Moonlight Mile (14 page)

“You have two days,” Yefim said to Kenny. “After that, you were your mother’s dream, guy. You understand?”

Kenny said, “Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.”

Yefim nodded. He turned and held out his hand to me and I shook it. He looked in my eyes. His were a liquid sapphire and reminded me of a candle flame slipping under the surface of melting wax. “What’s your name, my friend?”

“Patrick.”

“Patrick”—he placed a hand to his chest—“I am Yefim Molkevski. This is Pavel Reshnev. Do you know who Kirill is?”

I wished I didn’t.

“I assume you mean Kirill Borzakov.”

He nodded. “Very good, my friend. And who is Kirill Borzakov?”

“He’s a businessman from Chechnya.”

Another nod. “A businessman, yes. Very good. Though he’s not from Chechnya. You’re a Slavic businessman in this country, everybody thinks you Chechen or”—he spit on the carpet—“Georgian. But Kirill, like me and Pavel, is Mordovian. We take the girl.”

“What?” I said.

Pavel crossed the dining room and grabbed Sophie off the wall. She didn’t scream, but she wept a fair amount, shaking hands held up by her ears like she was trying to ward off wasps. Pavel’s free hand remained in the pocket of his car coat.

Yefim snapped his fingers and extended his palm in my direction. “Give to me.”

“ ’Scuse me?”

All the light drained from his eyes. “Patrick. Dude. You so smart up to now. Stay smart, guy.” He wiggled his fingers. “Come. Give me the gun in your left pocket.”

Sophie said, “Let me go,” but there was no heat in it, only resignation and more tears.

Pavel was turned all the way toward me, hand in his pocket, awaiting instruction. If Yefim sneezed, Pavel would put a bullet in my brain before anyone could say, “Gesundheit.”

Yefim wiggled his fingers again.

Holding the grip by two fingers, I removed the handgun from my jacket pocket and handed it to Yefim. He placed it in his coat pocket and gave me a small bow. “Thank you, dude.” He turned to Kenny. “We take her. Maybe we have her make us another one. Maybe we test Pavel’s new gun on her, yes? Shoot her many times.”

Sophie shrieked through her tears and it came out strangled and wet. Pavel hugged her tighter to him but seemed otherwise unconcerned.

“Either way,” Yefim said to Kenny and Helene, “she is ours now. She is not yours ever again. You find the other girl. You find Kirill’s property. You return it to us by Friday. Do not screw the poop on this one, piece of shit.”

He snapped his fingers and Pavel dragged Sophie past me and past Helene and over to the sliding glass doors.

Yefim gave my shoulder a fist chuck. “Be well, my good friend.” On his way out of the dining room, he grasped Helene’s face in his hands and gave her another hard kiss on the forehead and another push backward. This time she fell on her ass.

His back to us, he held up a finger. “Don’t make a asshole of me, Kenny. Or I make a big asshole of you.”

And then they were gone. Within a few seconds, a truck engine came to life and I got to the kitchen window in time to see a Dodge Ram bump out into the untilled mounds behind the house.

“Do you have another gun?” I said.

“What?”

I looked at Kenny. “Another gun.”

“No, man. Why?”

He was lying, of course, but I didn’t have time to argue. “You’re some kind of douche, Kenny.”

He shrugged and lit a cigarette and then yelled, “Hey,” when I swiped his car keys off the granite countertop in the kitchen and ran out the front door.

A yellow Hummer sat in the circular drive. The poster child for How Detroit Got It Wrong. An utterly useless behemoth that got such piss-poor mileage the Sultan of Brunei might be embarrassed to drive it. And we were shocked when GM came asking for a bailout.

I had the Dodge Ram in sight for half a minute as I climbed into the Hummer. It bounced across the field, up one furrow, down another, Pavel’s blond hair distinct behind the wheel. When they bounced out of the field, they went east toward the entrance gate, and I lost sight of them, but I figured I had at least a fifty percent shot of them heading for Route 1. When I barreled out of Sherwood Forest Drive and back up Robin Hood Boulevard, I saw their tire tracks had turned right out of the entrance toward Route 1. I goosed the gas as much as I could, but I didn’t want to overdo it and ride up their ass.

