“Okay, fuckhead.” Apparently, talking it out wasn’t an option.
“Dad, don’t do this!” Sarah screamed, pushing her way through the crowd with Paul’s help.
“I’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing.”
“But you-”
“Let him go, Sarah,” Paul said, looking me straight in the eye and pulling my daughter gently away from me. “Trust him.”
I felt in a time warp, like Rico Tripoli was talking to me out of the past, telling me he had my back. Funny thing is, Rico never really had my back, but for some reason I knew his son did.
“Come on, McKenna, follow me,” I said.
I had an idea of where I was going as I’d walked the house in my search for a quiet spot. I marched us towards a den that was full of soft and cushy furniture and not as many breakable objects d’art as in some other parts of the house. There was a giant, wall-mounted, flat screen TV in there too, but unless I missed a room with a boxing ring, this was the best I could do on short notice. To my dismay, the crowd seemed to be following us and at the head of the mob was our hostess.
“Come on, Prager,” McKenna shouted behind me, “you trying to tire me out or what?”
“Just shut up. You’ll get a piece of me soon enough.”
Then we all seemed to spill into the den I was looking for. The TV was on, but even in my agitated state, that same vague image caught my eye once again. Before I could fully focus on the image, McKenna charged me, knocking me back onto the thick Berber carpeting. That was a good thing because my head thumped down pretty good. McKenna was on top of me and I could hear and feel that the fall had taken as much or more of a toll on him as on me. I chopped the side of my left fist down into his right kidney and the air rushed out of him with a sick groan. He went limp. With that, I bridged my neck and shoulders and rolled him off me. I stood. He staggered to his feet.
“Pretty good for an old fuck,” he said, rubbing his kidney.
He swung a roundhouse right at me, but he was even drunker than I thought and I easily ducked the punch, delivering a right to his liver. He went down on his knees and vomited all over the nice carpet. Everyone’s attention was on him, but mine was on the screen. There it was again.
“What’s this?” I shouted, pointing at the screen.
“A Panasonic,” an unseen voice answered back.
“No. What’s this playing? What am I watching?”
“These are videos I had of Sashi’s shows,” Sonia said, somewhat disappointed that the fight hadn’t made it out of the first round. “I had a film editor put them together to run in a loop and had them transferred to a disc. Why do you ask?”
“I’m not sure, something caught my eye.” I turned and watched some more.
People were attending to McKenna, who was on his knees, drinking bottled water as someone applied a cold cloth to the back of his neck. Staff had appeared out of nowhere and were busily blotting up the mess the detective had made on the rug in front of him.
“What is it, Dad? What do you see?” Sarah and Paul stood on either side of me.
“I don’t know,” I said, watching scenes of Sashi and Ming and Cara the dog racing about as adults ogled her paintings, sipping Chardon-nay and acting as if they were in the presence of greatness. It was all so surreal. “I don’t know. Something. There! Stop. There!” I shouted. “Go back. Somebody stop it!”
Sonia found the controller and flashed back in that odd, still frame-by-frame way digitized video does.
“There!”
“For goodness sakes, what is it?” Sonia was screaming now.
“Him!” I pointed to a large man in the background, his arms folded across his massive chest, his eyes focused on Sashi in the foreground. “What’s he doing there?”
“Security,” Candy said as she stepped forward. “He worked for a security firm we hired to keep an eye on Sashi after she had gotten some weird fan letters.”
I shoved my way towards McKenna and yanked him up onto his feet. “Come on, McKenna. Let’s go.”
“Where’re we going?”
“To catch the real killer.”
“What? Not that-”
“Somebody call the Suffolk County Police Marine Bureau and tell them to get a boat to Santapogue Point.”
McKenna squinted at me. “Santapogue Point. Where the hell is that?”
“It’s on the Great South Bay in Babylon. I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go!”
There had been another link between John Tierney and Sashi Bluntstone, only it hadn’t dawned on me until that moment.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Fuck!
There was a three-inch blanket of white on the ground, the cars, the long driveway, and darkness had crept in under the cover of snow. Wind howled, icy flakes lashing our faces. I reached a gloveless hand into my pocket for my claim check and remembered that I’d given it to Sonia. No way I was going back inside.
“McKenna, give me your claim check.”
“Huh?”
“Your car claim check, give it to me.”
He was dazed, a little child just woken from sleep, patting his pockets down without rhyme or reason. The fight had braced him a bit and the vomiting had done him some good, but he was still drunk. Only time was going to make that better. Even fueled by my adrenaline rush, I wasn’t exactly feeling like a prize rooster either. Finally, McKenna pulled the playing card-sized stub out of his coat pocket. Paul Stern rushed past, grabbed it, and handed it to the eager valet.
“Neither of you guys is in any shape to drive,” Paul said, “and especially not in this weather.”
“This is police business, Paul.”
