Brothers and Bones (42 page)

“What?” I asked.

“Is Bonzetti with you yet?”

“Bonz?” I said. Bonz shook his head. “No, he’s out right now.”

“Where?”

“None of your business.”

There was a pause. Lippincott clearly wasn’t used to being spoken to like this.

“Did you watch the video, Charlie?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And Bonz killed my brother. I see that.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Fuck you, Mr. Lippincott.”

“What I meant was, how does it make you feel toward your friend?”

I paused, considering the best way to answer. “Confused.”

“Betrayed?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you still trust him?”

“I’m not sure I should.” It seemed like what Lippincott wanted to hear.

“Does he know you know?”

I hesitated only a fraction of a second, then said, “No.”

“Good. Charlie, it’s time for you to come see us.”

“Us?”

He hesitated, then said, “Carmen Siracuse and me.”

And there it was. Proof positive. “You guys been doing business for long, Lippincott?” I decided to drop the “Mister.”

“As long as necessary,” he replied.

“You piece of shit,” I said. “I trusted you. This city trusted you.”

“It isn’t what you think, Charlie.”

“Fuck you. I’m hanging up.”

“No!” Something in the way he said it made me pause. Had that been panic in his voice? “Please, Charlie, listen to me. He’s got her.”

“Who’s got who? Or whom? Oh, fuck you.” And then it hit me like an avalanche and my heart flash-froze into a chunk of ice in my chest. “Jessica? Siracuse has Jessica?”

“He does. And he’ll hurt her. Maybe kill her.”

Oh, God.
My fault. It was my fault. I should have seen this coming. I should have figured Siracuse would do something like this. But, frankly, it never occurred to me that he’d kidnap his own partner’s daughter. Perhaps clutching at straws, I voiced that very doubt.

“We’re not partners, Charlie!” Lippincott said, his voiced raised more than I’d ever heard it. He was rattled. “Not exactly.”

“What the fuck are you then,
exactly
?” I was rattled, too.

Before he could answer I heard a fumbling on the phone, then a different, cheerful voice said, “Hi, Charlie, it’s me. Uncle Carmen.”

And it was. He had that strange, distinctive voice, his words slightly garbled by the tongue he’d lost a piece of decades ago.

“You been a really bad boy, Charlie,” he said. “You killed Big Frank.” I didn’t bother correcting him. “I loved him, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said, “well, sorry for your loss, Siracuse, but under the circumstances I can’t really bring myself to grieve for him. Or for your loss.”

At my mention of Siracuse’s name, Bonz’s eyebrows rose.

An angry silence hissed over the line, finally broken when Siracuse said, “Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re going to come see us and bring your friend Bonzetti with you. If you don’t, I take a poke at your girlfriend, then I let a dozen or so of my boys take a crack, then Hammer Grossi, who I think you’ve met, will get his chance to nail her—in more ways than one, if you catch my meaning. Cops will find her washed up on the bank of the Charles. She’ll be unrecognizable, Charlie, given what my boys’ll do to her, not including what a night in the river does to a person’s looks.”

His words sliced me to the bone, but I steadied my voice. “Jessica broke things off with me when all this started. She dumped me when the going got rough, so as much as I’d rather not see her hurt, I can’t say I care enough anymore to put myself in danger for her. Sorry.”

“Is that right?”

“Sorry.”

“Tell you what,” Siracuse said. I heard a rustling of paper. “Why don’t you go back to your computer wherever you are and go to the web address I’m gonna give you here.”

“Why?”

“Indulge me. I think it would be a good idea. Even if you don’t love Ms. Lippincott anymore, you just admitted you’d rather not see her hurt.”

I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could, suppressed a curse, and said, “I’m at the computer. Now what.” I tried to sound unaffected.

“Go to this web address.” He recited it and I typed it in and the computer connected to it. A moment later, the screen filled with a black-and-white video image, disturbingly similar to the one in which Bonz killed Jake. In fact, it looked to be the very same windowless, cinder-block room. There was a chair in the middle, as there had been in the video of Jake, only this chair was occupied by Jessica, my love. Her hands appeared to be bound behind her back. Her hair was a rat’s nest, like she’d been shaking her head violently from side to side. To her left stood Hammer Grossi, a white bandage covering his left ear, or what remained of it. The ubiquitous hammer hung at his side. What I was seeing ripped the air from my lungs. A few feet away stood Andrew Lippincott. He was looking at the camera, not even bothering to look at his daughter, whose panicked eyes silently pleaded with him to help her, to save her. In those eyes I saw bewilderment and the pain of bottomless betrayal. One look at those eyes and any doubt I had about her possible complicity in any of this was gone. I burned inside with shame at what I’d been thinking. And I burned with rage at the men in that room, the men doing this to her. That included Carmen Siracuse, of course, who stood off to one side of the room, a phone to his ear.