I almost did anyway. I came over a rise on the country road I’d been zipping along, and there they were at the bottom, sitting at a red light in front of a combination grocery store/post office. I tried to bring my speed down as casually as possible, while keeping my head down like I was consulting a map on my seat, but trying to look inconspicuous in a yellow Hummer is like trying to look inconspicuous walking naked into a church. When I looked up again, the light had turned green and they punched the gas and took off at a good speed, though not tires a-screaming.

In another mile, they reached Route 1 and headed north. I gave it thirty seconds and pulled on. Traffic wasn’t thick, but it wasn’t thin, either, and I easily dropped back several car lengths and over two lanes. When you’re trying to stay undercover in a yellow Hummer, every little bit helps.

Only a suicide takes on Russian guns. And I liked life. A lot. So I had no intention of doing anything but keeping a soft tail on them until I saw where they took Sophie. Soon as I had an address, I’d make a 911 call and be done with this.

And that’s what I told my wife.

“Get off their tail,” she said. “Now.”

“I’m not on their tail. I’m five cars back, two lanes over. And you know how good I am on a tail.”

“I do. But they could be better. And you’re fucking driving a yellow fucking
Hummer
. Just get their license plate, call it in, and drive away.”

“You think they’re driving a car registered with the RMV? Come on.”

“You come on,” she said. “These guys are a whole different level of dangerous.
Bubba
thinks the Russian mob is too crazy to deal with.”

“As do I,” I said. “I’m just going to observe and report. They kidnapped a teenage girl, Ange.”

At that moment, my daughter called, “Hi, Daddy,” from somewhere in the background.

“You want to talk to her?” Angie asked.

“That’s low,” I said.

“I never said I fight fair.”

I passed Gillette Stadium on my right. Without a game being played inside, it looked large and alone. There was a mall beside it, a few cars in the parking lot. Up ahead, Pavel turned on his right blinker and drifted over into the far right lane.

“I’ll be home soon. Love you,” I said and hung up.

I moved over one lane, then another. There was only a red PT Cruiser between the Hummer and their Ram, so I kept the distance to a hundred yards.

At the next intersection, the truck turned right on North Street and then took an immediate right into a lot filled with tractor trailers backed up to a long, white distribution terminal. From the road, I could see the Ram drive down a dirt path alongside a row of tractor trailers and then take a left toward the back of the terminal.

I pulled into the lot and followed. To my right stood a retaining wall by the Route 1 overpass. Beneath the overpass, freight train lines and commuter rails fed north into the city or south toward Providence. To my left were the tractor trailers backed into their receiving bays. In one receiving bay, a few beefy guys pushed through thick strips of plastic to load boxes onto a trailer with Connecticut plates.

At the end of the path, the rail lines stretched off to my right while the brown dirt road curved to the left. I curved left around the terminal. The pickup truck sat in the middle of the path about fifteen yards away. Its parking lights were on. The engine idled. The passenger door was wide-open.

Yefim hopped off the passenger seat, screwing a suppressor onto the end of a semiautomatic handgun. In the time it took me to compute this, he walked five paces and extended his arm. The first shot punched a puckered hole in my windshield. The next four shots took out my front tires. The tires were just starting to hiss when the sixth shot added another puckered hole to the windshield. The hole sprouted veins. The veins widened, and the windshield crackled like popcorn in a microwave. Then it collapsed. Two more shots ripped up the hood, though I couldn’t be positive of either the number or their locations, because I was curled on the front seat, covered in windshield.

“Hey, guy,” Yefim said. “Hey, guy.”

I shook some glass out of my hair and off my cheeks.

Yefim leaned into the Hummer, his elbows on the window frame, the pistol and silencer dangling from his right hand. “License and registration.”

“Good one.” I eyed that pistol.

“No good one,” he said. “Serious request. License and registration.” He tapped the silencer against the side of the window frame. “Right fucking now, guy.”

I sat up and searched for the registration. Eventually, I found it tucked into the visor. I handed it to him, along with my driver’s license. He took a long look at them and handed the registration back.

“It’s registered to piece-of-shit Kenny. Piece-of-shit Kenny drives piece-of-shit fag-yellow Hum-vee. I knew it wasn’t yours. You too classy, man.”

