Moonlight Mile (22 page)
“Why not? That’s what the Department of Children and Families does. That’s what the government does all the time when they take kids away from bad parents.”
“After due process, though. After checks and balances and diligent investigation of the charges. You, on the other hand? One day your uncle Lionel snapped when your mother left you in the sun all afternoon because she was drunk. She took you home when she should have taken you to an emergency room, and Lionel came up to deal with your cries. He called a cop who was
known
for kidnapping kids he felt lived in unsafe environments, and they kidnapped you. No due process for your mother—”
“Don’t call her my mother, if you please.”
“Fine. No due process for Helene. No representation of her side of the story. Nothing.”
“My uncle Lionel had watched Helene ‘raise’ me, for lack of a better word, for four years. I’d say she was the beneficiary of four years of due process and due diligence on his watch.”
“Then he should have filed charges with DCF and asked a court for the right to raise you. It worked for Kurt Cobain’s sister, and she went up against a celebrity with money.”
She nodded. “Nice. When it comes to—what’d you call it?—societal ethics versus situational ones, Patrick Kenzie invokes the memory of Kurt Cobain to represent the interests of the state.”
Ouch. Direct hit.
Amanda leaned forward. “Because here’s what I heard about
you
many years later—I heard that the child molester you killed while you were looking for me? What was his name?”
“Corwin Earle.”
“Right. I heard—from
impeccable
sources—that he didn’t have a weapon when you shot him. That he posed no direct threat to you.” She sipped her tea. “And you shot him dead. Shot him in the back, wasn’t it?”
“The back of the neck, actually. And his hand was touching a weapon, technically speaking.”
“Technically speaking. So, you come upon a child molester who poses no direct threat to you, at least not by the state’s definition if they had investigated very hard, and you deal with this by firing one hell of a situational ethic into the back of his head.” She raised her cup to me. “Well done. I’d clap, but I don’t want to wake the baby.”
We sat in silence for a bit and she never took her eyes off me. Her self-possession was, quite frankly, a bit scary. It definitely didn’t fill me with feelings of warmth. And yet, I liked her. I liked that the world had given her a raw deal and she’d dealt with it by playing the world’s game right up to the point where she raised her middle finger to it and walked away from the whole sham. I liked that she refused to wallow in self-pity. I liked that she seemed incapable of asking for anyone’s approval.
“You’ll never give that baby up, will you?”
“They could break every bone in my body, and I’d continue fighting them with whatever muscle I got left. Cut out my tongue or I’ll never stop screaming with it. And if they lose sight of me for one second, I’ll sink my teeth into their eyes.”
“Like I said, you’ll never give up that baby, will you, Amanda?”
“And you?” She smiled. “You would never let me fight the fight alone, would you, Patrick?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But I’m not leaving Sophie out there to die or be shipped to the basement harem of some emir in Dubai.”
“Okay.”
“But Yefim’s going to want a baby.”
“We might be able to stall him on that if he gets the cross.”
“Yeah, but he won’t give us Sophie. He’ll just let us live another day.”
“That twit.”
“Who?”
“Sophie. You know I sent her to Vancouver right after, well, after—”
“Dre told me all about the bloodbath with Timur in the birthing room.”
“Ah. Yeah, so after that, I send Sophie to Vancouver with impeccable paperwork. I mean, flawless. The kind people pay six figures for. I rebirthed her.”
“But the new birth canal led right back to the Russian mob.”
“Yeah.”
I watched her for a bit, looking for some kind of uncertainty, even a hair of it, to creep into those placid eyes. But it never happened.
“Are you ready—I mean, really ready—to give up all you’re giving up here?”
“What am I giving up?” she asked. “You mean, like, Harvard and all that?”
“For starters.”
She widened her eyes at me. “I’ve got five ironclad identities. One of them, by the way, is already enrolled in Harvard next year. And one is enrolled in Brown. I haven’t decided which one I want yet. A real degree from either of those schools, or any school for that matter, is no better than a fake one. And in some cases, it’s worse because it’s less malleable. There’s an eighth continent now, Patrick. It’s accessed by a keyboard. You can paint the sky, rewrite the rules of travel, do whatever you want. No boundaries and no border wars because very few people even know how to find this continent. I do. Some other people I’ve met do. The rest of you remain here.” She leaned forward. “So, yes, playing by your rules, I’m Amanda McCready, an about-to-turn-seventeen high school dropout. According to
my
rules, though, Amanda McCready is just one card in a thick deck. Look at it like—”
She pushed back her chair, her eyes on the window that faced the street. She grabbed the bag at her feet and tossed it onto the table. I followed her gaze and saw a car out front, one that hadn’t been there a minute before.
