Finders Keepers (41 page)

“Mom?” She runs inside. There's nothing on the stove. “Mo—”

An arm grabs her around the middle, hard. Tina loses her breath in an explosive whoosh. Her feet rise from the floor, kicking. She can feel whiskers against her cheek. She can smell sweat, sour and hot.

“Don't scream and I won't have to hurt you,” the man says into her ear, making her skin prickle. “Do you understand?”

Tina manages to nod, but her heart is hammering and the world is going dark. “Let me—breathe,” she gasps, and the hold loosens. Her feet go back to the floor. She turns and sees a man with a pale face and red lips. There's a cut on his chin, it looks like a bad one. The skin around it is swollen and blue-black.

“Don't scream,” he repeats, and raises an admonitory finger. “Do
not
do that.” He smiles, and if it's supposed to make her feel better, it doesn't work. His teeth are yellow. They look more like fangs than teeth.

“What did you do to my mother?”

“She's fine,” the man with the red lips says. “Where's your cell phone? A pretty little girl like you must have a cell phone. Lots of friends to chatter and text with. Is it in your pocket?”

“N-N-No. Upstairs. In my room.”

“Let's go get it,” Morris says. “You're going to make a call.”

42

Pete's stop is Elm Street, two blocks over from the house, and the bus is almost there. He's making his way to the front when his cell buzzes. His relief at seeing his sister's smiling face in the little window is so great that his knees loosen and he has to grab one of the straphandles.

“Tina! I'll be there in a—”

“There's a man here!” Tina is crying so hard he can barely understand her. “He was in the house! He—”

Then she's gone, and he knows the voice that replaces hers. He wishes to God he didn't.

“Hello, Peter,” Red Lips says. “Are you on your way?”

He can't say anything. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. The bus pulls over at the corner of Elm and Breckenridge Terrace, his stop, but Pete only stands there.

“Don't bother answering that, and don't bother coming home, because no one will be here if you do.”

“He's lying!” Tina yells. “Mom is—”

Then she howls.

“Don't you hurt her,” Pete says. The few other riders don't look around from their papers or handhelds, because he can't speak above a whisper. “Don't you hurt my sister.”

“I won't if she shuts up. She needs to be quiet. You need to be quiet, too, and listen to me. But first you need to answer two questions. Have you called the police?”

“No.”

“Have you called
anyone
?”

“No.” Pete lies without hesitation.

“Good. Excellent. Now comes the listening part. Are you listening?”

A large lady with a shopping bag is clambering onto the bus, wheezing. Pete gets off as soon as she's out of the way, walking like a boy in a dream, the phone plastered to his ear.

“I'm taking your sister with me to a safe place. A place where we can meet, once you have the notebooks.”

Pete starts to tell him they don't have to do it that way, he'll just tell Red Lips where the notebooks are, then realizes doing that would be a huge mistake. Once Red Lips knows they're in the basement at the Rec, he'll have no reason to keep Tina alive.

“Are you there, Peter?”

“Y-Yes.”

“You better be. You just better be. Get the notebooks. When you have them—and not before—call your sister's cell again. If you call for any other reason, I'll hurt her.”

“Is my mother all right?”

“She's fine, just tied up. Don't worry about her, and don't bother going home. Just get the notebooks and call me.”

With that, Red Lips is gone. Pete doesn't have time to tell him he
has
to go home, because he'll need Tina's wagon again to haul the cartons. He also needs to get his father's key to the Rec. He returned it to the board in his father's office, and he needs it to get in.

43

Morris slips Tina's pink phone into his pocket and yanks a cord from her desktop computer. “Turn around. Hands behind you.”

“Did you shoot her?” Tears are running down Tina's cheeks. “Was that the sound I heard? Did you shoot my moth—”

Morris slaps her, and hard. Blood flies from Tina's nose and the corner of her mouth. Her eyes widen in shock.

“You need to shut your quack and turn around. Hands behind you.”

Tina does it, sobbing. Morris ties her wrists together at the small of her back, cinching the knots viciously.

