Moonlight Mile Part 31

My phone vibrated. I heard a horn. I looked down and saw RESTRICTED NUMBER RESTRICTED NUMBER on my screen. on my screen.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Where you?"

"Yefim?"

The winds.h.i.+eld vanished behind a cloak of mud. The Saab shook so hard the dashboard rattled. The seat s.h.i.+mmied beneath me. An empty coffee cup tipped out of the cup holder and fell to the floor mat on the pa.s.senger side.

"Patrick? ... you go ... I no ... stage."

I flicked on the wipers. The mud swept right and left, thinner than mud, I realized, as an Acela blew through the station. "Yefim? You keep dropping out."

"Can ... hear ... guy?"

I got out of the car because I couldn't see Dre anymore, noticed my hood was speckled with whatever had hit my winds.h.i.+eld.

"I can hear you now. Can you hear me?"

Dre wasn't on the platform.

He was nowhere.

"I ... f.u.c.k ..."

The connection died. I flipped my phone closed, looked left and right down the platform. No Dre.

I turned back around and looked down the line of cars beside my own. There were six of them, spread out, but I saw the same liquid splashed across their hoods and winds.h.i.+elds under the weak white lights. The Acela had vanished into the trees, going the kind of fast you thought only jets could go. The wet cars and wet platform glistened with something besides melting snow.

I turned my head, looked at the platform, turned again, looked at the cars.

Dre wasn't anywhere.

Because Dre was everywhere.

I found a flashlight and two plastic supermarket bags in the trunk of Dre's car. I put the bags over my shoes and used the handles to tie knots around my ankles. Then I walked through the blood to the platform. I found one of his shoes down the track, tucked into the inside of the rail. I found what could have been an ear a few feet farther down on the platform. Or it could have been part of a nose. Apparently, an Acela going top-speed didn't run you over; it blew you up.

On my walk back up the tracks, I spotted a shoulder between the track and the woods. That was the last of Dre I ever saw.

I went to the spot where he'd entered and exited the woods. I shone my flashlight in there, but all I could see were dark trees with clumps of leaves pooled at their bases. I could have gone in farther, but (a) I don't like woods; and (b) I was running out of time. The Acela pa.s.sed through Mansfield station, three miles up, and there was a chance someone would spot blood on the front of it or along the side.

Yefim, I could a.s.sume, had long since left and taken Sophie and the cross with him.

I walked back across the tracks and at first I didn't compute what I saw there. Part of me understood it enough to hold the flashlight beam in place, but the other half of me couldn't make sense of it.

I bent by the gravel between the tracks and the fence that rimmed the parking lot. I'd heard a thunk as it landed, as someone, for who knew what reason, tossed it from the woods to the other side of the tracks. And Dre had come rus.h.i.+ng out after it and stepped into the path of over six hundred tons of steel traveling 160 miles an hour.

The Belarus Cross.

I pinched the top left corner of it and lifted it out of the gravel. It was speckled with evaporating snow that revealed it was as b.l.o.o.d.y as the winds.h.i.+elds in the parking lot, as b.l.o.o.d.y as the platform and the trees and the stairs I descended to Dre's car. I popped the trunk and sat on the edge and removed the plastic bags and placed them in a third plastic bag. I found a rag in the trunk, and I used it to wipe off the cross as best I could. I tossed the rag into the plastic bag and tied off the handles. I took the bag and the cross up front with me and placed them on the pa.s.senger seat and got the h.e.l.l out of Dodgeville.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

There was only one pediatrician in a fifteen-mile radius of Becket, a Dr. Chimilewski, two towns over in Huntington. When Amanda pulled up in front of the office at ten the next morning, I stayed where I was and let her go inside and keep her appointment. I sat in Dre's car and replayed the conversation I'd had with Yefim on my way out of Dodgeville. He'd called me minutes after I left the train station and nothing we'd discussed made any sense yet.

When Amanda came out twenty minutes later, I was waiting with a cardboard cup of coffee that I offered to her. "I guessed cream, no sugar."

"I can't drink coffee," she said. "It aggravates my ulcer. But thanks for the thought."

She clicked the remote on her car to unlock the doors and came around me with the baby in the car seat. I opened the door for her.

"You can't have an ulcer. You're sixteen years old."

She snapped the car seat into its base in the backseat. "Tell that to my ulcer. I've had it since I was thirteen."

I stepped back as she closed the door on Claire.

"She okay?"

She looked through the window at the baby. "Yeah. She's just got that rash. No cause. They said it'll go away, just like Angie said. They said babies get rashes."

"Hard, though, right? All these things that could be real health scares turn out to be absolutely nothing, but you never know so you got to get it checked out."

She gave me a small and weary smile. "I keep thinking they're going to throw me out next time."

"They don't throw you out for being too careful about your child."

"No, but they tell jokes about you, I'm sure."