“Who is it?”
She didn’t answer. She dumped her leather bag on the dining-room table and pulled out of the pile two sets of the weirdest-looking handcuffs I’d ever seen. There was no chain between the cuffs. The base of each cuff met the base of the other. They were encased in hard black plastic. One cuff was standard size. On the other end, it was tiny. Small enough to cuff a bird maybe.
Or a baby.
“What the fuck are those?” I crossed the dining room and threw the lock on the front door.
“Don’t curse in front of the baby.”
The top of someone’s head passed beneath the dining-room window.
“Fine. What the heck are those?”
“High-security rigid handcuffs.” Amanda struggled into her Björn. “They use them to transport terrorists on planes. I had these modified. They kick ass, right?”
“They’re cool,” I said. “How many doors into the house?”
“Three if you count the cellar.” She unstrapped Claire from the car seat. The baby groaned and then huffed out several unhappy grunts. Amanda fit her legs into the holes of the Björn, slipped one flap over her shoulder, and buckled it as someone kicked in the back door.
Amanda snapped one cuff over her own left wrist, one over her right.
I pulled my .45, pointed it at the dining-room portico.
Amanda snapped one of the smaller cuffs over Claire’s left wrist.
A window broke in the living room, followed a second or two later by the sounds of someone climbing through it. I kept my eye on the portico, but now I knew they could flank me.
“A little help?” Amanda said.
I came over to her and she held her right arm up so that the smaller cuff hovered beside Claire’s left wrist.
“You bring game, sister.” I snapped the cuff closed over Claire’s wrist.
“In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Kenny came through the portico at the end of the room with a shotgun leveled at us.
I pointed my .45 at his head, but it was a hollow gesture; if he pulled that trigger from this distance, he’d kill all three of us.
I heard the racking of another shotgun, to my left. I glanced over. Tadeo stood where the living room met the dining room at the base of the staircase.
“You just ejected a shell trying to make a cool sound,” I told him.
He turned a bit red. “Still got one to put in your chest.”
“Dang,” I said, “that gun’s almost as big as you.”
“Big enough to cut you in half, homes.”
“But the recoil will blow your ass into the front yard.”
Kenny said, “Put your gun down, Patrick.”
I kept my gun where it was. “You Mexican, Tadeo?”
He nestled the shotgun stock into his shoulder. “You damn right I am.”
“I never had a Mexican standoff with an actual Mexican. There’s something cool about that, don’t you think?”
“Sounds racist to me, homes.”
“What’s racist about it? You’re Mexican, this is a Mexican standoff. It’d be like going Dutch with someone from Amsterdam. Now if, because I’m Irish, you accused me of having a small dick and being a drunk,
that’s
racist, but describing a standoff as a Mexican standoff as opposed to a plain old, you know, standoff, that seems a pretty victimless racial modification to me.”
“You’re stalling,” Kenny said.
“I’m giving everyone time to calm down.”
Helene came through the portico behind Kenny. She saw the three guns and took a big swallow, but kept coming into the dining room.
“Honey,” she said in a syrupy voice, “we just want the baby.”
“Don’t call me honey,” Amanda said.
“What should I call you?”
“Estranged.”
Kenny said to Helene, “Just get the baby.”
“Okay.”
Amanda raised her wrists so Kenny and Helene saw the cuffs. “Claire and me? We’re a package.”
Kenny’s face grew long and defeated. “Where are the keys?”
“Behind you in the handcuff-key jar.” Amanda rolled her eyes. “Really, Ken?”
“I can kill you,” Kenny said, “and just cut those cuffs off with a hacksaw.”
“If it was 1968 and this was
Cool Hand Luke,
maybe,” Amanda said. “You see any length of chain on these? You see anything you could cut?”
“Hey!” Helene yelled as if she were the voice of reason. “No one’s killing anyone.”
“Gosh, Moms,” Amanda said, “what exactly do you think Kirill Borzakov is going to do to me?”
“He won’t kill you,” Helene said, patting the air for effect. “He promised.”
“Oh, well, then,” I said to Amanda, “you’re fine.”
“Right?”
“Patrick,” Kenny said.
“Yeah?”
“You can’t win this. I mean, you’ve got to know that.”
“We just want the baby,” Helene said again.
“And that cross on the table,” Kenny said, noticing it for the first time. “Damn. Helene, pick that thing up, would ya?”
“Which?”
“The only Russian cross on the dining-room table.”
“Oh.”
