She was sued for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary responsibility, and breach of her confidentiality agreement. She was prosecuted for grand theft and convicted. She lost her house. She also lost her husband, who bailed while she was under house arrest. Her daughter was bounced from private school. Her son was forced to drop out of college. Last I heard, Peri Pyper worked days answering phones at a used-car dealership in Lewiston, worked nights cleaning floors at a BJ’s Wholesale in nearby Auburn.
She’d thought I was her drinking buddy, her harmless flirtation, her political soul mate. As they’d placed the cuffs on her, she’d looked into my face and seen my duplicity. Her eyes widened. Her lips formed a perfect O.
“Wow, Patrick,” she said, just before they led her away, “you seemed so real.”
I’m pretty sure it’s the worst compliment I’ve ever received.
So when her boss, a doughy dickhead with a 7 handicap and an American flag painted on the tail fin of his Gulfstream, came to Boston to thank me personally, I shook his hand firmly enough to make his man boobs shake. I answered his questions and even had a drink with him. I had done all that was asked of me. Branch Federated and Downeast Lumber could continue shipping its TSCs to construction sites all over North America, Mexico, and Canada. And the groundwater and top soil in the communities in which its mills operated could continue to poison the dinner tables of everyone within a twenty-mile radius. When the meeting was over, I went back home and chased a Zantac 150 with liquid Maalox.
“I was perfectly polite to that guy,” I said.
“Polite the way I’m polite to my wife’s sister with the fucking herpes sore under her right nostril.”
“You swear a lot for a blue blood,” I said.
“You’re fucking right I do.” He held up a finger. “But only behind closed doors, Patrick. That’s the difference. I modulate my personality for the room I’m in. You do not.” He paced a circle around his desk. “Sure, we snuffed out a whistle-blower in DLC, and Branch Federated compensated us regally. But what about next time? Who’s going to get their business next time? Because it isn’t going to be us.”
I didn’t say anything. The view was nice. A sky caught between gray and blue. A thin film of cold mist turning the air pearl. Far off beyond the center of the city, I could see trees that were black and bare.
Jeremy Dent came around the desk and leaned against it, his ankles crossed.
“You fill out your 479s on the Trescott case?”
“No.”
“Well, take the sub office and do that. Fill out your expense reports and don’t forget to file your 692s as well. See Barnes in equipment so he can clear you on the gear you used—what’d you go with, the Canon and the Sony?”
I nodded. “I used those new Taranti bugs in the kid’s place, too.”
“I heard they were glitchy.”
I shook my head. “Worked like a charm.”
He finished his drink and leveled his gaze at me. “Look, we’ll find a new case for you. And if you can just get through
that one
without pissing anybody off, we’ll hire you permanent, okay? You can tell your wife I gave you my word.”
I nodded, a hole in my stomach.
• • •
Back in the empty office, I considered my options.
I didn’t have many. I was working one case and it was far from a cash cow. An old friend, Mike Colette, had asked me to help figure out which employee was embezzling from his freight company. It took me a few days with the paperwork to narrow it down to his night-shift supervisor and one or two of his short-haul truckers, but then I did some further digging and they didn’t look as right for it as I’d originally thought. So now I’d turned my attention to his accounts-payable manager, a woman he’d promised me was a trusted confidante, beyond reproach.
I could expect to bill another five, maybe six, hours for that job.
At day’s end, I’d walk out of Duhamel-Standiford and wait for their next call, their next trial. In the meantime, the bills arrived in the mailbox every day. The food in the fridge got eaten and the shelves didn’t miraculously fill back up. I had a Blue Cross Blue Shield bill due at the end of the month and not enough money to pay it.
I sat back in my chair. Welcome to adulthood.
I had half a dozen files to update and three Brandon Trescott reports to write, but I picked up the phone instead and called Richie Colgan, the Whitest Black Man in America.
He answered the phone, “
Tribune,
Metro Desk.”
“Not an ounce of you sounds like a brother.”
“My people don’t have a sound, just a proud and royal legacy temporarily interrupted by racist crackers with whips.”
“You telling me if Dave Chappelle answers one phone and George Will answers the other, I’m gonna have trouble guessing which is the white guy?”
