Moonlight Mile

  Or, in this case, its driver. Kenny was its owner, and Kenny was fucked when the police found the car and saw who it was registered to. Not my problem, though. I drove it down the freight train tracks a couple hundred yards to a depot that led to the parking lot of Gillette Stadium. The only cars nearby were parked by the executive offices of One Patriot Place. The fan parking areas were barren for a couple hundred yards until you reached the shopping center next door. That’s where I drove the yellow Hummer. As I drove, I wiped. I used a handkerchief on the seat, the steering wheel, and the dashboard. I’m quite sure I didn’t get every fingerprint I’d left, but I didn’t have to. No one was going to get all CSI on the interior when it was registered to an ex-con who lived within two miles of the stadium.

  I parked on the outer fringe of the mall lot and took the escalator into the movie theater. It was Cinema De Lux, so I could have enjoyed table service from the balcony and paid $20 to watch a movie that would be on DVD for a buck in three months, but my mind was elsewhere. I found a bathroom with a handicapped stall and its own sink. I closed the door and removed my jacket and shook all the glass from it. I did the same with my shirt and then I used a wad of paper towels to push all the glass into one corner of the stall. I put my shirt back on, doing my best to ignore the tremors in my hands, but it was hard to do so when my fingers shook so much I couldn’t get the buttons into their holes. I gripped the sink and bent at the waist and took a dozen long, slow breaths. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Yefim walking toward me, casually extending his arm, casually firing into the windshield, casually ending my life if the situation had called for it. I opened my eyes. I stared at my reflection in the mirror and splashed some water on my face and stared at myself a little longer until my reflection looked a bit more in command of itself. I splashed some water on the back of my neck and tried to button my shirt again. My hands still shook but not as violently, and eventually I made do. Five minutes later, I left the bathroom looking a little bit better than when I’d entered.

  I went back down the escalator. A dark green cab sat out front of the theater. I hopped in and gave the driver the address of the house two doors over from where I’d left my car. A security guard was parked behind the Hummer, roof lights flashing. As we exited the parking lot, a Foxboro Police cruiser passed us. Kenny was almost out of time.

  The cab dropped me in front of the house on Tuck Terrace. I left the driver a solid tip but not so solid he’d be able to pick me out of a lineup. I walked to the house as he backed onto the road. I pretended to put a key in the front door as he pulled forward and then rode up the street. I walked over to the house where I’d left my Jeep. Back through the half-finished ranch, back across the field of sand, and I was once more at Kenny and Helene’s sliding glass door. It was unlocked, and I let myself in and stood watching as Kenny added the laptops to a duffel bag on the floor and Helene packed up the cable modems.

  Kenny noticed me. “You got my keys?”

  I patted my pockets and was surprised to find them. “Here you go.” I tossed him the keys.

  He zipped the duffel bag and lifted it off the floor. “Where’s it parked?”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly, “about that.”

  • • •

  “I can’t believe you killed my ride,” Kenny said as we drove past the empty Nottingham Hill security kiosk in my Jeep.

  “I didn’t kill it. Yefim did.”

  “I can’t believe you just fucking left it.”

  “Kenny, your Hummer looks like the bus at the end of The Gauntlet. The only way it was reaching your house was by U.N. airlift.”

  We came to the same stoplight where I’d almost run into Yefim and Pavel’s truck. A small armada of Foxboro Police cruisers came tear-assing down the road from the other direction. Kenny and Helene dropped in their seats as the cruisers blew through the red light, sirens a-rage. In another fifteen seconds, all four cruisers had disappeared over the rise behind us as if they’d never existed at all. I looked at Kenny, crammed under my glove compartment.

  “Subtle,” I said.

  “We don’t like calling attention to ourselves,” Helene said from the backseat.

  “Which is why you drive a yellow Hummer,” I said as the light turned green.