As Helene reached for the cross, I noticed something odd in the pile of things Amanda had dumped from her leather bag—Dre’s key chain. I experienced what Bubba likes to call a disturbance in the Force, and I was so baffled I almost said something to Amanda right then, but Kenny snapped my attention back the other way by tapping the barrel of the shotgun against the wall.
“Lower your gun, Patrick. Seriously, man.”
I looked at Amanda, looked at the baby strapped to her chest and cuffed to her wrists. Claire hadn’t made a peep since the second cuff went on her. She just stared up at Amanda with what, in a self-aware being, could have been considered awe.
“The gun’s making me nervous too,” Amanda whispered. “And I don’t see how it helps us.”
I flicked the safety on and raised my hand, the gun dangling from my thumb.
“Take his gun, Helene.”
Helene came over and I handed her the gun and she placed it awkwardly in her handbag. She looked past me at Claire.
“Oh, she’s so pretty.” She looked back over her shoulder at Kenny. “You should see her, Ken. She’s got my eyes.”
No one said anything for a few seconds.
“How is it,” Kenny asked, “you’re allowed to vote and operate machinery?”
“ ’Cuz,” Helene said proudly, “this is America.”
Kenny closed and opened his eyes.
“Can I touch her?” Helene asked Amanda.
“I’d kinda prefer you didn’t.”
Helene reached out anyway and squeezed Claire’s cheek.
Claire began to cry.
“Great,” Kenny said. “We gotta listen to that all the way back to Boston.”
Amanda said, “Helene?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you do me a huge solid and grab that diaper bag and the little cooler of formula?”
“What’re you going to do with me?” I asked Kenny. “Tie me to a chair or shoot me?”
Kenny gave me a confused look. “Neither. The Russians want all of you.” He used three fingers to point at us. “And they’re paying by the pound.”
T
he only trailer park inside Boston city limits is on the West Roxbury–Dedham border, squeezed in between a restaurant and a car dealership on a strip of Route 1 that is otherwise zoned for commercial or industrial use. And yet, after decades of fighting off developers and buyout offers from the car dealership, the little trailer park that could remains pressed hard against a sluggish brown stretch of the Charles River. I’d always rooted for the place, taken a vicarious pride in the residents’ resilience to yet more commercial sprawl. It would break my heart someday to drive past it and see a McDonald’s or an Outback in its place. Then again, I doubted someone would take me to a McDonald’s to kill me, but it looked highly likely that I might breathe my last in a trailer park.
Kenny pulled off Route 1 onto the entrance roadway and drove us due east toward the river. He was, I’d learned, still pissed about his Hummer. He ranted about it for half the drive. How the cops had it impounded over in Southie and wouldn’t believe his story that it was stolen and he was probably going to have his parole revoked over it if they could prove he’d been anywhere near it that morning, but most of all, what really killed him, was that he’d loved that car.
“One,” I said, “I don’t know how anyone could
love
a Hummer.”
“Oh, I loved it, bitch.”
“Two,” I said, “why you beefing with me? I didn’t shoot your stupid-looking car. Yefim did.”
“You stole it, though.”
“But it’s not like I said, ‘Let me take it through the bullet wash.’ I was trying to find out where they were taking Sophie, and Yefim shot the shit out of your ugly car.”
“It’s not an ugly car.”
“It’s a hideous car,” Amanda said.
“It’s a pretty gay-looking car,” Tadeo chimed in. “You man enough to get away with it, though, Ken.”
Helene touched his arm. “I love it, honey.”
“All of you, please,” Kenny said, “shut the fuck up now.”
We drove in silence for the last forty minutes. Kenny was driving a late-’90s Chevy Suburban, which probably got the same mileage as the Hummer but somehow managed to be only half as ridiculous to behold. Amanda, the baby, and I sat in back with Tadeo between us. They’d tied my hands behind my back with a length of rope. It was a pretty uncomfortable way to sit for a two-hour drive, and I got a crick in my neck that worked its way down into my shoulders and would, I was sure, stay there for days. Sucks getting old.
We got off the Pike and drove south on 95 for ten miles before Kenny pulled off onto 109 and drove east another six miles, then turned right on Route 1, and took a right into the trailer park.
“How much they paying you for this?” I asked Kenny.
“How about my life? That’s a good one. Can you double it?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” He looked in the rearview at her. “Amanda.”
“Yo, Ken.”
“I always thought you were a sweet kid, for what it’s worth.”
“I die fulfilled, then, Ken.”
Kenny snorted. “You’re what we’d call a pistol in my day.”
“I didn’t know they had pistols in your day.”
