Moonlight Mile Part 26

"How old old are you?" I said. are you?" I said.

"Kirill's wife, you know about her?"

"Violeta? I've heard stories."

"Her father heads a Mexican drug cartel. She believes in some arcane religion that practices animal sacrifice and, if you believe the rumors, worse. She was diagnosed with severe mental problems-in Mexico. Her family dealt with it by killing the doctor. And she's married to Kirill, not just because their marriage gives Kirill's gang an unbreakable drug supply but because the only person crazier than Violeta is Kirill and they love each other for it."

"And you stole their baby," Angie said, and the moment the words left her mouth we both knew she was right.

The bottle slipped from Claire's mouth.

"I ... what?"

"You have the Russian mob after you and it isn't because you're so great at ident.i.ty theft they can't afford to lose you. Yefim took Sophie."

"He what?"

"Took her," I said. "And when he did, he said, 'Maybe we have her make us another one.' " I c.o.c.ked my head, got a good look at Claire. That's where I'd seen those lips before, that hair. "That's Sophie's baby, not yours."

"She's mine," Amanda said. "Sophie didn't want her. Sophie was giving her up."

I turned to Dre. "And who would've helped facilitate that process?"

"Better than aborting them."

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure they have a great life. Claire's is certainly starting off wonderfully-you two on the run, a bunch of scary gangsters breathing down your necks, a small matter of ident.i.ty theft and crank production being your primary sources of income up to this point. Oh, and illegal baby-brokering, I a.s.sume. Yeah, Dre? That's the confidential part of your job-you specialize in unwed mothers, I'll bet. How warm am I?"

He gave me an embarra.s.sed smirk. "Blazing."

"Sounds like you guys got this all figured out."

"How am I any different," Dre said, "from any legal adoption agency? I find parents for women who don't want their babies."

"With zero oversight," Angie said. "You telling us you're able to investigate the people the Russian mob sells babies to? Are you serious?"

"Well, not all the time, sure, but-"

"Amanda," Angie said, "of all the babies you could have stolen, why steal the one who was supposed to go to two of the craziest sociopaths in the city?"

"Your answer is the question." Claire was asleep against her breast. She placed the bottle on the coffee table and stood. "I can only a.s.sume most times where the babies Dre brokers end up. And no"-another damaging glance at Dre-"I don't normally a.s.sume it's a great place they go to." She placed Claire in a dark rattan ba.s.sinet by the hearth. "But in this case? I knew knew she'd end up in a bad place. Sophie's a crank-head. She stopped doing it while she was pregnant, mostly because I had her move in with me and I stayed on her a.s.s. But she went right back to it when Claire was born." she'd end up in a bad place. Sophie's a crank-head. She stopped doing it while she was pregnant, mostly because I had her move in with me and I stayed on her a.s.s. But she went right back to it when Claire was born."

"Well, she had a reason," Dre said.

"Shut up, Dre." She turned back to me. "Sophie wasn't going to be raising Claire anyway-Kirill and his certifiably insane wife were." She came over by me and sat on the edge of the coffee table so that our knees were almost touching. "They want that child. And, yeah, the easy thing would be to give her back. I sure don't want to imagine what's going to happen when Yefim and Pavel get me in a room alone. Yefim keeps an acetylene torch in the back of his truck. The kind they use on construction sites, with the hood and everything?" She nodded. "That's Yefim. And he's the sanest one of that pack. So am I scared? I am petrified. And was taking Claire away from them borderline suicidal? Probably. But you two have a daughter. Would you want her growing up with Kirill and Violeta Borzakov?"

"Of course not," Angie said.

"Well, then?"

"It's not simply a case of the baby grows up with the Borzakovs or you kidnap her. There were other options."

"No," she said, "there weren't."

"Why?"

"You had to be there."

"Where?"

She shook her head and walked back to the ba.s.sinet and stood looking down into it, her arms crossed. "Angie, would you look at something for me?"