“No, but to discuss it in polite company is still
verboten
.”
“Now you’re German,” I said.
“Only on my French racist father’s side,” he said. “What up?”
“Remember Amanda McCready? Little girl went—”
“Missing, what, five years ago?”
“Twelve.”
“Shit. Years? How old
are
we?”
“ ’Member how we felt in college about old geezers who talked about, like, the Dave Clark Five and Buddy Holly?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s how kids today feel when we talk about Prince and Nirvana.”
“Naw.”
“Believe it, bitch. So anyway, Amanda McCready.”
“Yeah, yeah. You found her with the cop’s family, brought her back, everyone on the force hates your guts, you need a favor from me.”
“No.”
“You don’t need a favor?”
“Well, I do, but it’s directly connected to Amanda McCready. She went missing again.”
“No shit.”
“No shit. And her aunt says no one cares. Not the cops, not you guys.”
“Hard to believe. Twenty-four-hour news cycle and all? These days we can make a story out of anything.”
“Explains Paris Hilton.”
“Nothing explains that,” he said. “Point is—a girl disappears again twelve years after her first disappearance brought down a gang of cops and cost the city a few mil during a bad budget year? Shit, that’s news, white boy.”
“That’s what I thought. You almost sounded black there, by the way.”
“Racist. What’s the aunt’s name, uh, bitch?”
“Bea. Well, Beatrice McCready.”
“Aunt Bea, uh? Well, this ain’t Mayberry.”
• • •
He called me back twenty minutes later. “That was simple.”
“What happened?”
“I talked to the investigating officer, a Detective Chuck Hitchcock. He said they investigated the aunt’s claim, went to the mother’s house, poked around, and talked to the girl.”
“Talked to the girl? Amanda?”
“Yeah. It was all a hoax.”
“Why would Bea make up a—?”
“Oh, Bea’s a champ, what she is. You know Amanda’s mother—what’s it, Helene?—she’s had to take out a couple restraining orders on this woman. Ever since her kid died, she left the reser—”
“Wait, whose kid?”
“Beatrice McCready’s.”
“Her kid didn’t die. He’s at Monument High.”
“No,” Richie said slowly, “he’s not at Monument High. He’s dead. Him and a few other kids were in a car last year, none of them old enough to drive, none of them old enough to drink, but they did both anyway. They blew a stop sign at the bottom of that big-ass hill where St. Margaret’s Hospital used to be? Got pancaked by a bus on Stoughton Street. Two kids dead, two kids talking funny for the rest of their lives but not walking while they’re doing it. One of the dead was this Matthew McCready. I’m looking at it in our Web archives right now. June 15, last year. You want the link?”
I
exited JFK/UMass Station and headed for home, my head still buzzing. I’d hung up the phone and clicked on the link Richie sent me, and there it was—a page 4 story from last June about four boys who took a joyride in a stolen car and came flying down a hill stoked on pot and Jager. The bus driver never had time to hit his horn. Paralyzed from the waist down, Harold Endalis, 15. Paralyzed from the neck down, Stuart Burr-field, 15. Dead on arrival at the Carney ER, Mark McGrath, 16. Dead on scene, Matthew McCready, 16. I descended the station stairs and headed up Crescent Avenue toward home, thinking about all the stupid shit I’d done at sixteen, ten or twelve ways I could have died—probably should have died—before seventeen.
The first two houses on the south side of Crescent, a matching pair of small white Capes, were abandoned, victims of the wonderful mortgage crisis that had spread such cheer across the land of late. A homeless guy approached me in front of the second one.
“Yo, bro, you got a minute to hear me out? I’m not looking for a handout.”
He was a small guy, wiry and bearded. His baseball cap, cotton hoodie, and battered jeans were streaked with grime. The ripe odor coming off him told me it had been a while since he’d bathed. He didn’t have nut-bag eyes, though; there was no meanness in him, no crackhead edge.
I stopped. “What’s up?”
“I’m not a beggar.” He held out his hands to ward off my assumptions. “I want to make that clear.”
“Cool.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“But I got a kid, you know? And there ain’t no jobs. My old lady, she’s sick, and my baby boy he just needs some formula. Shit’s, like, seven bucks and I—”
I never saw his arm move, but he snatched my laptop bag off my shoulder just the same. He took off with it, tear-assing for the back of the nearest abandoned house. The bag held my case notes, my laptop, and a picture of my daughter.
