December Boys (18 page)

Nicki was ten years younger than the rest of us but she owned a much nicer ride. Funny, most girls I knew her age were slobs when it came to their cars. The floors of Nicki’s Jetta were freshly
vacuumed, cupholders wiped clean, interior sterile and unlived in, like Grandma’s place with the plastic still on the furniture. Of course that meant I couldn’t smoke. Nerves on edge, the ride took forever. I rested my head against the cold glass and pretended to sleep to avoid the threat of talking.

Dropping my keys on the counter, I sifted through the day’s mail I’d brought in with me from the foyer. Credit card bills. Gas bills. Water bills. A flyer begging for donations with pictures of kids looking a helluva lot happier than me. I flipped the pile to the table with the rest of the crap that would now be my problem.

I switched on the TV. Just for the background noise and color. I stood at the window. No cars idled down the block. I wondered if that car from yesterday had been there to watch me at all. Could’ve been a husband and wife letting the engine warm before an exciting date night on the town, dinner and a movie, in bed by ten. At least the snow was pretty. For as much as I bitched about the weather up here, I couldn’t imagine living in a place like Florida or California, where the sun shines all the time. I needed these quiet moments. This was the part of winter I enjoyed. The fresh snowfall, everything pristine, untainted. Give it a few hours and all this prettiness would be gone, trampled on by dirty boots, tires spitting mud, rendering white powder brown and ugly. For now, though, the world remained perfect.

My cell buzzed. Any thought my wife might have the decency to check in passed when I didn’t recognize the number.

“Mr. Porter?” The voice apprehensive, small.

“Yeah, this is Jay Porter. Who’s this?”

I heard a hand cupping the receiver. “This is Seth Shaw. I found your business card on our porch.”

That weird little kid from last night. He sounded so timid, I felt bad even asking his name. I’d seen his old man, who I assumed beat the shit out of him.

“How can I help you, Seth?” I realized, for some reason, I was whispering too.

“It’s about my sister, Wendy.” The boxy connection made me picture the boy crouched in a closet. “We got a lot of money after she went away.”

I walked into the kitchen and grabbed my cigarettes. “Who got money?” I couldn’t find a lighter so I used the stove.

“My dad and me. To fix the house. A lot of money.”

I’d seen the house. Additions like that didn’t come cheap.

“How old are you, Seth?”

“Fifteen.” And then before I could respond, he added, “I’m small for my age. There’s a problem with my spine. I’m a regular person. I’m not stupid.”

“Didn’t say you were. Do you talk to your sister?”

“Not in person. Used to get letters all the time saying how awful it was inside there. Haven’t gotten any letters in a while. Wendy has been in North River for a long time. You know she’s not my real sister, right?”

“I don’t know anything about your family, Seth, other than Wendy got in trouble for making a website.”

“Her mom married my dad. Like when I was three. I’ve known her my whole life. My stepmom died when I was seven. My dad never liked Wendy. But she’s my best friend. My sister didn’t do anything wrong. She wasn’t bullying anyone. She was trying to protect someone from being bullied.”

I wished I could reach over the line and hug this kid; he sounded so wounded. I wanted to help his sister, too—that’s why I’d gone out there in the first place. But if I suspected kickbacks and fraud, the knowledge didn’t suddenly grant me superpowers to fix the mess. I lacked any smoking gun. Seth was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for.

“Mr. Porter, they pay to keep my sister locked up.”

“Who pays?”

“I’m not sure. But I saw the man who brought the check to the house. I’d skipped school that day and was downstairs in the basement. My father drives trucks. He’s out of work. He didn’t know I was home. A man came to our door. I climbed on the couch and could see them on the porch through the cellar slots. I saw the man give Dad a bag. Heard him say, ‘Good luck with the repairs.’”

“When was this?”

“Like eight months ago? Contractors started showing up right after that. I asked my dad how we could afford all the repairs. We’d barely been able to keep the bank away since my stepmom died. My father said he’d applied for a government program that helps people like us who don’t have a lot of money get their houses fixed. You didn’t see our house before, Mr. Porter. It was falling apart.”

“Do you know when he applied for the program?”

“My dad said before he met Linda. That was my stepmom’s name.”

“So, over ten years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“But you see didn’t a penny until they locked Wendy up? You don’t know the name of the man who brought the money? Maybe you found his business card lying in the snow, too?”

