Moonlight Mile (20 page)

“I know it. It’s closed now. Off-season.”

“Which is why nobody will be around to bother us, man. Go to the east gate. You’ll find a way in. Meet me by the main stage.”

“When?”

“Four hours. You bring the cross.”

“You bring Sophie.”

“You bring baby, too?”

“Right now all’s I got is the cross.”

“That’s a sucky deal, man.”

“It’s the only deal I got if you want that cross in Kirill’s house by Saturday night.”

“Bring the doctor, then.”

I glanced at Dre, who stared at me with wide eyes and a childlike giddiness that I assumed was pharmaceutically generated.

“Who says I even know where he is?”

Yefim sighed. “You too smart not to know we know more than we say we know.”

It took me a second to catch up to that sentence. “We?”

“Me,” he said. “Pavel. We. You part of something, my friend, something you not supposed to understand yet.”

“Really?”

“True. I’m playing her game, you play mine. Bring doctor.”

“Why?”

“I want to deliver message to him in person.”

“Mmmm,” I said. “Not so sure I like that.”

“Don’t worry, guy, I’m not going to hurt him. I need him. I just want to tell him personally how much I would like to see him back on the job. You bring him.”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Ho-kay,” Yefim said. “I see you soon.” He hung up.

Dre returned the cross to its hiding place beneath his pullover but not before I got a look at it. If I’d passed it in an antique shop, I would have guessed the price at fifty dollars, no more. It was black onyx, fashioned in the Russian Orthodox style, with Latin inscriptions carved into the top and bottom of the face. In the center was etched another cross along with a spear and a sponge above a small rise that I presumed represented Golgotha.

“Doesn’t seem worth a bunch of dead people through the ages, does it?” Dre said before slipping it under his collar.

“Most of the things that people kill for don’t.”

“To the assholes doing the killing they do.”

I held out my hand. “Why don’t you give it to me?”

He gave me a smile that was all teeth. “Fuck you.”

“No, really.”

“No, really.” He bugged his eyes at me.

“Seriously,” I said. “I’ll take it and I’ll do the swap. No need for you to risk your ass out there with these kinds of people. It’s not your thing, Dre.”

His smile widened. “You might have everyone else buying your good-guy bullshit, but you’re no different than anyone else. You get a chance to hold this in your hand? This artifact worth, I dunno, what van Goghs are worth? You’ll
think
about doing the right thing, but then you’ll just keep driving until you can find someone to fence it.”

“So, why don’t you?”

“What?”

“Steal it and fence it?”

“Because I don’t know any fences, man. I’m a pill-popping degenerate gambler, I’m not fucking Val Kilmer in
Heat
. The first person I trusted to help me move this would shoot me in the back of the head as soon as I turned my back. You, though, you do know fences, I bet, and you do know people you can trust in the criminal world. You’d be halfway to Mexico with this thing if you could.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Your aw-shucks shtick doesn’t fool me.”

“Apparently not,” I said. “Darn. Let me ask you—why does Yefim seem to know everything about us right now but yet he somehow can’t find us?”

“What does he know about us?”

“He knows we’re together. He even made a reference to this being Amanda’s game, and all of us caught playing it.”

“And you doubt that?”

• • •

An hour later, we set out for the Comcast Center at Great Woods in Mansfield. As we walked out to Dre’s Saab, he removed the key from his key chain and handed it to me.

“It’s your car,” I said.

“Given my substance abuse issues, do you really want me behind the wheel?”

I drove the Saab. Dre rode shotgun and stared dreamily out the window.

“You’re not on just booze,” I said.

He turned his head. “I took a couple Xanax. You know . . .” He looked back out the window.

“A couple? Or three?”

“Three, actually, yeah. And a Paxil.”

“So pills and liquor, that’s your prescription for dealing with the Russian mob.”

“It’s brought me this far,” he said and dangled the photo fob of Claire in front of his blurry eyes.

“Why the hell do you have a picture of the kid?” I said.

