EMMA WAS THE LAST TO LEAVE THE PARKING LOT. EXCEPT FOR RYAN.
Half of the squad cars had fallen off and gone back to their regular routes. The others were ahead of Emma on the road to Swan Point Cemetery. Ryan was supposed to follow her, but she didn’t see his headlights in her rearview mirror. That was curious enough, and her suspicions were only heightened by the fact that his story didn’t ring true. Supposedly, Babes didn’t want Ryan to come. He only wanted his mother, who had been notified to wait at Swan Point for the police to escort her into the dark cemetery to find her son.
Oh, really now?
She pulled a U-turn, drove back to the old North Burial Ground, and parked in the lot. Ryan’s car was still there, never having moved. She got out of the car and walked to the driver’s-side window. Ryan was nowhere to be found.
Just as I thought.
Emma went back to her car. She still had the grounds map that the curator of the cemetery had given her before Ryan’s arrival. Only the oldest section of the cemetery boasted private, chapel-style family crypts that would have made a suitable home for a street person or a hiding spot for Babes. The curator had circled the five most likely prospects on the map. Emma retrieved a flashlight from her glove compartment and planned her route.
On paper, things looked easy enough. But as she stepped out of her car and surveyed the cemetery grounds, the darkness was foreboding. She reached for her cell and dialed Ryan’s number. It rang several times and went to voice mail. He’d chosen not to answer—probably didn’t want to talk to her. Emma couldn’t blame him. She felt as if she had let Ryan down, after he’d pleaded with her to keep the police out of it, only to have seven squad cars waiting for him in the parking lot. The least she could do was help him find Babes before something else went wrong—even if cemeteries did give her the creeps.
Emma felt a raindrop on her cheek. Then another. She looked up at the sky, and the rain started falling harder.
Naturally
, she thought.
She cinched up her raincoat and took a deep breath. Then she started down the path, her footfalls crunching in the pea gravel, a flashlight guiding her toward the black forest of oak trees and old stone monuments.
Ryan was battling the dark and worrying about the weather. Rain was not going to make it any easier to find Babes.
More than five minutes had passed, and Babes had yet to call back. Ryan was deathly afraid of what Babes might do alone, at night, in a dark and scary cemetery. So afraid that he ventured out into the grounds without specific directions.
The weather changed again. It was one of those weird nights when the sky wasn’t sure what it wanted to do. A sliver of a moon had broken through the clouds, but it didn’t offer much guidance. Ryan kept a flashlight in the trunk of his car but—Murphy’s Law—the batteries were dead. As best as he could tell, however, there seemed to be a limited number of large family crypts, and the old cemetery wasn’t
that
big. This was Rhode Island, not Texas. If he stuck to the gravel path and let his eyes adjust to the darkness, he was confident he could find Babes.
His cell vibrated in his pocket. He checked the number. It was Emma again. He let it ring through to voice mail once more. With Babes already on edge, the last thing he needed was the return of a half-dozen squad cars with beacons swirling.
Ryan followed the curve of the path behind a stand of beech trees and came upon the first large crypt. The impressive stone structure looked to be centuries old, and it was definitely large enough to serve as Babes’s hideout. He approached with caution.
“Babes?” he said in a gentle voice. “It’s me, Ryan.”
There was only silence. He checked the family name that was chiseled into the frieze:
BROWN
. He wondered if it was the same Brown as the university.
His cell vibrated again, but this time it wasn’t Emma. The number that flashed was the one from before—the one Babes had called on. Ryan answered quickly.
“Babes?”
There was no reply, but Ryan sensed that someone was on the line. “Babes, is that you?” The silence was palpable. “The police are gone,” said Ryan. “I told them you were at Swan Point Cemetery, and they bought it. It’s just you and me, I promise. Talk to me, Babes.”
His phone chirped. The call ended.
Babes was gone.
The Checker was furious.
Babes had completely shut down on the follow-up phone call. He was supposed to have given Ryan directions to the Dawes family crypt, but the retard froze up.
“A nicer nose ring,” said Babes, “you need a nicer nose ring.”
Vladimir tucked his phone into his pocket. “Will you shut up, already?” he said sharply.
Babes was crouched in the corner, rocking forward and back and clutching his knees to his chest. He was driving the Checker absolutely nuts, mumbling the same nonsensical sentence over and over.
“A nicer nose ring; you need a nicer nose ring.”
“I said, shut your trap!”
