Brothers and Bones (29 page)

“I’m not going to run and hide, Bonz. I want to make the people who ruined my life, and who killed my brother, pay for what they’ve done. Besides, if I ran, I’d have to leave Jessica behind, and that’s simply not an option.”

He nodded. Then frowned, pausing in his beard trimming.

“What?” I said.

After a moment, he shrugged and said nothing.

“No,” I said, “what is it?”

“Just this. You said you won’t leave Jessica behind.”

“And?”

“Well, you sure she’ll still wanna be with you? After all this?”

I held his gaze firmly in the mirror. “Yes. I am. She will. She’ll believe me. I know it.”

Bonz shrugged again and kept working at the hair on his face. Either I had spoken with such conviction that Bonz couldn’t help but now share my unswerving faith in Jessica or, more likely, he just didn’t care all that much.

After a few moments, I said, “How about you? What do you want? Seems to me you could easily cut and run now. All the heat’s focused on me. The cops don’t know who you are and Siracuse’s people don’t really know what you look like now. You could fade away and start over somewhere.”

He shook his head and a minor facial tic swept across his face. “They ruined my life, too. Thirteen years just gone. Took everything from me. My finger. My fucking mind. Somebody’s gotta pay for that.”

“So we’re on the same page, then.”

“Looks that way.”

“We need to find that tape,” I said.

He nodded.

Bonz had finished trimming his beard, which was now a manageable inch in length. With all the cutting complete, I opened a bottle of hair dye, read the instructions, slipped on rubber gloves, and got to work. We’d bought a special fast-acting coloring kit, so in less than twenty minutes, Bonz’s hair and beard were dark, dark black.

After the dye job, Bonz plugged in our new electric shaver and facial-hair-grooming kit and trimmed his beard to a neat, even shorter length. Next, with my help, we smeared gel into his hair and gave him a trendy, carefully mussed look, which helped hide the fact that no two strands of his hair were the same length.

With Bonz now coiffed, we got to work on me. Bonz shaved my head to a buzz cut, then we moved right on to the dyeing. In a short while, my formerly thick, curly, dark hair had become a platinum-blond crew cut. I looked ridiculous, but I also looked quite different, which was the whole point. In fact, as we stood in front of the mirror examining our work, we both had to admit that the transformations were remarkable. Bonz, in particular, looked like a different person entirely. There was nothing we could do to hide his facial scars or his crooked nose, but he was still nearly unrecognizable. My biggest problem was the half of my face that was still covered with bruises, though the ugly purple was starting to fade to an ugly mustard yellow. We’d picked up some women’s makeup and I tried applying a flesh-toned cover or foundation or whatever the heck it was, but all it did was make my face look bizarre, unnatural. We decided to take our chances and forgo the makeup entirely.

We picked up what hair we could and flushed it down the toilet in small handfuls. Whenever we checked out of the motel, we didn’t want to leave behind more evidence than we had to. Seeing as Bonz left enough hair on the floor to cover a family of naked grizzlies, the flushing process took a while.

When we were finished, we examined our new looks in the mirror for another few seconds. Bonz looked into the eyes of my reflection. He started to say something, stopped, and started again. “You know, Charlie,” he said, “even if we find that tape, take it to the press or the cops or whoever, you’ve still got a shitload of explaining to do. No guarantee any of the evidence against you concerning that dead body in your apartment will look any less bad for you.” I nodded. “What I’m saying is, even if we find the tape and tell the world whatever the hell Siracuse doesn’t want the world to know, it may not do you a bit of fucking good. You might still go to jail for murder.”

I was surprised Bonz didn’t need to sit and catch his breath after such a longwinded speech. He was definitely changing. He was talking in slightly longer sentences. More importantly, I thought, his facial tics and head twitches and episodes of staring blankly at his missing finger were growing less and less frequent. “I realize that,” I said. “I’ll worry about it later. For now, I want revenge, plain and simple.”

Bonz smiled. It was much easier to tell that now that he’d lost ninety-five percent of his facial hair. “Now we’re definitely on the same page.”

“Looks that way,” I said, wondering if I should have been worried about being on the same page with Bonz about anything. “Now I’m going to bed. With luck, something will come to me in my sleep.”