He looked over at me. “Because I love her, man.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “Or something like love.”

Half a minute later, he was snoring.

• • •

It’s rare you deal with any
KIND
of illegal swap where the party with the power doesn’t change the meeting place at the last minute. It tends to root out the threat of law enforcement surveillance, because it’s hard to set up audio bugs on the fly, and teams of black-clad federal agents weighted down with boom mikes, recorder bags, and infrared telephoto lenses are easier to spot when they’re scrambling around in the background.

So, I assumed Yefim would call to change the meet at the last minute, but I still wanted to get a lay of the land in case he didn’t. I’d been to the Comcast Center at least two dozen times in my life. It was an outdoor amphitheater cut into the woods of Mansfield, Massachusetts. I’d seen Bowie open for Nine Inch Nails there. I’d seen Springsteen and Radiohead. A year back, I saw the National open for Green Day and thought I’d died and gone to alt-rock heaven. Which is to say, I knew the layout pretty well. The amphitheater was a bowl with a long, high slope running down to it, and lower, wider slopes curving around in gradual swirls, so that if you continued to walk in a circle one way, you would eventually run out of road at the amphitheater itself. And if you walked in a circle the other way, you would eventually reach the parking lot. They set up the T-shirt kiosks on these slopes alongside the beer booths and the booths for cotton candy, baked pretzels, and foot-long hot dogs.

Dre and I walked around for a bit as a hesitant snow fell in the gathering dusk. Flakes appeared in the darkening air like fireflies, then melted on contact with whatever they touched—a wooden booth, the ground, my nose. At one of the wooden booths near a stand of turnstiles, I looked right and left and realized Dre was no longer with me. I turned back and walked up one slope and then down another, following my faint footsteps on the dampening pavement. I saw where his broke off and I used the last one I could make out as an arrow. I was walking past the VIP box seats toward the stage when my phone rang.

“Hello.”

It was Amanda. “Where are you guys?”

“One could ask you the same thing.”

“
My
location doesn’t matter right now. I just got a call that they’ve changed the location of your meeting. What meeting is that, by the way?”

“We’re at the Comcast Center. Who called?”

“A guy with a thick Russian accent. Any other stupid questions? He said Yefim is having trouble getting through to your cell.”

“How’d the Russians get your number?”

“How’d they get
yours
?”

I didn’t have an answer for that one.

“The meeting’s changed to a train station,” she said.

“Which one?”

“Dodgeville.”

“Dodgeville?” I repeated. I vaguely remembered seeing the name on packages when I’d loaded trucks in college but I couldn’t have pointed it out on a map. “Where the hell’s that?”

“According to a map I’m looking at, go to 152 and head south. Not far. They said only one of you can leave the car with the cross. So you have the cross, I take it.”

“Dre does, yeah.”

“They said bring the cross or they’ll kill Sophie in front of you. Then they’ll kill you.”

“Where are—?”

She’d hung up.

I came to the bottom of the aisle, found Dre sitting on the edge of the stage, looking out at the seats.

“Meeting location’s been changed.”

He didn’t seem surprised. “That’s what you predicted.”

I shrugged.

“Must be great,” he said, “being right all the time.”

“That’s how I come off, uh?”

He stared at me. “People like you wear your self-righteousness like—”

“Don’t blame me because you fucked your life up. I don’t judge you for any of that.”

“Then what do you judge me for?”

“Trying to get into the pants of a sixteen-year-old.”

“In many cultures that’s considered normal.”

“Then move to one of those cultures. Here, it just means you’re a douche bag. You don’t like yourself? Don’t put it on me. You don’t like the way your life turned out? Welcome to the club.”

He looked out at the seats, suddenly wistful. “I played a pretty mean bass in this band I had in high school.”

I managed not to roll my eyes.