"Sure." Angie joined her by the ba.s.sinet and they both looked in at Claire.

"See those red marks on her leg? Are those bites?"

Angie bent at the waist, peered in.

"I don't think so. I think it's just a rash. Why don't you ask Dre. He was a doctor."

"Not a very good one," Amanda said, and Dre closed his eyes and lowered his head. "A rash?"

"Yeah," Angie said, "babies get rashes. A lot."

"Well, what do you do?"

"It doesn't look really serious, but I understand how you feel. When are you seeing her pediatrician next?"

She looked almost vulnerable for a moment. "Her one-month checkup is tomorrow, so, I mean, do you think it can wait till then?"

Angie gave her a soft smile and touched her shoulder. "Definitely."

We heard a sharp noise behind us and we all jumped in place, but it was just the mail being pushed through the bra.s.s slot in the door. It fell to the floor-two circulars, a few envelopes.

Amanda and I moved toward it at the same time, but I was closer. I scooped up three envelopes, all addressed to Maureen Stanley. One was from National Grid, a second was from American Express, and the third was from the U.S. Social Security Administration.

"Miss Stanley, I presume." I handed the mail to Amanda and she s.n.a.t.c.hed it from my fingers.

We walked back over to the baby as Dre slid his flask back into his jacket.

Angie stood over the ba.s.sinet, looking in at the baby, her features softening until she looked ten years younger. She turned from the ba.s.sinet and her face grew harder. She looked at Dre and Amanda. "On the top of the list of things that don't add up about all the BS and half-truths you guys have been selling us since we walked through this door is this-why are you still here?"

"Here, as in Planet Earth?" Amanda said.

"No, here as in New England."

"It's my home. It's where I'm from."

"Yeah, but you're an ident.i.ty-theft master," I said.

"I'm adequate."

"You got Russians with blowtorches on your a.s.s and you decide to hide out ninety miles away? You could be in Belize by now. Kenya. But you stayed. I'm with my wife on this one-why is that?"

Claire fussed and suddenly let out a wail.

"Now look," Amanda said, "you woke the baby."

Chapter Twenty.

She took the baby into a bedroom off the living room and for a minute we could hear them in there-Amanda cooing, the baby crying-and then Amanda closed the door.

"When do they stop crying?" Dre asked us.

Angie and I both laughed.

"You're a doctor."

"I just deliver them. Once they leave the womb, they leave my sight."

"You didn't study child development in med school?"

"Sure, but that was a few years ago. And it was academic then. Now it's a bit more immediate."

I shrugged. "Every kid's different. Some start sleeping regular by the fifth or sixth week."

"Yours?"

"She went four and a half months before her sleep got dependable."

"Four and a half months? s.h.i.+t."

"Yeah," Angie said, "and then she started teething not long after that. You think you know what screaming sounds like now. But you don't. You don't have a clue. And don't even get me started on ear infections."

I said, " 'Member when she got infections in both ears and and a tooth coming in?" a tooth coming in?"

"Now you're just f.u.c.king with me," Dre said.

Angie and I looked over at him and shook our heads slowly.

"How come they're never like this in TV shows and movies?" he said.

"Right? They always conveniently go away when the main characters don't need them around."

"I was watching this one show the other night, right? The father's an FBI agent, mother's a surgeon, and they got, like, a six-year-old? One episode opens, they're on vacation together, no kid. I figure, okay, the kid's with the nanny, but the next scene they show the nanny moonlighting at the mother's hospital. The kid? Driving stick-s.h.i.+ft to get groceries, I guess. Playing hopscotch on the interstate."

"It's that Hollywood logic," Angie said, "the same way in the movies there's always a parking s.p.a.ce right outside hospitals and city halls."

"But what do you care?" I asked him. "She's not yours."

"Yeah, but ..."

"But what? Let me ask you now that we've gotten past the kid-is-yours bulls.h.i.+t-you sleeping with Amanda?"