I brushed some windshield pebbles off my coat. “Thank you.”

He fanned the air with my driver’s license and then put it in his pocket. “I keep this. I keep it, Patrick Kenzie of Taft Street, so you remember. So you know that I know who you are and where you live with your family. You have family, yes?”

I nodded.

“Go to your family, then,” he said. “Give them big hugs.”

He rapped the door with the gun one last time and walked back to the pickup truck. He climbed in, shut the door, and they drove away.

Chapter Sixteen

O
ne positive thing I learned about a Hummer—bitch didn’t drive too bad with its front tires blown out. As a few brave truckers and freight loaders worked their way out of the nearest loading bays, I backed the Hummer up twenty yards, pinned the wheel, and then popped it into drive and headed for the train tracks. Those front tires were slap-slap-slapping away as the men shouted at me but nobody gave chase; an SUV sporting eight fresh bullet holes tends to diminish the desire to confront its owner.

Or, in this case, its driver. Kenny was its owner, and Kenny was fucked when the police found the car and saw who it was registered to. Not my problem, though. I drove it down the freight train tracks a couple hundred yards to a depot that led to the parking lot of Gillette Stadium. The only cars nearby were parked by the executive offices of One Patriot Place. The fan parking areas were barren for a couple hundred yards until you reached the shopping center next door. That’s where I drove the yellow Hummer. As I drove, I wiped. I used a handkerchief on the seat, the steering wheel, and the dashboard. I’m quite sure I didn’t get every fingerprint I’d left, but I didn’t have to. No one was going to get all
CSI
on the interior when it was registered to an ex-con who lived within two miles of the stadium.

I parked on the outer fringe of the mall lot and took the escalator into the movie theater. It was Cinema De Lux, so I could have enjoyed table service from the balcony and paid $20 to watch a movie that would be on DVD for a buck in three months, but my mind was elsewhere. I found a bathroom with a handicapped stall and its own sink. I closed the door and removed my jacket and shook all the glass from it. I did the same with my shirt and then I used a wad of paper towels to push all the glass into one corner of the stall. I put my shirt back on, doing my best to ignore the tremors in my hands, but it was hard to do so when my fingers shook so much I couldn’t get the buttons into their holes. I gripped the sink and bent at the waist and took a dozen long, slow breaths. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Yefim walking toward me, casually extending his arm, casually firing into the windshield, casually ending my life if the situation had called for it. I opened my eyes. I stared at my reflection in the mirror and splashed some water on my face and stared at myself a little longer until my reflection looked a bit more in command of itself. I splashed some water on the back of my neck and tried to button my shirt again. My hands still shook but not as violently, and eventually I made do. Five minutes later, I left the bathroom looking a little bit better than when I’d entered.

I went back down the escalator. A dark green cab sat out front of the theater. I hopped in and gave the driver the address of the house two doors over from where I’d left my car. A security guard was parked behind the Hummer, roof lights flashing. As we exited the parking lot, a Foxboro Police cruiser passed us. Kenny was almost out of time.

The cab dropped me in front of the house on Tuck Terrace. I left the driver a solid tip but not so solid he’d be able to pick me out of a lineup. I walked to the house as he backed onto the road. I pretended to put a key in the front door as he pulled forward and then rode up the street. I walked over to the house where I’d left my Jeep. Back through the half-finished ranch, back across the field of sand, and I was once more at Kenny and Helene’s sliding glass door. It was unlocked, and I let myself in and stood watching as Kenny added the laptops to a duffel bag on the floor and Helene packed up the cable modems.

Kenny noticed me. “You got my keys?”

I patted my pockets and was surprised to find them. “Here you go.” I tossed him the keys.

He zipped the duffel bag and lifted it off the floor. “Where’s it parked?”

“Yeah,” I said slowly, “about that.”

• • •

“I can’t believe you killed my ride,” Kenny said as we drove past the empty Nottingham Hill security kiosk in my Jeep.

“I didn’t kill it. Yefim did.”

“I can’t believe you just fucking left it.”