“All these things we could have been,” he said. “You know? But you gotta choose a path, so you choose it, and you find yourself exiting med school knowing only one thing for certain—that you’re going to be a subpar doctor. How do you embrace your own mediocrity? How do you accept that in any race, for the rest of your life, you’ll arrive with the back of the pack?”

I leaned against the stage with him and said nothing. It was quite the view—all those seats. Beyond it, the great lawn of general seating rising into the dark sky under gently falling snow. Most nights in July, it would be full. Twenty thousand people chanting and screaming and swaying, pumping their fists toward the sky. Who wouldn’t want to stand onstage and have that view?

On some minor level, I felt bad for Dre. He’d been told by someone—a mother, I assumed—that he was special. Probably told it every day of his life, even as the evidence mounted that it was a lie, however well-intentioned. And now here he was, first career in shambles, second career about to be, and probably unable to remember the last time he’d made it through a day without substance abuse.

“You know why I never had any qualms about brokering baby sales?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Because nobody knows nothing.” He looked over at me. “You think the state knows any better about placing kids? You think anyone does? We don’t know shit. And by we, I mean all of us. We all showed up at the same shitty semiformal and we hope that somehow everyone will buy that we are what we dressed up as. A few decades of this, and what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens. We learn nothing, we don’t change, and then we die. And the next generation of fakers takes our place. And that? That’s all there is.”

I clapped him on the back. “I see a future in self-help for you, Dre. We got to motor.”

“Where?”

“Railway station. Dodgeville.”

He hopped off the stage and followed me up the aisle.

“Quick question, Patrick.”

“What’s that?”

“Where the fuck’s Dodgeville?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

D
odgeville, as it turned out, was one of those towns so small I’d always thought it was just an extension of another town—in this case, South Attleboro. As far as I could tell, it didn’t even have a traffic light, just one stop sign about six miles from the Rhode Island border. Idling there, I saw an RR sign to my left. So I turned left off Route 152, and after a few hundred yards, the train station appeared, as if dropped there, in an otherwise uninterrupted stretch of woodlands. The tracks ran straight into the forest—just a hard line that vanished into cowls of red maple. We pulled into the parking lot. Other than the tracks and the platform, there wasn’t much to see—no stationhouse to protect against December’s bite, no Coke machines or bathrooms. A couple of newspaper stands by the entrance stairs. Deep woods on the far side of the tracks. On the near side, the platform on the same level as the rails, and the parking lot we’d pulled into, which was lit with sallow white light, the snow spinning like moths under the bulbs.

My phone vibrated. I opened the text:

One of you bring cross to platform. One of you stay in car.

Dre had craned his head to look at the message. Before I could reach for my door, he’d reached for his and was out of the car.

“I got this,” he said. “I got this.”

“No, you—”

But he walked away from the car and out of the parking lot. He climbed the short steps to the platform and stood in the center. From where he stood, a strip of hard black rubber fringed in bright yellow paint extended across the track.

He stood there for a bit as the snow fell harder. He took two or three steps to the right, then four or five to the left, then back to the right again.

I saw the light before he did. It was a circle of yellow bouncing in the woods, a flashlight beam. It rose, then fell and rose halfway back up again before it slid left, then right. It made the same movement a second time—the sign of the cross—and this time Dre’s head turned toward it and locked on. He raised one hand. He waved. The light stopped moving. Just hovered in the woods directly across from Dre, waiting.

I rolled down my window.

I heard Dre say, “No worries,” and cross the tracks. The snow grew thicker, some of the flakes starting to resemble bolls of cotton.

Dre entered the woods. I lost sight of him. The flashlight beam vanished.

I reached for my door, but my cell vibrated again.

Stay in the car.

I kept the phone open on my lap and waited. It wouldn’t be much of a task to simply hit Dre over the head, take the cross, and disappear into the woods with Sophie, the cross, and my peace of mind. My left hand clenched the door handle. I flexed the fingers, relaxed. Ten seconds later, I found myself clenching the handle again.

The cell phone screen lit up:

Patience, patience.

