Moonlight Mile Part 4

"Well, take the sub office and do that. Fill out your expense reports and don't forget to file your 692s as well. See Barnes in equipment so he can clear you on the gear you used-what'd you go with, the Canon and the Sony?"

I nodded. "I used those new Taranti bugs in the kid's place, too."

"I heard they were glitchy."

I shook my head. "Worked like a charm."

He finished his drink and leveled his gaze at me. "Look, we'll find a new case for you. And if you can just get through that one that one without p.i.s.sing anybody off, we'll hire you permanent, okay? You can tell your wife I gave you my word." without p.i.s.sing anybody off, we'll hire you permanent, okay? You can tell your wife I gave you my word."

I nodded, a hole in my stomach.

Back in the empty office, I considered my options.

I didn't have many. I was working one case and it was far from a cash cow. An old friend, Mike Colette, had asked me to help figure out which employee was embezzling from his freight company. It took me a few days with the paperwork to narrow it down to his night-s.h.i.+ft supervisor and one or two of his short-haul truckers, but then I did some further digging and they didn't look as right for it as I'd originally thought. So now I'd turned my attention to his accounts-payable manager, a woman he'd promised me was a trusted confidante, beyond reproach.

I could expect to bill another five, maybe six, hours for that job.

At day's end, I'd walk out of Duhamel-Standiford and wait for their next call, their next trial. In the meantime, the bills arrived in the mailbox every day. The food in the fridge got eaten and the shelves didn't miraculously fill back up. I had a Blue Cross Blue s.h.i.+eld bill due at the end of the month and not enough money to pay it.

I sat back in my chair. Welcome to adulthood.

I had half a dozen files to update and three Brandon Trescott reports to write, but I picked up the phone instead and called Richie Colgan, the Whitest Black Man in America.

He answered the phone, "Tribune, Metro Desk." Metro Desk."

"Not an ounce of you sounds like a brother."

"My people don't have a sound, just a proud and royal legacy temporarily interrupted by racist crackers with whips."

"You telling me if Dave Chappelle answers one phone and George Will answers the other, I'm gonna have trouble guessing which is the white guy?"

"No, but to discuss it in polite company is still verboten verboten."

"Now you're German," I said.

"Only on my French racist father's side," he said. "What up?"

"Remember Amanda McCready? Little girl went-"

"Missing, what, five years ago?"

"Twelve."

"s.h.i.+t. Years? How old are are we?" we?"

" 'Member how we felt in college about old geezers who talked about, like, the Dave Clark Five and Buddy Holly?"

"Yeah?"

"That's how kids today feel when we talk about Prince and Nirvana."

"Naw."

"Believe it, b.i.t.c.h. So anyway, Amanda McCready."

"Yeah, yeah. You found her with the cop's family, brought her back, everyone on the force hates your guts, you need a favor from me."

"No."

"You don't need a favor?"

"Well, I do, but it's directly connected to Amanda McCready. She went missing again."

"No s.h.i.+t."

"No s.h.i.+t. And her aunt says no one cares. Not the cops, not you guys."

"Hard to believe. Twenty-four-hour news cycle and all? These days we can make a story out of anything."

"Explains Paris Hilton."

"Nothing explains that," he said. "Point is-a girl disappears again twelve years after her first disappearance brought down a gang of cops and cost the city a few mil during a bad budget year? s.h.i.+t, that's news, white boy."

"That's what I thought. You almost sounded black there, by the way."

"Racist. What's the aunt's name, uh, b.i.t.c.h?"

"Bea. Well, Beatrice McCready."

"Aunt Bea, uh? Well, this ain't Mayberry."

He called me back twenty minutes later. "That was simple."

"What happened?"

"I talked to the investigating officer, a Detective Chuck Hitchc.o.c.k. He said they investigated the aunt's claim, went to the mother's house, poked around, and talked to the girl."

"Talked to the girl? Amanda?"

"Yeah. It was all a hoax."

"Why would Bea make up a-?"

"Oh, Bea's a champ, what she is. You know Amanda's mother-what's it, Helene?-she's had to take out a couple restraining orders on this woman. Ever since her kid died, she left the reser-"

"Wait, whose kid?"

"Beatrice McCready's."

"Her kid didn't die. He's at Monument High."