  On Route 1, we passed the stadium again. The Hummer was surrounded by local and state police, a black-panel crime scene truck, and two news vans. Kenny looked at the state of it—the blown tires, the shattered windshield, the shot-up hood. Another news van pulled into the lot. A helicopter flew overhead.

  “Shit, Kenny,” I said, “you’re big-time.”

  “Please,” he said, “can’t you let a man grieve in peace?”

  • • •

  We stopped in Dedham, back behind the Holiday Inn at the intersection of Route 1 and Route 1A.

  “Okay,” I said. “In case you haven’t figured it out, you two are screwed. I saw you grab the computers, but I’m sure you left something behind in the house that’ll tie you to all the wonderful fraud and identity theft you’ve been up to. Not to mention the meth dust in the microwave. I’m only half as smart as most cops at this, so let’s assume they’ll have you two charged by midday and will be out on the prowl with no-knock warrants by dinnertime.”

  “You’re such a bad bluffer.” Helene lit a cigarette.

  “You think?” I reached over the backrest, took the cigarette out of her mouth and flicked it out the window past Kenny’s face. “I got a four-year-old, you moron. She rides in this car.”

  “So?”

  “So, I don’t want her going to the playground smelling like a Newport.”

  “Touchy, touchy.”

  I held out my hand to her.

  “What?”

  “Gimme the pack.”

  “Nigger, please.”

  “Gimme the pack,” I repeated.

  Kenny sounded weary. “Give it to him, Helene.”

  She handed over the pack. I slid it into my pocket.

  “So,” Kenny said, “you got a solution for us?”

  “I dunno. Tell me what Kirill Borzakov wants with Amanda.”

  “Who said he wants Amanda?”

  “Yefim did.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “So what’s Amanda got that they could want?”

  “She ripped a load, took it on the run with her.”

  I made the sound of an NBA buzzer when the shot clock runs out. “Bullshit.”

  “No, he’s serious.” Helene, all wide-eyed.

  “Get out of my car.”

  “No, listen.”

  I reached across Kenny and pushed his door open. “See ya.”

  “No, really.”

  “Really. We’ve got less than two days to trade whatever Amanda’s got for Sophie. Now I know you don’t give a shit about the life of a teenage girl, but I’m kind of a dinosaur that way, and I do.”

  “So go to the police.”

  I nodded as if that made perfect sense. “Testify in open court against the Russian mob.” I scratched my chin. “By the time it’s safe for my daughter to leave Witness Protection, she’ll be fifty-fucking-five.” I looked at Kenny. “No one’s going to the cops.”

  “Can I have my cigarettes back?” Helene said. “Please.”

  “You going to smoke in my ride?”

  “I’ll open the door.”

  I tossed them back over the seat to her.

  “So where’s this leave us?” Kenny said.

  “What I said—we need to make a trade. The more you two dick me around on what exactly it is they want from Amanda, the less chance Sophie will be in anything less than three or four pieces by the time Friday rolls around.”

  “And we told you,” Kenny said, “Amanda ripped off their—”

  “It’s a piece of fucking jewelry,” Helene said. She opened the back door wide and placed one foot on the ground as she lit her cigarette. She blew the smoke out past the door and gave me a look like Satisfied?

  “Jewelry.”


  She nodded as Kenny closed his eyes and rested his head against the seat. “Yeah. Don’t ask me what it looks like or how she got it, but she stole this, what, crucifix?”

  “Well, it’s not a crucifix,” Kenny said. “ ’Least I don’t think so. They keep calling it a ‘cross.’ ” He shrugged. “That’s all we know.”

  “And you don’t know how this cross got into her possession?”

  Another head shake. “Nope.”

  “So you have no idea how Amanda might have had the opportunity to put her hands on this cross, or why she was hanging out with the Russian mob. Is that what you’re selling?”

  “We don’t smother her,” Helene said.

  “What?”

  “Amanda,” Helene said. “We let her make her own decisions. We’re not up her ass all the time. We show her respect as a person.”

  I looked out the car window for a bit.