“Charlie?” he said. “Are you there yet? Can you see us?” The video was slightly behind the sound I heard in the phone.

“I can.”

“Then you can see I’m not fucking around here, right?”

“I don’t think you’d hurt—”

Siracuse laughed and gave a hand signal to Grossi, who leaned over and punched Jessica in the face. I heard the blow over the phone a split second before I saw it. Her head snapped to the side and her eyes grew wider, terrified. My own head jerked on my neck as though it had been my jaw catching Grossi’s fist. On-screen, Jessica’s whole body began to shake. I thought Lippincott might have winced at the sound of the blow, but I couldn’t be certain. Bonz put a hand on my shoulder. Grossi raised his fist again.

“Stop!” I yelled.

“Daddy?!” I heard Jess’s voice over the phone, faint, but clear, filled with fear and confusion and anger. “Why don’t you do something to stop this, to help me? Why are you letting them—”

Grossi hit her again and my heart clenched in my chest like a fist. Siracuse raised his hand and Grossi stepped casually back into his place, a small smile on his lips. Jessica’s head dropped to her chest. She was sobbing. I was shaking.

Siracuse said to me, “I don’t think you’ve been completely honest with me, Counselor.”

He raised a handheld tape recorder to the phone and pressed a button. I heard a click, followed by my own voice, sounding small and tinny. “I love you, too. And no doubt about it for me. Jessica, I’m going to beat this. I’m going to get my life back and we’ll start building a real life together. You and me. No more waiting. We’ll get married, buy a house, have kids, the whole thing. Because you were right the other day, we need to move forward.
I
need to move forward. I should have done so long ago. Anyway, I want you to know how much you mean to me, Jess, how much I love you, even if I haven’t always shown it. You’re the most important thing to me, and we’ll get our life back, our future. I swear to you.”

I closed my eyes. He’d tapped her phone. Maybe even had Randy Deacon’s firm plant the bugs for him.

“Jessica,” Siracuse said, holding the phone receiver toward her in the air, “you got anything you want to say to Charlie?”

At my name, Jessica raised her head. I watched her take a few deep breaths, collecting herself. She sniffed loudly, then said, very calmly, “Don’t put yourself in danger for me, Charlie. Tell these people to fuck themselves. Tell them to—”

Grossi stepped forward and Jessica recoiled from the blow she anticipated, one that didn’t fall, though, because Siracuse didn’t order it. Instead, the fat man said into the phone, “She’s got spirit, Charlie, I’ll give her that. Be a shame to see a girl like her floating dead in the river like garbage, don’t you think?”

I sighed. “Even if I wanted to turn myself over to you, I couldn’t get Bonz to do the same. He owes nothing to Jessica or even to me.”

“You’re a smart little fuck,” Siracuse said in his deceptively pleasant tone, “so trick him. I’m sure you’ll think of something. Tell him you figured everything out, you know where the tape is, and you’re going to get it. We’ll be waiting.”

“But I do have the tape,” I said without thinking. Bonz raised his eyebrows again. I shrugged.

My declaration gave Uncle Carmen pause.

“Bullshit,” he said.

“It’s true.”

“You’re lying, you prick,” he said, the trademark affected pleasantness leaving his voice. “If you had the tape you’d have already been to the cops with it and they’d already be knocking on my door.”

“I’m trying to decide how to best use it to my advantage. I might take it to the cops, if I think that’s the smart thing to do. But it might not be. I still have that nasty little murder charge hanging over my head, and a shit heap of evidence against me, courtesy of you guys.”

He chuckled, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. So if you have the tape, you lying fuck, tell me what’s on it.”

It was a reasonable question, one I really should have been prepared for if I was going to make this bluff, but I’d spoken rashly, trying to buy time, and I hadn’t had the chance to think it through very far. I took a breath and said, “Let’s just say you and Andrew Lippincott are on it, your, shall we say, distinctive voices—his deep baritone and your, uh, little speech issue coming across loud and clear—and you definitely wouldn’t want anyone else to hear it.”

“Give me more, Beckham.”

“Bite me, Siracuse.”

“Fuck it, I’m gonna kill her right now.”

“Go ahead. Then I definitely go to the cops.”

He sucked air through his teeth for a second, then said, “You’re not a bad bluffer, Charlie, you know that? Okay, we want the tape. And we want Bonzetti. What do you want?”

