The Whole Lie (22 page)

His chest moved.

“Moe?” I said. Set my hand on his chest, felt it fall and rise.

“Moe! It's Conway.
Breathe,
Moe.
Breathe.
” Pulled my cell, dialed 911 as I spoke.

Six minutes later, God bless 'em, the EMTs crash-carted their way in and I eased my way out. By the time the first white-on-black Winthrop police Charger slammed down Moe's block, I was driving around the corner, making my way back to the main drag.

I drove to a drugstore I'd passed on my way in. Parked near the back corner, wobbled over to the Dumpster, puked. Wiped as much shit from my hands as I could, went in the store. Bought water, toothpaste, toothbrush, paper towels, disinfecting wipes. Ignored the clerk's wrinkled nose while I paid. Cleaned up, brushed teeth, climbed back in my truck.

I was shaking. I was colder than I should be. I fired the truck, blasted the heater.

Think it through.

It hadn't been neighborhood creeps who'd attacked Moe: Twenty-five grand worth of kick-ass photo gear sat untouched on his porch.

So look at it square: He'd been attacked because of me. By this fucking Vernon in the green Expedition. Had to be him.
And you led Vernon right to Moe's house the other day because you couldn't spot a goddamn big-ass SUV riding your bumper.

But what had Vernon wanted from Moe? Had to be information, but what? I pushed puzzle pieces around. Vernon had wiped out Blaine, had smothered Moe …

My mouth dropped open.

I looked at my knuckles on the steering wheel. Death-grip white.

Vernon Lee killed Savannah Kane.

I'd been hung up on the Saginaw people because Bert had a lot to lose. But so did Vernon, as far as he was concerned. This was a brass ring like he'd never seen in his low-rent life. And wouldn't again, and he damn well knew it.

Maybe Blaine and Savvy had double-crossed Vernon. Or maybe Blaine had talked Savvy into forgetting about the whole blackmail scam.

Vernon had gone wild. Vernon had gone on a no-holds-barred tear. He'd chucked Savvy off an air-conditioning unit in Charlestown. He'd run his own son through a guardrail, accidentally or not. But all the killing hadn't done him any good: He still hadn't found the blackmail pics. So maybe he was flailing, caught in a red mist of his own. With Blaine and Savvy gone, the nearest target was me. Moe was just a connection. Nothing more.

Vernon Lee killed Savannah Kane.

So face it.
This was on my shoulders. This was for me to live with.

This was for me to avenge.

I was still shaking.

But I wasn't cold anymore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sweet hot fury. Warms the belly, makes a man feel limber.

Racers call it the red mist. It shoves aside your judgment, your common sense, everything you know about the laws of physics. When you're watching a race on TV and one driver tries a boneheaded pass, a pass he never had any chance of making, and he wipes out at least two cars, and you ask yourself:
What the hell was he thinking?
The answer is that he wasn't. The red mist took him over, made him stupid. For a few seconds there, the driver didn't care if he lived or died. By God, he was gonna make that pass.

Now here's the problem: One out of a hundred times, you actually pull off a red-mist move. You make a pass that looked impossible, or save what looks like a done-deal spin at 165 mph.

Result: Everybody says you're a wheel man. Everybody says you're a stud.

Which guarantees you'll try ninety-nine more boneheaded red-mist moves.

Ask any racer.

Sweet fury, red mist, was a specialty of mine for a long time. On the track, it helped me build my rep—then helped cost me my ride. Off the track, it saved my life more than once. But it put me in some bad spots, too.

Funny thing: My value to the Barnburners was built around the red-mist days—days when walking into some jerk's home or office, slamming his nose on a counter, and snapping a couple of his fingers for good measure was no harder for me than buying a soda—but the older I got, the less I liked all that. I had to pump myself up, get a good mad on, fake the fury sometimes.

No need to fake now.

What I
did
need was to find him. Vernon Lee of Level Cross.

Which shouldn't be a problem, since he kept finding me.

So drive. Act natural, eyeball the mirror.

I did.

And planned.