  After the silence went on a bit too long, Helene said, “What’re you thinking?”

  I looked over the seat at her. “I’m thinking how I’ve never had the impulse to hit a woman in my life, but you get me in an Ike Turner frame of mind.”

  She flicked her cigarette into the parking lot. “Like I haven’t heard that before.”

  “Where. Is. She.”

  “We. Don’t. Know.” Helene bulged her eyes at me like a pissy twelve-year-old, which, in terms of emotional development, wasn’t far off the mark.

  “Bullshit.”

  Kenny said, “Man, I taught that girl how to create new identities so tight she could join the CIA. Obviously, she created a few I didn’t know about and now she’s running around with one of those identities. And she’s got a flawless fucking social security card and birth certificate, I assure you. And once you got those, you can create a ten-year credit history in about four hours. And once you’ve done that? Shit. The country’s one big ATM.”

  “You told Yefim you were close.”

  “I woulda told that ice-blood motherfucker anything he needed to hear, long as it got him to leave my kitchen.”

  “So you’re not close.”

  He shook his head.

  I looked at Helene in the rearview. She shook her head.

  We sat in silence again for a bit.

  “Then what good are you?” I said eventually and started the Jeep. “Get out of my car.”

  • • •

  I was scheduled to have a beer with Mike Colette, my friend who owned the distribution warehouses. He’d hired me to discover which of his employees was embezzling, and I’d found an answer he wasn’t going to like. I thought of canceling the meeting, because I was still a hair shaky from the eight bullets that had been fired in my direction, but we’d agreed to meet in West Roxbury and I was already over on that side of town, so I called his cell and told him I was on my way.

  He sat at one of the bar tops by the window at West on Centre and gave me a wave as I came through the door, even though he was the only guy at the tables. He’d been like that since we’d met at UMass, an earnest, solid guy of entrenched decency. I never met a soul who didn’t like him. The logic among our friends was if you didn’t like Mike, it said nothing about him but everything about you.

  He was a small guy with close-shorn curly black hair and the kind of handshake that you could feel in every bone of your body. He gave it to me when I reached the table and I was so distracted I hadn’t prepared for it. I damn near ended up on my knees and I was pretty sure carpal tunnel set in immediately.

  He pointed at the beer in front of my chair. “Just ordered it for you.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Get you anything? Appetizer or something?”

  “Oh, no, I’m fine.”

  “Sure? You look a little off, man.”

  I took a sip of beer. “I had a run-in with some Russians.”

  He drank from his own frosted mug, his eyes wide. “They’re a fucking menace in the trucking business, man. I mean, not all Russians, but Kirill Borzakov’s crew? Whew. Stay away from those guys.”

  “Too late.”

  “No shit?” He put his beer on the coaster. “You had a run-in with Borzakov’s guys?”

  “Yup.”

  “Kirill’s not just a thug, man, he’s an out-of-his-fucking-mind thug. You heard he got another DUI?”

  “Yeah, last week.”

  “Last night.” Mike pushed a folded Herald across the table at me. “And this one beats all.”

  I found it on page 6: “ ‘Butcher’ Borzakov’s Bezerko Blowup.” He’d taken his Targa into a Danvers car wash. Halfway through the service, he’d apparently become impatient. This was bad news for the car that sat ahead of his in the wash. Kirill rammed it. The car was propelled out of the wash, but the engine of Borzakov’s Targa seized up. Police found him in the parking lot, covered in suds as he tried to attack one of the Panamanians who worked the gas pumps with a wiper blade he’d snapped off his own car. He was Tasered and taken to the ground by four staties. He posted first-quarter NBA numbers on the Breathalyzer and the staties also found a half-gram of cocaine in his seat console. It took him all the way to dinnertime to make his bail. In the sidebar, they ran the names of the four men whose deaths he was suspected of ordering this past year.

  I folded the paper. “So it’s not the fact that he’s a killer that should bother me, it’s that he’s a killer having some kind of psychological meltdown?”

