he looked at the floor.
“All right, douche,” Bubba said. “We’ll let you sit in for a few hands, you want to find redemption for what you did to your wife or whatever bullshit you told yourself.” He stood and towered over Phil until Phil looked up. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding—Patrick forgives. Angie forgives. I don’t. Someday I’m going to hurt you.”
Phil nodded. “I know that, Bubba.”
Bubba used his index finger to prop Phil’s chin up. “And if anything that happens in this room leaks, I’ll know it didn’t come from Patrick. Which means I’ll kill you, Phil. Got it?”
Phil tried to nod, but Bubba’s finger kept his head from moving.
“Yes,” Phil said through gritted teeth.
Bubba looked up at a dark wall on the other side of the elevator. “Lights,” he called.
Someone behind the wall flicked a switch and a sickly green-and-white neon flickered in the few remaining light fixtures over the back half of the alleys. There was more sputtering and several gauzy yellow bars of light shafted over the bowling pits themselves.
Bubba raised his arms and turned around grandly, like Moses parting the Red Sea, and we looked down the alleys as a rat scurried for safety along one of the gutters.
“Holy shit,” Phil said under his breath.
“You say something?” Bubba said.
“No. Nothing,” Phil managed.
At the end of the alley directly in front of me, Kevin Hurlihy was kneeling in the pit. His hands were tied behind his back and his legs were tied at the ankles and a noose around his neck was tied to a nail in the wall over the pit. His face was swollen and shiny with bloody welts. The nose Bubba had broken was flabby and blue, and his broken jaw was wired shut.
Jack Rouse, looking even worse for
wear, was tied in an identical fashion in the next alley over. Jack was a lot older than Kevin and his face was almost green and slick with sweat.
Bubba took in our shocked faces and smiled. He leaned in toward Phil and said, “Take a good look at them. Then think what I’m going to do to you someday, pussy.”
As Bubba sauntered down the alley toward them, I said, “What, you already interrogated them?”
He shook his head and swigged some vodka. “Hell, no. I had no idea what questions to ask.”
“So why they all beat to shit, Bubba?”
He reached Kevin and bent down by him, looked back at me with his deranged grin. “Because I was bored.”
He winked and slapped Kevin’s jaw and Kevin screamed through his wired teeth.
“Jesus, Patrick,” Phil whispered. “Jesus.”
“Relax, Phil,” I said, though my own blood churned.
Bubba stepped over beside Jack and slapped him in the side of the head so hard you could hear the sound ring across the fourth floor, but Jack didn’t scream, just closed his eyes for a moment.
“Okay.” Bubba turned around and his trench coat lifted and swirled around him for a moment. He staggered back to us and his combat boots sounded like the hoofs of Clydesdales. “Ask your questions, Patrick.”
“How long they been there?” I said.
He shrugged. “Few hours.” He picked up a dusty bowling ball from the rack, wiped it with his sleeve.
“Maybe we should get them some water or something.”
He spun on me. “What? You fucking kidding me? Patrick”—he placed his arm around me, used the bowling ball to gesture in their direction—“that’s the asshole who threatened to kill you and Grace. Remember? Those are the fucks who could have stopped this a month ago, before Angie got shot, before Kara Rider got crucified. They’re the enemy,” he hissed and the alcohol on his breath rode over me like a wave.
“True,” I said as Kevin shook involuntarily. “But—”
“No buts!” Bubba said. “No buts! You said today you were ready to shoot them if necessary. Right? Right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then? What? There they are, Patrick. Be a man of your word. Don’t fucking embarrass me. Don’t.”
He removed his arm and pulled the bowling ball close to his chest, caressed it.
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