Moonlight Mile

  “Five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  My cell phone vibrated and I took it out, looked at the screen, saw a number I didn’t recognize. I put it back in my pocket.

  “Pretty soon, one of Kirill’s guys—Pavel; I think you two met—he comes to me and says I should apply for a job opening at the Department of Children and Families. Turns out they got a guy in HR working off his own debt. So I apply and he waives the CORI check, and I get the job that I’m eminently overqualified for. A few weeks later, after a particularly attractive fourteen-year-old pregnant girl leaves my office, my phone rings and they tell me I have to present her with an offer.”

  “What do you get per baby?” Angie’s voice was weary with contempt.

  “One thousand off my debt.”

  “So you’ve got to get them five hundred and twenty-six babies before you’re off the hook?”

  He gave that a resigned nod.

  “How close are you?”

  “Not close enough.”

  My phone vibrated again. I looked at it. Same number. I put it back in my pocket.

  My wife said, “You know even if you got them five hundred and twenty-six babies to sell on the black market . . .”

  He finished the sentence. “They’ll never be done with me.”

  “No.”

  My cell vibrated a third time. I had a text message. I flipped the phone open.

  Hey guy. Anser your

  fucking phone. Sincerely

  Yefim.

  Dre took another hit from his flask. “You’re like a fifteen-year-old girl with that thing.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d know all about that.”

  My phone rang again. I got off the couch and walked out to the front porch. Amanda was right—from here, you could hear the brook gurgle.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, my good guy. What you do with the Hummer?”

  “I drove it over to the stadium and left it there.”

  “Ha. That’s a good one. Maybe I see Belichick driving it one day in his hoodie.”

  In spite of myself, I smiled.

  “What’s up, Yefim?”

  “Where you at, my friend?”

  “Around. Why?”

  “I thought maybe we could talk. Maybe we could help each other out here.”

  “How’d you get my phone number?”

  He laughed, a deep, long belly chuckle. “You know what day it is?”

  “It’s Thursday.”

  “It is Thursday, yes, my friend. And Friday is a big day.”

  “Because you wanted Kenny and Helene to find you something by Friday.”

  I could hear the snort through the phone. “Kenny and Helene couldn’t find a chicken in the chicken soup, my man. But you? I look in your eyes after I shoot that faggot car and I see you’re afraid—you’d be one icy fucker if you weren’t—but I also see you’re curious. You sitting there thinking, If this crazy Mordovian don’t pull this trigger, I’ve got to know why he points it at me in the first place. I see that in your eyes, man. I see it. You a type.”

  “Yeah, what type?”

  “The type keep coming. What’s that saying about size of the dog?”

  “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s—”

  “The size of the fight in the little dog. Yeah.”

  “Close enough.”

  “So, I’ve got to figure you already know where this crazy Amanda is.”

  “What makes you think she’s crazy?”

  “She stole from us. That makes her fucking cuckoo clock, man. And if you don’t know where she is, I bet a bag of mice you’re close.”

  “A bag of mice?”

  “Old Mordovian expression.”

  “Ah.”

  “So where’s she at, my friend?”

  “Let me ask you something first.”

  “Shoot straight away.”

  “What does she have that you want so bad?”

  “You playing with me, guy?”

  “No.”

  “Making fun of Yefim?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Then why you ask such a asshole-stupid question like that? You know what we want.”

  “I honestly do not. I know you want Amanda and I know—”

  “We don’t want Amanda, man. We want what she took. Kirill looks bad, man. He looks like he can’t find one little girl stole his property? The Chechens up the block? They’re starting to laugh, guy. We probably have to kill a few just to close their mouths, not have to look at their rotting fucking teeth.”

  “So, what—?”

  “The fucking baby! And the fucking cross! I need both. If that stupid card-junkie piece-of-shit doctor goes back to work and can find me another baby, I’ll give that one to Kirill, he won’t know the difference. But if I don’t have that cross and some baby by this weekend? It’s going to be a fucking bloodbath, guy.”

  “And you’ll give me Sophie in exchange?”

  “No, I won’t fucking give you Sophie. We’re not let’s-make-it-a-deal here. Yefim say he wants the baby and the cross, you bring me the baby and the cross. Otherwise, they sell this soup in the little towns along the Black Sea? Only get it in these little towns. It comes in a red can. Parts of you will be in those cans. Parts of your family too, guy.”

  Neither of us said anything for a minute. The heel of my hand had turned dark red from clenching the phone and my pinkie had gone numb.

  “You still there, my main man?”

  “Go fuck yourself, Yefim.”

  He gave that a low, soft laugh. “No. I fuck you, man. I fuck you and your wife and your little girl in Savannah.”

  I looked out on the road. The tar was very black. It matched the tree trunks by the church. The clouds had dropped down the mountain and hovered just above the telephone wires that stretched the length of the road. The air was damp.