  “For starters.” He placed an index finger to his nose. “I hear he’s dipping into his own supply.”

  I shrugged. Man, was I sick of this shit.

  “Patrick, no offense, but you ever think of doing something else?”

  “You’re the second person to ask me that today.”

  “Well, I could be in the market for a new manager after this lunch, and you did work in trucking all through college, if I remember.”

  I shook it off. “I’m good. Thanks, Mike.”

  “Never say never,” he said. “All I’m saying.”

  “I appreciate that. Let’s talk about your case.”

  He folded his hands together and leaned into the table.

  “Who do you think is embezzling from you?”

  “My night manager, Skip Feeney.”

  “It’s not him.”

  His eyebrows went up.

  “I thought it was him, too. And I’m not saying he’s a hundred percent trustworthy. My guess is he takes a box off a truck every now and then. If you went to his house you’d probably find stereo equipment that matched missing shipments, that kind of thing. But he’s only able to fuck with the shipping manifests. He’s not able to get to invoices. And, Mike, the invoices are the key. In some cases, you’re being double- and triple-billed for shipments that don’t originate with you and don’t arrive at their destinations because they don’t exist.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly.

  “Someone ordering five pallets of Flowmaster mufflers. That sound right to you?”

  “Yeah, that’s about right. We’ll sell them all by July, but if we waited until April to order them, the price would be another six, seven percent higher. It’s a smart risk, even if it eats a little space.”

  “But you’ve only got four pallets in the warehouse. And the invoice reads ‘four.’ But the payment was for five. And I checked—they shipped five.” I pulled a notepad from my laptop bag and flipped it open. “What can you tell me about Michelle McCabe?”

  He sat back in his chair, his face drawn.

  “She’s my accounts-receivable manager. She’s the wife of a buddy of mine. A good buddy.”

  “I’m sorry, man. I am.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I reached back into the laptop bag, came out with my case file. I slid it across the table to him. “Go through the top twenty invoices. Those are the dirty ones. I attached the invoices the companies received so you can compare.”

  “Twenty?”

  “Could be more,” I said, “but those are the ones would hold up in a
ny court if she ever sued you. Or if she files a grievance with the Labor Board, throws any sort of wrongful termination shit at you. If you want to have her arrested—”

  “Oh, no.”

  Of course that would be his reaction.

  “I know, I know. But if you did, all the proof you need is right there. At the very least, Mike, you should consider making her pay restitution.”

  “How much?”

  “This past fiscal year alone? She took you for twenty thousand minimum.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And that’s just the stuff I found. A true auditor, knowing where to look, who knows what he’d find?”

  “This economy, and you’re telling me I got to shitcan my accounts-receivable manager and my floor manager?”

  “For different reasons, but yeah.”

  “Christ.”

  We ordered two more beers. The place began to fill up; the traffic outside thickened on Centre Street. Across the street, people pulled up in front of the Continental Shoppe to pick up their dogs from a day’s grooming. While we sat there, I counted two poodles, one beagle, one collie, and three mutts. I thought of Amanda and her thing for dogs, the only trait I’d heard ascribed to her that sounded soft, humanizing.

  “Twenty thousand.” Mike looked like someone had swung a bat into his stomach, then slapped him in the face while he was doubled over. “I ate dinner at their house last week. We went to the Sox a couple times last summer. Christ, two years ago, she’d just started for me? I gave her an extra thousand as a Christmas bonus because I knew they were about to get their car repo’d. I just . . .” He raised his hands above his head and brought them back down helplessly behind his skull. “I’m forty-four years old and I don’t understand anything about people. I just don’t get them.” He brought his hands back to the table. “I don’t understand,” he whispered.

  I hated my job.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It had been a few hours since my encounter with Yefim and I still couldn’t shake it. Back in the day, I would have manned up with a drink or six, maybe called Oscar and Devin so we could meet at some dive to out-understate one another when it came to violent encounters.