Moonlight Mile

“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, b
ut 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.”

  “So how soon after Timur died did Yefim find you?”

  “It took him about six hours.”

  “And?”

  “And I asked him how he felt about having a boss so sloppy he’d send a moron like Timur to pick up something as priceless as the Belarus Cross. That got the wheels turning pretty quick.”

  “So the plan was always to make Kirill desperate enough and embarrassed enough that a palace coup would look inevitable from the outside.”

  “We refined it as time wore on, but that was the general objective. I got the baby and Sophie, Yefim got everything else.”

  “And what about Sophie? What happens next for her?”

  “Well, rehab for starters. And then maybe we’ll go visit her mom.”

  “You mean Elaine?”

  She nodded. “That’s her mom. It’s all about nurture, Patrick, not nature.”

  “And what about your nurturer?”

  “Beatrice?” She smiled. “Of course, I’m going to see Bea. Not tomorrow, but soon. She’s got to meet her grandniece. Don’t you worry about Bea. She never has to worry about anything for the rest of her life. I’ve already got a lawyer working on Uncle Lionel’s early release.” She sat back. “They’re going to be fine.”

  I watched her for a bit, this almost-seventeen-year-old going on, what, eighty?

  “You feel remorse about any of this?”

  “Would that help you sleep? To know I feel remorse?” Amanda pulled one leg up on the bench and propped her chin on her knee and peered across the space between us. “For the record, I don’t have a hard heart. I just have a hard heart for ass-holes. You want crocodile tears, I don’t have them. For who—for Kenny and his rape jacket? Dre and his baby mill? For Kirill and his psycho-bitch wife? For Timur and—”

  “What about yourself?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Yourself,” I repeated.

  She stared back at me, her jaw working, but no sound leaving her mouth. After a time, her jaw stopped moving. “You know what Helene’s mother was?”

  I shook my head.

  “A gin-soaked mess,” she said. “She went to the same bar for twenty years to smoke and drink herself into an early grave. When she died, no one from the bar went to her funeral. Not because they didn’t like her, but because they’d never learned her last name.” Her eyes clouded for a moment, or it could have been the reflection of the river. “Her mother? Pretty much the same. Not a McCready woman I know of ever graduated high school. They all spent their lives dependent on men and bottles. So twenty-two years from now, when Claire’s going off to grad school, and we’re living in a house where roach-races aren’t our primary form of entertainment and the electric has never been shut off, and collection agencies don’t call every night at six? When that’s my life, then you can ask me how many regrets I have about my lost youth.” She pressed both palms together above her knee. Seen from a distance, she might have appeared to be praying. “Until then, though, if it’s okay with you? I’ll sleep like a baby.”

  “Babies get up every couple hours and cry.”

  Amanda gave me a gentle smile. “Then I’ll get up every couple hours and cry.”

  We sat there for a few minutes with nothing to say to each other. We watched the river. We huddled into our separate coats. Then we both stood and walked back to the others.

  • • •

  Helene and Tadeo shifted in place by the front of the SUV, listless, in shock. Sophie held Claire and kept looking at Amanda like she was going to found a religion in her name.

  Amanda took Claire from Sophie and looked at her motley crew. “Patrick is going to take off for public transportation. Say bye to him.”

  I got three waves, Sophie’s accompanied by another apologetic smile.

  Amanda said, “Tadeo, you said you’re over at Bromley-Heath, right?”

  Tadeo said, “Yeah.”

  “We’ll drop Tadeo first, then Helene. Sophie, you’re at the wheel. You’re sober, right?”

  “I’m sober.”

  “Okay, then. We’ve got to make one stop. There’s a Costco up Route 1 a couple miles. They got kids’ stuff.”

  “This ain’t time to shop for toys,” Tadeo said. “Man, it’s Christmas Eve.”

  She grimaced at him. “We’re not getting her toys. We’re getting her a car seat base and a car seat. Drive all the way back to the Berkshires without one? Damn, man.” She ran a hand over Claire’s fine brown hair. “What kind of mother do you think I am?”

  • • •

  I walked to the bus station. I took the bus to the subway. Took the subway to Logan Airport. I never saw Amanda again.

  I met my wife and daughter in Terminal C of Logan. My daughter did not, as I’d always imagined she would at a moment such as this, run into my arms in slow motion. She hid behind her mother’s leg in one of her extremely rare shy moments and peeked at me. I came to her and kissed Angie until I felt a tug on my jeans and looked down to see Gabby peering up at me, her eyes still puffy from the nap she’d taken on the plane. She raised her arms.

  “Up, Daddy?”

  I picked her up. I kissed her cheek. She kissed mine. I kissed her other cheek and she kissed my other cheek. We leaned our foreheads together.

  “Miss me?” I asked.

  “I missed you, Daddy.”

  “You said that with such formalit
y. ‘I missed you, Daddy.’ Was your grandma teaching you how to be a proper lady?”

  “She made me sit up straight.”

  “Horrors.”

  “All the time.”

  “Even in bed?”

  “Not in bed. Know why?”

  “Why?”

  “That would be silly.”

  “It would,” I agreed.

  “How long’s this cute-fest going to drag on?” Bubba appeared out of nowhere. He’s the size of a young rhino standing on its hind legs, so his gift for sneaking up on people never ceases to amaze me.

  “Where were you?”

  “I stashed something on the way in, so I had to pick it up on the way out.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t smuggle one through security.”

  “Who says I didn’t?” He jerked his thumb at Angie. “This one has luggage issues.”

  “One little bag,” Angie said, spreading her hands the length of a bread loaf. “And another little bag. I did some shopping yesterday.”

  “To baggage claim,” I said.

  • • •

  It was Logan, so they changed the baggage carousel location twice, and we trekked back and forth through the claim area. Then we stood with a bunch of other people, everyone jostling to get closest to the belt, and watched as nothing happened. The belt didn’t move. The little siren light didn’t spin. The clarion bell that announced incoming luggage didn’t sound.

  Gabby sat on my shoulders and tugged at my hair and occasionally my ears. Angie held my arm a little tighter than usual. Bubba wandered over to the newsstand and next thing we knew he was chatting up the cashier, leaning into the counter and actually smiling. The cashier was toffee-skinned and in her mid-thirties. She was small and thin but even from a distance she had the look of someone who could kick some major ass if pissed off. Under Bubba’s attentions, though, she lost five years in her face and began to match him smile for smile.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” Angie said.

  “Weaponry.”

  “Speaking of which, you really threw it in the Charles?”

  “I did.”

  “That’s littering.”

  I nodded. “But I’m a big recycler, so I’m allowed the occasional eco-sin.”