“Ow!
Ow
, mister! That's too tight!”

“Deal with it.” He wonders vaguely how many shots might be left in his old pal's gun. Two will be enough; one for the thief and one for the thief's sister. “Walk. Downstairs. Out the kitchen door. Let's go. Hup-two-three-four.”

She looks back at him, her eyes huge and bloodshot and swimming with tears. “Are you going to rape me?”

“No,” Morris says, then adds something that is all the more terrifying because she doesn't understand it: “I won't make that mistake again.”

44

Linda comes to staring at the ceiling. She knows where she is, Tom's office, but not what has happened to her. The right side of her head is on fire, and when she raises a hand to her face, it comes away wet with blood. The last thing she can remember is Peggy Moran telling her that Tina had gotten sick at school.

Go get her and take her home
,
Peggy had said.
I'll cover this
.

No, she remembers something else. Something about the mystery money.

I was going to talk to Pete about it, she thinks. Get some answers. I was playing solitaire on Tom's computer, just killing time while I waited for him to come home, and then—

Then, black.

Now, this terrible pain in her head, like a constantly slamming door. It's even worse than the migraines she sometimes gets. Worse even than childbirth. She tries to raise her head and manages to do it, but the world starts going in and out with her heartbeat, first
sucking
, then
blooming
, each oscillation accompanied by such godawful agony . . .

She looks down and sees the front of her gray dress has changed to a muddy purple. She thinks, Oh God, that's a lot of blood. Have I had a stroke? Some kind of brain hemorrhage?

Surely not, surely those only bleed on the inside, but whatever it is, she needs help. She needs an ambulance, but she can't make her hand go to the phone. It lifts, trembles, and drops back to the floor.

She hears a yelp of pain from somewhere close, then crying she'd recognize anywhere, even while dying (which, she suspects, she may be). It's Tina.

She manages to prop herself up on one bloody hand, enough to look out the window. She sees a man hustling Tina down the back steps into the yard. Tina's hands are tied behind her.

Linda forgets about her pain, forgets about needing an ambulance. A man has broken in, and he's now abducting her daughter. She needs to stop him. She needs the police. She tries to get into the swivel chair behind the desk, but at first she can only paw at the seat. She does a lunging sit-up and for a moment the pain is so
intense the world turns white, but she holds on to consciousness and grabs the arms of the chair. When her vision clears, she sees the man opening the back gate and shoving Tina through.
Herding
her, like an animal on its way to the slaughterhouse.

Bring her back!
Linda screams.
Don't you hurt my baby!

But only in her head. When she tries to get up, the chair turns and she loses her grip on the arms. The world darkens. She hears a terrible gagging sound before she blacks out, and has time to think, Can that be me?

45

Things are
not
golden after the rotary. Instead of open street, they see backed-up traffic and two orange signs. One says FLAGGER AHEAD. The other says ROAD CONSTRUCTION. There's a line of cars waiting while the flagger lets downtown traffic go through. After three minutes of sitting, each one feeling an hour long, Hodges tells Jerome to use the side streets.

“I wish I could, but we're blocked in.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, where the line of cars behind them is now backed up almost to the rotary.

Holly has been bent over her iPad, whacking away. Now she looks up. “Use the sidewalk,” she says, then goes back to her magic tablet.

“There are mailboxes, Hollyberry,” Jerome says. “Also a chainlink fence up ahead. I don't think there's room.”

She takes another brief look. “Yeah there is. You may scrape a little, but it won't be the first time for this car. Go on.”

“Who pays the fine if I get arrested on a charge of driving while black? You?”

Holly rolls her eyes. Jerome turns to Hodges, who sighs and nods. “She's right. There's room. I'll pay your fucking fine.”