“I’ll be doing the same in a minute,” Bonz said as he stepped over to the toilet. “Close the door behind you.”

I did, then dragged my tired body over to one of the beds and climbed in, noticing with mild irritation that the motel’s sheets were coarse, even scratchy. The mattress was too firm and too lumpy, but I’d survive. Besides, as exhausted as I was, I didn’t think any of it would matter. I’d have no trouble sleeping. Before I dropped off, though, I wanted to do just a little more thinking. I lay with my eyes open, staring at the ceiling, running the facts I knew through my head.

In the bathroom, the toilet flushed. A moment later, Bonz walked into the room, stark naked.

“A toilet,” he said. “An actual toilet, with a door. What’ll they think of next?”

I didn’t want to think about how Bonz had had to take care of his bathroom business over the years.

He went over to the other bed and slipped between the sheets.

“Holy shit,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Sheets. Jesus Christ, I forgot what they felt like. Beats the hell out of cardboard. This is fucking heaven.”

And to think I’d been complaining in my head about the sheets when this guy had been sleeping in boxes or on cement.

Bonz had left the overhead light on. The switch was by the door. Rather than ask him to get out of bed and turn it off, or even offer to shoot rock-paper-scissors for it, I thought it best to get up and do it myself. I was halfway back to my bed, padding across the dark room, when I heard Bonz snoring. Loudly. Sheesh, would I even be able to fall asleep with that chain-saw buzzing in the next bed? Evidently so, because I soon found myself struggling to concentrate on our problem, on Jake’s prayer clue, on where the tape could be hidden, on what our next move should be, on how to stay away from cops and killers, on what I would say to Jessica when we finally spoke, as my mind’s lens lost focus and a comfortable blankness began to displace my thoughts.

Later, I wasn’t sure how much later, I awoke to a thrashing in the dark. The pale light spilling in through the motel curtains washed across Bonz, in his bed, in the throes of a sheet-twisting nightmare, his face strained, his lips skinned back from his teeth, his neck muscles corded as he snapped his head from side to side, alternately grunting and gasping for air. I was about to call to him, to try to drag him up out of whatever pit of dark horrors he’d fallen into, when his face relaxed suddenly, his mouth fell slack, and his breathing slowed. I closed my eyes again and dropped back into a sleep blissfully empty of dreams or nightmares.

THIRTY-ONE

A deep-throated, rumbling, wild-animal growl woke me from a sound sleep. I snapped upright, wide-eyed with sudden panic. Sunlight was knifing through a six-inch gap in the curtains, cutting a swath through the darkness of the room. The growl came again, close on my right, and I located the source. In the dim light I saw Bonz asleep in the next bed, on his back. He let loose another growling snore that I could almost feel in my chest, then rolled onto his side. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock. Five twenty. The harsh daylight slicing through the crack in the curtains told me it was afternoon, not 5:20 in the morning.

I smiled ruefully. I was supposed to have been in court eight hours ago to continue the government’s prosecution of Vasily Redekov, underboss of the Russian mob. Under the circumstances, I was sure the judge gave Lippincott a continuance until new lead counsel could get himself up to speed on the case. Redekov and his lawyers must have gotten a huge kick out of the stories in this morning’s papers about the federal prosecutor on their case. They must have felt like kids waking up on Christmas morning. Probably spent all day giggling, thinking about how best to use my troubles to their advantage the next time they faced the jury.

I thought about waking Bonz so we could get started, then realized I had no idea what it was we were going to start doing. I didn’t know our next move. So I decided to take a shower and think about it. I do a lot of good thinking in the shower, which is great when you don’t pay your own water bill.

The water was nice and hot this afternoon. I closed my eyes and let it pound my tired muscles. The long sleep had done me good. I felt rested and sharp. I ran Jake’s clue through my mind over and over. He said that if I wanted to find the answers, I should to turn prayer. Despite feeling sharp, I had no idea what that could mean. The only thing that made sense to me was to search the only church both Jake and I knew—meaning Saint John’s—but Bonz and I had done that and come up empty. I racked my brain. One other possibility came to mind. Perhaps there was a clue within the text of a prayer. Perhaps somewhere, buried in a millennia-old prayer, were words that would point me to the place where Jake hid the tape, or to the person to whom he may have entrusted it. If so, the prayer would have to be Catholic, of course, and one of the better-known ones, as Jake wasn’t religious man at the end and likely wouldn’t have known the words to the more obscure prayers. Plus, he knew I was even less religious than he was.