Tadeo laughed. “This bitch is cold.” He turned to her. “That’s a compliment.”
“Never had a doubt.”
We drove to the end of the main road. The trees and the river were the same light brown, and a riot of leaves salted with snow covered everything—the ground, the cars, the trailer roofs, the satellite dishes on top of the trailers, the tin carports. The sky was unblemished blue marble. A hawk flew in low over the river. The trailers sported wreaths and colored lights and the roof of one even sported a light display in the shape of Santa riding a golf cart, for some reason.
It was one of those days that, while cold, was so clear and bright that it nearly made up for the four more months of frigid gray we faced. The crisp air smelled like a cold apple. The sun was sharp and warm on my skin when Kenny stopped the Suburban and opened the back door and pulled me out.
Amanda, the baby, and Tadeo got out the other side and we all stood by a long double-wide trailer along the riverbank. It was empty back here. No cars in front of the few nearby trailers, everyone probably at work or last-minute Christmas shopping.
The door of the trailer opened and Yefim stood there, smiling while he chewed some food, a sub sandwich in one hand, a Springfield XD .40 cal in his waistband.
“Welcome, my friends. Come, come.” He waved us toward him and we all filed in.
When Amanda passed him, he raised an eyebrow at the cuffs. “Not bad.” Once we were inside, he closed the door behind us, and said to me, “How you doing, hump?”
“I’m all right. You?”
“Good, good.”
The inside of the trailer was a lot bigger than I’d imagined. On the back wall, in the center, was a sixty-inch TV screen. Two guys stood in front of it playing Wii Tennis, swinging their arms back and forth and jumping in place while their midget avatars ran back and forth across the screen. To the right of the TV was a sky-blue leather couch, two matching armchairs, and a glass coffee table. Past that, a thick black curtain was strung across the width of the room. On the sky-blue couch, Sophie sat with her mouth covered with electrical tape and her hands bound with a bungee cord. She glanced at all of us, but her eyes lit up when they fell on Amanda.
Amanda smiled back at her.
To our left was a kitchenette, and beyond that a small bathroom and a large bedroom. Cardboard boxes took up nearly every inch of free space—filling the shelves, stacked on the floors, crammed in the spaces above the kitchen cupboards. I could see them stacked in the bedroom and assumed they filled the space behind the black curtain—DVD players, Blu-Ray players, Wii, PlayStation, and Xbox players, Bose home theater systems, iPods, iPads, Kindles, and Garmin GPS systems.
We stood in the entranceway and watched the two men play virtual tennis for a moment with Sophie staring at us. She looked much better than she had the other day, like maybe they’d kept her meth-free and her body was starting to respond.
Yefim cocked his head at me. “Why you tied up, man?”
“Your friend Kenny.”
“He’s not my friend, man. Turn around.”
Kenny seemed hurt by the comment. He gave Helene a look like,
You believe this shit
?
I gave Yefim my back and he cut the rope off my wrists, eating his sub the whole time, breathing through nostrils thick with hair.
“You look well, my friend. Healthy.”
“Thank you. You too.”
He slapped his heavy gut with his gun hand. “Ha ha. You a funny hump.” His voice suddenly boomed. “Pavel!”
Pavel turned in the middle of his backhand and looked back at Yefim as his avatar spun and then fell on the court and the tennis ball bounced past him.
“You on the clock. Take their weapons.”
Pavel sighed and tossed his remote onto a chair. His companion did the same. His companion was skinny as death, sunken cheeks and shaved head, Russian words tattooed on his neck. He wore a wife-beater that clung to his emaciated chest and black-and-yellow-striped sweatpants.
“Spartak,” Amanda whispered to me.
Spartak took Tadeo’s shotgun and Pavel took Kenny’s.
“Other guns,” Pavel said, snapping his fingers, his voice and gaze as flat as a dime. “Hurry.”
Kenny handed over a Taurus .38 and Tadeo forked over a FNP-9. Pavel put the two shotguns and two handguns in a black canvas bag on the floor.
Yefim finished his sandwich and wiped his hands with a napkin. He burped and we all got a nice blast of peppers and vinegar and what I think was ham.
“I got to get to the gym, Pavel.”
Pavel looked up from the bag as he zipped it closed. “You look fine, man.”
“I feel I lack discipline.”
Pavel took the bag over to the kitchen and placed it on the small countertop beside the stove. “You look fine, Yefim. All the ladies say so.”
Yefim smiled broadly at that, his eyebrows raised as he mock-primped his hair. “I’m George Clooney, eh? Ha ha.”
“You George Clooney with big Russian cock.”