"No," Richie said slowly, "he's not at Monument High. He's dead. Him and a few other kids were in a car last year, none of them old enough to drive, none of them old enough to drink, but they did both anyway. They blew a stop sign at the bottom of that big-a.s.s hill where St. Margaret's Hospital used to be? Got pancaked by a bus on Stoughton Street. Two kids dead, two kids talking funny for the rest of their lives but not walking while they're doing it. One of the dead was this Matthew McCready. I'm looking at it in our Web archives right now. June 15, last year. You want the link?"

Chapter Five.

I exited JFK/UMa.s.s Station and headed for home, my head still buzzing. I'd hung up the phone and clicked on the link Richie sent me, and there it was-a page 4 story from last June about four boys who took a joyride in a stolen car and came flying down a hill stoked on pot and Jager. The bus driver never had time to hit his horn. Paralyzed from the waist down, Harold Endalis, 15. Paralyzed from the neck down, Stuart Burr-field, 15. Dead on arrival at the Carney ER, Mark McGrath, 16. Dead on scene, Matthew McCready, 16. I descended the station stairs and headed up Crescent Avenue toward home, thinking about all the stupid s.h.i.+t I'd done at sixteen, ten or twelve ways I could have died-probably should have died-before seventeen. exited JFK/UMa.s.s Station and headed for home, my head still buzzing. I'd hung up the phone and clicked on the link Richie sent me, and there it was-a page 4 story from last June about four boys who took a joyride in a stolen car and came flying down a hill stoked on pot and Jager. The bus driver never had time to hit his horn. Paralyzed from the waist down, Harold Endalis, 15. Paralyzed from the neck down, Stuart Burr-field, 15. Dead on arrival at the Carney ER, Mark McGrath, 16. Dead on scene, Matthew McCready, 16. I descended the station stairs and headed up Crescent Avenue toward home, thinking about all the stupid s.h.i.+t I'd done at sixteen, ten or twelve ways I could have died-probably should have died-before seventeen.

The first two houses on the south side of Crescent, a matching pair of small white Capes, were abandoned, victims of the wonderful mortgage crisis that had spread such cheer across the land of late. A homeless guy approached me in front of the second one.

"Yo, bro, you got a minute to hear me out? I'm not looking for a handout."

He was a small guy, wiry and bearded. His baseball cap, cotton hoodie, and battered jeans were streaked with grime. The ripe odor coming off him told me it had been a while since he'd bathed. He didn't have nut-bag eyes, though; there was no meanness in him, no crackhead edge.

I stopped. "What's up?"

"I'm not a beggar." He held out his hands to ward off my a.s.sumptions. "I want to make that clear."

"Cool."

"I'm not."

"Okay."

"But I got a kid, you know? And there ain't no jobs. My old lady, she's sick, and my baby boy he just needs some formula. s.h.i.+t's, like, seven bucks and I-"

I never saw his arm move, but he s.n.a.t.c.hed my laptop bag off my shoulder just the same. He took off with it, tear-a.s.sing for the back of the nearest abandoned house. The bag held my case notes, my laptop, and a picture of my daughter.

"You dumb s.h.i.+t," I said, not sure if I was talking to myself or to the homeless guy, maybe to both of us. Who knew the f.u.c.ker had such long arms?

I pursued him down the side of the house through knee-high weeds and crushed beer cans, empty Styrofoam egg containers, and broken bottles. It was probably a squatters' house these days. When I was a kid, it was the Cowans' house, then the Ursinis'. A Vietnamese family bought it next and did a lot of rehab on it. Just before the father lost his job and then the mother lost hers, they'd begun remodeling the kitchen.

It was still missing the back wall there; some of the plastic tarps nailed to the framing flapped in the afternoon breeze. As I reached the backyard, the homeless guy was only a few feet ahead and about to be slowed by a chain-link fence. I sensed movement to my left. A plastic tarp parted and a dark-haired guy swung a length of pipe into the side of my face and I spun into the plastic and fell into the unfinished kitchen.

I'm not sure how long I lay there-long enough to notice, as the room shook behind watery waves of air, that all the copper had been stripped from beneath the sink and behind the walls. Long enough to feel reasonably certain my jaw wasn't broken, though the left side of my face was simultaneously numb and on fire, and blood leaked steadily from it. I got to my knees and a nail bomb detonated in my skull. Everything that wasn't directly in front of my nose vanished behind black cloaks. The floor s.h.i.+mmied.