The most well-known Catholic prayer, of course, is the Lord’s Prayer, which begins, “Our Father, who art in heaven….” Then there’s the Hail Mary, which, in addition to being a famous football play, is also a pretty famous prayer. Those two are the real biggies—the Mommy and Daddy of them all, so to speak. As I recited them over and over in my head, I began to doubt this entire line of thinking. I could be wrong, of course, but I simply saw no solution to Jake’s puzzle in those dusty, ancient words. Bonz and I were screwed. Well,
I
was screwed. Without that tape, I had no leverage against Carmen Siracuse, and it would only be a matter of time before he or the cops caught up with me.

But wait. An entirely new thought occurred to me. Maybe there was another way. If I couldn’t find the tape, perhaps I could deduce what was on it. A long shot, sure, but if I could do that, I might not actually need the tape itself. If I could figure out what it was that Siracuse so desperately wanted to keep hidden, then maybe I’d come across evidence of same, evidence I could take to the authorities. Or, even if no actual evidence existed, I might be able to bluff my way through—that is, convince Siracuse that I did, in fact, have the tape. If he bought that, he’d have to leave me alone. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to take him down or avenge Jake’s murder, but at least I might be able to avoid going to jail. And if I managed that, I could always continue to work toward finding the tape or evidence that would finally tie Siracuse to Jake’s murder or to whatever was on the tape Jake hid.

So there it was. Two independent lines of investigation in front of me. Either figure out where the tape itself was, or figure out what was on the tape and use that information against Siracuse. And because we likely wouldn’t have a hell of a lot of time before somebody who was after us managed to grab us, we’d have to pursue both lines as best we could until it became clear that one or the other was either a total dead end or, alternatively, a much more fruitful line of investigation.

After a long, hot shower, I went back into the room and found Bonz still snoring away. I dressed, then picked up Jake’s notes and sat on the bed again, my back against the wall. I reached for the lamp on the nightstand, glanced at Bonz, and wondered how pissed he’d be when I turned on the light. I decided to take my chances. I flicked on the light. Bonz—whose new, shorn look surprised me momentarily—squinted in his sleep, snuffled loudly, and rolled over onto his stomach. I took the rubber bands off Jake’s notes and began to flip through them.

Though I’d read the notes many times, and, as I said, I have something close to the proverbial eidetic memory, I hoped that seeing the words again, written in Jake’s handwriting, might spark something in me. The notes pertained to several potential stories on which Jake was working at the time of his disappearance. He seemed to be at different stages in each. The first notes related to alleged financial improprieties by members of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. There were general notes about the suspected misdealing, as well as names of the supposedly guilty parties, and other names and phone numbers, apparently either informants or witnesses. There were also random thoughts written in the margins, like, “Talk to Margaret M.” and “Allude to other scandal?” After several pages, the notes shifted to a potential second story, this one about suspected patient abuse in local health-care facilities. Again, there were story notes, lists of names with contact information where available, and margin notes like “Get Mike’s time records” and “B.B. 2/76.”

The final topic of the notes was a potential exposé of corruption in certain areas of the mayor’s office, midlevel employees with ties to the Siracuse family, the Italian mob. Again, there were story notes, names, and thoughts and scraps of information jotted in the margin. All told, sixteen single-sided pages of handwritten information, none of it triggering anything in me. I sighed and rubbed my temples. I closed my eyes and called to mind everything I could, everything that seemed to hold even the slightest potential to move my dual investigations forward—the various things I’d seen in the church, Father Sean’s tragically ugly face, the things I’d read in Jake’s notes, Carmen Siracuse’s words at the charity event, Hammer Grossi’s words in my apartment—and let these disjointed images and words run free in my mind, hoping two or more that belonged together would find their way to each other, form some kind of bond, send me a collective signal, something to nudge me in the right direction. In no time, my head was swimming.