First Class Killing (26 page)

He stopped. I had to stop. My muscles cramped. The paint can smelled of chemicals—solvent, maybe—and I wished I were a smoker with a lighter. I listened, but there was nothing, which meant that he was listening, too. I began to shake.

Then I heard him wheezing. Even though he was very close by, I felt a small relief that he was the one closer to me. He was struggling to breathe the heavy air and I knew, of the two, he was the one I could outrun, if only I could see where to run.

He stood for a long time. When he finally moved past, my whole body unclenched, and I nearly fell over. I waited for a good long time, until I couldn’t hear him anymore. When I straightened up, I hoped that my bones wouldn’t audibly creak. I took a deep breath and counted to myself.
One…
I wrapped my hand around the handle of the paint can
…two
…whirled around, which was not easy in total darkness, and…
three…
let it fly.

It seemed to take forever to come down. When it did, it hit dead solid on something hard and heavy. The noise boomed like an explosion from deep within a cave.

They yelled to each other. I started to feel my way along, going in the direction I had picked. I put one foot lightly in front of the other, slowly at first, but then it was hard to hold back, hard not to shut down my brain, let my instincts take over, and go crashing out of there as fast as I could. I held back until I saw the light spilling down the ramp. I began to jog toward the entrance, and then a fire kicked in, and I was running full out, and I couldn’t have stopped for any reason. If they were behind me, I didn’t know, because the only thing I could hear was the drumbeat of my own feet pounding the ground, my own heart pushing me forward.

I was flying.

The opening was ahead, the light washing into the dark tunnel like the tide rising onto the shore. I wanted to feel that light on me. The ramp was steeper than I had realized. I was breathing in a rhythm—in-in, out-out—every two steps, but the air seemed to hold less and less oxygen. At the moment when I felt I had to slow down, I heard the shots, loud and sharp, like the crack of an old tree branch snapped off in a windstorm. One of the rounds ricocheted off the ground in front of me. I knew they could see me against the light. I ran left and right in a jagged zigzag, aiming for the top of the ramp. I started to feel that something was pulling me forward, pulling me to safety. The opening was in front of me. I would make it. Fifty feet. Thirty. Twenty.

I didn’t even see him.

The collision was monumental, at least from my end. There was no time to stop, to turn, to do anything but plow right into him, which was like running headfirst into a Sequoia. I slammed into his chest. My head snapped back, and I was crumpling to the ground when he caught me. He had me by both arms. If I hadn’t been dazed from the crash, I would have been too spent to do anything anyway, so all I could do was stare at him.

He was big, especially across the shoulders. His head was square. His sport coat looked, in the dim light, to be a dusty rose over a black turtleneck. With a dizzying, disorienting rush of recognition, I realized I knew this man, and if I hadn’t been nearly unconscious I would have been scared, because the last time I had seen him was in Chicago, where his jacket had been lemon yellow. I expected any second for one of his big hands to release my arm and grab me by the throat.

It didn’t.

He turned his thick shoulders and looked down into the tunnel, probably seeing down there what I could hear—my two pursuers coming up the ramp.

“Go,” he said. He let go of my arms and turned me around. “Run.”

I wanted to drop to my knees. I wanted to let my head hang down until I could breathe again, but I could hear the other two coming. I put one hand on my aching side and started moving again, limping back toward the fence. When I turned to look back, he was gone.

I couldn’t get the dust out of my nasal passages. I kept blowing, sniffing, snorting, and mashing my nose against my face. Whether it was in my snout or in my mind, I couldn’t say, but I had an itch there that I couldn’t scratch, and it kept me on the razor’s edge of a sneeze. I smelled as if I’d just come in from a long run, only terror sweat is more pungent and rancid than exercise sweat. Both of my shoulders throbbed, the right one more than the left. I hoped I hadn’t torn something important.

I had found my way to the Fleet Center complex, which led directly to North Station, where there were plenty of people hanging out waiting for commuter trains to the suburbs. I sat on a bench along one wall and watched them. It had been more than an hour since I had crawled out of the tunnel, and I was trying to figure out if it made sense to go back to my car in the North End. It was either that or call Harvey, which seemed almost harder than any other option I could think of.