Someone helped me to my feet and then pushed me into a wall, and someone else laughed. A third person, farther away, said, "Bring him in here."

"I don't think he can walk."

"Lead him, then."

Fingers vise-gripped the back of my neck and guided me into what had once been the living room. The black cloaks receded from view. I could make out a small fireplace, the mantel torn away and probably used as firewood. I'd been in this room once before, when a bunch of us sixteen-year-olds followed Brian Cowan in here to raid his father's liquor cabinet. A couch had sat under the windows facing the street. A garden bench sat there now and a man sat on it, his eyes on me. I was dropped on the couch across from him, a ratty orange thing that smelled like the Dumpster behind a Red Lobster.

"You gonna puke?"

"Curious about that myself," I said.

"I told him to trip you, not hit you with a pipe, but he got a little excited."

I could see the guy with the pipe now-a slim, dark-haired Latino in khaki cargo pants and a wife-beater. He gave me a shrug as he tapped the pipe back and forth in his palm. "Oops."

"Oops," I said. "I'll remember that."

"You won't remember s.h.i.+t, pendejo, pendejo, I hit you again." I hit you again."

Hard to argue with logic. I took my eyes off the help and considered the boss on the bench. I would have expected prison-lean and prison-mean, gin-pale eyes. Instead, the guy wore a yellow-and-green-plaid s.h.i.+rt under a black wool sweater and a pair of tan corduroys. On his feet were a pair of canvas Vans with a pattern of black and gold squares. His red hair was a little on the longish side and flyaway. He didn't look gangsta; he looked like a science teacher at a prep school.

He said, "I know you got some rough friends and I know you've been in some serious sc.r.a.pes, so you don't scare easy."

News to me. I was scared s.h.i.+tless. p.i.s.sed off, instinctively memorizing every detail I could about the two guys I could see, and thinking about ways to get the Latino's pipe into my hands and straight up his a.s.s-but scared out of my mind, just the same.

"Your first instinct is going to be to come after us, if we let you live." He unwrapped a piece of bubble gum and popped it in his mouth.

If.

"Tadeo, give him a towel for his face." The science teacher gave me a c.o.c.ked eyebrow. "Yeah, I said his name. Know why, Patrick? Because you won't come after us. You know why you won't come after us?"

It would hurt too much to shake my head, so I simply said, "No."

"Because we're bad f.u.c.king guys and you're a soft f.u.c.king guy. Maybe not once, but this isn't 'once.' I hear your business went to s.h.i.+t because you started bailing on anything that smelled like a rough case. Understandable for a guy who got shot a bunch of times, almost bled out and s.h.i.+t. Still, the word's out you don't have the stones to do this at our level anymore. You're not part of this life. And you don't want to be."

Tadeo came back from the kitchen area and put two paper towels in my hand. I fumbled for them, listing to my left, and he ran the end of the pipe along the side of my neck with a soft chuckle.

I s.n.a.t.c.hed the pipe out of his hand and drove a foot into his knee at the same time. Tadeo fell backward and I came off the couch. The science teacher yelled, "Hey!" and pointed a pistol at me and I froze. Tadeo scrambled backward on his a.s.s until he reached the wall. He stood, favoring his good leg. I remained frozen, the pipe in my hand, my arm c.o.c.ked. Science Teacher lowered the gun as an indication I should lower the pipe. I gave him a tiny nod of agreement. Then I flicked my wrist. The pipe tomahawked across the room and hit Tadeo between his eyebrows. He let out a yelp and bounced off the wall. The gash above his nose opened and flooded his eyes. He took two steps toward the center of the room and then three more steps to the side. He took a few more steps and walked into the wall. He put his hands on the wall and gulped for air.

"Oops," I said.

Science Teacher dug the gun barrel into my neck. "Sit," he hissed, "the f.u.c.k down."

The third guy came into the room now-huge, maybe six-four, three-eighty. He was breathing heavy, waddling.

"Take Tadeo upstairs," the redhead said. "Put him in the shower, throw some cold water on him, see if he has a concussion."

"How do I see if he has a concussion?" the big guy asked.

"Look into his eyes, I don't f.u.c.king know. Ask him to count to ten."

I asked, "Will you learn anything new if he can't?"