He leaned back, propped his right ankle up on his left knee. "If I was?"

"We already went down that road. I'm asking if you're not."

"Why would you-?"

"You don't seem her type, man."

"She's seventeen years ol-"

"Sixteen."

"She turns seventeen next week."

"Then next week I'll say she's seventeen."

"My point is, what type type could she possibly have at this age?" could she possibly have at this age?"

"And my point is, not you." I spread my hands. "Sorry, man, but I just don't see it. I see the way you look at her and, yeah, I see a guy waiting for that seventeenth birthday so his conscience can let him off the hook. But I don't see anything like that when she looks at you."

"People change."

"Sure," Angie said, "but attraction doesn't."

"Oh, man," he said, and he suddenly looked forlorn and cast-off. "Man, I dunno, I dunno."

"What don't you know?" Angie asked.

When he looked at her, his hair was damper, his eyes had picked up a milky film. "I don't know why I keep f.u.c.king myself up up. I do something like this every few years just to make absolutely positive I'll never have a normal life. And my shrink would say, sure, I engage in compulsive behaviors and I'm trying to replay patterns that go all the way back to my parents' divorce and somehow get a different result. And I understand that, I do, but I just want someone to tell me how to stop f.u.c.king doing dumb f.u.c.king things. I mean, you know how I ended up losing my medical license and owing the Russians?"

We shook our heads. "Drugs?" I offered.

"Well, sort of. I wasn't addicted to them or anything. It wasn't that. I met a girl. Russian girl. Well, Georgian. Svetlana. She was, whew, she was everything. Crazy in bed, crazy out of it, too. So beautiful you wanted to eat your hand just looking at her. She ..." He dropped his right foot back on the floor, sat there looking down at it. "One day she asks me to write her a scrip for Dilaudid. I say, Of course not. I quote the Hippocratic oath, the Ma.s.sachusetts statutes prohibiting doctors from writing scrips for anything but diagnosed medical conditions, blah, blah, blah. Cut to the chase, she wears me down in less than a week. Why? I don't know. Because I've got no center. Whatever. But she wears me down. Three weeks after that, I'm writing her OxyCon scrips and scrips for f.u.c.king fentanyl, for Christ's sake, and pretty much anything else she wants. When that starts leaving too much of a paper trail, I start clipping the s.h.i.+t outright from the hospital pharmacy. I even took a moonlighting job at the Faulkner so I could do it there, too. I didn't know it, but they were already investigating me by that point. Svetlana, G.o.d love her, she'd noticed how much I liked playing blackjack at Foxwoods the couple times we went, so she hooked me into this game over in Allston. They played it out of the back of a Ukrainian bakery. First time I played, I cleaned up. Good, fun guys, great-looking women hanging around, all of them probably stoned on my s.h.i.+t. Next time I go, I win again. A lot less, but I win. By the time I start losing, they're all nice about it-they'll accept more OxyCon in lieu of actual money, which is good, because Svetlana's pretty much cleaned me out of money. They give me a grocery list-Vicodin HP, Palladone, Fentora, Actiq, boring old Percodan, you name it. By the time the state medical board has me arrested and files charges, I'm already in the hole twenty-six grand to Kirill's sharks. But twenty-six grand is like tip-jar money at a coffee shop compared to what's on the horizon. Because unless I want to do three-to-six at Cedar Junction, I got to come up with money for good lawyers. Another two hundred fifty grand in the hole to pay Dewey, Screwum and Howe, but at least I only get my license revoked, no jail time, no criminal finding. Kirill slides up to me at one of his restaurants a couple weeks later, tells me that the 'no criminal finding'? That was his doing. And that costs another quarter-million. I can't prove he didn't didn't influence the judge, and even if I could, if Kirill Borzakov says you owe him five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars, guess what you owe Kirill Borzakov?" influence the judge, and even if I could, if Kirill Borzakov says you owe him five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars, guess what you owe Kirill Borzakov?"

"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.