A Confidential Source (37 page)

Ayers had stayed behind, but he’d demanded to be updated by cell phone. He wanted to know the minute the tape was secured
and had called once already while we were still in the parking lot. That had started Reuben and the Parka grumbling in their
native tongue.

We took a right and followed the river, toward the first footbridge. Most of the river was black at this hour, the extinguished
braziers creating unattractive lumps in the darkness, but there were lights above and under the bridges. I searched desperately,
hoping for a cop to emerge from the shadow into the light.

Contained by the river on one side and a stone wall on the other, the path was painfully narrow. I eyed the stone wall, which
was ten to twelve feet high and made of blocks that created natural footholds. But even if I could get out of the Parka’s
grip, there wasn’t enough distance. Even if I got to the wall, he’d shoot me like a fish in a barrel.

“Can we slow down?” I asked, shifting my weight and exaggerating my limp. “I can’t keep up.”

“After you find the fucking tape, we’ll slow down,” the Parka responded.

Emerging from the second footbridge, the path widened, with enough room for a few trees along the river and near the wall.
The Parka gripped me tighter as we passed the stairway to Memorial Drive, hurrying me past my chance for escape, but ahead,
at the Steeple Street bridge, there was another stairway, another street exit.

I peered up at the footbridges for a sign of a uniform. Even a maintenance man cleaning up the last of the WaterFire litter.
Anyone to call for help. But there was no one.

“Somewhere in there,” I said, pointing to ground cover just beyond where I’d actually tossed the tape in the narrow ribbon
of green along the river.

“Those aren’t fucking bushes. That’s fucking ivy,” the Parka said.

But he must have seen my darting eyes. He told Reuben to wait at the entrance to the stairway. My heart fell. There was no
way to get past him. The Parka stood over me, the gun pointed as I bent to my knees, only a few feet from the river’s edge.
I glanced up again, trying to will a cop to appear on the bridge. But no one came. I groped through the ivy, flailing through
the foliage, knowing I’d dropped the Altoids box at least five feet away.

I glanced at the bridge. Anyone, a jogger, a bum, someone I could call for help. But it was still too early. At least twenty
minutes or more until dawn. My fingers dug at the earth, around roots, futilely. No one came. No one was going to come. I
moved a few feet forward, closer to the stairway. “Maybe up this way,” I said, pointing to another clump of ivy.

The Parka remained standing over me, watching me forage. Wordlessly, I moved on to the next clump and the next. Finally, he
began to tire. He kept his gun pointed at me, but backed up across the path to where Reuben was now sitting on the bench.

As I moved past a tree to a clump of ivy at the river’s edge, my gaze caught a piece of wood floating in the murky, brown
water. It looked like a log from last night’s WaterFire that must have fallen off a fuel boat or broken free from the burning
pile at the brazier. I considered trying to grab it as a weapon. But then I had another thought.

The river was less than thirty feet wide, with a gondola platform diagonally across from me, on the other side. Directly in
front of me, about halfway across the river, there was one of the braziers from WaterFire. I’d swum in high school and my
lungs were in good shape from running. If I took a long, shallow dive, I might be able to stay underwater until I could hide
behind the brazier. The water was dark and I’d be hard to see. There was a chance I could make it.

I made a decision: I was not going to go back with these men. I was not getting back in the Cadillac no matter what. I’d rather
get shot here trying to escape than let the Parka take me back to Bootsie’s Roast Beef, where he could rape me first, where
it would take weeks for anyone to find my rotting corpse.

It must have been like the process of drowning, the part where you stop flailing wildly and gulping for air, because the last
of my fear dissipated. I no longer felt the pain in my ankle or in my ear. I didn’t care how cold the night was, or how cold
the water might be.

I noticed that the Parka was no longer actually aiming the gun at me. He was sitting on the bench next to Reuben with the
gun hanging from his hand as he watched me. I took a breath and moved to the clump of ivy closest to the water. The Parka
stretched his legs in front of him and leaned toward Reuben, saying something.