“Kenny, your Hummer looks like the bus at the end of
The Gauntlet
. The only way it was reaching your house was by U.N. airlift.”

We came to the same stoplight where I’d almost run into Yefim and Pavel’s truck. A small armada of Foxboro Police cruisers came tear-assing down the road from the other direction. Kenny and Helene dropped in their seats as the cruisers blew through the red light, sirens a-rage. In another fifteen seconds, all four cruisers had disappeared over the rise behind us as if they’d never existed at all. I looked at Kenny, crammed under my glove compartment.

“Subtle,” I said.

“We don’t like calling attention to ourselves,” Helene said from the backseat.

“Which is why you drive a yellow Hummer,” I said as the light turned green.

On Route 1, we passed the stadium again. The Hummer was surrounded by local and state police, a black-panel crime scene truck, and two news vans. Kenny looked at the state of it—the blown tires, the shattered windshield, the shot-up hood. Another news van pulled into the lot. A helicopter flew overhead.

“Shit, Kenny,” I said, “you’re big-time.”

“Please,” he said, “can’t you let a man grieve in peace?”

• • •

We stopped in Dedham, back behind the Holiday Inn at the intersection of Route 1 and Route 1A.

“Okay,” I said. “In case you haven’t figured it out, you two are screwed. I saw you grab the computers, but I’m sure you left something behind in the house that’ll tie you to all the wonderful fraud and identity theft you’ve been up to. Not to mention the meth dust in the microwave. I’m only half as smart as most cops at this, so let’s assume they’ll have you two charged by midday and will be out on the prowl with no-knock warrants by dinnertime.”

“You’re such a bad bluffer.” Helene lit a cigarette.

“You think?” I reached over the backrest, took the cigarette out of her mouth and flicked it out the window past Kenny’s face. “I got a four-year-old, you moron. She rides in this car.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t want her going to the playground smelling like a Newport.”

“Touchy, touchy.”

I held out my hand to her.

“What?”

“Gimme the pack.”

“Nigger, please.”

“Gimme the pack,” I repeated.

Kenny sounded weary. “Give it to him, Helene.”

She handed over the pack. I slid it into my pocket.

“So,” Kenny said, “you got a solution for us?”

“I dunno. Tell me what Kirill Borzakov wants with Amanda.”

“Who said he wants Amanda?”

“Yefim did.”

“Oh, right.”

“So what’s Amanda got that they could want?”

“She ripped a load, took it on the run with her.”

I made the sound of an NBA buzzer when the shot clock runs out. “Bullshit.”

“No, he’s serious.” Helene, all wide-eyed.

“Get out of my car.”

“No, listen.”

I reached across Kenny and pushed his door open. “See ya.”

“No, really.”

“Really. We’ve got less than two days to trade whatever Amanda’s got for Sophie. Now I know you don’t give a shit about the life of a teenage girl, but I’m kind of a dinosaur that way, and I do.”

“So go to the police.”

I nodded as if that made perfect sense. “Testify in open court against the Russian mob.” I scratched my chin. “By the time it’s safe for my daughter to leave Witness Protection, she’ll be fifty-fucking-five.” I looked at Kenny. “No one’s going to the cops.”

“Can I have my cigarettes back?” Helene said. “Please.”

“You going to smoke in my ride?”

“I’ll open the door.”

I tossed them back over the seat to her.

“So where’s this leave us?” Kenny said.

“What I said—we need to make a trade. The more you two dick me around on what exactly it is they want from Amanda, the less chance Sophie will be in anything less than three or four pieces by the time Friday rolls around.”

“And we told you,” Kenny said, “Amanda ripped off their—”

“It’s a piece of fucking jewelry,” Helene said. She opened the back door wide and placed one foot on the ground as she lit her cigarette. She blew the smoke out past the door and gave me a look like
Satisfied?

“Jewelry.”

She nodded as Kenny closed his eyes and rested his head against the seat. “Yeah. Don’t ask me what it looks like or how she got it, but she stole this, what, crucifix?”

“Well, it’s not a crucifix,” Kenny said. “ ’Least I don’t think so. They keep calling it a ‘cross.’ ” He shrugged. “That’s all we know.”

“And you don’t know how this cross got into her possession?”