I called Mary Giarusso, Barnburner gossip queen, and told her about Moe. I knew she'd pin down which hospital they were taking him to, would bang the jungle drums. The Barnburners would feel guilty about ignoring my earlier calls for help. They'd rally around Moe.

Trundled through a Dunkin' Donuts drive-through. No Vernon. Kept one eye on my mirrors as I slowed for the toll booths at the Ted Williams Tunnel.

Where there were a half-dozen blue-and-gray state police vehicles waiting for me, along with Winthrop, East Boston, and Logan Airport cruisers. Mostly Crown Vics, but a couple of Ford Explorers for good measure, one of them a K-9 unit.

At least ten semiautos were pointed at me.

I didn't even put my truck in park—didn't want to move my hands that much. Instead: I stopped just after the toll booth, wrists on steering wheel, hands up.

The one who opened my door was the one who'd been running the show at Braxton High: tall, silver near–buzz cut, greyhound body. “Detective Wu would like to speak with you,” he said. “Check that. Detective Wu would
very much
like to speak with you.”

“A K-9 unit?” I said, looking around the concrete canyon we were in. “What'd you think, I was going to run off through a swamp?”

Traffic in both directions was a mess, everybody swivel-heading at the scene. So while two young staties cuffed me and politely elbow-walked me to a cruiser, it wasn't hard for me to spot the green Ford Expedition dropping into the tunnel. Gold trim. Eddie Bauer package. Vernon Lee couldn't have been more than a quarter-mile behind me when I was pulled over.

Hell.

*   *   *

A couple hours later, I walked out of the state police barracks at Logan Airport's Terminal D. The staties had driven my truck here. Wu had said it was a courtesy. Then he'd sat opposite me in a pale-blue cinder block room, yellow legal pad in front of him, and had begun asking questions.

The drugstore clerk near Moe's place had dimed me out. Pretty smart of her, really: A non-local had come in smelling of shit, with puke at the corner of his mouth, and bought all sorts of cleanup supplies just as the neighborhood exploded with sirens. She phoned my license plate to the Winthrop cops.

“Moe Coover was a friend, huh?” Wu had said once I walked him through the basics. “So you called nine-one-one and fled the scene. With friends like you.”

“I waited till the EMTs showed up. Wasn't much more for me to do.”

“Except maybe hang around awhile and help us do our job.”

I said nothing.

“You keep popping up, Sax. You gotta know that bugs a guy like me.”

“What's the latest on Savannah Kane?”

“Accidental death by misadventure.” Pause. “Unless you got something more to say about it.”

I said nothing.

“Persuade me, Sax. I'm persuadable. I'm persuadable as hell.”

I said nothing.

Wu's cell, sitting on the table, buzzed with an incoming text. He read it. Then he stepped from the room.

In less than a minute he came in again. Left the door open, stood with his back against it. Made an exaggerated sweep with his right arm.

I looked a question at him.

“Beat it,” he said.

It could only mean one thing. “Moe came to,” I said. “He described the guy.”

“Beat it.”

I may have smiled as I walked out. Moe was okay.

In my truck I texted Charlene I'd be a few minutes late for our meeting, then got the hell out of Logan. At the first rest area on the Mass Pike, I climbed from the truck and double-checked my hidey-hole—didn't trust the staties as far as I could throw them. Courtesy, my ass.

But their search hadn't been thorough, and the dirty pics were still there. I climbed back in and hit the throttle.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden is in a town called Boylston, ten minutes north of Charlene's house. They've got indoor hothouses with a zillion kinds of plants. I guess the plants and flowers are rare. Charlene says they are; truth be told, most of 'em don't look like much to me.

To us, it was the location and the grounds that made Tower Hill worth visiting. It sits on a slope that rolls to a big reservoir. Lots of grass, lots of hiking, blazing colors in the fall.

It was dusk when I got there, and the volunteer lady was ready to close up. I only wheedled my way in because the lady knew Charlene was waiting.

Rolling up the drive, I thought about what Tower Hill really meant to us.

It was where we became a couple. It was where we became a family, or tried our level best to, before Charlene's daughter Jesse hit hard times and everything flew apart.