And then I heard the cell phone ring: Ayers calling for an update. The distraction I needed. My chance. When the Parka reached
for the phone on his belt, I pushed off my good ankle and dove into the river.

A shock of water, so cold it was like diving into slush. My chest tightened. I opened my eyes underwater, but couldn’t see
anything. I had to hope like hell I was going in the right direction, hope I was swimming in a straight line, hope I could
hold my breath long enough to make it to the brazier.

I heard someone shouting and then, through the water, a gunshot. I swam like mad through the cold, brown water. My hand whacked
something thick and globular that felt like a jellyfish. Only no kind of fish could survive in this river. I couldn’t think
about what it might actually be. I was running out of air. Had to find the brazier. Had to surface.

I knocked into something hard and lifted my head. I heard another gunshot and a splash of water. I’d. hit another log, a floating
piece of cedar. I couldn’t see the brazier anywhere. And then I realized that I must have bypassed it—and had swum toward
the gondola platform because it was now only a couple of feet away.

I heard another splash and looked back. Shit, Reuben was coming after me. My arms were cold, frozen under me as I pulled myself
onto the gondola platform. I had no choice but to make a run for it on my bad ankle. I had no choice but to hope the Parka
was a really shitty shot.

Pain began to spiral from my ankle to my hip. It was getting harder to ignore it. It was getting hard to take each step. I
reached a stairway that led to the Citizens Bank building and heard another gunshot. Something burned into the back of my
calf and my ankle buckled. My knee hit the cement. I tried to push myself up, but my leg was too weak and my arms were shivering
with cold. I heard the sound of a car somewhere in the distance; I looked up and saw a police cruiser in the parking lot.
Two cops jumped out.

I screamed for help. Within a minute, someone was lifting me up by the arms. “You’re bleeding,” the cop said. “She’s been
shot!” he called to someone else. And then the black river began to stream behind my eyes, and my body wavered as if swimming
through some new medium. The first light of sunrise dissolved and the sky was darker than ever.

*    *    *

I must have passed out, because I woke up on an examination bed in the emergency room at Rhode Island Hospital, covered in
blankets, my leg burning.

My wet jeans had been cut off and thrown on a chair. I was wearing a johnny and a nurse was cleaning up the back of my calf.
“Saline first. Then a little Betadine,” she said.

I winced. The pain of my leg cut through the momentary confusion. I’d been shot.

“The bullet just grazed you. The doctor says you’ll only need about eight stitches in your leg and probably four in your earlobe.”

I put my hand to my ear and fingered the bandage. My fingers smelled of something dark and sour. River water.

“You lost quite a bit of blood last night. You need to replenish your fluids,” the nurse continued. She gestured to a tall
plastic cup on a table beside the bed.

I took a sip. Apple juice. I closed my eyes, savoring its ordinariness. It was all over. I was in the hospital, safe.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Matt Cavanaugh standing in the doorway. His eyes were especially dark and ringed, as if he was
worried. And then I realized, he was worried about me.

He was completely rumpled, in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, and his hair was still mussed up on one side. He was studying me
intently, taking in the bandaged ear and leg, shaking his head. “Are you all right?”

For a moment, he sounded sweet and familiar, like someone I’d known for a long time. Like someone I’d expect to worry about
me. Then, he combed his hair with his fingers and stood straight, squaring his shoulders. A prosecutor again. He lifted himself
from the door frame and crossed his arms, waiting.

It took me a moment to realize what he was waiting for. “Obviously, I should have listened to you,” I said.

He smiled, but without too much triumph.

The nurse dabbed my leg a second time and my eyes opened wide with pain. Matt moved beside the bed and squeezed my hand. And
then he said to the nurse, “Can’t you give her something for the pain?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Really. It was just the antiseptic.”

This reminded the nurse that I needed antibiotics and she set off down the hall. When she’d gone, Matt sat down on the chair
beside the bed and, still holding my hand, told me that the Providence police had tipped him off about my distress call. “I’ve
been at the station all night, waiting to hear.”

