Moonlight Mile (19 page)
I finally trusted myself to speak. “And you think—”
“No think. I know. That little girl has it. Or that fucking card-junkie doctor. Oh, you tell him to get back to work. You tell him we need him so much we won’t take a finger. We take a toe. He don’t need a toe as much and he need his finger. So, yeah, he’ll limp. People limp. Get me that cross, get me that baby, man. I’ll—”
“No deal.”
“I just told—”
“I know what you just told me, you fucking hump. You threaten my wife? You threaten my daughter? One thing happens to them, or my friend calls and says he saw one of you Stallone-in-
Nighthawks
-looking motherfuckers at the strip mall? I’ll burn your whole fucking organization to the ground. I’ll—”
He was laughing so hard I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
“Ho-kay,” he said finally, still chugging out a trail of soft giggles. “Ho-okay, Meester Kenzie. You funny guy, my main friend. Funny, funny guy. You know where my cross is?”
“I might. You know where Sophie is?”
“Not anymore, but I can find her plenty fast.” He chuckled again. “Where you come up with ‘hump,’ man? I never hear that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Old tape, I guess.”
“I like it. I can use it?”
“Help yourself.”
“Say to some guy, ‘You pay me money or else, you, you hump.’ Ha.”
“All yours.”
“I find Sophie. You find cross. I’ll call you later.”
He laughed once more and hung up.
• • •
I was still shaking when I got back into the house, the adrenaline swirling at the base of my skull so badly I got a headache.
“Tell me about the Belarus Cross.”
Dre looked like he’d hit the flask a few more times while I was out on the porch. Angie sat in the armchair closest to the hearth. She looked so small, for some reason, so lost. She gave me a look I couldn’t quite read but it was pained, even forlorn. Amanda sat at the far end of the couch, a video baby-monitor on the end table beside her. She’d been reading
Last Night at the Lobster
and she put it on the coffee table, spine bent, and looked at me.
“Who were you talking to?”
“The Belarus Cross,” I said.
“You were talking to a cross?”
“Amanda.”
She shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The what?”
I didn’t have time for this. Which left me with two options—threat or promise.
“They’ll let you keep the baby.”
She sat up. “What?”
“You heard me. If this genius over here”—I nodded at Dre—“can come up with another baby pronto, they’ll let you keep Claire.”
She turned on the couch. “Can you?”
“It’s possible.”
“Fucking Dre,” she said, “can you or not?”
“I don’t know. There’s one girl who’s close. I mean, she
could be
in early labor or it could just be false labor. With the equipment I have at my disposal, it’s an inexact science.”
Amanda’s jaw clenched and unclenched. She used both hands to pull her hair behind her head. She slowly twirled it into a ponytail and took a band off the side table and tied it off.
“So you talked to Yefim.”
I nodded.
“And he was explicit.”
“Couldn’t have been clearer—give them the cross and
a
baby, and they forget all about you.”
She’d pulled into herself, her knees up to her chest, bare feet clutching the couch cushion. Pulling the hair off her face should have made her features sharper and less vulnerable, but it managed to have the opposite effect. She looked like a child again. A petrified child.
“Did you believe him?”
I said, “I believe he believed it. Whether he can float it past Kirill and his wife, that’s another issue.”
“This all started because Kirill saw a picture of Sophie. That’s one of the”—she looked down the couch—“services Dre provides, the pictures. Kirill and Violeta saw Sophie, and I guess she looked like Violeta’s younger sister or something and, from that point, they wanted Sophie’s baby, no one else’s.”
“So it might be more complicated than Yefim lets on.”
“It’s always more complicated,” she said. “How old are
you
?”
I gave that a small smile.
Amanda looked down the couch at Dre, who sat there like a dog waiting for her to say “park” or “supper.”
“Even if he could supply another baby, wouldn’t we be doing the same thing—giving a child over to two psychopaths?”
I nodded.
“Can you live with that?”
I said, “I came here to find you and get Sophie out of their hands. That’s as far as I’ve thought.”
“How nice for you.”