  “You don’t think we watch you?” Yefim said. “You don’t think we have friends in Savannah? We have friends everywhere, guy. And, yeah, you got that big crazy Polack protecting your little girl so we lose a couple of guys taking them out. But that’s okay—we get more guys.”

  I stood on the porch looking out on the road. When I spoke, the words came out clipped and harder than I intended. “Tell me about this cross.”

  “The cross,” Yefim said, “is the Belarus Cross. It go back a thousand years, man. Some people call it the Varangian Cross, other people, they call it the Yaroslav Cross, but I always like Belarus Cross. No price on this thing, man. Prince Yaroslav, he pay the Varangians with this cross to kill his brother Boris in the unification war back in, like, 1010 or 1011. But then he miss the cross so much, after he become ruler of all Kievan Rus, he send some other Varangians against the first Varangians, and they kill them, bring the cross back to him. It was in the czar’s pocket back in ’17 when they put him against that basement wall and, boom, blow his brains out. Trotsky had it in Mexico with him when they ice-axed his head. That cross get around, man. Now Kirill get it, and he’s showing it off at party on Saturday. All the big fish be there, man. Real gangsta. And he need that cross.”

  I finally trusted myself to speak. “And you think—”

  “No think. I know. That little girl has it. Or that fucking card-junkie doctor. Oh, you tell him to get back to work. You tell him we need him so much we won’t take a finger. We take a toe. He don’t need a toe as much and he need his finger. So, yeah, he’ll limp. People limp. Get me that cross, get me that baby, man. I’ll—”

  “No deal.”

  “I just told—”

  “I know what you just told me, you fucking hump. You threaten my wife? You threaten my daughter? One thing happens to them, or my friend calls and says he saw one of you Stallone-in-Nighthawks-looking motherfuckers at the strip mall? I’ll burn your whole fucking organization to the ground. I’ll—”

  He was laughing so hard I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

&n
bsp; “Ho-kay,” he said finally, still chugging out a trail of soft giggles. “Ho-okay, Meester Kenzie. You funny guy, my main friend. Funny, funny guy. You know where my cross is?”

  “I might. You know where Sophie is?”

  “Not anymore, but I can find her plenty fast.” He chuckled again. “Where you come up with ‘hump,’ man? I never hear that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Old tape, I guess.”

  “I like it. I can use it?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “Say to some guy, ‘You pay me money or else, you, you hump.’ Ha.”

  “All yours.”

  “I find Sophie. You find cross. I’ll call you later.”

  He laughed once more and hung up.

  • • •

  I was still shaking when I got back into the house, the adrenaline swirling at the base of my skull so badly I got a headache.

  “Tell me about the Belarus Cross.”

  Dre looked like he’d hit the flask a few more times while I was out on the porch. Angie sat in the armchair closest to the hearth. She looked so small, for some reason, so lost. She gave me a look I couldn’t quite read but it was pained, even forlorn. Amanda sat at the far end of the couch, a video baby-monitor on the end table beside her. She’d been reading Last Night at the Lobster and she put it on the coffee table, spine bent, and looked at me.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “The Belarus Cross,” I said.

  “You were talking to a cross?”

  “Amanda.”

  She shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The what?”

  I didn’t have time for this. Which left me with two options—threat or promise.

  “They’ll let you keep the baby.”

  She sat up. “What?”

  “You heard me. If this genius over here”—I nodded at Dre—“can come up with another baby pronto, they’ll let you keep Claire.”

  She turned on the couch. “Can you?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Fucking Dre,” she said, “can you or not?”

  “I don’t know. There’s one girl who’s close. I mean, she could be in early labor or it could just be false labor. With the equipment I have at my disposal, it’s an inexact science.”

  Amanda’s jaw clenched and unclenched. She used both hands to pull her hair behind her head. She slowly twirled it into a ponytail and took a band off the side table and tied it off.

  “So you talked to Yefim.”

  I nodded.

  “And he was explicit.”

  “Couldn’t have been clearer—give them the cross and a baby, and they forget all about you.”

  She’d pulled into herself, her knees up to her chest, bare feet clutching the couch cushion. Pulling the hair off her face should have made her features sharper and less vulnerable, but it managed to have the opposite effect. She looked like a child again. A petrified child.

  “Did you believe him?”

  I said, “I believe he believed it. Whether he can float it past Kirill and his wife, that’s another issue.”

  “This all started because Kirill saw a picture of Sophie. That’s one of the”—she looked down the couch—“services Dre provides, the pictures. Kirill and Violeta saw Sophie, and I guess she looked like Violeta’s younger sister or something and, from that point, they wanted Sophie’s baby, no one else’s.”

  “So it might be more complicated than Yefim lets on.”

  “It’s always more complicated,” she said. “How old are you?”

  I gave that a small smile.

  Amanda looked down the couch at Dre, who sat there like a dog waiting for her to say “park” or “supper.”

  “Even if he could supply another baby, wouldn’t we be doing the same thing—giving a child over to two psychopaths?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you live with that?”