I thought about it. “Jessica. The evidence against me to disappear, as best you can. And I want a million dollars.” I threw in the dollar demand just for the hell of it.

Siracuse laughed. “A million bucks, Counselor?”

“I’m going to have to begin my life again, Siracuse, somewhere. I’ll need start-up money, right?”

He thought things over for a few seconds, then said, “And you’ll give us Bonzetti?”

I lied. “Sure. The bastard killed my brother. I owe him nothing.”

Bonz’s eyebrows rose yet again.

“You can get him to come to the meet?” Siracuse asked.

“No problem.”

Another few seconds of thinking, then, “I’ll give you half a million, you greedy shit, and not a dollar more. Now, when and where?”

“Give me a number. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Why not do it tonight?”

“Because I hid the tape somewhere, in case you caught up with us, and I can’t get at it until tomorrow morning.” Siracuse said nothing, so I added, “But I dropped letters in the mail to three people—two friends, one reporter. They should get them in a day or two, telling them where they can find the tape, though not what’s on it. I tell you this just in case you have second thoughts about our deal.”

Siracuse stewed for a moment, then said, “You got until ten a.m. Then you meet me at my warehouse in Charlestown.” He gave me the address, then added, “You don’t wanna see your girlfriend fucked blind by two dozen guys, Beckham, then dumped in a river with her skull full of nails. I know you don’t. So you do not want to fuck with me. Be there at ten in the morning and bring the tape and your pal Eddie, that disloyal, rotten fuck.”

“Eddie?”

“Bonzetti, you idiot.”

Oh. I’d forgotten Bonz must have a first name. “Just make sure Jessica’s there,” I said. “And I want Lippincott there, too. Oh, and Siracuse…you don’t want to fuck with me, either.” I hung up, closing the phone with hands that I now noticed were shaking. I took a deep, shuddering breath, and let it out slowly

Bonz gave me a minute to collect myself, then said, “They have Jessica?”

I nodded and pressed my fists into my eyes.

“Sorry, Charlie.”

“Yeah.” I looked up at him. “Eddie Bonzetti?”

“Why do you think I don’t use my full name?”

I nodded and dropped my head into my hands.

“I don’t want to add to your worries here,” Bonz said, “but now what? You told ’em we have the tape and, unless you figured out where it is in the past hour or so, you were lying.”

“I was lying.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“I’m not sure. I was buying time. I’m starting to get an idea of what might be on that tape, but now I need the tape itself by ten a.m. tomorrow. I was just trying to stall by saying I couldn’t retrieve it until morning. I was hoping I could find it before then.”

“If you can’t?”

I looked up at him.

“If I can’t, I think Jessica dies.”

FORTY-SEVEN

The alarm on my watch beeped and the day and I woke together, both of us in a thick fog. I’d gotten less than an hour of sleep and my mind was cloudy. I rubbed my eyes, rolled off the couch, and walked over to a window in Rantham’s apartment and looked outside. I was pretty sure dawn was breaking out there but it was hard to be sure, given the heavy blanket of fog covering the city.

Last night had been chilly, the air moist, and when we’d arrived at Rantham’s place the sky already seemed to be promising fog for the morning. For once, the weather kept its promise and morning broke somewhere behind a curtain of haze.

Because it had been so cold last night, Bonz and I decided to accept the kind hospitality of Rantham and Harwick and spend the night. Rantham, for one, was so gracious a host that we even untaped him once when he had to use the bathroom. The Big Bopper wasn’t as gracious, though, which led to us responding in kind, which led to Harwick spending the night where he’d landed after Bonz decked him, only now he was smelling pretty ripe. Rantham, on the other hand, spent the night taped but lying more comfortably on a blanket I’d laid out for him on the floor. Bonz took the only bed in the apartment. I sat on the couch and thought. And thought. Bonz offered to sit with me, let me bounce ideas off him, but I wanted to be alone with the facts we knew. I held the puzzle pieces up in my mind, examining their shapes from all angles, trying to fit them together. I ran Jake’s last words through my mind—“Find Charlie and tell him if he wants to find the answers to take the refuge offered by the Lord’s Prayer.” After I listened to those words play in a continuous loop for a while, I reluctantly silenced them and thought about the Lord’s Prayer itself. “Our Father, who art in heaven….” After a dozen or so times through, I set the prayer aside, threaded my mental projector, and showed the images I’d burned into memory at Saint John’s—all the places Jake could have hidden the tape. Four hours later, I closed my eyes and fell asleep, no closer to figuring out the tape’s location.