my mum. I told you last time, it wasn’t the best investment. The location and all. He worked so hard to keep it going. And the harder he worked, it seems, the harder we all worked, the closer we got to the brink. Maybe he would have done it if someone offered. He was already giving his blood, sweat and tears. Why not a kidney too?”
I screwed up on the way to the Monsignor O’Brien Highway. Canadian drivers are used to kilometres; the GPS spoke in miles. It told me to turn right in 0.3 miles. It didn’t sound like much, so a minute later, when a right turn came up, I took it-too late to see the sign that said No Exit.
“Recalculating,” the GPS said.
Bitch.
I started up the road, looking for a place to turn around. There were no driveways. The whole block on the right side was the back of a manufacturing plant, lined with tall cyclone fencing topped with coils of razor wire. The other side was a wrecking yard where dozens of crushed and mangled cars sat atop each other, also fenced off. I started a three-point turn. I was backing away from the left-hand curb when I heard another engine and saw a black muscle car turn up the street. An old Monte Carlo, polished and pinstriped. The driver didn’t hesitate, as I had when I’d realized I was going into a dead end. He came full throttle toward me. I had nowhere to go but out the passenger side and into the street.
Two men got out of the car. The driver was around forty, lean and hard-looking, with dirty blond hair hanging down to his collar, all in black like a roadie or guitar player. But instead of an instrument he carried a sawed-off pool cue.
The passenger was bigger, way bigger, and carried a baseball bat.
Jesus Christ, my head. I was going to have to deck one of them fast and hope the other one didn’t get a clean shot at me. I was too far from Francis Street and its hospitals to let that happen. And so fucking rusty. But my mouth wasn’t. I said, “Which one of you is Sean?”
The smaller one cocked his head and grinned. “Who?”
“Sean Daggett.”
He smiled and tapped the pool cue against his empty palm as he moved up on my right. “My friend here prefers a baseball bat. It suits his build and he has a sweet swing, as you’ll see. But me, I carry this cue-you know why? ’Cause a pool cue’s the first thing I ever swung at another man with real intent. Sixteen years old and I cracked his fucking skull. Made him bleed out his ears. Left him about fifty per cent dumber than he was before. And over the years I’ve always found it’s not only good for cracking heads, it also works pretty good on wrists and knees, arms and ribs. Pretty much anything. Can even shove it up a man’s ass if I want to make him cry.”
I was trying to visualize a kick I could deliver hard enough to put him down before he could swing at me.
“So someone hired you to find the runaway doctor?”
“Yes.”
“You anywhere close to finding him?”
“Not very. But I know a lot about you, Sean, and so do the cops.”
“Like what?”
“The organ ring you’re running. The one David was involved in.”
“The cops know fuck all and you know less. You’re not talking your way out of this, boy. Unless you know where the doc is.”
“No.”
“Then this is going to hurt like hell.”
They were each about a yard away from me and moving in, brandishing their weapons, when an engine roared and a car burned up the street. It was another Dodge Caliber, gold instead of white, and Jenn was at the wheel. And she wasn’t stopping. We all backed off. She steered right at the bigger man, the one with the bat, and hit him hard enough to drive him windmilling into the air. He slammed into a parked car and crumpled onto his back, his left leg bent at a ninety-degree angle. I took two quick strides and snatched up his baseball bat. Jenn got out of the car with a tire iron in her hand and we moved in together toward Daggett two on one, the odds suddenly reversed.
“All gratitude aside,” I said to Jenn, “what the hell are you doing here?”
“I followed you.”
“Why?”
“In case something like this happened.”
“All right,” I said. “We will talk about it later.”
“Much later,” Daggett said. He was pointing an automatic pistol at me. “Jesus, you didn’t think I’d come to a fight with just a cue. My father raised me better than that.” He slipped the shortened cue into an inside pocket of his jacket and said, “Lay them down. Both of you. Now.”
I dropped the bat. Jenn let the tire iron fall. He moved quickly to Jenn and said, “Keys?”
“In the car.”
He turned to me, the gun at Jenn’s head, and said, “Go get the keys out of your car. Fast. You try anything, I’ll kill your girl.”
If the gun had been pointing at me, I could have taken it from him. Krav Maga teaches that well. But it was aimed at Jenn’s head, not mine, so there was nothing worth trying. I went and got the keys and flipped them to Daggett, who slipped them in his pocket.
“Now go get her keys,” he said. “Same way.”
When he had both sets of keys, he bunched his fist in the hair at Jenn’s nape and started backing the two of them up toward the Monte Carlo. Her face was stretched in pain as she stumbled to match his stride while going backwards.
When he got to the car, he said, “Here’s the deal. I need that Jew doctor. I need him to come in from wherever he is and fast. Six p.m. Monday latest. That gives you two days to find him and bring him to me.”
“I swear I don’t know where he is.”
“Then find him. Because your girlfriend is sitting on a gold mine, and I’m not talking about her pussy, sweet as it probably is. You say you know what I’m doing, then you know what Blondie here is worth. Two young healthy kidneys? These sweet blue corneas? Find him by Monday, boy, or the next time you look in her eyes, they’ll be in someone else’s face.”
He bunched her hair again. I could tell by her look he wasn’t hurting her badly, just keeping tight control, the gun pressed into her neck where any shot would kill her. He backed up to the trunk of his car and told her to use one hand to unlatch it and raise the door. She did as she was told. He made her get in and shut the trunk and leaned back against it, the gun in his hand pointing idly at the ground.
“You’re at the Sam Adams, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m calling there Monday morning. Sometime after nine, in case I sleep in.”
I wanted to hurl myself at him and tear out his throat with my teeth. I said, “Why Monday?”
“Just have my Jew for me. And don’t call no cops. Not in Brookline or the BPD. You’re on your own, boy. Prove you’re good enough.”
He took my keys out of his pocket and threw them twenty yards up the road where they landed in low brush along the fence. The second set landed about ten feet farther.
He said, “You want to make any speeches about not harming a hair on her head, chasing me to the ends of the earth if I do, etcetera, now would be the time.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“You call that a speech?” he said with a laugh. Then he opened the rear door and tucked the gun in his belt and pulled his buddy to his feet, surprisingly strong for someone his size. The man was groaning, a long string of glassy snot hanging from his nose like a third-grader’s. As Daggett angled the big man into the back seat of the Monte Carlo, I took a step forward but he whipped the gun out and fired it in one motion, the round spitting up dirt a few feet to my left. He grinned as I froze in place. Then he finished loading the man in, closed the door and got in on the driver’s side. I just stood there as he backed up, then wheeled around past me, spitting gravel as he headed out toward the highway.
My partner, my best friend in the world, taken by a gangster counting useful body parts. No way of knowing
