Moonlight Mile

by Dennis Lehane

  “Why would he step in front of a . . . ?”

  “Because he was chasing this.” I placed the Belarus Cross on the table.

  It sat between us for about twenty seconds before either of us spoke.

  “Chasing it?” Amanda said. “That makes no sense. He had it with him when he left the house, didn’t he?”

  “And I assume he handed it over to someone, and then that someone threw it back over the tracks.”

  “So you think . . . ?” She closed her eyes tight and shook her head. “I don’t even know what you think.”

  “I don’t either. Here’s what I know—Dre crossed the tracks into the woods and then someone threw this cross out of the woods and over the tracks. Dre came running out after it and ran into a really fast train. Yefim, meanwhile, claims he was never at the train station and that he never changed the original meeting place. Whether he’s lying or not, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance either way, that’s his claim. We don’t have Sophie, they don’t have the Belarus Cross, and it’s Christmas Eve. Friday. Dre was the last chance Yefim had of scoring another baby to give to Kirill and Violeta. So now Yefim wants the original deal back in place—that cross”—I looked down the table—“and that baby for Sophie’s life, my life, the life of my family, and your life.”

  She fingered the cross a couple of times, pushing it up the table a few inches.

  “What do the inscriptions mean, do you know? I can’t read Russian.”

  “Even if you could,” I said, “they’re not in Russian. That’s Latin.”

  “Fair enough. You know any Latin?”

  “I took four years of it in high school but all I retained is about enough to read a building foundation.”

  “So, no idea?”

  I held it in my hand. “A little. The one up top reads Jesus, Son of God, defeats.”

  She frowned.

  I shrugged and racked my brain a bit. “No, wait. Not defeats. Crushes. No. Wait. Conquers. That’s it. Jesus, Son of God, conquers.”

  “What about the bottom one?”

  “Something about a skull and paradise.”

  “That’s the best you can do?”

  “I took my last Latin class ten years before you were born, kid. My best ain’t bad.”

  She poured herself more tea. She held the cup in both hands and blew on it. She took a tentative sip and then placed the cup back down on the table. She sat back in her chair, her eyes on me, as calm as ever, this serious child, this marvel of self-possession.

  “It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

  “It’s the history that gives it its worth. Or maybe just someone deciding it’s worth something, like gold.”

  “I never understood that mentality,” she said.

  “Me, either.”

  “I can tell you, though, that Kirill’s already lost too much face over this to let any of us live. Certainly not me.”

  “You been reading the papers lately?”

  She looked over the teacup at me and shook her head.

  “Kirill’s hitting his own product too much. Or he’s just having a full-on mental breakdown. He might wrap one of his cars around a pole at a hundred miles an hour before he ever gets around to you.”

  “So, I’ll just wait for that day.” She grimaced at me. “And even if, let’s say, everything goes according to this fairy-tale scenario that Yefim—Yefim, yes?—outlined for you?”

  “Yefim, yeah.”

  “So, okay. We live, Sophie lives, your family lives. What about her?” She pointed down the table where Claire sat, strapped in her car seat, wearing a tiny pink knit hoodie and matching pink sweatpants, her eyes closed to slits. “They take her into their home, Kirill and Violeta, and pretty soon she’s not just the idea of a baby. She’s an actual baby. She cries at inconvenient times, she screams, she howls when her diaper’s wet, and she shrieks—I mean, like an electrified banshee—when you change her top because she hates having anything covering her face and you can’t remove a top without covering her face, at least not the ones I have on hand. So they take her, these psychotic children in middle-aged bodies, and let’s say they get past all the inconveniences and total lack of sleep that go with having a baby in the house, twenty-four-seven. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t think Kirill, who’s now lost massive face, power, and respect because he got his own black-market baby stolen from him and he couldn’t get her back—you’re telling me he’s not going to resent that child? Kirill, who, as you said, is having some sort of psychotic meltdown lately? He’s not going to come home some night, amped up on Polish vodka and Mexican cocaine, and bludgeon that baby when she has the temerity to cry because she’s hungry?” Amanda threw back her entire cup of tea like it was a shot of whiskey. “Do you really think I’m giving my baby back to them?”