I was pretty sure the two men at Monica’s had been waiting for her, not me, probably for the same reason as the big guy had been after me…her in Chicago. Blackmail schemes gone awry. This was a dangerous game Monica was playing. Why did I keep paying the price? The big guy must have figured out his mistake, which was why he’d had no use for me tonight.

I did not want to deal with Harvey, so I went outside and hailed a cab that took me to the North End. I gave the cabbie five dollars extra to wait until I got safely into my car.

When I reached up to grab my seat belt, I noticed the business card in the visor. Printed on the front was the name Djuro Bulatovic. Below it was an 800 number. On the back was a handwritten note.

My sincerest apologies. Please call.

They say first impressions are the ones that last. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to think of Djuro Bulatovic as anyone but the man in the lemon chiffon jacket who choked me until I passed out.

Chapter

30

E
VEN WITHOUT THE ROBIN’S-EGG-BLUE JACKET,
he wouldn’t have been hard to spot. He was twice the width of any two people sitting on the benches around him, and he wore a smartly coordinated tam. Based on the data points I had collected so far, I imagined the Djuro Bulatovic closet to be a tidy repository of pastel, home to a disciplined row of ecru, dusty rose, mint green, and lavender sport jackets, all with muted silk linings, each as big as a sleeping bag.

He read his newspaper and never looked up. He seemed content to wait for my approach. The only problem was, I was having a hard time putting myself within the radius of his lightning-fast reach.

But there were plenty of people around on the street, many of them late-season tourists moving in the direction of the Prudential Center, embarkation point for the ubiquitous duck tours. It was the perfect low-humidity, light jacket day for such an outing.

The first step out to the sidewalk was the hardest. Then I put my head down, jaywalked across the street, and inched up to the man who had terrorized me…and saved me. When I was close enough to read his newspaper, he folded it and put it on his lap.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I brought you soup for lunch. Goulash. It’s good. Thick.” He pointed to the two cardboard cartons next to him on the bench. Steam curled up from the holes in the lids.

“You brought me soup?”

“Goulash. Did you want for us to take the tour? I wasn’t sure when you said to meet here. I bought tickets in case that was your intention.”

Goulash and a duck tour. He wasn’t exactly making me cower. The moon-shaped face, thick eyebrows, and sledgehammer forehead—they were all there, but now arranged in an expression that was deferential, almost gentle.

“I’ll skip the duck ride.” In spite of everything that had happened the night before, I had finally gotten a good night’s sleep. I’d spent the morning taking a long hot bath to soothe my aching muscles. I had no desire to go on an open-air, amphibious crawl through the crowded city streets of Boston and up the Charles River. “I don’t know where Monica is.”

“That is not,” he said, “why I wanted to see you.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Only to talk.”

“Why would I talk to you? You almost killed me.”

“No.” He was greatly offended. “I did not. I was asked to send a message in a forceful way. Did you get the message?”

“In the most forceful way. Except you gave it to the wrong person.”

“Yes.” His hands were on his knees and his large head tilted at an attitude of true contrition. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I hope I helped you last night.”

“You did.” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Thank you for that.”

“Please, sit.”

I did, although it took a few seconds. I was still pretty creaky. “I assume you haven’t found Monica and that’s why you were there last night. You’re still looking for her.”

“Yes. I was watching for her when those two men came.” He dismissed them with a snort. “Amateurs.”

“Are these amateurs still breathing?”

“Of course. We had a discussion.”

“You didn’t happen to get who they worked for?”

“This is not what we discussed. We spoke about what would happen if they bothered you or Monica again. That is how a professional approaches work. Not with a gun.”

I tried to peek under his jacket. I couldn’t see it, but I had to believe he had a weapon of his very own. “This is what you do, then? You—”

“I make sure that debts are paid and agreements are honored.”

“For Arthur Margolies?”

“For many clients. He is one.”