He flipped open a shield at me. “And I’m an assistant State’s Attorney in Windham County, Vermont. I told you I was a lawyer, but you never asked what kind. You probably assumed I was an ambulance chaser?”
He was right. That’s exactly what I’d assumed. “You’re out of your jurisdiction,” was all I managed to say.
“And you’re a drunk sixty-year-old man who hasn’t worn a badge in almost thirty years. Besides, I grew up in Vermont and was raised to drive in snow like this with my eyes closed. I’ve seen how downstate New Yorkers drive in this soup and it’s not pretty.”
McKenna opened his mouth to say something, but he either forgot what he had to say or thought better of it. Then the valet pulled up to the front entrance with the detective’s car. Paul Stern handed the kid a fiver and went straight for the driver’s seat.
“In or out, gentlemen? Come on.”
We both got in, me up front with Paul Stern and McKenna in the back.
“Hang on,” Paul shouted and hit the gas. The Crown Vic held a pretty steady line as we drove down the long drive and through the front gates. “Just tell me where I’m going and I’ll get us there.”
I gave him directions how to go south and east, but once we got off Chicken Valley Road and onto 107, it was a total slog.
After about five minutes and two hundred yards of torturous progress on 107, McKenna seemed to regain some brain function and lose all his patience. “Fuck this! Moe, hit that switch and that switch there,” he said, leaning over the seat and pointing at the dash.
When I did as he asked, the wailing siren kicked on, lights embedded in the grill strobed ahead of us and a bar of like-colored lights mounted to the back window flashed behind us. Now we were cooking and Paul seemed to know exactly what he was doing at the wheel.
“A highway patrol unit?” I asked.
“It’s what they gave me. Good thing too.”
“Call the Suffolk cops,” I said, turning back to McKenna, reciting Jimmy Palumbo’s address to him. “Tell them to close off his block, but not to approach him. He’s a big, strong motherfucker and he’s got a carry permit. I know he carries a Sig 9mm and probably has other weapons too. No need to get anybody hurt here.”
“Jimmy Palumbo, the guy who played for the Jets?” McKenna puzzled.
“Him. Just make the call and remi
nd them to have their marine unit in West Babylon Creek at Santapogue Point. I just hope he hasn’t split yet.”
“What’s that ex-jock got to do with this?”
“Everything,” I said. “Everything.”
I listened as McKenna made the call. Things were going fine until he said the part about them not approaching the house. Cops are more territorial than Siamese fighting fish and they don’t want to hear a cop from a neighboring county telling them how to handle business inside their own bailiwick. Hell, when I was on the job, we didn’t like guys from the next precinct over even setting foot on our turf. McKenna wasn’t exactly in the best of shape to begin with and he was a bad drunk: one of those guys who had it all under control when they were dry, but who seemed to completely lose it after a few drinks. And at that moment he was fighting a losing battle with his Suffolk County counterpart on the other end of the phone. I waved to get his attention.
“Hold on a second,” McKenna slurred, covering the phone with his palm. “What?”
“What’s going on?”
“The police boat’s in position, but they want to send in the freakin’ troops. You know, in Suffolk they don’t get to use the SWAT team too often except to break up loud summer parties in the Hamptons. What am I going to say to him? He’s pissed off enough as it is.”
I thought for a few seconds. “Tell him we think Sashi’s still alive.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Just tell him that. They’re not gonna storm the Bastille if there’s a chance she’s alive.”
“You don’t think she really is, do you?”
“No,” I said, “not for a second.”
“ They’re not going to believe it either. They may be Suffolk County yahoos, but even they can read papers and watch TV.”
“Tell him whatever the fuck you have to to convince him we’ve got new evidence that she’s alive. Have your chief call their chief, whatever.”
I needed to talk to Jimmy Palumbo and the only way to make sure the cops didn’t go in guns blazing was to convince them he still had Sashi with him and that she was still alive. He was our only hope of finding her remains. The cruel irony of having to pretend she was alive to find her dead wasn’t lost on any of us and we all bowed our heads there for a second. Then McKenna shrugged his shoulders and repeated what I said. After another few seconds, he got off the phone.
“Fuck me if it didn’t work. That asshole captain changed his tune as soon as I said we think the kid might still be alive.”
“No one wants to go in shooting if a little kid’s around. Would you?”
“Well, we stalled them for now, but they won’t wait forever.”
“It won’t be forever, just another couple of minutes.”
I flicked off the siren and lights a block before we turned south off Montauk Highway. Without being told to, Paul slowed the car down. Unlike Main Street, the streets in this part of Babylon were really slick and had yet to be plowed, though the police cruisers that had preceded us left several sets of tire tracks cut into the otherwise pristine layer of snow. About three blocks before Palumbo’s street, I told Paul to pull over.
“What are you planning on doing?”
“What if I told you I had to take a leak?”
“With all due respect, I’d say you were full of shit. Forget it.”
