The Whole Lie (24 page)

Savvy Kane pictures. A girl I'd loved, her neck snapped.

Blaine Lee pictures. Blood and hair and scalp jammed in a cracked windshield.

The pictures spun, danced, floated. The pictures became Vernon Lee of Level Cross.

The pictures were stained by red mist.

No wonder I couldn't pray. The pictures were the opposite of prayer.

The pictures made me thirsty.

Cut the shit.

“I'm sorry,” I said, whispering it.

I flopped back into the cot.

I lay awake a long time.

My last thought, over and over, when I finally drifted away:
Nobody can say I didn't try.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Funny things, words. The way their meaning bounces off you—until it doesn't.

In cold blood.

Found myself thinking those words early the next morning, Saturday. Full cup of coffee, full tank of gas.

I cruised.

I trawled.

I trawled for Vernon Lee.

I trawled in cold blood.

Driving east toward Winthrop, toward Moe's house, visor down against a cold hard sunrise, I tried to heat my blood with Moe images, Savvy images. Snapped necks, diaper shit-smears, Vernon the freak who had to be getting off on it all. Maybe he hadn't at first. But he was now.

I wanted red mist.

I didn't get it.

In cold blood.

Driving with one eye on my mirror. Trawling, hoping for the first time ever that I
would
pick up a tail.

Winthrop, Eastie, back through the tunnel, Mass Pike to the Allston/Brighton tolls, sun at my back now, climbing but not yet warming the day. Just driving to places I'd been. Vernon had followed me before. Maybe he'd follow me again.

I didn't know what the hell else to do.

Cold blood.

Barnburner experience could only take me so far, I realized on Mass Ave in Cambridge. Vernon Lee wasn't some gal's meth-head ex who needed a good scaring. He wasn't some third-rate shylock I could rattle with a couple of open-hand slaps.

Vernon Lee was a stone-cold killer, and whatever I was going to do to him I was going to do without a red-mist rage.

Could I?

Cold coffee. An illegal U-turn on Mass Ave. Back to the Pike onramp, feeling like a jackass.
Driving around hoping to pick up a tail.
That
was your plan? That was it?

I wished Randall was around to help me make a better one. Wondered how he was doing down in Level Cross, glanced at the side-view as I merged onto the Pike …

… and there it was. Green Expedition, gold trim, the Eddie Bauer model.

“Well I'll be damned,” I said out loud.

I may have smiled.

I drove. I led Vernon west. He planted himself two hundred yards behind me and stayed there. Did he
want
me to spot him, or was he just stupid?

I didn't care.

Got off the Pike at the Framingham exit. Drove slowly, signaled my turns, stopped looking in the mirror—didn't want to lose him, didn't want to scare him off. I worked my way through the strip-mall ghetto, banged a left on Concord Street, drove south.

Toward my part of Framingham.

I knew exactly where I was leading Vernon.

No more hemming and hawing about cold blood versus red mist. Pack that away. Do what you already decided to do.

Every couple of years, the Framingham powers that be made a Keystone Kops effort to supercharge the downtown area. The idea—or pipe dream—was to add businesses that weren't check-cashing joints or nail salons, maybe even businesses without a Brazilian flag in the window and a sign reading
PORTUGUES FALADO AQUI
. Framingham was drooling to attract hip restaurants, yuppie lofts, office condos.

The projects had a predictable arc: They always launched with fanfare and tax bucks, and they always dribbled to a close years later when some poor developer lost his shirt after being jerked around by the city.

Eight years ago, one developer who apparently hadn't learned this lesson had agreed to build a five-story concrete parking garage
before
he built the shopping-and-professional arcade it would service.

The garage got built. The arcade was a hole in the ground. The developer tanked.

Framingham.

I thought all this as I hung a left and approached the place, which hulked just off Route 135 near the Natick border. Five stories of ugly, maintained (sort of) at city expense, to service a vacant lot.

For me, right now, it was perfect.

I reached under the bench seat, pulled out a ball cap, grabbed my sunglasses. The garage would have surveillance cams. Some of them might even work. If they did, they'd be set up to grab license numbers. So no way was I pulling in.

