“I got her.”
“Hold her tight.”
“I’m holding her. She’s in a Björn, Yefim.”
“Of course. I forget.” Yefim pinched the handcuffs at their centers and pulled them away from Amanda and the baby.
Amanda rubbed her wrists and looked around at the carnage. “Well . . .”
Yefim held out his hand. “Pleasure, Miss Amanda.”
“You’re no slouch yourself, Yefim.” She shook his hand. “Oh, the cross is in Helene’s purse.”
Yefim snapped his fingers. Pavel threw him the purse. Yefim pulled out the cross and smiled. “My family, before we end up in Mordovia two hundred years ago? We live in Kiev.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “True. My father, he tells me we’re descended from Prince Yaroslav himself. This is a family heirloom, man.”
“From a prince to a king,” Pavel said.
“Oh, you too kind, man.” He rummaged in the bag and then looked at me. “Whose gun?”
“That’s mine.”
“It was in the bag the whole time? Pavel!”
Pavel held up his hands. “Spartak supposed to check woman.”
They both looked down at Spartak as his blood ran under the sectional. After a few seconds they looked at each other and shrugged.
Yefim handed me my gun like he was handing me a can of soda, and I put it in the holster behind my back. Four people had just been killed in front of me, and I felt nothing. Zip. That’s what twenty years of swimming in shit had cost me.
“Oh, wait.” Yefim reached into his back pocket and pulled out a thick black wallet. He rummaged around in it for a bit and then handed me my driver’s license. “You ever need something, you call me.”
“I won’t,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You go sell insurance like the little man?”
“Not insurance.”
“What you do, then?”
“Going back to school,” I said and realized I meant it.
He raised his eyebrows at that and then nodded. “Good idea. This is no life for you anymore.”
“No.”
“You’re old.”
“Right.”
“You have kid, wife.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re old.”
“You said that already.”
He held the cross out for me to see. “Beautiful, eh? Every time someone die for it, it gets more beautiful, I think.”
I pointed at the Latin on the bottom. “What’s that mean?”
“What you think it means?”
“Something about heaven or paradise. Eden, maybe. I don’t know.”
Yefim looked at the bodies on the couch and on the floor by his feet. He chuckled. “You like this, man. It means, ‘The place of the skull has become paradise.’ ”
“Which means what?”
“I always thought, dying isn’t death. Where you see a skull, that guy? He already in paradise. Forever, my friend.” He scratched his temple with his gun sight and sighed. “You got Blu-Ray?”
“Huh?”
“You got Blu-Ray player?”
“No.”
“Oh, man, you crazy. Pavel, tell him.”
Pavel said, “You not watching movies unless you watch the Blu-Ray. It’s the pixels. Ten-eighty dpi, Dolby True HD sound? Change your life, man.”
Yefim waved his arms at the boxes stacked above Kirill’s corpse. “I like the Sony, but Pavel swears by JVC. You take two. You watch both with your wife and daughter, tell me which you like best. Hey?”
“Sure.”
“You want PlayStation 3?”
“No, I’m good.”
“iPod?”
“Got a couple, thanks.”
“How about a Kindle, my friend?”
“Nah.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He shook his head several times. “I can’t give those fucking things away.”
I held out my good hand. “Take care, Yefim.”
He clapped both my shoulders hard and kissed me on both cheeks. He still smelled of ham and vinegar. He hugged me and pounded his fists on my back. Only then did he shake my hand.
“You, too, my good friend, you hump.”
A
ll in all, it was an interesting Christmas Eve.
We were delayed getting out of the trailer park, because both Helene and Tadeo soiled themselves when Yefim and Pavel shot four people to death in the time it took to light a cigarette. Then Tadeo fainted. It happened just after Yefim and I discussed Blu-Rays and Kindles. We exchanged our Russian man-hug and heard a thump and looked over to see Tadeo lying on the floor of the trailer, breathing like a fish that had ridden a wave into shore but forgot to ride it back out.
“You ask me,” Yefim said, “I’m not sure this little man can handle the insurance business.”
We stood by the Suburban for a minute—Amanda, the baby, Sophie, and me. Sophie shivered and smoked and looked at me apologetically, either for the smoking or the shaking, I couldn’t tell. Pavel had told us to stay put and then he’d gone back inside the trailer. When he returned, he carried two Blu-Ray players.
Inside, someone fired up a chain saw.
Pavel handed me the Blu-Ray players. “You enjoy.
Do svidanya
.”
“Do svidanya.”
I went to the back of the Suburban and then called to Pavel as he reached for the door of the trailer. “We don’t have the car keys.”
He looked back at me.
“Kenny had them. They’re still in one of his pockets.”
“Give me minute.”
“Hey, Pavel?”
He looked back, one hand on the door.
“You have any ice in there?” I held up my scorched palm.
“I take a look.” He went back into the trailer.
