Gone, Baby, Gone (37 page)

I shook my head against the booze. “Run that one by me again.” I stood up, and my feet felt unsteady in the sand. I crossed to the jungle gym opposite the swings and perched myself on a rung.

“If society doesn’t work, how do we, as allegedly honorable men, live?”

“On the fringes,” I said.

He nodded. “Exactly. Yet we must coexist within society or otherwise we’re—what, we’re fucking militia, guys who wear camouflage pants and bitch about taxes while they drive on roads paved by the government. Right?”

“I guess.”

He stood and wavered, grasped the swing chain, and tilted back into the pools of dark behind the swing-set arch. “I planted evidence on a guy once.”

“You what?”

He tilted back into the light. “True. Scumbag named Carlton Volk. He was raping hookers for months. Months. A couple pimps tried to stop him, he fucked them up. Carlton was a psycho, black-belt, prison-weight-room kind of guy. Couldn’t be reasoned with. And our buddy Ray Likanski gives me a phone call, lets me in on all the details. Skinny Ray, I guess, had a soft spot for one of the hookers. Whatever. Anyway, I know Carlton Volk is raping hookers, but who’s going to convict him? Even if the girls had wanted to testify—which they didn’t—who would believe them? A hooker saying she was raped is a joke to most people. Like killing a corpse; supposedly it ain’t possible. So I know Carlton’s a two-time loser, out on probation; I plant an ounce of heroin and two unlicensed firearms in his trunk, way back under the spare where he’ll never find ’em. Then I put an expired inspection sticker over the up-to-date one on his license plate. Who looks at their own plate until it’s near renewal time?” He floated back into the dark again for a moment. “Two weeks later, Carlton gets stopped on the inspection sticker, cops an attitude, et cetera, et cetera. Long story short, he gets dropped as a three-time felon for twenty years hard, no parole possibility.”

I waited until he’d swung back into the light again before I spoke.

“You think you did the right thing?”

He shrugged. “For those hookers, yes.”

“But—”

“Always a ‘but’ when you tell a story like that, ain’t there?” He sighed. “But a guy like Carlton, he thrives in prison. Probably goes through more young kids sent up for burglary and minor dope-dealing than he ever would have raped in hookers. So did I do right for the general population? Probably not. Did I do right for some hookers no one else gave a shit about? Maybe.”

“If you had to do it again?”

“Patrick, lemme ask you: What would you do with a guy like Carlton?”

“We’re back to the death penalty again, aren’t we?”

“The personal one,” he said, “not the societal one. If I’d had the balls to whack Volk, no one gets raped by him anymore. That’s not relative. That’s black and white.”

“But those kids in prison, they’ll still get raped by someone else.”

He nodded. “For every solution, a problem.”

I took another swig of rum, noticed a lone star floating above the thin night clouds and city smog.

I said, “I stood over that kid’s body and something snapped. I didn’t care what happened to me, to my life, to anything. I just wanted…” I held out my hands.

“Balance.”

I nodded.

“So you popped a cap in the back of a guy’s head while he was on his knees.”

I nodded again.

“Hey, Patrick? I’m not judging you, man. I’m saying sometimes we do the right thing but it wouldn’t hold up in court. It wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of”—he made quotation marks with his fingers—“society.”

I heard that
yuh-yuh-yuh
yammering Earle had made under his breath, saw the puff of blood that had spit from the back of his neck, heard the thump as he’d fallen to the floor and the spent shell skittered on the wood.

“In the same circumstances,” I said, “I’d do it again.”

“Does that make you right?” Remy Broussard ambled over to the jungle gym, poured some more rum into my cup.

“No.”

“Doesn’t make you wrong, though, does it?”

I looked up at him, smiled, and shook my head. “No again.”

He leaned back into the jungle gym and yawned. “Nice if we had all the answers, wouldn’t it?”

I looked at the line of his face etched in the darkness beside me, and I felt something squirm and niggle in the back of my skull like a small fishing hook. What had he just said that bugged me?

I looked at Remy Broussard and I felt that fish hook dig deeper against the back of my skull. I watched him close his eyes and I wanted to hit him for some reason.

Instead I said, “I’m glad.”

“About what?”