  “It’s not your baby.”

  “That social security card you saw yesterday? That wasn’t mine. That was hers. I already have one with the same last name. She’s mine.”

  “You kidnapped her.”

  “And you kidnapped me.”

  She’d never raised her voice, but the walls seemed to shake just the same. Her lips trembled, her eyes grew red, tremors raced through her hands. Outside of highly controlled fury, I’d never seen her show emotion.

  I shook my head.

  “Yes, you did, Patrick. Yes, you did.” She sucked wet air through her nostrils and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Who were you to say where my home was? Dorchester was just where I was born. I was Helene’s spawn, but I was Jack and Tricia Doyle’s child. You know what I remember about that time when I was so-called kidnapped? For seven perfect months, I didn’t feel nervous or anxious. I didn’t have nightmares. I wasn’t sick, because when you leave a house where your mother never cleans and there’s roaches and roach bacteria everywhere and rotten food fermenting in the sink—when you leave a place like that, you tend to feel better. I ate three times a day. I played with Tricia and our dog. After dinner, every night, they dressed me for bed and then brought me to a chair by the fireplace—seven o’clock on the dot—and they read to me.” She looked down at the table for a moment, nodding to herself in such a way I doubted she knew she was doing it. She looked up. “And then you came. Two weeks after you returned me to Dorchester, and a DSS caseworker had cleared Helene to raise me, you know what happened at seven o’clock?”

  I said nothing.

  “Helene had spent the day drinking because she got stood up on a date the night before. She put me to bed at five o’clock because she was too far in the bag to deal with me anymore. And then at seven o’clock—on the dot—she came into my bedroom to apologize for being such a bad mother, feeling all sorry for herself and confusing that with empathy for another human being. And while she was apologizing, she puked all over me.”

  Amanda reached out and pulled the small teapot to her. She poured the rest of it into her cup. She didn’t have to blow on it as much this time.

  “I’m—”

  “Don’t dare say you’re sorry, Patrick. Spare me that, please.”

  A long, dead minute passed.

  “You ever see them anymore?” I asked eventually. “The Doyles?”

  “They’re prohibited from having any contact with me. It’s a provision of their probation.”

  “But you know where they are.”

  She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Tricia did one year in jail and got another fifteen probation. Jack got out two years ago, after ten years in prison for reading me bedtime stories and giving me proper nutrition. They’re still together. You believe that? She waited for him.” She looked at me with shiny, defiant eyes. “They live in North Carolina now, just outside Chapel Hill.” She pulled her hair from its ponytail and shook it violently until it hung straight down beside her face again. From back in its shroud, her eyes found me again. “Why’d you do it?”

  “Bring you home?”

  “Bring me back.”

  “It was
a case of situational ethics versus societal ones, I guess. I took society’s side.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “I don’t know that I’d do any differently now,” I said. “You want me to feel guilty and I do, but that doesn’t mean I was wrong. If you keep Claire, trust me, you’ll do things that make her hate you, but you’ll do them because you’ll believe it’s for her own good. Every time you say no to her, for example. And sometimes you’ll feel bad about it. But that’s an emotional response, not a rational one. Rationally, I know damn well I don’t want to live in a world where people can just pluck a child out of a family they deem bad and raise a stolen child as they see fit.”

  “Why not? That’s what the Department of Children and Families does. That’s what the government does all the time when they take kids away from bad parents.”

  “After due process, though. After checks and balances and diligent investigation of the charges. You, on the other hand? One day your uncle Lionel snapped when your mother left you in the sun all afternoon because she was drunk. She took you home when she should have taken you to an emergency room, and Lionel came up to deal with your cries. He called a cop who was known for kidnapping kids he felt lived in unsafe environments, and they kidnapped you. No due process for your mother—”

  “Don’t call her my mother, if you please.”