Then he lowered his voice. “We got those assholes,” he said. “The guy who shot you and the other guy he was with. They’re
in custody.”

A wave of relief. “They were working for Gregory Ayers,” I said.

Matt didn’t say he knew that already, but the lack of surprise or indignation told me he’d been trying to prove Ayers’s involvement
in the ring for some time.

I thought about the tape, the microcassette in the ivy. It was critical evidence that never should have been in my pocket.
That never rightly belonged to me. “The tape…”

Matt was suddenly at attention, listening carefully.

“Leonard put a copy in my mailbox. It’s in the ivy along the river, inside an Altoids box, just past the footbridge, the one
right before Steeple Street.”

“On the opposite side from the gondola platform?”

I nodded.

A sheen of something came over his eyes. Gratitude, maybe? It almost looked like real affection. Then he offered another squeeze
of my hand and was gone.

C
HRONICLE
R
EPORTER
A
BDUCTED
.” Written by Jonathan Frizell, the story ran in Monday’s paper, the day after I came home from the hospital. The 24-point
headline was placed above the fold along with an atrocious photograph of me in a johnny while I was still in the emergency
room.

That whole next week I was besieged by requests for interviews from television, radio, and even my old newspaper, the
Boston Ledger.
I granted these interviews sparingly after consulting Dorothy first to make sure I said nothing that scooped our own investigative
team.

Gregory A. Ayers was picked up at home, charged in federal court as a coconspirator in the murder of Barry Mazursky, and held
without bail in the ACI, which was within view of his old lottery headquarters. Ayers was also charged with kidnapping, felony
assault, conspiracy to defraud the state lottery system, and misappropriation of state funds. He was going to be prosecuted
under the federal RICO act, which meant that Matt Cavanaugh would have to turn his case over to the feds.

It was strange to be the subject of a news event, instead of the reporter, and I had new sympathy, new understanding for the
people I’d quoted in the past. Had I gotten it right? Or altered it just slightly to smooth a transition in the writing? I
hoped it was the former, because now I could see that people do remember exactly what they said, how that differed from what
was in the paper, and what kind of phrase they would never in their life have uttered.

And the questions were always the same: How did it feel to be abducted? Was I afraid for my life? Was I shocked to discover
the evil side of kindly old Gregory Ayers?

I gave reporters the glaringly obvious answers I knew they needed for their stories and tried my best to be quotable, but
privately, I was frustrated. I didn’t want to be the subject of this story, I wanted to be the byline behind it. State corruption
of this magnitude was natural fodder for a Pulitzer and here I was forcibly sidelined by my editors, who insisted I take time
off to recover.

And sure, I was lying on my futon with my leg elevated, my sprained ankle still swollen, and both the back of my leg and earlobe
sore. And sure, I was still having dreams of the Parka chasing me through orangey smoke so thick I couldn’t breathe or see.
But the best way for me to get over the violence and ache of seared flesh was to get back to work. Get on with it.

Compulsively, I listened to round-the-clock television and radio coverage of the scandal and reread the week’s
Chronicle.
Nearly all of the stories were written, at least in part, by Frizell, who was a shoo-in for the job on the investigative
team.

Now, after almost a week of forced recovery, I sat restlessly on the futon with Frizell’s latest story on my lap, staring
at the art department’s rendition of the $250,000 scratch ticket I’d been offered. The graphic had become a logo for the series.

“It was probably counterfeit,” Walter said. My mother, who’d spent the first several days with me, had called him and he’d
come down from Boston after his shift this afternoon. He was standing at the stove heating up the quart of curried zucchini
soup Geralyn had made for me.

“No. Frizell’s story today said it was legit,” I corrected him. “The governor is launching an investigation into lottery procedures
to figure out how Ayers could have identified a winner like that from the inventory.”

The way a lot of the reporters, especially the television people, covered the bribe made me sound like a hero for not taking
it. But not Frizell. His story pointed out that even if I’d made the exchange, given him the real tape, Ayers would likely
have tried to kill me anyway.