“Hey, Amanda? People who live in glass houses with kidnapped babies shouldn’t throw stones.”
“I know, it’s just that it sounds so much like the kind of logic that sent me back to Helene twelve years ago.”
“I’m not playing this record right now. You want to hash all that shit out at some quieter time, I’ll be your Huckleberry. But right now we need to get them this Belarus Cross and, if possible, convince them we’ll get them another baby.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Get them another baby?”
She nodded.
“I don’t have a clue, but I do know the cross will buy us time. It’s supposed to be on display in Kirill’s house by Saturday night. If it’s not there, I have no doubt they’ll kill all of us, my family included. We get it to them, though, it’ll buy us another couple of days on the baby issue.”
Angie’s eyes had widened and she glared at me.
“Sounds good to me,” Dre said.
“I’m sure it does,” Amanda said. She turned back to me. “What if they renege? All Yefim has to do is figure out where I am, and there’s not too many places for me to hide. You found us in one morning. What’s to stop him from getting the cross and then coming right up the road for the baby?”
“His word that he wouldn’t is all I got to go on.”
“And you’d take it—the word of an assassin who goes all the way back to the Solntsevskaya Bratva in Moscow?”
“I don’t even know what that is,” I said.
“A gang,” she said, “a brotherhood. Think the Crips or the Bloods with military discipline and connections going all the way to the top of the Russian oil conglomerates.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. That’s where Yefim got his start. And you’ll take his word?”
“No,” I said. “I won’t. But what’s our alternative?”
After a couple of tentative yelps, the baby started crying full-force. We could hear her on the monitor and we could hear her through the door. Amanda slid off the couch and slipped on her flats. She took the monitor with her into the bedroom.
Dre took another drink from his flask. “Fuck-ing Russians.”
“Why don’t you slow down?” I said.
“You were right.” He took another drink. “Earlier.”
“About what?”
He ground the back of his head into the couch, his eyes rolling back toward the bedroom door. “Her. She doesn’t like me very much, I don’t think.”
“Why’s she with you, then?” Angie asked.
He exhaled up toward his own eyes. “Even Amanda, cool as she is, needs help with a newborn. Those first couple weeks? You’re going to the supermarket every five minutes—diapers, formula, more diapers, more formula. The kid’s up every ninety minutes, wailing. Ain’t much in the way of sleep or freedom.”
“You’re saying she needed a gofer.”
He nodded. “But she’s got the hang of it now.” He let loose a soft and bitter chuckle. “I thought when we first met, you know, here’s my shot—an innocent girl, untouched, uncorrupted, of
blazing
intelligence. I mean, she can quote Shaw, she can quote Stephen Hawking, she’s so cool she can quote
Young Frankenstein,
get into a debate with you on quantum physics and the lyrics to ‘Monkey Man’ on the same night. She likes Rimbaud and Axl Rose, Lucinda Williams and—”
“This going to go on for a while?” Angie said.
“Huh?”
I said, “It sounds like you thought you could mold Amanda into your very own Nexus 6 model of every chick who dumped on you in high school.”
“No, it wasn’t like that.”
“It was exactly like that. This version wouldn’t take a shit on you, she’d adore you. And you could sit up all night and give her your rap about Sigur Rós or the metaphorical significance of the rabbit in
Donnie Darko
. And she’d just bat her eyes and ask where you’d been all her life.”
He looked down at his lap. “Hey, fuck you,” he whispered.
“Fair enough.”
I could see the child I’d found after seven months, playing on a porch not far from here with an openhearted woman who’d adored her, and a bulldog named Larry. If I’d left her there, who would she be now? Maybe she’d be a basket case who remembered just enough of her life before she’d been snatched from a neglectful mother to know that her life here with Jack and Patricia Doyle was a lie. Or maybe she’d have very little memory of her time with a white-trash alcoholic in a three-decker apartment in Dorchester that smelled of carpet funk and Newports, so little that she’d live a well-adjusted life in small-town America and all she’d know of identity theft and credit card fraud and Russian killers from the Solntsevskaya Bratva would be things she picked up watching
60 Minutes
. Even if Amanda had never been kidnapped in the first place, with Helene for a mother, her chances of growing up a healthy, well-adjusted child were somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred million to one. So the kidnapping had, in some demented way, exposed her to the knowledge that another way of life existed. One that wasn’t her mother’s life of fast food and full ashtrays. Of collection notices and ex-con boyfriends. After she’d glimpsed the world of this tiny mountain town, she’d decided to will her way back to it. And maybe, from that point on, will became her defining character trait.