  “Fine. No due process for Helene. No representation of her side of the story. Nothing.”

  “My uncle Lionel had watched Helene ‘raise’ me, for lack of a better word, for four years. I’d say she was the beneficiary of four years of due process and due diligence on his watch.”

  “Then he should have filed charges with DCF and asked a court for the right to raise you. It worked for Kurt Cobain’s sister, and she went up against a celebrity with money.”

  She nodded. “Nice. When it comes to—what’d you call it?—societal ethics versus situational ones, Patrick Kenzie invokes the memory of Kurt Cobain to represent the interests of the state.”

  Ouch. Direct hit.

  Amanda leaned forward. “Because here’s what I heard about you many years later—I heard that the child molester you killed while you were looking for me? What was his name?”

  “Corwin Earle.”

  “Right. I heard—from impeccable sources—that he didn’t have a weapon when you shot him. That he posed no direct threat to you.” She sipped her tea. “And you shot him dead. Shot him in the back, wasn’t it?”

  “The back of the neck, actually. And his hand was touching a weapon, technically speaking.”

  “Technically speaking. So, you come upon a child molester who poses no direct threat to you, at least not by the state’s definition if they had investigated very hard, and you deal with this by firing one hell of a situational ethic into the back of his head.” She raised her cup to me. “Well done. I’d clap, but I don’t want to wake the baby.”

  We sat in silence for a bit and she never took her eyes off me. Her self-possession was, quite frankly, a bit scary. It definitely didn’t fill me with feelings of warmth. And yet, I liked her. I liked that the world had given her a raw deal and she’d dealt with it by playing the world’s game right up to the point where she raised her middle finger to it and walked away from the whole sham. I liked that she refused to wallow in self-pity. I liked that she seemed incapable of asking for anyone’s approval.

  “You’ll never give that baby up, will you?”

  “They could break every bone in my body, and I’d continue fighting them with whatever muscle I got left. Cut out my tongue or I’ll never stop screaming with it. And if they lose sight of me for one second, I’ll sink my teeth into their eyes.”

  “Like I said, you’ll never give up that baby, will you, Amanda?”

  “And you?” She smiled. “You would never let me fight the fight alone, would you, Patrick?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But I’m not leaving Sophie out there to die or be shipped to the basement harem of some emir in Dubai.”

  “Okay.”

  “But Yefim’s going to want a baby.”

  “We might be able to stall him on that if he gets the cross.”

  “Yeah, but he won’t give us Sophie. He’ll just let us live another day.”

  “That twit.”

  “Who?”

  “Sophie. You know I sent her to Vancouver right after, well, after—”

  “Dre told me all about the bloodbath with Timur in the birthing room.”

  “Ah. Yeah, so after that, I send Sophie to Vancouver with impeccable paperwork. I mean, flawless. The kind people pay six figures for. I rebirthed her.”

  “But the new birth canal led right back to the Russian mob.”

  “Yeah.”

  I watched her for a bit, looking for some kind of uncertainty, even a hair of it, to creep into those placid eyes. But it never happened.

  “Are you ready—I mean, really ready—to give up all you’re giving up here?”

  “What am I giving up?” she asked. “You mean, like, Harvard and all that?”

  “For starters.”

  She widened her eyes at me. “I’ve got five ironclad identities. One of them, by the way, is already enrolled in Harvard next year. And one is enrolled in Brown. I haven’t decided which one I want yet. A real degree from either of those schools, or any school for that matter, is no better than a fake one. And in some cases, it’s worse because it’s less malleable. There’s an eighth continent now, Patrick. It’s accessed by a keyboard. You can paint the sky, rewrite the rules of travel, do whatever you want. No boundaries and no border wars because very few people even know how to find this continent. I do. Some other people I’ve met do. The rest of you remain here.” She leaned forward. “So, yes, playing by your rules, I’m Amanda McCready, an about-to-turn-seventeen high school dropout. According to my rules, though, Amanda McCready is just one card in a thick deck. Look at it like—”

  She pushed back her chair, her eyes on the window that faced the street. She grabbed the bag at her feet and tossed it onto the table. I followed her gaze and saw a car out front, one that hadn’t been there a minute before.