“He didn’t drop a card. He was driving a construction truck.”

“Didn’t say ‘Lombardi’ on the side, by any chance?”

“No. Began with a ‘T.’ Red letters.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“No. Just the logo on the side of the truck as he was pulling out.”

“Okay, Seth,” I said, “Thanks for calling. I’ll do what I can—”

“Oh, and the driver had a tattoo. On his neck.”

“A tattoo? On his neck? Thought you said you didn’t see anything else?”

“It was a pretty big tattoo.”

“You remember what kind of tattoo?”

“One of those Jewish stars.”

* * *

Charlie wasn’t picking up, and the number I had for Fisher was out of service. Which showed how often I talked to the guy. I called Nicki. Got her voice mail. I was anxious to share the news. Even if I wasn’t sure what the news meant.

I remembered that first day driving around looking for the Olisky house, taking a wrong turn and stumbling across the abandoned construction site with old Lombardi equipment rusting in ditches. That’s where I’d seen the name before. On the guard shack on the way out. Tomassi. Red lettering and logo. At the time, I’d assumed vendor, on-site management, security of some sort. A quick Google search yielded Tomassi as the largest construction outfit in Massachusetts, one of New England’s oldest. Big fish gobbled up smaller fish all the time. This had to be the construction truck Seth saw. The more distressing factor was the Star of David neck tattoo, which could only belong to one man: Erik Bowman, Adam Lombardi’s old head of security, with whom I’d had a run-in last year when he broke into my place searching for the hard drive my brother had stolen. Made sense a guy like Bowman would land another job in the same field. Except Bowman was no ordinary security guard. He was a former motorcycle gangbanger who beat, intimidated, and murdered, a thug with no conscience. In addition to knocking me out cold, I was pretty sure he’d killed my brother’s junkie pal, Pete. Not that

I could prove it. Now he was delivering hush money to keep a girl locked up in North River? Which made sense if he were still working for Adam. But he wasn’t.

My cell vibrated. I took the call without a glance, expecting Nicki or Charlie, still buzzing over the implications of Bowman’s involvement.

“Are you okay?” my wife asked. “You sound out of breath.”

I didn’t bother with the truth, that my lungs were working overtime funding a two-pack-a-day habit. “Running to catch the phone,” I lied.

“You picked up on the first ring.”

“Must be a delay on your end.” I knew how stupid that sounded.

“Yeah,” she said, either not buying my excuse or not caring. “I didn’t know if you were still planning on coming up to see Aiden today?”

When she mentioned my son, I remembered her offer coming on the eve of a nor’easter. “Thanks for the invite, by the way. Great time to plan a trip. Last night was supposed to be the storm of the decade.”

“I forgot you were getting slammed down there. I heard it was a false alarm though, no?”

“You forgot?”

“Yeah, Jay. I forgot. Same as you did, apparently.”

“They close the mountain roads out of Ashton, you know that.”

“Except you don’t live in Ashton anymore.”

“I was there last night.”

“How am I supposed to know that?”

“Or maybe you didn’t want me coming up to see Aiden in the first place.”

“I’m over two hours away. The storm wasn’t going to hit us up here.”

“So, what? Now Burlington’s your hometown?”

“Think whatever you’d like,” my wife said. “Are you coming to see your son today or not? I need to know so I can plan my day—”

“It’s wonderful you’re trying to fit my relationship with our child into ‘your day.’”

“You said you wanted to see Aiden. I’m trying to set that up. You were complaining yesterday that I was keeping him from you.”

“You are! By being three hours away in fucking Burlington.”

“Okay, Jay, I’m hanging up now. Call me when you are ready to see Aiden.”

“When I’m ready?”

“Yes. When you are ready to see your son, call me.”

“I’m
ready
now. But I can’t control the fucking sky. If my son was home, like he should be, I could see him now!”

“Are you sure about that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Even if we were there, you’d be getting drunk in the garage with your scrapbook, brooding over your dead brother, which is how you spend all your free time. Ignoring me. Ignoring Aiden. Chasing ghosts.”

“That’s a rotten thing to say.”

“Sorry,” Jenny said, “you’re right. Call me later. After the storm’s cleared. We’ll set something up.”