I put the Blu-Ray players on the ground at the back of the Suburban, and my phone rang. I read the caller ID:
ANGIE CELL
. I flipped the phone open as fast as I could and walked away from the Suburban toward the river.
“Hey, babe.”
“Hi,” she said. “How’s Boston?”
“It’s nice here right now. The weather.” I reached the river-bank, stood watching the brown Charles slosh along, ice chips surfing along the top every now and then. “Thirty-eight, maybe thirty-nine degrees. Blue sky. Feels more like Thanksgiving. How’s it there?”
“It’s about fifty-five. Gabby loves it, man. All the squares, the horse-drawn carriages, the trees. She can’t get enough.”
“So you’re going to stay?”
“Hell, no. It’s Christmas Eve. We’re at the airport. We board in an hour.”
“I never gave you an all-clear.”
“Yeah, but Bubba did.”
“Oh, really.”
“He said it was just as easy to shoot Russians in Boston.”
“A solid point. All right, then, come home.”
“You done?”
“I am done. Hold on.”
“What?”
“Hang on a sec.” I crooked the phone into the space between my ear and my shoulder, never as easy to do on a cell as it is on a home phone. I pulled my .45 Colt Commander out of the holster at my back. “You still there?”
“I’m here.”
I ejected the clip, then jacked the round out of the chamber. I pulled back on the slide and disengaged it from the grip. I tossed the slide in the water.
“What’re you doing?” Angie asked.
“I’m throwing my gun in the Charles.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.” I tossed the clip in, watched it sink beneath the sluggish current. I flicked my wrist and the grip followed. I was left with one bullet and the frame. I considered both.
“You just threw your gun away. The .45?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I tossed the frame up and out in an arc and got a respectable splash when it hit.
“Honey, you’re going to need that for work.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing this shit anymore. Mike Colette offered me a job in his freight company and I’m going to take him up on it.”
“You’re serious?”
“Know what it is, babe?” I looked back at the trailer. “When you start out doing this, you think it’s just the truly horrible shit that’s going to get you—that poor little boy in that bathtub back in ’98, what happened in Gerry Glynn’s bar, Christ, that bunker in Plymouth . . .” I took a breath, let it out slowly. “But it’s not those moments. It’s all the little ones. It’s not that people fuck each other over for a million dollars that depresses me, it’s that they do it for ten. I don’t give a shit anymore whether so-and-so’s wife is cheating on him, because he probably deserved it. And all those insurance companies? I help them prove a guy’s faking his neck injury, they turn around and drop coverage on half the neighborhood when the recession hits. The last three years, every time I sit on the corner of the mattress to put my shoes on in the morning, I want to crawl back into bed. I don’t want to go out there and do what I do.”
“But you’ve done a lot of good. You do know that, don’t you?”
I didn’t.
“You have,” she said. “Everyone I know lies, breaks their word, and has perfectly legitimate excuses for why they do. Except you. Haven’t you ever noticed that? Two times in twelve years, you said you’d find this girl no matter what. And you did. Why? Because you gave your word, babe. And that might not mean shit to the rest of the world, but it means everything to you. Whatever else happened today, you found her twice, Patrick. When no one else would even try.”
I looked at the river and wanted to pull it over me.
“So I understand why you can’t do it anymore,” my wife said, “but I won’t hear you say it didn’t matter.”
I kept looking at the river for a bit. “Some of it mattered.”
“Some of it did,” she said.
I looked at the bare trees and the slate sky that stretched behind them. “But I’m all the way out. You okay with that?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Mike Colette’s having a good year. His distribution warehouse is thriving. He’s opening a new warehouse off Freeport next month.”
“And you, having worked your way through college in the freight business . . .” she said. “And that’s where you see yourself in ten years?”
“Huh? No, no, no. That where you see me?”
“Not at all.”
“I thought I’d get my master’s. I’m pretty sure I could secure some kind of financial aid, a grant, something. My grades were pretty stellar back in the day.”
“Stellar?” She chuckled. “You went to a state college.”
“Cold,” I said. “Still counts as stellar.”
“And what will my husband become in his second career?”
“I was thinking a teacher. History maybe.”
I waited for the sarcastic assessment, the playful dig. It didn’t come.
“You like that idea?” I asked her.
“I think you’d be great,” she said softly. “So what’ll you tell Duhamel-Standiford?”
“That this was my last lost cause.” A hawk glided low and fast over the water and never made a sound. “I’ll be waiting at the airport.”
“You just made my year,” she said.
“You made my life.”
After I hung up, I looked out at the river again. The light had changed while I’d been on the phone and now the water was copper. I perched the last remaining bullet on the end of my thumb. I peered at it for a bit, squinting until it looked like a tall tower built along the riverbank. Then I flicked my middle finger off the center of my thumb and fired it into the copper water.
• • •
“Merry Christmas,” Jeremy Dent said when his secretary put me through. “You done with your charity case?”