In the woods, the yellow light reappeared. It hovered, steady, about three feet off the ground.

My cell vibrated, but it wasn’t a text this time, it was an incoming call from a restricted number.

“Hello.”

“Hey, my . . .” Yefim’s voice dropped out for a second. “ . . . you at?”

“What?”

“I said where . . . ?”

The phone went dead in my ear.

I heard something thunk into the gravel on the near side of the platform. I peered out the windshield, but I couldn’t see anything, with the hood of the Saab in the way. I kept looking anyway, because that’s what you do. I gave the wipers a quick flick on and off and sloughed off the snow. A few seconds later, Dre appeared at the same spot in the woods where he’d vanished. He was moving fast. He was alone.

My phone vibrated. I heard a horn. I looked down and saw
RESTRICTED NUMBER
on my screen.

“Hello?”

“Where you?”

“Yefim?”

The windshield vanished behind a cloak of mud. The Saab shook so hard the dashboard rattled. The seat shimmied beneath me. An empty coffee cup tipped out of the cup holder and fell to the floor mat on the passenger side.

“Patrick? . . . you go . . . I no . . . stage.”

I flicked on the wipers. The mud swept right and left, thinner than mud, I realized, as an Acela blew through the station. “Yefim? You keep dropping out.”

“Can . . . hear . . . guy?”

I got out of the car because I couldn’t see Dre anymore, noticed my hood was speckled with whatever had hit my windshield.

“I can hear you now. Can you hear me?”

Dre wasn’t on the platform.

He was nowhere.

“I . . . fuck . . .”

The connection died. I flipped my phone closed, looked left and right down the platform. No Dre.

I turned back around and looked down the line of cars beside my own. There were six of them, spread out, but I saw the same liquid splashed across their hoods and windshields under the weak white lights. The Acela had vanished into the trees, going the kind of fast you thought only jets could go. The wet cars and wet platform glistened with something besides melting snow.

I turned my head, looked at the platform, turned again, looked at the cars.

Dre wasn’t anywhere.

Because Dre was everywhere.

• • •

I found a flashlight and two plastic supermarket bags in the trunk of Dre’s car. I put the bags over my shoes and used the handles to tie knots around my ankles. Then I walked through the blood to the platform. I found one of his shoes down the track, tucked into the inside of the rail. I found what could have been an ear a few feet farther down on the platform. Or it could have been part of a nose. Apparently, an Acela going top-speed didn’t run you over; it blew you up.

On my walk back up the tracks, I spotted a shoulder between the track and the woods. That was the last of Dre I ever saw.

I went to the spot where he’d entered and exited the woods. I shone my flashlight in there, but all I could see were dark trees with clumps of leaves pooled at their bases. I could have gone in farther, but (a) I don’t like woods; and (b) I was running out of time. The Acela passed through Mansfield station, three miles up, and there was a chance someone would spot blood on the front of it or along the side.

Yefim, I could assume, had long since left and taken Sophie and the cross with him.

I walked back across the tracks and at first I didn’t compute what I saw there. Part of me understood it enough to hold the flashlight beam in place, but the other half of me couldn’t make sense of it.

I bent by the gravel between the tracks and the fence that rimmed the parking lot. I’d heard a thunk as it landed, as someone, for who knew what reason, tossed it from the woods to the other side of the tracks. And Dre had come rushing out after it and stepped into the path of over six hundred tons of steel traveling 160 miles an hour.

The Belarus Cross.

I pinched the top left corner of it and lifted it out of the gravel. It was speckled with evaporating snow that revealed it was as bloody as the windshields in the parking lot, as bloody as the platform and the trees and the stairs I descended to Dre’s car. I popped the trunk and sat on the edge and removed the plastic bags and placed them in a third plastic bag. I found a rag in the trunk, and I used it to wipe off the cross as best I could. I tossed the rag into the plastic bag and tied off the handles. I took the bag and the cross up front with me and placed them on the passenger seat and got the hell out of Dodgeville.