“They won’t just let this go,” Dre said, “no matter what Yefim told you.”
“Why not?”
“For starters?” he said. “Somebody’s got to pay for Timur.”
“Who’s Timur?” Angie asked, coming over to the couch.
“He was a Russian.”
“Yeah? What happened to him?”
“We kinda killed him.”
S
o you kinda killed a Russian named Timur to get the Belarus Cross.”
“No,” he said.
“No you didn’t kill him?”
“Well, yes, but we didn’t do it to get the Belarus Cross. We didn’t know shit about the Belarus Cross until we opened the suitcase.”
“What suitcase?” Angie sat on the edge of the couch.
“The one handcuffed to Timur’s wrist.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”
Dre considered his flask but returned it to his pocket. He played with a key chain instead, swinging the keys absently around a hard plastic fob, which encased a picture of Claire. “You heard of Zippo?”
“Sophie’s boyfriend,” Angie said.
“Yeah. Notice how no one’s seen him around in a while?”
“It did come to our attention.”
He lay back on the couch like he was in a shrink’s office. He dangled the key chain above his head so that the picture of Claire swung back and forth over his face, the shadow passing over his nose. “There’s an old movie memorabilia warehouse in Brighton, right along the Mass Pike. You go in there, you’d see an entire floor devoted to posters, half of them oversize European ones. Second floor is props and costumes; you want the NYU philosophy degree that Swayze had on his wall in
Roadhouse,
they got it there, not in L.A. Russians got all sorts of weird shit there—Sharon Stone’s chaps from
The Quick and the Dead,
one of Harry’s fur suits from
Harry and the Hendersons
. They also have a third floor no one goes to, because that’s where the delivery and postdelivery rooms are.” He wiggled his fingers. “I’m a doctor, lest we forget, and these babies can’t be documented at a hospital. The moment they enter the system, they’re traceable. So we deliver them at a movie memorabilia warehouse in Brighton and they’re usually on a plane out of town three days later. Some special cases, they’re out the door as soon as the cord is cut.”
“Which was the case with Claire.” Angie leaned forward, chin on her hand.
He held up one finger. “Which was
supposed to
be
the case with Claire. But it wasn’t just me and Sophie in the delivery room. Amanda was there and so was Zippo. I’d advised strongly against it. It was going to be hard enough to give the baby up without actually seeing her be born. But Amanda overruled me, as Amanda is wont to do. And we were all in there when Sophie gave birth.” He sighed. “It was an incredible birth. So smooth. Sometimes it goes that way with young mothers. Normally it doesn’t, but sometimes . . .” He shrugged. “This was one of those times. So we’re all standing there, passing this baby around, laughing, crying, hugging—I actually hugged Zippo, though I couldn’t stand the kid in real life—and the door opens and there’s Timur standing there. Timur was a giant, a bald, big-eared, face-only-a-blind-mother-could-love Chernobyl baby. You think I’m kidding but, no, he was literally born in Chernobyl in the mid-eighties. A mutant freak, Timur. And a drunk and a crank addict. All the positives. He comes through the door for the pickup. He’s early, he’s fucked up, and he’s got a suitcase cuffed to his wrist.”
I started seeing it now—five people walk into a room, two die, but four walk out. “So he’s not taking no for an answer.”