Given my plans. The plans I'd made in cold blood.

Instead: I parked on 135, dodged through a hole in the fence made by junkies and thugs who liked to cut from a taco stand to the garage. I walked at a steady pace, not daring to turn and look for Vernon. Had to assume that once I'd sucked him this far, he'd make the full commitment.

I entered the garage, took a right, and sprinted to the first 180-degree turn, where concrete angled up to become Level Two. Dodged behind a post, listened. For maybe the third time in five years, I wished I had a gun. The damn things are like four-wheel drive: You hardly ever want it, but when you want it, you
really
want it.

Heard the gate buzz, heard the Expedition's low rumble as it came my way.

Good.

No stairs; that would ruin my sucker-hole plan. Instead, I double-timed up the ramps. The idea was to keep the SUV far enough back to stay curious, to always wonder if I'd be around the next corner.

Level Three. One of the many foolish things about this garage was that although it was plunked down in the suburbs, it'd been built to city scale for city-sized cars. So even at a walking pace, the Expedition's tires complained as it tracked the tight turns at either end. I maintained my double-time pace, never looking back, hoping Vernon's curiosity would beat out the alarms that ought to be going off in his head.

Level Four. The parked cars, thin to begin with, were nearly nonexistent up here, a few wrecks clustered near the elevators.

Level Five: rooftop. Nowhere else to go. Sudden sunlight made me glad for the sunglasses. The wind was a little stronger up here, making a cold day colder.

I ran hard toward the elevator area. Had a general idea what I was looking for, but needed some luck to find it.

Got some. There, propping open a stairwell door: a steel wheel from a car, thirteen inches in diameter, once silver, now mostly rust. I snagged it, skinning my knuckles on the deck, and duckwalked back to the only car on this level: an ancient pigeon-shit-covered Montego.

Squatting, I heard the Expedition's tires gripe their way around the corner, heard hesitation when Vernon didn't see what he expected to: me. He was looking at an empty rooftop, pigeon shit, and the Montego.

While Vernon tipped the throttle and slow-rolled my way, I gripped the steel wheel I planned to use as a weapon and thought about this structure … the rest of the story, as the radio guy used to say.

The rest of the story was that the contractor who'd lost his shirt was a friend of a friend, and I got to know him during the project. Hell, I was part of a crew who tried to talk him
out
of the project. We told him how Framingham worked. We pointed out the half-dozen abandoned efforts to yuppify downtown, we made him watch the all-day traffic jams caused by the train tracks, we asked how many big-time retail chains would welcome methadone clinics and bail bondsmen as neighbors.

Poor sap was too much of an optimist to listen. So I watched him piss away the business he'd built, his thrice-mortgaged house, and his kids' college funds putting up the world's least useful and least used garage.

Near the end, he'd wised up some. Not enough, but some. He threw in the towel on quality, for starters—said he was damned if he'd keep doing top-notch work while the planning commission and the zoning board and the banks jerked him around.

He skimped on rebar. He skimped on his mix.

Last time I saw him, he said if I ever parked in his joke of a garage, I'd best skip the top floors. Said a Boy Scout with a penknife could whittle those floors to nothing. Said you hit a main support with a shopping cart, you might bring the whole damn thing down—the concrete was no better'n what you'd buy in a sack at Home Depot.

I heard he was in Corpus Christie lately, working oil rigs when he could.

The Expedition would have doors that locked automatically once you reached five miles an hour. There would be no easy way inside that SUV. That was where my rusty wheel came in.

When he neared the Montego, Vernon slowed even more. He had to be puzzled, wondering where the hell I'd gone. I kept my head down.

The SUV drew level. Its V8 made a nice little whump-whump at idle.

I tightened my grip on the wheel.

The Expedition moved forward. There was nowhere else to go; Vernon was getting set to turn around and drive out.

Time to stop thinking.
Cold blood.

I rose and stepped from behind the Montego. Hooked a sharp left, flew at the driver's side of the Expedition. When Vernon spotted me from the corner of his eye, he hit the brakes and the SUV's nose dipped.