Babes fell silent, but he continued to rock back and forth.
Vladimir raised his monocular and surveyed the grounds. Minutes earlier he’d watched the squad cars leave the parking lot. His vision was less than ideal, but as best he could tell, all but one vehicle—presumably Ryan’s—had taken to the road and headed toward the river. The last phone call had not gone well, but at least it had explained one delightful turn of events: Ryan had fooled the police with the Swan Point ruse.
Pretty slick, Mr. James.
In the distance, Vladimir spotted an approaching light. He strained to make it out, but visibility was worsening. Just when it had seemed that the night was going to clear, the clouds returned and the intermittent rainfall resumed.
The bright yellow beam faded and reappeared beneath the canopy of trees. The approach of autumn had claimed a fair number of leaves over the past week or so, and more had fallen in the afternoon rain. But the old section of the cemetery contained hundreds of mature trees with more than enough foliage to limit Vladimir’s visibility. The tall conifers didn’t help matters. Even with his night vision, Vladimir couldn’t get a clear enough line of sight to determine who was coming—at least not with certainty. In fact, every time the flashlight pointed right at him, it overloaded his infrared illuminator. He could tell only that it was someone wearing a raincoat. But who else could it have been?
It almost made him laugh.
Could you possibly make yourself an easier target, James?
BABES WEDGED HIMSELF AS DEEP INTO THE CORNER AS POSSIBLE.
Inside the old stone chapel it was darker than night, but Babes’s pupils were adjusting. He could see the Russian across the room, peering out one of the broken panes of the chapel’s stained-glass window. Babes could have jumped him, had he been able to find the courage. But his captor seemed no more worried about Babes than about the bodies in the surrounding graves.
Arrogant jerk.
Who did this hotshot with the fancy gun and silencer think he was, threatening him and Ryan with a twofer? Babes had seen plenty of movies and television dramas—like
The Sopranos.
Did this joker really think Babes was so stupid that he didn’t know a contract killer when he saw one? And Yaz—easy prey for the Russian—was an even bigger idiot. If Yaz hadn’t concocted the extortion scheme, the Russian would never have found him or Babes. The irony was that a homeless guy like Yaz probably didn’t even care about the money. He just wanted to show some rich guy how clever he was.
Another arrogant jerk.
The more Babes pondered it, the madder he got. But he couldn’t fool himself. More than anything, Babes was mad at Babes—for everything that had ever gone wrong for anyone he had ever known in his entire life. As always, he was to blame, and now it was time to pay the price for his screwups. His mother would have told him it was all okay—“You’re a good boy, Babes,”—but it was his father’s tough love that was playing in his head now. “Damn it, Rachel, you’re enabling him,” his father would say. “Babes needs to learn that there are consequences for his actions.”
Consequences. They were Babes’s biggest fear—and fear kept him cowering in the corner. Fear felt like ice to Babes, and when it mixed with the heat of his anger, his emotions swirled inside him like a spring tornado.
Babes recoiled into his comfort zone—knees to his chest, rocking back and forth. He worked it slow and steady for a while, but as the storm inside him intensified, his pace quickened. The night was growing colder by the minute, but Babes was actually breaking a sweat. He breathed in and out like a long-distance runner. The rhythm helped him focus, but his emotions were too complex to sort out. Without a doubt, he had failed Chelsea on the night of her accident. All he’d needed to do was take her cell phone and dial 911. A child could have saved her. But not Babes. It was disgraceful, and now that he’d gone on Ryan’s radio show and told the world about it, the shame was more than he could handle.
Babes kept rocking. It was all he could do to keep his emotions in check. The fear remained; he could never get rid of it entirely. But only the anger continued to grow, and in one key respect, Babes could feel his resolve strengthening.
He was determined not to fail Ryan.
Babes suddenly stopped rocking. He thought he’d heard something. Keeping his body perfectly still was self-inflicted torture, but he forced himself to listen.
He heard it again. It was coming from outside the chapel—a crunching noise, very faint and in the distance. It sounded like a giant monster chewing ice cubes. No, someone was walking. Footsteps in pea gravel.
Someone’s coming!
Babes took a good look at the Russian. The man was on one knee, still peering out the broken window. It was impossible for Babes to see the expression on his face in the darkness, but his movements seemed different now—smoother, more purposeful and controlled. The Russian bent down to retrieve something from a leather bag on the floor beside him. It took a moment, but finally Babes discerned the shape in the shadows. It was a gun—a pistol of some sort, different from the one with the silencer on it. Slowly the Russian raised his new weapon and put the barrel through the hole in the window.