“Not taking ‘no’?” Dre sat up and put the key chain in his jeans. “Timur crashes into the room, says, ‘I take baby,’ and goes to cut the umbilical cord. I swear to Christ—I never saw anything like it. He grabs the surgical shears, starts coming toward me with them, I’m holding the baby, we’ve all just been laughing and hugging and crying and here’s this Chernobyl mutant coming at me with surgical shears. He’s got them open and he’s heading right for the umbilical cord, one eye closed ’cause he’s so fucked up he’s seeing double, and that’s when Zippo jumps on his back and cuts his throat with the scalpel. I mean, just opens it from one side to the other.” He covered his face in both hands for a moment. “It was the worst fucking thing I ever saw and I did my ER internship in Gary, Indiana.”
I hadn’t heard anything from the back bedroom in a while. I stood.
Dre didn’t even notice. “Here’s the best part. Timur the Chernobyl Mutant? Even with his throat cut, he flips Zippo off his back and as soon as Zippo hits the ground, Timur shoots him three times in the chest.”
I stood by the bedroom door, listening.
“So now we’ve got this freak of nature with a cut throat pointing a gun at us, and we’re all going to die, right? But then his eyes roll back to whites and he drops toward the floor and he’s already gone by the time he lands.”
I knocked softly on the bedroom door.
“We don’t know what to do at first, but then we realize no matter what happens, they’ll probably kill us. Kirill loved Timur. Treated him like his favorite dog. Which, when you think of it, he was.”
I knocked softly again. I tried the door. It was open. I pushed it inward and looked in at an empty bedroom. No baby. No Amanda.
I looked back at Dre. He didn’t seem surprised. “She gone?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s gone.”
“She does that a lot,” he said to Angie.
• • •
We stood out back, looking at a small yard and a strip of gravel that ran along the edge of the yard in a downward slope and ended at a thin dirt alley. Across the alley was another yard, much bigger, and a white Victorian with green trim.
“So, you had another car back here,” I said.
“You’re the private investigators. Aren’t you supposed to check for stuff like that?” He took a snort of the clean mountain air. “It’s a stick.”
“Huh?”
“Amanda’s car. A little Honda thing. She just dropped the emergency brake and rolled to the alley, took a right.” He pointed. “She made the road in about ten seconds from there, would be my guess, and then she turned the engine over, popped it into first.” He whistled through his lower teeth. “And a-way she went.”
“Nice,” I said.
“She does it a lot, like I said. She’s half-jackrabbit. Anything bothers her, she just leaves. She’ll be back.”
“What if she doesn’t come back?” I said.
He plopped down on the couch again. “Where’s she going to go?”
“She’s the Teenage Great Impostor. She can go anywhere.”
He held up an index finger. “Correct. But she doesn’t. This whole time on the run, I’m like you—I’ve been advocating foreign countries, islands. Amanda won’t go for it. This is where she was happy once, this is where she wants to stay.”
“It’s a nice sentiment,” Angie said, “but no one’s that sentimental with their life on the line, and Amanda strikes me as far less sentimental than most.”
“Yet”—he raised his hands to the sky—“here we are.” He hugged his arms. “I’m cold. Heading back in.”
He went back inside. I started to follow, but Angie said, “Hang on a sec.”
She lit a cigarette and her hands shook. “Yefim threatened our daughter?”
“It’s what they do to rattle you.”
“But it’s what
he
did. Yes?”
After a moment, I nodded.
“Well, it worked. I’m rattled.” She took a few quick puffs off her cigarette, and for a time she wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You gave your word to Beatrice you’d find Amanda and bring her home. And you . . . baby, you’d break yourself in half before you’d break your word, which is what I probably love most about you. You know that?”
“I do.”
“You know how
much
I love you?”
I nodded. “Of course. Gets me through more than you know, believe me.”
“Back at ya.” She gave me a shaky smile and took another shaky toke off her shaky cigarette. “So you have to honor your word. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
I saw where this was going. “But you don’t have to.”
“Exactly. ‘It’s who you give your word to.’ ” She smiled, her eyes filling.
“You know how hot it is that you can quote
The Wild Bunch
?”
She gave me a faux curtsy, but then her face returned to something serious and addled.