“That’s the best George Clooney to be!” Yefim shouted, and he and Pavel and Spartak all roared with laughter.
The rest of us stood around looking at one another.
When Yefim stopped laughing, he wiped at his eyes and sighed and then clapped his hands together. “Let’s go see Kirill. Spartak, you stay with Sophie.”
Spartak nodded and pulled back the black curtain on another living room. This one was bigger than the one we were leaving, fifteen-by-twenty was my guess, and the walls were all mirrored. A long purple sectional formed a U. The sectional must have been custom-built, because its sides ran the length of the room. The center of the room was bare. Above our heads, and reflected in the mirrors, was a TV, this one playing a Mexican
telenovela
. Above the sectional were shelves, dozens of them, and all those shelves were filled with more Blu-Ray players and iPods and Kindles and laptops.
A thin man with a huge head sat beside a dark-haired woman in the center of the sectional. The woman had a kind of stricken madness in her face that drew you to her in helpless, morbid fascination. Violeta Concheza Borzakov had been beautiful once, but something had eaten away at her, and she was only thirty or thirty-two, tops. Her sunset skin was lightly dimpled all over, like the surface of a pond at the beginning of a light rain, and her hair was the blackest black I’d ever seen. She had eyes so dark they almost matched her hair, and something resided in them that was both frightened and frightening; a butchered soul lived back there, abandoned and agitated. She wore a charcoal newsboy cap, a black silk crewneck under a gray silk wrap, black leggings, and knee-high black boots. She watched us come like we were cuts at a steakhouse being wheeled to her on a cart.
Kirill Borzakov, meanwhile, wore a white silk sweatshirt under a white cashmere sportcoat, tan cargo pants, and white tennis shoes. His silver hair was cut tight to his huge skull and the pockets under his eyes came in layers of three. He smoked a cigarette with the kind of loud, liquid smacks that made you never want to smoke a cigarette, and flicked the ash in the vicinity of an overflowing ashtray by his right hand. Beside the ashtray was an open compact mirror that sported several small bumps of cocaine. His gaze was impersonal. It had been at least three decades since empathy had crawled in there and died. I got the feeling that if my chest burst open and Lenin himself stepped out of it, Kirill would continue smoking his cigarette and glancing up at the Mexican soap opera.
Yefim said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Kirill and Violeta Borzakov.”
Kirill stood and walked around us, inspecting his collection of chattel. He looked at Kenny and Helene and then over at Pavel.
Pavel took Kenny and Helene by the shoulders and sat them down at the foot of the sectional on the left side. Kirill cocked his head at Pavel again, and a second or two later, Tadeo was pushed onto the couch beside Helene.
Kirill walked around me in a slow circle. “Who are you?”
“I’m a private investigator,” I said.
A sucking noise as he took a drag off his cigarette and flicked the ash onto the faux-oak floor. “The private investigator who find the girl for me?”
“I didn’t find her for you.”
He nodded at that, as if I’d said something sage, and took my left hand in his. “You didn’t find her for me?”
“No.”
His grip was soft, almost delicate. “Who you find her for?”
“Her aunt.”
“But not for me?”
I shook my head. “Not for you.”
He gave me another nod as he wrapped his fingers around my wrist and ground his cigarette out in my palm.
I’m not sure how I managed not to scream. For half a minute, all I could feel was a fat ember burning through my flesh. I could smell it. My mind went black and then red and I flashed on an image of the nerves in my hand hanging like vines as smoke curled up them.
While he burned me, Kirill Borzakov looked into my eyes. There was nothing to see in his. No anger, no joy, no thrill that comes with violence or the elation of absolute power. Nothing. He had the eyes of a reptile sunning itself on a rock.
I grunted several times and exhaled through gritted teeth and tried to block images of what my hand must look like by now. I flashed on my daughter, and for a moment that calmed me, but then I realized I’d brought her into this moment, this polluted violence and sickness, and I tried to remove the image of her from my head, tried to will her away from this depravity, and the pain pulsed twice as strong. Then Kirill dropped my wrist and stepped back.
“See if this aunt can make your skin grow back.”
I flicked the dead cigarette butt from the center of my palm as Violeta Borzakov said, “Kirill, you’re blocking the TV.”
The coal was black now, on its way to ash, and the center of my palm looked like the top of a volcano—puckered and red, the burned flesh peeled back.
On the Mexican soap, the music swelled and a beautiful Latina in a white peasant top turned on her heel and stalked out of an earth-toned room as the lights went down. The next thing we saw was a commercial with Antonio Sabato Jr. hawking some kind of skin cream.
