where he was taking her.
It couldn’t be good, wherever it was.
I ran to where he had thrown my keys. When I saw them glittering in a clump of weeds, I knelt to pick them up. My head started to spin and I had to stay down on my knees, useless once again, until I felt strong enough to stand.
CHAPTER 19
I tell myself I am not a violent man. Yes, I have committed acts of violence in my life. I have killed three people but I don’t think of myself as a killer. I have hurt other people but I don’t think of myself as a thug or a bully. But the thoughts racing through my head as I got into the car were the darkest, bloodiest kind. I wasn’t seeing red- it was solid black. If Sean Daggett killed Jenn, I would kill him. I would do it with my hands and feet, a blunt instrument, a knife or a gun-whatever I could find. I would shatter his skull, choke him on his own teeth. Crush his throat. Explode his heart. Set him on fire and watch him burn and not even piss on him until he was a smouldering ruin. Even if he didn’t kill her: if he caused her any pain at all, just a bump or bruise, he would die. If he killed or hurt David Fine, he would die. I would do it on my own if I had to. But I didn’t.
When my hands stopped shaking, I took out my phone and tried to remember the number of a certain Italian restaurant in Toronto. I used to know it by heart. But since the concussion, my memory has been a little less sharp. I knew the area code and that it started with the same exchange as my brother’s downtown office. It was the last four numbers I wasn’t sure of. I punched in the first six, then added my best guess for the final four. I heard it engage, waited while it rang three times and sighed with relief when a woman said, “Giulio’s.”
“Hi, Monica,” I said. She was the daytime manager and nighttime hostess. “It’s Jonah.”
“Hi, hon,” she said. “I hope you don’t want to come in tonight, we got problems.”
“What happened? Is Dante there?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And up to his knees in water. A dishwasher hose broke last night and leaked through to the basement, which is presently flooded.”
“Tell him I need him.”
“All right. But his mood is trending shitty. It’s looking like the story of Jonah down there anyway. Hey, maybe that’ll get him to crack a smile. It would be the first of the day.”
My friendship with Dante Ryan is by far the weirdest in my life. Impossible to explain to anyone else because when I met him the year before, he was still killing people for a living and was considered by several police agencies and his peers to be one of the best around. A future Hall of Famer in his trade. Our paths crossed when he was given a contract he couldn’t bring himself to fulfill because it included killing a boy the same age as his son, Carlo, then turning five. He sought out my help and we saved a few lives, lost a few, took away a few between us. But we did it all together and it forged a strong, mostly unspoken bond between us.
He doesn’t mingle with any of my other friends, except Jenn. I have been to his house to meet his wife and son just once, and most of our meetings take place at Giulio’s, his restaurant on John Street in Toronto’s Entertainment District, still named after its corpulent former owner. The food is authentic southern Italian, and I drink and eat there free because Ryan says he would have none of it if not for me. It’s true so I take it.
“Hey,” he said into the phone. “You’re lucky you’re not the dead man who closed up and left last night before the dishwasher stopped. I was about to jump through the phone line and throttle you. Listen, can I call you back in a bit?”
“No, you can’t,” I said. “I need you.”
“Jonah, if you could see-”
“It’s Jenn,” I said. “She’s in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“She’s been abducted.”
“What! Where are you? My car’s right out back. I’ll be-”
“Ryan, we’re in Boston.”
“What!” Ryan and Jenn got to know each other pretty well during our trip to Chicago, and while he may not be up on all the latest nuances of dealing with a lesbian he finds attractive, his affection for her is clear.
“Boston. That’s where I am-where she was taken.”
“You know who by?”
“An Irish thug named Sean Daggett.”
“How long ago?”
“A few minutes.”
“Okay. Now think about this before you answer. Should I grab a cab to the island airport, which is like ten minutes away, and be there in under four hours? Or do you want me to
If he drove, he meant, he could bring guns across the border in his metal photographer’s case, lined with foam cutouts for each pistol and its matching suppressor. His gear would never make it through any level of airport security.
“If you flew,” I said, “could you pick up that equipment here?”
“Of course,” he said. “It’s readily available in most big cities, for a price. I’d just have to contact my local supplier for a name there.”
“Then fly,” I said. “I’ll pay whatever it costs. Call me when you land. I’ll be out near the airport anyway.”
CHAPTER 20
The Institute of Contemporary Art was stunning. Most of the great buildings we had seen driving around Boston the last two days were brick or stone. This was a great expanse of glass and steel thrusting out over the harbour, almost like a giant private box in a stadium grandstand.
The lobby was a large glassed-in atrium filled with people attending Slow Art Day. Volunteers stood near the entrance handing out pamphlets and museum maps. I saw no sign that Congressman McConnell was in the room.
An elderly woman with tightly curled hair approached me. “Are you familiar with Slow Art Day?” she asked.
“A bit.”
She offered me a pamphlet and a map of the museum, which I declined. I wanted to keep my hands free in case I had to throttle the congressman. “We encourage you to take your time as you go through,” she said. “Really enjoy every wonderful piece you see.”
“I will.”
“And don’t forget there’s a picnic lunch at one o’clock where everyone is free to eat and talk about the work they saw. It comes with your admission.”
“Great. Do you know, by any chance, when Congressman McConnell will arrive?”
“No, I don’t. Maybe someone at the service desk would. But I’m looking forward to seeing him too,” she said. “I’m a bit of a fan. I don’t even live in his district, but there’s something about him. I would have compared him to a Kennedy at one time, but nowadays it’s not such a compliment.”
Yes, there was something about him. And I’d get it out of him if I had to pull it out of his sternum. I thanked the volunteer and went to the service desk. No one there knew exactly when McConnell would arrive either, only that it would be after eleven-thirty, when the public viewing began. I stopped at the first work of art past admissions that gave me a good view of the front entrance. It was a giant metal spider that could have crawled out of an early science fiction movie about a Martian invasion. The metal looked flimsy and crimped, scraped here and there, unsteady. More of an invader in retreat. I walked around it slowly, taking in its every detail, its meaning, weighing it in the context of everything I knew. Or pretending to while eyeballing the entrance. I’d been circling it for twenty minutes when the noise level rose and a large group of people surged into the lobby, including a few media folk who started setting up video cameras near a podium that had been positioned against a wall.
Congressman Marc McConnell of the historic Eighth District was in the building. He stopped inside the