“I don’t care about these people,” she said. “I mean, did you listen to that story in there? That turd isn’t just a turd, he’s a
monster
turd. He sells babies. In a just world, he would be getting raped in prison, not sitting in a warm living room in a pretty little town. And now my daughter’s in
danger
? Because of them?” She pointed at the house. “It’s not an acceptable risk-versus-reward equation for me.”
“I know.”
“Knowing that they
know
she’s in Savannah? She’s not going to sleep tonight without me.”
I told her that I’d alerted Bubba and that he’d let me in on the backup he’d brought down South with him, but it didn’t seem to do much to allay her fears.
“That’s nice,” she said. “It is. He’s Bubba and he’d die protecting her. I don’t doubt that. But, baby? I’m her
mother
. And I need to get to her. Tonight. No matter what it takes.”
“Which is what I love most about you.” I took her free hand. “You’re her mom. And she needs her mom.”
She laughed, but it was a torn, wet laugh, and she ran the heel of her hand under each eye. “Her mom needs her.”
She draped her arms over my shoulders and we kissed in the bright cold, which made the smooth warmth of her tongue even warmer, even smoother.
When we broke the kiss, she said, “There’s a bus station in Lenox.”
I shook my head. “Don’t be ridiculous. Take the Jeep and drive like, well, me. Leave the car in long-term parking at the airport. If I need it, I’ll come get it.”
“How will you get home?”
I put my hand on her cheek for a moment, thinking how outrageously lucky I was to have met her and married her and become a parent with her. “Have you ever, in your life, known me to have a problem getting where I need to get?”
“You are a marvel of self-sufficiency.” She shook her head, the tears coming now. “But we’re breaking you of that, you know, your daughter and me.”
“Oh, I noticed.”
“You did?”
“I did.”
Her hug was crushing, her hands gripping the back of my head and neck like it was all that kept her from drowning in the Atlantic.
We walked around the front of the house to the Jeep. I handed her the keys. She got in and we traded another full minute of inappropriate public affection before I stepped back from the driver’s window.
Angie put the Jeep in drive, looked out the window at me. “How come they can find our daughter in Georgia but they can’t find one sixteen-year-old girl in Massachusetts?”
“A fair question.”
“A sixteen-year-old girl toting a baby around a town with a population of, at best, two thousand?”
“Sometimes hiding in plain sight is the best cover.”
“And sometimes if something smells it’s because it’s rotten, babe.”
I nodded.
She blew me a kiss.
“As soon as you see our daughter,” I said, “shoot me a photo of her.”
“Love to.” She looked back at the house. “I don’t know how I did this for fifteen years. I don’t know how you do it now.”
“I don’t think about it.”
She smiled. “Sure you do.”
• • •
I let myself back into the
HOUSE
and found Dre plopped on the couch watching
The View,
Babs and the girls chatting about global warming with Al Gore. The nitwit blonde with the concentration-camp collarbones asked him to explain a study she’d read that linked global warming to cow flatulence. Al smiled and looked like he’d rather be getting a colonoscopy during a root canal. My cell phone vibrated—the restricted number again.
“It’s Yefim,” I said.
Dre sat up. “I have it.”
“What?”
“The cross.” He grinned like a little boy. He reached under the collars of his pullover and the henley beneath it. He pulled out a leather cord hung around his neck. A cross dangled from it, thick and black. “I gots it, baby. You tell Yefim—”
I held up a finger to him and answered the phone.
“Hello, Patrick, you hump.”
I smiled. “Hello, Yefim.”
“You like? I used ‘hump’ for you.”
“I like.”
“You got my cross, man?”
It hung against Dre’s upper chest. It was black and the size of my hand.
“I have your cross.”
Dre gave me a double thumbs-up and another idiotic grin.
“We meet, then. Go to Great Woods.”
“What?”
“Great Woods, man. The Tweeter Center. Oh, hang on.” I heard him place his hand over the phone and speak to someone. “I been told it’s not called Great Woods or the Tweeter Center no more. It’s called—what? Hang on, Patrick.”
“The Comcast Center,” I said.
“It’s called the Comcast Center,” Yefim said. “You know it, right?”