He’s going to shoot Ryan!
There was a moment of confusion for Babes—the hot and the cold swirling inside him, the anger combining with the fear of losing Ryan. The tornado within him took over, propelled Babes from his cocoon, and sent his body flying across the room. He broadsided the Russian with the force of a charging rhinoceros, but it was like running into an oak tree. Babes felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and a jolt to his spine on impact. The Russian oak fell over, but not before he managed to squeeze off a single shot that reverberated like a canon inside the stone chapel.
Babes rolled across the floor, and he heard the gun sliding on the concrete floor somewhere beside him. He’d knocked it from the Russian’s hand, but Babes didn’t look for it, didn’t want to get anywhere near it. He was barely aware of his screams as he hurried toward the door, pushed his way out of the chapel, and ran faster than he’d ever run before, disappearing among the tall trees and crumbling tombstones of the black burial grounds.
RYAN HEARD THE GUNSHOT, FOLLOWED BY SCREAMING.
Babes?
The first two family crypts had turned up nothing for Ryan. He wasn’t sure where to go next in the darkness, and the search for Babes was slow without a flashlight. Then, through the woods, he’d spotted the glow of a flashlight moving steadily across the grounds, like a ship on the horizon. Ryan had been following it until the gunshot had stopped it cold.
The beam of light was now aiming straight up at the clouds.
“Babes!”
All along, suicide had been Ryan’s biggest fear. Providence was like any other big city: it wasn’t difficult to get a handgun illegally, even for someone like Babes, who had no idea how to use one. The screams immediately following the gunshot told him that Babes had botched the attempt, and in his mind’s eye, Ryan saw him running frantically through the cemetery with powder burns on his scalp—or worse.
Ryan raced through the darkness toward the glowing flashlight. The screaming had stopped, and the utter silence only exacerbated his fears. A hundred-yard dash through a cemetery was a tricky thing in the dark. The rain was letting up, but the grass was wet and slippery. Ryan tripped once over a low-lying gravestone, got up immediately, and continued toward the light. The second stumble came just twenty yards farther along, as Ryan stepped into a hole. This time he’d turned his ankle, but he sprinted through the pain. He was breathing heavily when he reached the flashlight, but what he found there turned his fears to confusion.
“Emma?” he said.
She was lying on the wet grass, her body in a strange pose, almost a twisted heap. She’d obviously fallen—dropped—to the ground. Ryan grabbed the flashlight and knelt at her side. Then he saw the blood.
“Oh, God,” he said.
She looked up at him, her eyes clouded. “Is it as bad as it feels?”
There was so much blood. The bullet was in her upper right torso. Ryan hoped it was the shoulder.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said, trying to reassure her.
The ground was cold with dampness, and Ryan worried that she might go into shock. He removed his jacket and laid it on top of her for warmth, and he removed his shirt as well. The rain was now more of a mist, but it felt cold on his bare skin.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Don’t try to talk.”
Ryan was no paramedic, but years ago one of his neighbors back in Texas had been accidentally shot on a hunting trip. Ryan recalled people saying that applying pressure on the wound had stopped the man from bleeding to death.
“This is going to hurt,” he said.
Ryan rolled his shirt into a ball and pressed it directly to the wound.
Emma’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. It was as if the pain had transported her to another place, beyond screaming.
“Hang in there,” said Ryan. With his free hand he dug his cell from his pocket and dialed 911.
Another gunshot rang out, and Ryan dove to the ground.
“Babes, it’s me, Ryan! Stop shooting!”
Another shot ricocheted off the tombstone. Ryan didn’t want to move Emma, but he had no choice. He took her by the left arm and, gently as possible, dragged her about five feet, where they both found cover behind a much bigger stone monument.
“Kill the flashlight,” said Emma, her voice weakening.
Ryan grabbed it and switched off the light, which made them far less conspicuous. Only his cell phone glowed in the darkness.
The 911 dispatcher was on the line: “What is your emergency?”
“I’m not the one shooting!” Babes shouted. He was somewhere nearby, invisible in the night.
It took a moment for Ryan to process things—bullets flying, Emma wounded, Babes hiding.
“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
Ryan spoke into the phone. “There’s a shooter at the North Burial Ground. Emma Carlisle has been shot. Send the police and an ambulance—and hurry!”