“You dumb shit,” I said, not sure if I was talking to myself or to the homeless guy, maybe to both of us. Who knew the fucker had such long arms?
I pursued him down the side of the house through knee-high weeds and crushed beer cans, empty Styrofoam egg containers, and broken bottles. It was probably a squatters’ house these days. When I was a kid, it was the Cowans’ house, then the Ursinis’. A Vietnamese family bought it next and did a lot of rehab on it. Just before the father lost his job and then the mother lost hers, they’d begun remodeling the kitchen.
It was still missing the back wall there; some of the plastic tarps nailed to the framing flapped in the afternoon breeze. As I reached the backyard, the homeless guy was only a few feet ahead and about to be slowed by a chain-link fence. I sensed movement to my left. A plastic tarp parted and a dark-haired guy swung a length of pipe into the side of my face and I spun into the plastic and fell into the unfinished kitchen.
I’m not sure how long I lay there—long enough to notice, as the room shook behind watery waves of air, that all the copper had been stripped from beneath the sink and behind the walls. Long enough to feel reasonably certain my jaw wasn’t broken, though the left side of my face was simultaneously numb and on fire, and blood leaked steadily from it. I got to my knees and a nail bomb detonated in my skull. Everything that wasn’t directly in front of my nose vanished behind black cloaks. The floor shimmied.
Someone helped me to my feet and then pushed me into a wall, and someone else laughed. A third person, farther away, said, “Bring him in here.”
“I don’t think he can walk.”
“Lead him, then.”
Fingers vise-gripped the back of my neck and guided me into what had once been the living room. The black cloaks receded from view. I could make out a small fireplace, the mantel torn away and probably used as firewood. I’d been in this room once before, when a bunch of us sixteen-year-olds followed Brian Cowan in here to raid his father’s liquor cabinet. A couch had sat under the windows facing the street. A garden bench sat there now and a man sat on it, his eyes on me. I was dropped on the couch across from him, a ratty orange thing that smelled like the Dumpster behind a Red Lobster.
“You gonna puke?”
“Curious about that myself,” I said.
“I told him to trip you, not hit you with a pipe, but he got a little excited.”
I could see the guy with the pipe now—a slim, dark-haired Latino in khaki cargo pants and a wife-beater. He gave me a shrug as he tapped the pipe back and forth in his palm. “Oops.”
“Oops,” I said. “I’ll remember that.”
“You won’t remember shit,
pendejo,
I hit you again.”
Hard to argue with logic. I took my eyes off the help and considered the boss on the bench. I would have expected prison-lean and prison-mean, gin-pale eyes. Instead, the guy wore a yellow-and-green-plaid shirt under a black wool sweater and a pair of tan corduroys. On his feet were a pair of canvas Vans with a pattern of black and gold squares. His red hair was a little on the longish side and flyaway. He didn’t look gangsta; he looked like a science teacher at a prep school.
He said, “I know you got some rough friends and I know you’ve been in some serious scrapes, so you don’t scare easy.”
News to me. I was scared shitless. Pissed off, instinctively memorizing every detail I could about the two guys I could see, and thinking about ways to get the Latino’s pipe into my hands and straight up his ass—but scared out of my mind, just the same.
“Your first instinct is going to be to come after us, if we let you live.” He unwrapped a piece of bubble gum and popped it in his mouth.
If
.
“Tadeo, give him a towel for his face.” The science teacher gave me a cocked eyebrow. “Yeah, I said his name. Know why, Patrick? Because you won’t come after us. You know why you won’t come after us?”
It would hurt too much to shake my head, so I simply said, “No.”
“Because we’re bad fucking guys and you’re a soft fucking guy. Maybe not once, but this isn’t ‘once.’ I hear your business went to shit because you started bailing on anything that smelled like a rough case. Understandable for a guy who got shot a bunch of times, almost bled out and shit. Still, the word’s out you don’t have the stones to do this at our level anymore. You’re not part of this life. And you don’t want to be.”
Tadeo came back from the kitchen area and put two paper towels in my hand. I fumbled for them, listing to my left, and he ran the end of the pipe along the side of my neck with a soft chuckle.