“Killing Corwin Earle.”

“Me too. I’m glad I killed Roberta.” He poured more rum into my cup. “Hell with it, Patrick, I’m glad none of those sick pricks walked out of that house alive. Drink to that?”

I looked at the bottle, then at Broussard, searched his face for whatever it was about him that suddenly bothered me. Frightened me. I couldn’t find it in the dark, in the booze, so I raised my cup and touched the plastic to the bottle.

“May their hell be a lifetime in the bodies of their victims,” Broussard said. He raised his eyebrows up and down. “Can I get an amen, brother?”

“Amen, brother.”

28

I sat for a long time in the ashen, half-dark of my moonlit bedroom watching Angie sleep. I ran my conversation with Broussard over and over in my head, sipped from a large cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I’d picked up on my walk home, smiled when Angie mumbled the name of the dog she’d had as a child and reached out and stroked the pillow with the palm of her hand.

Maybe it was shell shock over the interior of the Tretts’ house that had triggered it. Maybe it was the rum. Maybe it was just that the more determined I am to keep painful events at bay, the more likely I am to focus on the little things, minutiae, a casually dropped word or phrase that rings in my head and won’t stop. Whatever the case, tonight in the playground, I’d found a truth and a lie. Both at the same time.

Broussard had been right: nothing worked.

And I had been right: facades, no matter how well built, usually come down.

Angie rolled onto her back and let out a soft moan, kicked at the sheet tangled up by her feet. It must have been that effort—trying to kick with a leg encased in plaster—that woke her. She blinked and raised her head, looked down at the cast, then turned her head and saw me.

“Hey. What’re…” She sat up, smacked her lips, pushed hair out of her eyes. “What’re you doing?”

“Sitting here,” I said. “Thinking.”

“You drunk?”

I held up my coffee cup. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

“Then come to bed.” She extended her hand.

“Broussard lied to us.”

She pulled the hand away, used it to push herself farther up the headboard. “What?”

“Last year,” I said. “When Ray Likanski bolted the bar and disappeared.”

“What about it?”

“Broussard said he barely knew the man. Said he was one of Poole’s occasional snitches.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Tonight, with half a pint of rum in him, he told me Ray was his own snitch.”

She reached over to the nightstand, turned on the light. “What?”

I nodded.

“So…so maybe he just made an oversight last year. Maybe we heard him wrong.”

I looked at her.

Eventually she held up a hand as she turned toward the nightstand for her cigarettes. “You’re right. We never hear things wrong.”

“Not at the same time.”

She lit a cigarette and pulled the sheet up her leg, scratched at her knee just above the cast. “Why would he lie?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been sitting here wondering the same thing.”

“Maybe he had a reason to protect Ray’s identity as his snitch.”

I sipped some coffee. “Possibly, but it seems awful convenient, doesn’t it? Ray is potentially a key witness in the disappearance of Amanda McCready; Broussard lies about knowing him. Seems…”

“Shady.”

I nodded. “A bit. Another thing?”

“What?”

“Broussard’s retiring soon.”

“How soon?”

“Not sure. Sounded like very soon. He said he was closing in on his twenty, and as soon as he reached it he was turning in his shield.”

She took a drag off her cigarette, peered over the bright coal at me. “So he’s retiring. So what?”

“Last year, just before we climbed up to the quarry, you made a joke to him.”

She touched her chest. “I did.”

“
Sí
. You said something like ‘Maybe it’s time we retired.’”

Her eyes brightened. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s time we hung ’em up.’”

“And he said?”

She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and thought about it. “He said…” She jabbed the air with her cigarette several times. “He said he couldn’t afford to retire. He said something about medical bills.”

“His wife’s, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “She’d been in a car accident just before they were married. She wasn’t insured. He owed the hospital big.”

“So what happened to those medical bills? You think the hospital just said, ‘Ah, you’re a nice guy. Forget about it’?”

“Doubtful.”

“In the extreme. So a cop who was poor lies about knowing a key player in the McCready case, and six months later the cop’s got enough money to retire—not on the kind of money a cop gets after thirty years in, but somehow on the kind a cop gets after twenty.”

She chewed her lower lip for a minute. “Toss me a T-shirt, will you?”

