piece. He knew it would eventually get him. One way or another, he’d die because of it. He had to. But maybe, before that happened, maybe, if all went well—maybe their deaths would amount to something in the end. Although he knew their ghosts wouldn’t let go of him, not even then.
Chapter 26
Boston, Massachusetts
Sheltering behind a tall hedge in the brisk, early morning chill, Matt waited and watched, trying to make sure no unpleasant surprises were in store for him at the hotel before breaking cover and making his way in. Tense and alert while avoiding eye contact, he slipped past a few bleary-eyed businessmen who brought a semblance of life to the drab, cookie-cutter lobby, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and reached the refuge of his room.
He was as tired as he was pissed off.
He’d had to dump the Mustang a few blocks from Bellinger’s place, and that only fueled his anger. The car represented a personal milestone for him, a notable and particularly satisfying step on his road back from the edge. Danny had not just guided him onto that road, but paid the toll and given him fuel money to boot. And now Matt had been forced to abandon the car on some dark side street, all because of the same bastards who had taken Danny away.
He was seriously pissed off.
After parking the Mustang, he’d scuttled in the shadows for a couple of blocks, then crossed to the north side of Broadway, where he’d hot-wired a defenseless, decade-old Ford Taurus. He’d then cut west, heading out of town before looping back on the turnpike, on the lookout for any blue-and-whites. He’d parked in an inconspicuous corner on the backlot of a small shopping center around the corner from the hotel and walked the rest of the way.
He stood by the window of his room, watching the city as it sprang to life. It was another overcast, wintery day, the sun struggling to break through the pasty-gray cloud cover. He lay down on his bed, his muscles and nerves ravaged by tension and fatigue. He hadn’t slept, and his body was crying out for a break. He hadn’t put it through such a ringer for years. But he knew that would have to wait. He opted instead for a long, hot shower to reinvigorate him and help settle his mind. It bought him a renewed, if rapidly dwindling, lease on life. Twenty minutes later, he was back at a workstation in the austere and windowless business center.
He used the white pages’ website to do a reverse listings search on the phone number he got off Bellinger’s answering machine. The number yielded the curious name of Csaba Komlosy, with a home address—no surprises there—in the same geek-central catchment area straddling Harvard and MIT that Bellinger—and Danny—lived in. He thought about calling him. According to his message, he and Bellinger had been discussing what was happening in Antarctica just before Bellinger had met Matt, and Matt sensed that this Csaba—he wasn’t sure how to pronounce it—could fill in some of the blanks. He decided against making that call. The goon squad seemed to be avid wiretappers. A face-to-face would be better anyway. He jotted down the address, an apartment by the sound of it, clicked on the map link for a more accurate read of its location, then, deciding he couldn’t duck it anymore, pulled up the website of the
It was the first item.
His face contorted with sadness—and rage.
The report wasn’t long. A stabbing. Close to a bar in South Boston, shortly after midnight. They’d identified the body as Bellinger’s. There was a brief mention of a brawl in the nearby bar, but nothing more. A murder investigation was under way.
The report didn’t mention Matt—yet. But he knew there’d be more to come on that front.
They’d make sure of it.
He exhaled heavily, rubbed some alertness into his face, and re-read the article. Its dry, clinical words pushed a caustic bile of anger up to his throat, burning him with their finality. His fists hovered over the keyboard, clenched bloodless-white tight, as he summoned up every drop of restraint inside him to keep from bashing it against the desk and ripping the whole workstation to shreds.
It was that simple for these bastards. They could just pluck someone off the street, cut him open, dump him in the snow, and move on to their next assignment without batting an eyelid. A man’s life—an innocent, decent man’s life, snuffed out in its prime, and all because of what . . . a phone call? An idea?
Matt was boiling.
He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing his fury to subside. A moment later, he raised his concentration back to the screen, keyed in the homepage of his tracker, and logged in.
The Chrysler was no longer outside his place.
A detailed map displayed the car’s itinerary in thirty-second increments. Backtracking to the first movement that his GPS tracker had registered, Matt saw that the goons had finally given up their stake-out—or, he thought, merely passed the baton to the next team—almost an hour ago. Which, he noted, was after he’d made it out of Bellinger’s place. He wondered if that meant that they were already aware of his little excursion to Cambridge. If they were, it meant they had insights into police activity, either through radio scanners or courtesy of someone inside the department. He made a mental note of it and zoomed in on the Chrysler’s current location.
It was parked on a street in Brighton, not far from St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, and hadn’t moved for twenty-three minutes. The tracker’s website featured a built-in link-up with Google Maps. Matt clicked on the “street view” option, moved the little orange avatar to the Chrysler’s current location, and clicked again. A wide- angle shot popped up, as clear and detailed as if he were standing right in the middle of the street—not in real time, of course, but whenever the Google van with the panoramic camera had done its survey, which couldn’t have been that long ago, given that this wasn’t exactly Cold War-era technology. It afforded him a detailed view of what the place looked like. He full-screened it, scrolled up the street and back for a virtual drive-by, then rotated the camera to get a good look at the opposite sidewalk.
The narrow, residential street had a string of small, two-story clapboard houses. The fix, accurate to within three yards of the tracker’s location if you believed the pitch of the well-oiled salesman he’d bought it from, fell on a tired-looking, seal-gray house with a small balcony over the front porch and a gabled window in its roof.
He needed to take a closer look. A live one.
It didn’t take long to get there at this early hour, given that he was heading against the rush hour traffic. The light snow from the previous night was mostly gone, and the old Taurus was, well, functioning. He turned into Beacon and headed west, his mind busy imagining the different ways things could play out once he found them. He tried to rein in his primal instincts. Yes, they were vile, blood-sucking scum, and he knew he’d find it hard to resist beating the crap out of them if he ever got the chance. But there was no need to turn this into a suicide mission. If they were there, he needed to find out more about them—who they were, what they were doing, who had hired them.
What they knew about Danny.
What happened to him.
Once he got all that—well, there was no reason to let them live, really.
The notion just came to him, and it didn’t make him flinch. Which surprised him. He’d never killed anyone before. Sure, he’d had his share of fights. Before prison. In prison. He’d taken some serious beatings over the years, but he’d cracked a few skulls too. He hadn’t started out that way. He was wild and reckless and played by his own rules, but he wasn’t a thug and he never set out to hurt anyone. And although prison had a way of hardening a man, physically as well as mentally, it didn’t change what he was about. He was more prone to letting his temper erupt, less shy about using his fists, but he never took pleasure from it. It was always in self-defense, and never went beyond doing no more than was necessary to neutralize any threat facing him.
This felt different. And right now, he wasn’t too worried about that. Que sera, sera. He had to find them first.
He turned right on Washington and headed north, his pulse nudging upward with each passing block as he