Another head shake. “Nope.”

“So you have no idea how Amanda might have had the opportunity to put her hands on this cross, or why she was hanging out with the Russian mob. Is that what you’re selling?”

“We don’t smother her,” Helene said.

“What?”

“Amanda,” Helene said. “We let her make her own decisions. We’re not up her ass all the time. We show her respect as a person.”

I looked out the car window for a bit.

After the silence went on a bit too long, Helene said, “What’re you thinking?”

I looked over the seat at her. “I’m thinking how I’ve never had the impulse to hit a woman in my life, but you get me in an Ike Turner frame of mind.”

She flicked her cigarette into the parking lot. “Like I haven’t heard that before.”

“Where. Is. She.”

“We. Don’t. Know.” Helene bulged her eyes at me like a pissy twelve-year-old, which, in terms of emotional development, wasn’t far off the mark.

“Bullshit.”

Kenny said, “Man, I taught that girl how to create new identities so tight she could join the CIA. Obviously, she created a few I didn’t know about and now she’s running around with one of those identities. And she’s got a flawless fucking social security card and birth certificate, I assure you. And once you got those, you can create a ten-year credit history in about four hours. And once you’ve done
that
? Shit. The country’s one big ATM.”

“You told Yefim you were close.”

“I woulda told that ice-blood motherfucker anything he needed to hear, long as it got him to leave my kitchen.”

“So you’re not close.”

He shook his head.

I looked at Helene in the rearview. She shook her head.

We sat in silence again for a bit.

“Then what good are you?” I said eventually and started the Jeep. “Get out of my car.”

• • •

I was scheduled to have a beer with Mike Colette, my friend who owned the distribution warehouses. He’d hired me to discover which of his employees was embezzling, and I’d found an answer he wasn’t going to like. I thought of canceling the meeting, because I was still a hair shaky from the eight bullets that had been fired in my direction, but we’d agreed to meet in West Roxbury and I was already over on that side of town, so I called his cell and told him I was on my way.

He sat at one of the bar tops by the window at West on Centre and gave me a wave as I came through the door, even though he was the only guy at the tables. He’d been like that since we’d met at UMass, an earnest, solid guy of entrenched decency. I never met a soul who didn’t like him. The logic among our friends was if you didn’t like Mike, it said nothing about him but everything about you.

He was a small guy with close-shorn curly black hair and the kind of handshake that you could feel in every bone of your body. He gave it to me when I reached the table and I was so distracted I hadn’t prepared for it. I damn near ended up on my knees and I was pretty sure carpal tunnel set in immediately.

He pointed at the beer in front of my chair. “Just ordered it for you.”

“Thanks, man.”

“Get you anything? Appetizer or something?”

“Oh, no, I’m fine.”

“Sure? You look a little off, man.”

I took a sip of beer. “I had a run-in with some Russians.”

He drank from his own frosted mug, his eyes wide. “They’re a fucking menace in the trucking business, man. I mean, not all Russians, but Kirill Borzakov’s crew? Whew. Stay away from those guys.”

“Too late.”

“No shit?” He put his beer on the coaster. “You had a run-in with Borzakov’s guys?”

“Yup.”

“Kirill’s not just a thug, man, he’s an out-of-his-fucking-mind thug. You heard he got another DUI?”

“Yeah, last week.”

“Last
night
.” Mike pushed a folded
Herald
across the table at me. “And this one beats all.”

I found it on page 6: “ ‘Butcher’ Borzakov’s Bezerko Blowup.” He’d taken his Targa into a Danvers car wash. Halfway through the service, he’d apparently become impatient. This was bad news for the car that sat ahead of his in the wash. Kirill rammed it. The car was propelled out of the wash, but the engine of Borzakov’s Targa seized up. Police found him in the parking lot, covered in suds as he tried to attack one of the Panamanians who worked the gas pumps with a wiper blade he’d snapped off his own car. He was Tasered and taken to the ground by four staties. He posted first-quarter NBA numbers on the Breathalyzer and the staties also found a half-gram of cocaine in his seat console. It took him all the way to dinnertime to make his bail. In the sidebar, they ran the names of the four men whose deaths he was suspected of ordering this past year.