"Let 'em tell jokes."

She walked around to the driver's side, looked over the roof at me. "You can follow or just meet me back at the house. I'm not running anywhere."

"I've noticed."

I turned to walk toward Dre's Saab.

"Where's Dre?"

I turned back to her, met her eyes. "He didn't make it."

"He ..." She c.o.c.ked her head slightly. "The Russians?"

I said nothing. I held her gaze. I looked for something in her eyes that would tell me, one way or another, which side she was playing in this. Or was it all sides?

"Patrick?" she said.

"I'll see you back at the house."

In the kitchen, she made green tea for herself and brought the cup and small pot out to the dining room with her. Claire sat in her car seat in the center of the dining-room table. She'd fallen into a deep sleep in the car and Amanda told me she'd learned no good came from pulling her out of the car seat and moving her to the ba.s.sinet once they were inside. It was just as easy and just as safe to leave her where she slept.

"Angie get back all right?"

"Yeah. She arrived in Savannah at midnight. Got to her mother's by half-past."

"She doesn't strike me as someone from the South."

"She's not. Her mother remarried in her sixties. Her husband lived in Savannah. He pa.s.sed about ten years ago. By then, her mother was in love with the place."

She placed her teapot on a coaster and sat at the table. "So what happened at the train station?"

I sat across from her. "First tell me how we ended up at the train station."

"What? I got a call and they said the meeting site was changed."

"Who called you?"

"It could have been Pavel, could have been this other one they call Spartak. Actually, now that I think of it, it did sound more like him. He's got a higher voice than the others. But then what do I know for sure?" She shrugged. "They all sound pretty much the same."

"And Spartak or whoever said ..."

"He said something like, 'We no like Comcast Center. Tell them meet at Dodgeville Station, half hour.' "

"But why call you?"

She sipped her tea. "I don't know. Maybe Yefim lost your-"

I shook my head. "Yefim never made that call."

"He had Spartak make it."

"No, he didn't. Yefim was waiting at the Comcast Center when Dre got himself vaporized by an Acela."

The teacup froze halfway to her mouth. "You want to repeat that one?"

"Dre got hit by a train going so fast that it liquefied him. There's probably a forensics team out there right now, bagging up the Dre sc.r.a.ps. But they're little sc.r.a.ps, I a.s.sure you."

"Why would he step in front of a ... ?"

"Because he was chasing this." I placed the Belarus Cross on the table.

It sat between us for about twenty seconds before either of us spoke.

"Chasing it?" Amanda said. "That makes no sense. He had it with him when he left the house, didn't he?"

"And I a.s.sume he handed it over to someone, and then that someone threw it back over the tracks."

"So you think ... ?" She closed her eyes tight and shook her head. "I don't even know what you think."

"I don't either. Here's what I know-Dre crossed the tracks into the woods and then someone threw this cross out of the woods and over the tracks. Dre came running out after it and ran into a really fast train. Yefim, meanwhile, claims he was never at the train station and that he never changed the original meeting place. Whether he's lying or not, and there's a fifty-fifty chance either way, that's his claim. We don't have Sophie, they don't have the Belarus Cross, and it's Christmas Eve. Friday. Dre was the last chance Yefim had of scoring another baby to give to Kirill and Violeta. So now Yefim wants the original deal back in place-that cross"-I looked down the table-"and that baby for Sophie's life, my life, the life of my family, and your life."

She fingered the cross a couple of times, pus.h.i.+ng it up the table a few inches.

"What do the inscriptions mean, do you know? I can't read Russian."

"Even if you could," I said, "they're not in Russian. That's Latin."

"Fair enough. You know any Latin?"

"I took four years of it in high school but all I retained is about enough to read a building foundation."

"So, no idea?"

I held it in my hand. "A little. The one up top reads Jesus, Son of G.o.d, defeats Jesus, Son of G.o.d, defeats."

She frowned.

I shrugged and racked my brain a bit. "No, wait. Not defeats defeats. Crushes. Crushes. No. Wait. No. Wait. Conquers. Conquers. That's it. That's it. Jesus, Son of G.o.d, conquers. Jesus, Son of G.o.d, conquers."

"What about the bottom one?"

"Something about a skull and paradise."

"That's the best you can do?"

"I took my last Latin cla.s.s ten years before you were born, kid. My best ain't bad."

She poured herself more tea. She held the cup in both hands and blew on it. She took a tentative sip and then placed the cup back down on the table. She sat back in her chair, her eyes on me, as calm as ever, this serious child, this marvel of self-possession.

"It doesn't look like much, does it?"

"It's the history that gives it its worth. Or maybe just someone deciding it's worth something, like gold."

"I never understood that mentality," she said.

"Me, either."

"I can tell you, though, that Kirill's already lost too much face over this to let any of us live. Certainly not me."