I opened my dresser, took a dark green Saw Doctors shirt from the drawer, and handed it to her. She pulled it over her head and kicked away the sheets, looked around the room for her crutches. She looked over at me, saw that I was chuckling under my breath.

“What?”

“You look pretty funny.”

Her face darkened. “How’s that?”

“Sitting there in my T-shirt with a big white cast on your leg.” I shrugged. “Just looks funny is all.”

“Ha,” she said. “Ha-ha. Where are my crutches?”

“Behind the door.”

“Would you be so kind?”

I brought them to her and she struggled onto them, and then I followed her down the dark hall into the kitchen. The digital display on the microwave read 4:04, and I could feel it in my joints and the back of my neck, but not in my mind. When Broussard had mentioned Ray Likanski on the playground, something had snapped to attention in my brain, started marching double time, and talking with Angie had only given it more energy.

While Angie made half a pot of decaf and pulled cream from the fridge and sugar from the cupboard, I went back to that final night in the quarry, when it seemed we’d lost Amanda McCready for good. I knew a lot of the information I was trying to recall and sift through was in my case file, but I didn’t want to rely on those notes just yet. Poring over them would just put me back in the same place I’d been six months ago, while trying to conjure it all back up from this kitchen could bring a fresh perspective.

The kidnapper had demanded four couriers to bring Cheese Olamon’s money in return for Amanda. Why all four of us? Why not just one?

I asked Angie.

She leaned against the oven, crossed her arms, thought about it. “I’ve never even considered that. Christ, could I be that stupid?”

“It’s a judgment call.”

She frowned. “You didn’t question it.”

“I know I’m stupid,” I said. “It’s you we’re trying to decide on.”

“A whole dragnet,” she said, “swept those hills, locked down the roads around it, and they couldn’t find anyone.”

“Maybe the kidnappers had been tipped off to an escape route. Maybe some of the cops had been paid off.”

“Maybe there was no one up there that night besides us.” Her eyes shimmered.

“Holy shit.”

She bit down on her lower lip, raised her eyebrows several times. “You think?”

“Broussard fired those guns from his side.”

“Why not? We couldn’t see anything over there. We saw muzzle flashes. We
heard
Broussard saying he was under fire. But did we see him at all during that time?”

“Nope.”

“The reason, then, that we were brought up there was to corroborate his story.”

I leaned back in my chair, ran my hands through the hair along my temples. Could it be that simple? Or, maybe, could it be that devious?

“You think Poole was in on it?” Angie turned from the counter as steam rose from the coffeemaker behind her.

“Why do you say that?”

She tapped her coffee mug against her thigh. “He was the one who claimed Ray Likanski was his snitch, not Broussard’s. And, remember, he was Broussard’s partner. You know how that works. I mean, look at Oscar and Devin—they’re closer than husband and wife. A hell of a lot more blindly loyal to each other.”

I considered that. “So how did Poole play into it?”

She poured her coffee from the pot even though the machine was still percolating and coffee dripped through the filter, sizzled off the heating pan. “All these months,” she said as she poured cream into her cup, “you know what’s nagged me?”

“Give it to me.”

“The empty bag. I mean, you’re the kidnappers. You’re pinning a cop down to a cliff top and sneaking in to scoop up the money.”

“Right. So?”

“So you pause to open the bag and pull the money out? Why not just take the bag?”

“I don’t know. Either way, what difference does it make?”

“Not much.” She turned from the counter, faced me. “Unless the bag was empty to begin with.”

“I saw the bag when Doyle handed it to Broussard. It was bulging with money.”

“But what about by the time we reached the quarry?”

“He unloaded it during the walk up the hill? How?”

She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “I don’t know.”

I came out of my chair, got a cup from the cupboard, and it fell from my fingers, glanced the edge of the counter, and fell to the floor. I left it there.

“Poole,” I said. “Son of a bitch. It was Poole. When he had his heart attack or whatever it was, he fell on the bag. When it was time to go, Broussard reached under him and pulled the bag out.”

“Then Poole goes down the side of the quarry,” she said in a rush, “and hands off the bag to some third party.” She paused. “Kills Mullen and Gutierrez?”