“It’s already passed. The worst of it is out to sea.”

Jenny groaned. I could hear the frustration. I didn’t blame her. I was sick of dealing with me.

My wife took a deep breath. “Let’s start again. Would you like to see your son today?”

“Yes.”

“What time is good for you?”

“What time is good for you?”

“What time is it now?”

“Like ten thirty. I think.”

“I have a few errands to run,” Jenny said. “Why don’t you plan on getting here later in the afternoon. You can take Aiden to dinner. Spend a few hours together.”

We hung up without saying goodbye.

I
COULD TAKE
Aiden to dinner. Me. Alone. We weren’t a family anymore. I’d pick up my son at the door and return him two hours later. I was grateful for the one-on-one time with my boy but couldn’t ignore the implications. The prearranged visit felt like a court order granted to a fuck-up father. How did we end up here?

At the computer, I surfed the net for news on the Senate bill, the one designed to loosen regulations regarding privatization. I scoured the
Monitor
and
Herald
archives as well as New Hampshire’s official state page—even listened to a podcast—all relevant info hiding in plain sight.

When Lombardi Construction leveled the TC Truck Stop and Maple Motor Inn last year, the plan was to build a new resort, the town looking to cash in on the ski craze up here. Or maybe I had been too quick to assume, inferring without due diligence. Words like “diversion program” and “juvenile prison” hadn’t been on my radar, and now that they were, I saw them everywhere I looked. A necessary weapon in the fight against youth crime and teenage drug addiction, the need for privatization spelled out clear as the northern lights.

But why would Lombardi sell the rights to build the damn thing? Tomassi was linked to the construction of the new detention facility, tentatively dubbed the uninspiring Coos County
Center. You had to figure they’d come up with something sexier before the grand opening. The amount of money bandied about was staggering, and hard to comprehend. Eighty-million-dollar budgets, another twelve slotted for requisitions, six more for advertising, few hundred thousand here, couple mil there. According to the experts, the bill’s passing was a formality, with the potential revenue projected to be in the billions. Ski resort. Juvenile prison. What did it matter? That much money only begets more of it.

Dinner in Burlington left me with a few hours to kill, and I wasn’t going to spend them stewing in that house, scrounging around electronically, zooming in and out of satellite images, taking virtual walks in the dark. I set out to visit the old truck stop. I didn’t know what I expected to find. Contact info for Bowman would be nice. Fat chance they stored that information in a trailer. I had no intention of hopping a fence like a lunatic, rooting around a private construction site to find out. But I needed something tactile, tangible to make this feel real again.

Ringing Charlie from the road, my call went straight to voice mail. I left a long-winded, rambling message about the Shaw boy and Bowman, my theory about Tomassi being another Lombardi subsidiary, or at least a link in the chain, friends with financial benefits, whatever, because no way Adam sells off a piece of the pie that big without securing a slice for himself, even if I wasn’t sure how any of that constituted a law being broken. Lombardi had been awarded the contract to build the ski resort. Why would it matter if they also built the prison? Unless fostering the need, proposing the bill, winning the contract, and then also anointing yourself king of it all smacked of such overkill, even a bunch of greedy fucks like the Lombardis had to cut some bait. Something sure as hell was up. No way this planet contained two Bowmans.

Coming around the mountain, I sped up the Desmond Turnpike, all its degenerate glory on full display.

College papers and advocacy rags often ran features on the Turnpike. The place had become an infamous institution, like Route 66, only less scenic and with more blow jobs and overdoses. No one pulled off the shoulder and snapped pictures of speed freaks going duckpin bowling. This was a stretch of road where you kept your eyes locked straight ahead, got to where you were going, which was anywhere but here. People didn’t remain on the Turnpike. Not by choice, anyway. After Chris died, I saw this world in a different light.

I’d read an op-ed a while back, a rant from a landlord, bitching about freeloaders. His prospective tenant, some woman who “couldn’t speak a lick of English,” wanted to rent one of his shit rooms, and she’d had the nerve to apply using Section 8 housing vouchers. The landlord had done the math. Adding up the Section 8, the free medical care and SSI, the extra kids popped out to beef up payout, food stamps, incidentals, he had determined that everyone on this Turnpike was earning over one hundred thousand dollars a year, parasites sucking off the tit of hard-working Americans.