I snatched the pipe out of his hand and drove a foot into his knee at the same time. Tadeo fell backward and I came off the couch. The science teacher yelled, “Hey!” and pointed a pistol at me and I froze. Tadeo scrambled backward on his ass until he reached the wall. He stood, favoring his good leg. I remained frozen, the pipe in my hand, my arm cocked. Science Teacher lowered the gun as an indication I should lower the pipe. I gave him a tiny nod of agreement. Then I flicked my wrist. The pipe tomahawked across the room and hit Tadeo between his eyebrows. He let out a yelp and bounced off the wall. The gash above his nose opened and flooded his eyes. He took two steps toward the center of the room and then three more steps to the side. He took a few more steps and walked into the wall. He put his hands on the wall and gulped for air.
“Oops,” I said.
Science Teacher dug the gun barrel into my neck. “Sit,” he hissed, “the fuck down.”
The third guy came into the room now—huge, maybe six-four, three-eighty. He was breathing heavy, waddling.
“Take Tadeo upstairs,” the redhead said. “Put him in the shower, throw some cold water on him, see if he has a concussion.”
“How do I see if he has a concussion?” the big guy asked.
“Look into his eyes, I don’t fucking know. Ask him to count to ten.”
I asked, “Will you learn anything new if he can’t?”
“I told you to shut up.”
“No. You told me to sit the fuck down, and you’re already running out of options.”
The fat guy led Tadeo out of the room. Tadeo kept polishing the air in front of him, like a dog having a dream.
I lifted the paper towels off the floor. One side of them was clean, and I pressed that side to my face, came back with a red Rorschach test. “I’m going to need stitches.”
Science Teacher leaned forward on his bench, the gun pointed at my stomach. He had an open face with a light dusting of freckles the same color as his hair. His smile was bland and eager, like he was acting the community-theater role of someone who wanted to be helpful. “What makes you think you’re walking out of here?”
“Like I said, your option-clock is ticking down to nothing. There were people on the street when that guy boosted my bag. Someone’s already called the cops. The house next door isn’t occupied, but the house behind you is, you dumb shit, and there’s a good chance someone saw Tadeo pop me with the pipe. So whoever hired you to deliver whatever message you’re supposed to deliver, I’d get kinda peppy about delivering it.”
Science Teacher didn’t strike me as stupid. If he’d wanted to kill me, he would have put two in the back of my head when I’d been kneeling on the floor of the unfinished kitchen.
“Stay away from Helene McCready.” He squatted in front of me, the gun dangling between his thighs as he gazed up into my face. “You snoop around her or her kid, you ask any questions, I’ll bullet-fuck your entire life.”
“Gotcha,” I said with a nonchalance I didn’t feel.
“
You
got a kid now, Patrick, a wife. A nice life. Go back to it and stay in it. And we’ll all forget this.”
He stood and stepped back as I made it to my feet. I walked into the kitchen and found the roll of paper towels on the floor. I pulled off a wad and pressed it to my face. He stood in the doorway, staring at me, the gun in his waistband. My own gun sat back in the desk at Duhamel-Standiford. Not that it would have done me any good after Tadeo hit me in the head with a pipe. Then they would have just taken the gun, and I’d be out a laptop, a laptop bag, and a gun.
I looked over at him. “I gotta go to an ER and get my face stitched up, but don’t worry, I don’t take it personally.”
“Gosh,” he said, “you promise?”
“You threatened my life, but I’m cool with that, too.”
“Darn white of you, too.” He blew a bubble and let it snap.
“But,” I said, “you stole my laptop and I really can’t afford to buy a new one. Don’t suppose you’d give that back to me?”
He shook his head. “Finders keepers.”
“I mean, that fucks me up, man, but I’m not going to turn it into something it ain’t. Because it’s just business. Right?”
“If it ain’t, ‘business’ will do until the right word shows up.”
I pulled the paper towels from my face. They were a mess. I folded them over and put the wad back to the side of my head for a minute, looked again at the redheaded science teacher standing in the doorway.
“So be it,” I said and dropped the red wad of paper towels on the floor, tore off a fresh batch, and let myself out of the house.