He seemed pretty forthcoming, so I pressed on. “Is Monica blackmailing him with sex tapes? Is that why you’re after her?”

“Yes. She made them with a secret camera and she is trying to sell them back to him. I was asked to intervene.”

I knew it. This had to be Monica’s bright idea. Angel was too smart to cannibalize her own business. “But you don’t know what she looks like? I mean, how could you mix us up?”

He seemed pained to be reminded of his gaffe. “I have never seen the videos. My client deleted them.”

Or so he thought. “Then how were you supposed to find her?”

“I was told to follow a man, that he would lead me to her.”

“Told by your client?”

“Yes.”

“Any idea how he knew which man?”

“No.”

That was curious. Why wouldn’t he have his guy set up on Monica’s hotel? Why the trick’s hotel? Maybe he didn’t know where she would be staying, but somehow did know who her date would be. How would he know that? I was pretty sure the reverend wasn’t in league with Arthur Margolies. Maybe he had inside information. Maybe he got Monica to tell him herself. Maybe she was senior enough to know in advance who her guy was. And maybe there was no way I could answer any of these questions myself.

“I don’t suppose you would hook me up so I could talk to Arthur Margolies?”

“Why?”

“I have questions for him.”

“I cannot let you speak to Mr. Margolies.”

Figured. “Who is he, anyway?”

He shook his head. “It was not his fault. It was a sloppy error on my part, for which you paid the price. Once again, I offer my sincerest apologies.” He picked up one of the cartons. “And soup.”

When he offered it to me, I remembered the glass of water on the night table in Chicago and the neatly made bed in which I had found myself. I accepted his steaming offering of peace.

The carton had some weight to it and felt warm in my hands. I lifted the lid. It smelled absolutely rejuvenating and made me realize how famished I was. When he offered a plastic spoon from his pocket, I snagged it and dug in, proving just how easy it is to win me over.

“Are you from Bosnia?”

He had the kind of face that transformed completely with a smile. “How did you know?”

“You’re reading a paper from Sarajevo, and I can’t pronounce your name.”

“I am from Dubrovnik. You can call me Bo.”

“How do you say your name?”

What he said sounded like “Juro Boolahtovitch.” He seemed pleased that I’d asked. When I finished, he nudged the second carton into my space without even looking at me.

“You’ve paid your debt,” I said.

“It is yours. Please, what else can I do for you?”

This was an opportunity I didn’t want to waste. Not the soup, but the offer of support. “I need to find Monica. I need to talk to her.”

“She is not at work,” he said. “She is not at home, and no one knows where to find her.”

“Do you think…I mean, would your client have done something to her? Or had someone else do something to her?”

“No. He left it to me to handle. He does not want her hurt. Only to understand that what she was doing was not acceptable.”

I watched one of the duck boats, a dark purple one named
Beantown Bettie,
chug out of the parking lot and merge into the heavy flow on Boylston. It was fully loaded in October, which spoke to the inexplicable popularity of these cheesy tours.

“Bo?”

“Yes.”

“When did you figure out that I wasn’t Monica?”

“In Chicago. I looked at your driver’s license.”

“After I passed out.”

“Yes.”

“So if your client had wanted me dead, I would be dead?”

He let his gaze drift up to the clouds. “I do not see any point in making hypotheticals. He did not, and you are not.” He looked at my face and then my throat. “I remain in your debt.”

He was clearly a man of high standards—attacking the wrong victim being a definite violation—and proud of his adherence to them. There was something in there worth trusting.

“Does that mean you would be willing to do me a favor?”

“I would need to know one thing,” he said. “Why did you not call the police in Chicago?”

“It was not in my best interest to get the authorities involved.”

“Is it because you do what Monica does?”

“Am I a prostitute?”

“No,” he asked. “Are you a blackmailer? Is that why you want to see Mr. Margolies?”

“No. I’m not a blackmailer, and I’m not a prostitute. I’m looking for Monica because I need to find people she’s working with. I’m trying to break up the prostitution ring.”

“Tell me what you need.”