“I am,” I said.
“So we’ll see you the day after tomorrow.”
“Nah.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t want to work for you, Jeremy.”
“But you said you did.”
“Well, then, I guess I led you on,” I said. “Doesn’t feel good, does it?”
He was calling me a very bad name when I hung up on him.
• • •
At the southwestern tip of the trailer park, someone had arranged a few benches and potted plants to create a sitting area. I walked over to it and took a bench. It wasn’t the rear patio at The Breakers or anything, but it wasn’t bad. That’s where Amanda found me. She handed me the car keys and a small plastic bag filled with ice. “Pavel put your DVD players in the back.”
“That’s one considerate Mordovian hit man.” I placed the ice over the center of my palm.
Amanda sat on the bench to my right and looked out at the river.
I reached across and placed the Suburban keys on the bench beside her. “I’m not driving back to the Berkshires.”
“No? What about your Blu-Rays?”
“Keep ’em,” I said. “Have a high-def fest.”
She nodded. “Thanks. How’re you going to get home?”
“If memory serves,” I said, “there’s a bus station on Spring Street, the other side of Route 1. I’ll take it to Forest Hills, catch the T to Logan, meet my family.”
“That’s a sound plan.”
“You?”
“Me?” She shrugged. She looked out at the river again for a bit.
After the silence had gone on too long, I asked, “Where’s Claire?”
She cocked her head back toward the Suburban. “Sophie’s got her.”
“Helene and Tadeo?”
“Last I saw Yefim, he was trying to get Tadeo to fork over extra cash for a pair of Mavi jeans. Tadeo’s still shaking, he’s all, ‘Just give me the fucking Levi’s, man,’ but Yefim’s like, ‘Why you wear Levi’s, guy? I thought you were classy.’ ”
“Helene?”
“He gave her a sweet pair of Made Wells. Didn’t even charge her.”
“No, I meant—is she still puking?”
“She stopped about five minutes ago. Another ten minutes, she’ll be good for the car.”
I looked back over my shoulder at the trailer. It looked pale and innocuous against the brown water and the blue sky. Across the river stood an Irish restaurant. I could see patrons eating lunch, staring blankly out the windows, no idea what lay inside that trailer, awaiting the chain saw.
I said, “So, that was . . .”
She followed my gaze. Her eyes were wide with what I’d guess was residual shock. She might have
thought
she knew what it was going to be like in there, but she really hadn’t. A strange, fractured half-smile/half-frown tugged the corners of her mouth. “Yeah, right?”
“You ever see anyone die before?”
She nodded. “Timur and Zippo.”
“So you’re no stranger to violent death.”
“No expert, either, but I guess these young eyes have seen a few things.”
I zipped my coat up an inch and raised the collar as late December drifted off the river and snaked into the trailer park. “How’d those young eyes feel when they saw Dre blow up in front of them?”
She remained very still, bent forward just a bit, elbows resting on her knees. “It was the key chain, right?”
“It was the key chain, yeah.”
“The idea of him, dead or alive, carrying a picture of my daughter in his pocket? It just didn’t sit right with me.” She shrugged. “Oops.”
“And you knew the Acela’s schedule, I’m sure, when you threw the cross back over the tracks.”
She laughed. “Are you serious? Whatever you think happened in those woods, do you honestly believe people walk around all conscious of their motives all the time? Life’s a lot more sideways than that. I had an impulse. I threw the cross. His dumb ass chased it. He died.”
“But
why
did you throw the cross?”
“He was talking about quitting drinking so he could be the man I needed. It was gross. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I don’t need a man, so I just threw the damn cross.”
“Not bad for a story,” I said, “but it doesn’t answer the original question—why were we there in the first place? We weren’t trading anything for Sophie. Sophie wasn’t even in those woods that night.”
She remained unnaturally still. Eventually, she said, “Dre had to go. One way or the other, he’d served his purpose. If he’d just walked away, he’d still be alive.”
“You mean if he’d just walked away to anything but the path of a fucking Acela.”
“Yeah. That.”
“What if I’d been with Dre?”
“But you weren’t. That wasn’t accidental. Since the day Timur and Zippo died, and I ended up with Claire and the cross in my possession?” She shook her head slowly. “Nothing’s been accidental.”
“But if everything hadn’t gone according to plan?”
She turned her palms up on her knees. “But it
did
. Kirill never would have allowed himself to be led to a place like this if everything didn’t look perfectly logical in a very logically fucked-up way. Everybody had to play their parts to a T. In my experience, the only way that ever happens is when people don’t know they’re playing parts.”
“Like me.”
“Come on.” She chuckled. “You
suspected
. How many times did you ask why I’d made myself so easy to find? We had to make it easy—the combined intellect of Kenny, Helene, and Tadeo couldn’t solve a
TV Guide
crossword. I had to make sure the bread crumbs were croutons.”