Jerome swings right. The Mercedes clips the fender of the car stopped ahead of them, then bumps up onto the sidewalk. Here comes the first mailbox. Jerome swings even farther to the right, now entirely off the street. There's a thud as the driver's side knocks the mailbox off its post, then a drawn-out squall as the passenger side caresses the chainlink fence. A woman in shorts and a halter top is mowing her lawn. She shouts at them as the passenger side of Holly's German U-boat peels away a sign reading NO TRESPASSING NO SOLICITING NO DOOR TO DOOR SALESMEN. She rushes for her driveway, still shouting. Then she just peers, shading her eyes and squinting. Hodges can see her lips moving.

“Oh, goody,” Jerome says. “She's getting your plate number.”

“Just drive,” Holly says. “Drive drive drive.” And with no pause: “Red Lips is Morris Bellamy. That's his name.”

It's the flagger yelling at them now. The construction workers, who have been uncovering a sewer pipe running beneath the street, are staring. Some are laughing. One of them winks at Jerome and makes a bottle-tipping gesture. Then they are past. The Mercedes thumps back down to the street. With traffic bound for the North Side bottlenecked behind them, the street ahead is blessedly empty.

“I checked the city tax records,” Holly says. “At the time John Rothstein was murdered in 1978, the taxes on 23 Sycamore Street were being paid by Anita Elaine Bellamy. I did a Google search for her name and came up with over fifty hits, she's sort of a famous academic, but only one hit that matters. Her son was tried and convicted of aggravated rape late that same year. Right here in the city. He got a life sentence. There's a picture of him in one of the news stories. Look.” She hands the iPad to Hodges.

Morris Bellamy has been snapped coming down the steps of a courthouse Hodges remembers well, although it was replaced by the concrete monstrosity in Government Square fifteen years ago. Bellamy is flanked by a pair of detectives. Hodges recalls one of them, Paul Emerson. Good police, long retired. He's wearing a suit. So is the other detective, but that one has draped his coat over Bellamy's hands to hide the handcuffs he's wearing. Bellamy is also in a suit, which means the picture was taken either while the trial was ongoing, or just after the verdict was rendered. It's a black-and-white photo, which only makes the contrast between Bellamy's pale complexion and dark mouth more striking. He almost looks like he's wearing lipstick.

“That's got to be him,” Holly says. “If you call the state prison, I'll bet you six thousand bucks that he's out.”

“No bet,” Hodges says. “How long to Sycamore Street, Jerome?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Firm or optimistic?”

Reluctantly, Jerome replies, “Well . . . maybe a tad optimistic.”

“Just do the best you can and try not to run anybody ov—”

Hodge's cell rings. It's Pete. He sounds out of breath.

“Have you called the police, Mr. Hodges?”

“No.” Although they'll probably have the license plate of Holly's car by now, but he sees no reason to tell Pete that. The boy sounds more upset than ever. Almost crazed.

“You can't. No matter what. He's got my sister. He says if he doesn't get the notebooks, he'll kill her. I'm going to give them to him.”

“Pete, don't—”

But he's talking to no one. Pete has broken the connection.

46

Morris hustles Tina along the path. At one point a jutting branch rips her filmy blouse and scratches her arm, bringing blood.

“Don't make me go so fast, mister! I'll fall down!”

Morris whacks the back of her head above her ponytail. “Save your breath, bitch. Just be grateful I'm not making you run.”

He holds on to her shoulders as they cross the stream, balancing her so she won't fall in, and when they reach the point where the scrub brush and stunted trees give way to the Rec property, he tells her to stop.

The baseball field is deserted, but a few boys are on the cracked asphalt of the basketball court. They're stripped to the waist, their shoulders gleaming. The day is really too hot for outside games, which is why Morris supposes there are only a few of them.

He unties Tina's hands. She gives a little whimper of relief and starts rubbing her wrists, which are crisscrossed with deep red grooves.

“We're going to walk along the edge of the trees,” he tells her. “The only time those boys will be able to get a good look at us is when we get near the building and come out of the shade. If they say hello, or if there's someone you know, just wave and smile and keep walking. Do you understand?”

“Y-Yes.”

“If you scream or yell for help, I'll put a bullet in your head. Do you understand
that
?”

“
Yes
. Did you shoot my mother? You did, didn't you?”