back in the car, we divvied up the goods so each of us had what he needed for the night.
Ryan and I headed back to our new hotel to check in. I needed some time with him to go over the finer points of the plan. Sometimes two voices were easier to bring into harmony than four.
Frank and Victor left to visit the East Boston home of George Riklitis and impress upon him that if he showed up tonight, it would be as a cadaver donor, not a live one. And to borrow his car, which was the make and model the guards would be expecting.
We were coming up Massachusetts Avenue, just crossing Columbus, when I heard an engine kick into a higher gear behind us and saw a van swinging out to pass me on the left. Its side door was open and a gun barrel was sticking out. As soon as the front end came level with our rear, I swung the wheel hard and clipped his bumper. The van lurched to the left, almost hitting a southbound car, then veered back into its lane and kept coming. I floored it, wishing now we had the hemi-V8 engine Ryan had wanted.
Ryan levered his seat back so he could scramble into the rear. He kept his head down and Glock up as he lowered the rear window, leaned his arm out and fired out of it. The van braked and went into my blind spot momentarily. Then I could see it again in the rear.
“Hang on,” I yelled, and spun the wheel right, sending us sliding through the intersection. Half a dozen horns blared in concert as I corrected the skid and took off eastbound.
“They make the turn?” I yelled.
“Just now.”
I had the bigger engine but it wasn’t like we were on a highway; it gave us no real advantage. There were cars in front of me doing moderate speeds-maybe ten miles over the limit. We were screaming along twice as fast with the van on our heels. Ryan leaned out the window and fired again, then ducked back in.
“You hitting anything?”
“Old ladies in crosswalks.”
“Use the shotgun.”
“We’ll go fucking deaf in here.”
“I don’t care,” I yelled. “Get them off our tail.”
He racked the shotgun and was bringing it to bear out the window when I saw brake lights going on in front of me in the lineup for a red light. I hit my own brakes and Ryan flew forward between the headrests. His head slammed into the back of mine, sending pain shooting straight through to my eyes. I kept my foot down hard, looking for a turn I could make. There was none. The van was coming up closer behind us.
“He’s going to hit us,” Ryan said.
“The fuck he is!” I waited as he grew closer in my mirror, shifted my eyes to the opposing traffic, then hit the gas as I spun the wheel to the left. As I cut sharply across the westbound lanes, the van crashed into the rear of the car that had been in front of me. I saw the driver’s door start to open so I braked and threw it into reverse and slammed the Charger’s rear end into the driver’s side, staving in his door. Then I put it back in drive and leapt ahead of the oncoming cars into a fierce, fuck-all-of-you kind of U-turn. I got a full brass section of horns in reply, plus a clutch of Boston middle fingers, ignored them and wrenched the wheel and floored it the other way, watching in my rearview as a man yanked away at the door of the van, having no luck opening it.
“You okay?” I asked Ryan.
“I’m the one should be asking you. You bleeding?”
I touched the back of my head. The pain was immediate but there was no broken skin or blood. “No. An icepack and two gelcaps and I’ll be fine.”
“Usually not my own fucking head I crack.”
I turned south off Albany onto Southampton Street and parked. We got out of the car and checked the damage. Another rental car, another crumpled rear end. I knelt down and checked the underside for a transponder.
“Anything?” Ryan said.
“No.”
“At least there are no bullet holes in the car.”
“When that’s the best thing you can say, you know you’re pretty well fucked.”
We got back in and took a circuitous route back to the hotel.
“Man, Daggett played me,” I said. “He had me so focused on tonight, I didn’t think he’d try to hit us today.”
“Let’s see who plays who in the end.”
“Think we should change hotels again? In case they know where we’re going.”
“Fuck that,” Ryan said. “I’m tired and I’m armed and I’m in a mood like I got PMS. If I was them, I’d leave me alone right now.”
CHAPTER 36
The Bay State Hotel was a find Jenn would have been proud of, right across from the great reflecting pool of the Christian Science complex. As her face came into mind, I felt a hot surge of rage through my body. Helpless at not being able to get her right now, this minute, to see her unharmed and throw my arms around her and carry her to safety like a damsel. Instead my visions were of her tied up, twisting to get free of her bonds, maybe being questioned by Daggett, being slapped or punched if he didn’t like her answers. I got out of the car clenching and unclenching my own fists, trying to breathe the coiled tension out of my body. Some of it went. Most stayed.
The hotel was a two-storey ell set back in a parking lot, with a small pool and a few shaded tables in a fenced-off area. Our room was in the wing that faced the great dome of the Mother Church. It was a small, very basic space that hadn’t been designed with two grown men with big guns in mind. We put most of the gear in the closet and sat across from each other across a small marble-topped table, where I uploaded all the photos DeMaurice Simms had taken to my laptop so we could zoom in on every entrance, window and alarm junction. We pored over the landscape, noting the best places to try to get in, whether through the hoarding, over it or via the trunk of a car.
I called Stayner to get a description of his assistant, James Reimer: a tall man, mid-forties, wore wire-framed glasses, balding but trying to hide it with plugs.
“Beard? Facial hair?” I asked.
“No, he’s clean shaven.”
“When you say tall …”
“About six-one, I guess. A good few inches taller than me, at any rate, and I’m five-nine.”
“Okay, I’m six feet. If I had glasses on, and a cap and mask, could I fool someone?”
“Maybe for a minute, if they didn’t look too close. He doesn’t carry himself like you do. He’s not athletic at all. He stoops a bit.”
I asked Stayner if his key fob would work from inside the trunk.
“How on earth would I know that?”
“Test it.”
“You expect me to get inside?”
“You have a second set of keys?”
“Of course.”
“Then have your wife stand by to let you out if it doesn’t work.”
“If I do this, any of this, you have to promise you’ll get Daggett.”
“I already have promised,” I said.
“To whom?”
“Me.”
“It’s early yet,” Ryan said. “Not even dark. We could mount up right now and hit him at home.”
“Daggett?”
“Someone has to know where he lives. The four of us could crash his house.”
“He has a wife and kids.”