When we first got together, neither of us had a whole lot of experience dating. Experience with the opposite sex? Not a problem. Experience getting to know someone, caring for someone? That's plenty different.

Other than AA commitments, coffee sessions with carloads of Barnburners, and maybe a McBurger here and there, Tower Hill was the first place we went for a date. Charlene had read about it, and the article had lit off a half-buried memory that she'd once enjoyed gardening.

It had been our favorite spot ever since that first date. I remembered standing by a fountain, looking around like a boy at a high school dance, taking her hand. I remembered how nice it felt. It was the first hand I'd held in a long time.

We became grown-ups at Tower Hill. It became our place. We ate in the little café. Charlene signed up for the mailing list. The old ladies who ran the place knew our names, thought we were cute.

One August afternoon a few years back, an old Chinese guy who must have been half mountain goat caught us making love in our secret spot where the tall grass met the trees, a full quarter-mile from any building. Instead of pretending not to see us, he began whacking my ass with his walking stick like we were a pair of mongrels going at it in his front yard. I never saw Charlene laugh so hard, before or since, clutching me with legs and arms as I fended off the walking stick and cursed the Chinaman.

The memory still made me smile as I passed Charlene's Volvo and headed for the big greenhouse where we always met.

Hint one that this would not be a happy meeting: Charlene stood outside the greenhouse. She's chilly by nature, and she was underdressed in a baby-blue cardigan that didn't match her business clothes at all—she must have rummaged through her car for it.

Hint two: Her jiggling, arms-crossed stance as she waited. Charlene is the stillest person I've ever known.

All this slowed my pace. Maybe I even stepped quietly. Maybe part of me knew what was coming before she turned.

I was two feet away when she did. I startled her. She got over it fast.

“You're late,” she said.

“I texted,” I said.

“Still,” she said.

“Aren't you cold?” I said.

“There are people inside,” she said. “Walk to the Secret Garden?”

We walked. When I reached for her hand, she used it to adjust her purse strap.

“What gives?” I said.

At the exact same time, she said, “Clearly things are not working.”

We stopped walking. We faced each other. The day's last shot of sun slashed past my right shoulder. It caught her hair in a certain way. So did a wind gust. Behind her, tiny burnt-orange leaves sailed from a half-dozen trees. The trees were from someplace special. I couldn't remember where.

“I'll stop,” I said.

“Stop what?”

“I'll stop with the Barnburners stuff.”

“But you won't,” she said, stroking my cheek with the back of a hand. “You won't, will you? Think it through. Tell the truth.”

China? Japan? Japan sounded right. They looked like regular trees, regular leaves, but in three-quarter scale. That seemed very Japanese.

“No,” I said. “I won't.” My throat was dry. I swallowed. “Will I?”

“You won't.” She eye-locked me. “Tell me about Savannah Kane.”

“You know we had a thing. It was before you and me.”

She shook her head, annoyed. “There's more.
Tell
me, Conway. Please.”

I looked in Charlene's eyes. They were the color of the ocean in ads for the Bahamas. “I, ah,” I said.

She waited.

“I betrayed her.”

“Nonsense. Betrayal is impossible for you, it's … it's the
opposite
of you.”

“I betrayed her.”

Charlene waited, knowing there had to be more.

*   *   *

Sixteen years ago, in Kentucky's Franklin County Courthouse, in a thrift-store suit that made me look like a clown who ran a funeral home, I spoke exactly the words James Sebelius had coached me to say. He'd trained me well. I spoke the words so unvaryingly that the judge called both the prosecutor and the exasperated defense lawyer for a little chitchat. I couldn't make out her words, but the judge smelled a rat. No matter. When the defense lawyer asked me slightly different questions, trying to throw me off or expose a lie, I just said my words again.

The judge—it wasn't a jury trial—had no choice but to convict Savannah Kane of Possession of a Controlled Substance Totaling Greater than Two Ounces, Intent to Distribute, and a half-dozen pissant charges Sebelius and his buddies had piled on. Due to Savvy's existing record and state mandatory-sentencing rules, the judge had to send her to the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women in Pewee Valley for no fewer than sixty-one months.