  I said, “I came here to find you and get Sophie out of their hands. That’s as far as I’ve thought.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “Hey, Amanda? People who live in glass houses with kidnapped babies shouldn’t throw stones.”

  “I know, it’s just that it sounds so much like the kind of logic that sent me back to Helene twelve years ago.”

  “I’m not playing this record right now. You want to hash all that shit out at some quieter time, I’ll be your Huckleberry. But right now we need to get them this Belarus Cross and, if possible, convince them we’ll get them another baby.”

  “And if we can’t?”

  “Get them another baby?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t have a clue, but I do know the cross will buy us time. It’s supposed to be on display in Kirill’s house by Saturday night. If it’s not there, I have no doubt they’ll kill all of us, my family included. We get it to them, though, it’ll buy us another couple of days on the baby issue.”

  Angie’s eyes had widened and she glared at me.

  “Sounds good to me,” Dre said.

  “I’m sure it does,” Amanda said. She turned back to me. “What if they renege? All Yefim has to do is figure out where I am, and there’s not too many places for me to hide. You found us in one morning. What’s to stop him from getting the cross and then coming right up the road for the baby?”

  “His word that he wouldn’t is all I got to go on.”

  “And you’d take it—the word of an assassin who goes all the way back to the Solntsevskaya Bratva in Moscow?”

  “I don’t even know what that is,” I said.

  “A gang,” she said, “a brotherhood. Think the Crips or the Bloods with military discipline and connections going all the way to the top of the Russian oil conglomerates.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. That’s where Yefim got his start. And you’ll take his word?”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t. But what’s our alternative?”

  After a couple of tentative yelps, the baby started crying full-force. We could hear her on the monitor and we could hear her through the door. Amanda slid off the couch and slipped on her flats. She took the monitor with her into the bedroom.

  Dre took another drink from his flask. “Fuck-ing Russians.”

  “Why don’t you slow down?” I said.

  “You were right.” He took another drink. “Earlier.”

  “About what?”

  He ground the back of his head into the couch, his eyes rolling back toward the bedroom door. “Her. She doesn’t like me very much, I don’t think.”

  “Why’s she with you, then?” Angie asked.

  He exhaled up toward his own eyes. “Even Amanda, cool as she is, needs help with a newborn. Those first couple weeks? You’re going to the supermarket every five minutes—diapers, formula, more diapers, more formula. The kid’s up every ninety minutes, wailing. Ain’t much in the way of sleep or freedom.”

  “You’re saying she needed a gofer.”

  He nodded. “But she’s got the hang of it now.” He let loose a soft and bitter chuckle. “I thought when we first met, you know, here’s my shot—an innocent girl, untouched, uncorrupted, of blazing intelligence. I mean, she can quote Shaw, she can quote Stephen Hawking, she’s so cool she can quote Young Frankenstein, get into a debate with you on quantum physics and the lyrics to ‘Monkey Man’ on the same night. She likes Rimbaud and Axl Rose, Lucinda Williams and—”

  “This going to go on for a while?” Angie said.

  “Huh?”

  I said, “It sounds like you thought you could mold Amanda into your very own Nexus 6 model of every chick who dumped on you in high school.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  “It was exactly like that. This version wouldn’t take a shit on you, she’d adore you. And you could sit up all night and give her your rap about Sigur Rós or the metaphorical significance of the rabbit in Donnie Darko. And she’d just bat her eyes and ask where you’d been all her life.”

  He look
ed down at his lap. “Hey, fuck you,” he whispered.

  “Fair enough.”

  I could see the child I’d found after seven months, playing on a porch not far from here with an openhearted woman who’d adored her, and a bulldog named Larry. If I’d left her there, who would she be now? Maybe she’d be a basket case who remembered just enough of her life before she’d been snatched from a neglectful mother to know that her life here with Jack and Patricia Doyle was a lie. Or maybe she’d have very little memory of her time with a white-trash alcoholic in a three-decker apartment in Dorchester that smelled of carpet funk and Newports, so little that she’d live a well-adjusted life in small-town America and all she’d know of identity theft and credit card fraud and Russian killers from the Solntsevskaya Bratva would be things she picked up watching 60 Minutes. Even if Amanda had never been kidnapped in the first place, with Helene for a mother, her chances of growing up a healthy, well-adjusted child were somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred million to one. So the kidnapping had, in some demented way, exposed her to the knowledge that another way of life existed. One that wasn’t her mother’s life of fast food and full ashtrays. Of collection notices and ex-con boyfriends. After she’d glimpsed the world of this tiny mountain town, she’d decided to will her way back to it. And maybe, from that point on, will became her defining character trait.

  “They won’t just let this go,” Dre said, “no matter what Yefim told you.”

  “Why not?”

  “For starters?” he said. “Somebody’s got to pay for Timur.”

  “Who’s Timur?” Angie asked, coming over to the couch.

  “He was a Russian.”

  “Yeah? What happened to him?”

  “We kinda killed him.”

  Chapter Twenty-One