The Dead Room

‘Stay back,’ John – Sean – screamed. ‘I’m not going with him.’

Darby moved in front of Pine, raising her hands near her head. ‘You’re right, you’re not going with him.’

‘You can’t make me. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.’

‘Look at me,’ Darby said. ‘Look at me.’

He did, lips quivering. Tears spilled down his cheeks and the gun shook in his hand.

‘You don’t have to go with him, I promise.’ Her heart was beating fast but she wasn’t afraid. ‘And I promised I’d help you, remember? You can trust me.’

He didn’t answer. He scanned each of the faces staring at him.

Darby cocked her head over her shoulder and said, ‘Everyone, out of the room.’

Pine hesitated.

‘Do it,’ Darby said. ‘Now.’

When everyone had left, she backed up slowly and shut the door.

The boy’s frightened gaze shifted to the recorder lying on the tangled blanket.

‘It’s off,’ Darby said. ‘It’s just you and me, Sean.’

He started sobbing but didn’t lower the gun.

‘You’ve been through a lot tonight,’ Darby said. ‘You’re scared, you’re angry and upset. I understand what you’re going through. My father was murdered. Whatever this is about, I’ll help you solve it.’

‘You can’t.’

‘I can. I will. I gave you my word. Whatever this is about, you can trust me.’

He kept sobbing.

‘Put the gun down on the bed,’ Darby said. ‘Just put it down and then you and I will talk. Just me and you, okay? I promise –’

He slammed the muzzle underneath his chin and pulled the trigger.

12

Jamie Russo popped the boot, then considered the two handguns lying on the passenger seat: her .44 Magnum and a Glock with an extended magazine. She went with the Magnum, slid it inside her shoulder holster and stepped out of the car. The right side of her face throbbed and she could still taste blood on the back of her throat.

A full moon hung in the sky above the rock walls of the old Belham Quarry. She had left the car headlights on and could see the edge of the cliff. She wasn’t worried about being seen. No houses for miles and she doubted anyone came out this way any more, especially at this time of night.

She walked to the back of the car, her sneakers sinking in the soft, muddy earth.

The man she knew only as Ben lay on his back inside the boot. His clothes and swollen, cut face were smeared with blood and covered with shards of glass. His icy-blue eyes were open, squinting underneath a pale square of dim light.

Thank God, she thought, sighing with relief. Before leaving the house, she had quickly bound the gunshot wound on his thigh with duct tape to keep him from bleeding out. During the long, slow drive through the back streets, then navigating her way through the maze of winding trails that led to the quarry, she had choked on the possibility that he would die.

A sick fear mixed with excitement rushed through her veins as she gripped him by his Celtics jacket and hoisted him up into a sitting position. She wasn’t worried about him hitting her again. She had duct-taped his hands behind his back and tied his ankles together before dragging him across the kitchen hall to the garage.

Thick strips of duct tape covered his mouth. She yanked the tape down across his lips, taking skin and hair.

Ben’s eyes clamped shut. He gritted his teeth, hissing back a scream. She stared at him, taking in his features again: the dishevelled black hair matted against his sweaty, tanned face; his broken nose; big ears sticking out from the sides of his head; perfect white teeth.

Caps, she thought, and then stared at his neck. The first time she had seen him, that night in her home, he’d had what she called ‘rooster neck’, a wrinkled curtain of flesh dangling underneath his chin. It was gone now, and the skin along his face was smooth and tight, not a wrinkle anywhere. He’s had a facelift. And his eyes… I could’ve sworn they were brown.

Ben opened his eyes. They were bloodshot and rheumy. After he had hit her back at the house, a good solid right cross that had nearly knocked her off her feet, she had wrestled him to the kitchen floor and slammed his head twice against the broken shards of glass.

Ben rested the back of his head against the opened boot lid. Moths batted against the lid’s single bulb.

‘How long have you been following me?’ he croaked.

Hearing his voice released the vice-like grip on her heart. For the first time in years, she felt as if she could breathe.

‘You going to answer my question?’

‘Today,’ she said. ‘This… morning.’

‘Where?’

‘Drugstore.’

‘Drugstore… drugstore… The one in Wellesley Center?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve been watching me all day?’

She nodded. He’d left the drugstore and climbed into the passenger seat of a black BMW with tinted windows. She tailed the car on the highway as Ben and his partner drove to Charlestown. An hour later, when the BMW pulled into the narrow driveway of a small corner home, she watched, from the minivan’s rear-view mirror, Ben and the driver step out of the car. The driver was a few inches taller than Ben, maybe six two, and had grey curly hair and a dark tan. He wore white shorts and a bright floral Hawaiian shirt that couldn’t hide his enormous stomach.

She found a parking spot at the far end of the street and watched the house for the rest of the morning and afternoon. She left the minivan once to run across the street to the drugstore to buy a couple of energy bars, a bottle of water and a box of latex gloves.

At half past eight the BMW pulled out of the driveway. It stopped once, in front of some shitty tenement in Dorchester to pick up the white man in the suit, and then the three of them drove straight to the house in Belham.

‘You followed me all day and not once did I see you,’ Ben said. He shook his head. ‘I must be getting soft in my old age. What’s your name, hon?’

‘Say… it.’

‘If I knew your name, don’t you think I’d tell you?’

He blinked several times, then squinted as he tried to focus on her face. Fine white scars from the multiple corrective surgeries covered her jaw line, cheek and forehead. The side effects from the steroids and seizure medication gave her face a puffy, bloated look that no amount of dieting or exercise could diminish.

‘Five… ah… years,’ she said. ‘Five years… ago, you… ah… ah… came, ah…’

‘What’s with your voice? You retarded or something?’

‘No.’

‘Then what is it? Some sort of birth defect?’

Jamie couldn’t get the words out. She knew what she wanted to say: Five years ago, you came into my house and shot me in the head. You shot my two children while your two partners were downstairs torturing my husband. Her problem was actual speech. The .32 slug that had entered through her lower jaw, shattering her cheekbone and severing the optic nerves of her left eye, had lodged itself in the front lobe – Broca’s area, the neurologists had told her, the brain’s central processing system for language and speech. While