Perfect.

What happened next happened fast but felt slow. That was a good thing. It used to work the same way when I was driving well: The world just about froze, and it seemed every move I made was the right one.

I stepped toward the driver's door, raised the wheel over my head with both hands, whipped it straight at the window. Needed to smash glass. If I smashed Vernon's head, too, so much the better.

Steel shattered glass, and then my arms, head, and torso were inside the SUV. I got my feet on the running board, but before I could let go of the wheel and claw the lock open, something stung the meat of my right shoulder.
Hard.
And kept stinging.

Vernon was biting me.

I said, “Ow.”

Vernon hit the gas.

We picked up speed quick.

Or maybe it just felt that way when you had a steel wheel in your hands, a man's teeth buried in your shoulder, and a slick plastic running board under your boots.

We were moving fast now. I had maybe four seconds to figure this mess out.

I did the easy part first: Let go of the goddamn steel wheel, which dropped into the passenger seat. Then I glanced through the windshield and grabbed the steering wheel, wondering if I had room to turn us around.

No way, not with a Ford Expedition's turning radius. If I yanked the wheel, I'd just pull us into the wall on my side. And I didn't want to do that.

Yet.

Vernon's teeth in my shoulder were getting to be an annoyance. I wriggle-shrugged hard, trying to elbow his face while I did. It worked, although it felt like I left a chunk of shoulder in his mouth. He made an animal sound, an outraged growl.

Dead ahead, the low concrete wall was coming at us. With my head jammed in the steering wheel, I had a close-up of the speedometer. It said 28. Man, had I screwed up: I realized Vernon's plan was to ram the wall, busting my head against the steering wheel, maybe deploying the airbag against my temple as a bonus.

I needed to stop us.

I slapped at the column shifter, heard the engine scream with revs as I knocked us into neutral. It was a start.

I squeezed my torso between Vernon's legs, eeling toward the floor, blindly reaching around in the driver's footwell. We had to be damn close to that wall. My left hand reached, grasped, stabbed.

Got it.
I'd found the SUV's emergency brake. I shoved as hard as I could, felt us brake brake brake, the rear wheels locking …

… we nosed into the wall, and even though my ear slammed the brake pedal, I got very lucky: We tapped just hard enough to blow the airbags. I could tell because one of them hit my hip, hurting like hell.

The Expedition automatically shut down when the bags deployed.

It was quiet the way it's quiet right after it's loud.

But only for a moment: Vernon made his angry-bear noise again, fired the SUV, and popped it in reverse. Then he buried his foot in the throttle. While gassing us backward,
fast,
with his right foot, he tried to kick my head with his left.

A tiny part of my brain gave Vernon some credit: He was tough as hell. There weren't many who could take an airbag in the face, growl like a bear, and keep right on driving.

Moving ass-backward now, really cooking. Vernon's left shoe clipped my ear hard, and I faced facts: I was losing here. Upside down, shoulder-bit, kicked in the head, airbagged in the hip. I was on my way out.

One chance. Whatever was going to happen needed to happen
now
, while we were in reverse. I wriggled and pushed, eeling again but backward this time, needing to pull my head from the damn footwell where Vernon was kicking it.

A second or two before I would have grayed out, I made it: Got myself right-side up. Shook my head to clear it, elbow-smashed Vernon's face and chest a few times. Looked out the passenger window: Holy shit, we were flying. I had to get out, and it was going to hurt.

Wait wait wait, don't give him a chance to brake …

There! One final elbow-shot, then I propelled myself out the driver's window. I had a fifth of a second to tell myself to curl into a ball and land well.

Yeah, right. I flopped to concrete like a sack of suet. I hurt everywhere …

… but not for long, because I looked up in time to watch the green Expedition smash through concrete and drop five stories, a five-thousand-pound anvil.

I rose. I hobbled to the edge. I looked down.

Five stories. A gradual hillside rose to meet this side of the garage, but still: Call it a forty-five-foot drop into weeds and dirt. The SUV had hit ass-first, had continued over onto its roof. Impact had shortened it a full three feet.