  “Who is it?”

  She didn’t answer. She dumped her leather bag on the dining-room table and pulled out of the pile two sets of the weirdest-looking handcuffs I’d ever seen. There was no chain between the cuffs. The base of each cuff met the base of the other. They were encased in hard black plastic. One cuff was standard size. On the other end, it was tiny. Small enough to cuff a bird maybe.

  Or a baby.

  “What the fuck are those?” I crossed the dining room and threw the lock on the front door.

  “Don’t curse in front of the baby.”

  The top of someone’s head passed beneath the dining-room window.

  “Fine. What the heck are those?”

  “High-security rigid handcuffs.” Amanda struggled into her Björn. “They use them to transport terrorists on planes. I had these modified. They kick ass, right?”

  “They’re cool,” I said. “How many doors into the house?”

  “Three if you count the cellar.” She unstrapped Claire from the car seat. The baby groaned and then huffed out several unhappy grunts. Amanda fit her legs into the holes of the Björn, slipped one flap over her shoulder, and buckled it as someone kicked in the back door.

  Amanda snapped one cuff over her own left wrist, one over her right.

  I pulled my .45, pointed it at the dining-room portico.

  Amanda snapped one of the smaller cuffs over Claire’s left wrist.

  A window broke in the living room, followed a second or two later by the sounds of someone climbing through it. I kept my eye on the portico, but now I knew they could flank me.

  “A little help?” Amanda said.

  I came over to her and she held her right arm up so that the smaller cuff hovered beside Claire’s left wrist.

  “You bring game, sister.” I snapped the cuff closed over Claire’s wrist.
>
  “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  Kenny came through the portico at the end of the room with a shotgun leveled at us.

  I pointed my .45 at his head, but it was a hollow gesture; if he pulled that trigger from this distance, he’d kill all three of us.

  I heard the racking of another shotgun, to my left. I glanced over. Tadeo stood where the living room met the dining room at the base of the staircase.

  “You just ejected a shell trying to make a cool sound,” I told him.

  He turned a bit red. “Still got one to put in your chest.”

  “Dang,” I said, “that gun’s almost as big as you.”

  “Big enough to cut you in half, homes.”

  “But the recoil will blow your ass into the front yard.”

  Kenny said, “Put your gun down, Patrick.”

  I kept my gun where it was. “You Mexican, Tadeo?”

  He nestled the shotgun stock into his shoulder. “You damn right I am.”

  “I never had a Mexican standoff with an actual Mexican. There’s something cool about that, don’t you think?”

  “Sounds racist to me, homes.”

  “What’s racist about it? You’re Mexican, this is a Mexican standoff. It’d be like going Dutch with someone from Amsterdam. Now if, because I’m Irish, you accused me of having a small dick and being a drunk, that’s racist, but describing a standoff as a Mexican standoff as opposed to a plain old, you know, standoff, that seems a pretty victimless racial modification to me.”

  “You’re stalling,” Kenny said.

  “I’m giving everyone time to calm down.”

  Helene came through the portico behind Kenny. She saw the three guns and took a big swallow, but kept coming into the dining room.

  “Honey,” she said in a syrupy voice, “we just want the baby.”

  “Don’t call me honey,” Amanda said.

  “What should I call you?”

  “Estranged.”

  Kenny said to Helene, “Just get the baby.”

  “Okay.”

  Amanda raised her wrists so Kenny and Helene saw the cuffs. “Claire and me? We’re a package.”