“Yeah,” McKenna agreed, “you’re not going to get yourself killed on my watch.”
“It’s not your county and it’s not your watch. I led Palumbo right to John Tierney and gave him more than enough money to get away. You said it yourself, McKenna, the cops won’t wait forever. If they kill Palumbo, we’ll never know what happened to Sashi’s body. I’m not risking it. I think he’ll talk to me.”
“I don’t like it.”
Paul agreed with the detective even as he slowed to a ten-mile-an-hour crawl to take a left turn. I didn’t put it up for further debate or a vote. I simply opened the door and rolled out of the Crown Vic into a drift. Ten miles an hour was about eight miles an hour too many. The snow cushioned my landing a little bit, a very little bit, and I banged down pretty good, the breath knocked out of my lungs as if a house had fallen on me. But the adrenaline kicked in again and I was up and running. Not very steadily or fast, my bad knee killing me, but running nonetheless. I didn’t look back and I didn’t think ahead. I just knew I had to get to Palumbo before the cops did.
The wind was more ferocious down here on the Great South Bay and it whipped the snow up so bad that it was hard to see more than half a block in front of me or hear anything more than the wind’s angry howl or my own labored breathing. I cut a parallel path to Jimmy’s street, but in the opposite direction. Up ahead of me and to my right, I could see the eerie soft glow of the cops’ colored lights reflecting off the blowing snowflakes. Wisely, they had set up choke points on two of the three north-south roads leading away from this stubby thumb of land that jutted slightly into the Great South Bay. They were far enough away so that Jimmy wouldn’t have been able to see their lights from his house, but if he tried to drive north from where his house was located to one of the main roads, he’d run smack into a wall of cops.
Now that I had moved far enough in the opposite direction, I changed my course from parallel to perpendicular. The cops hadn’t bothered blocking off the most easterly of the three north-south roads because there was no way for Jimmy to access it by car or on foot. To reach this last road, he’d have to swim the narrow channel I was now standing in front of. And unless human evolution took a sudden, unexpected turn and I miraculously sprouted wings, swimming was exactly what I would have to do. Problem was, I wasn’t much of a swimmer under the best conditions and these were pretty fucking far away from the best conditions. Like I said, I hadn’t thought ahead. I knew the channel was here, that I’d have to get across it and another one like it to reach Jimmy’s house. I guess I hoped I’d find a ladder or something so I wouldn’t have to go in the water, but there was no ladder, no something, and I still had to get across. It looked like I was about to join the Polar Bear Club and I had begun untying my shoes when I heard a loud knocking, wood against wood.
I got down on hands and knees in the snow and looked along the length of the channel. There, to my right, fifty or sixty feet behind me, was a dinghy that had broken loose in the storm and drifted up this channel. I’d walked right past it. I got up, went back the way I’d come, and stood over where the dinghy had caught on a wood piling. She was rocking pretty hard in the water, but I climbed down into her without going over. Shit! One of her oars was missing, so there was no way I’d be able to row all the way over to Jimmy Palumbo’s house. Given how choppy the water was and the size of the swales even in this narrow, sheltered channel, I probably wouldn’t have made it anyway. I used the one remaining oar to push the dinghy off the piling, paddled across the thin strip of water, and pulled myself up on the opposite side. One down, one to go.
I was running again, heading for the short block that ran parallel to Jimmy’s street. Other than the sounds of the ocean and the storm, it was strangely quiet. I slowed down, searching the street for a house with a backyard that faced across the channel at Jimmy’s dock. There was only one candidate on the right side of the street. The house was totally dark and the driveway was empty of cars. When I threw a snowball at the front window, no dogs barked, no alarms sounded, no lights flashed. I crept up the driveway and went through the unlocked gate into the backyard. And there, across the second narrow channel, was Jimmy’s dock. That’s where my luck ran out. This house, like all the houses down here, had a backyard dock too, but it was empty. No boat. This time there would be no dinghy to get me across the water.
I thought about just letting the police do what they wanted to do in the first place, but no. Jimmy Palumbo had made me an accomplice to at least one murder and maybe two. He was mine. If there was only an ounce of redemption for me in finding out where Sashi was buried, I was going to get it. Besides, I noticed the lights were
on in Jimmy’s house, which was a good thing, but so too were the running lights on in his boat. That, and beneath the howl of the wind and the crash and slap of the surf, I could make out the low growl and purr of the boat’s idling twin engines. Fuck me, but I was going in. I was still a little boozy and figured the water couldn’t drown me any faster than my own raging guilt. Now I had three people’s blood on my hands: Katy’s, Sashi’s, and Tierney’s. I meant to wash some of it off or to die trying. I threw off my shoes and sports jacket, bundled up my parka for a makeshift flotation device, and dived into the black water.
It was worse than I ever thought it would be, much worse. The shock of the wet and the biting cold robbed me of my breath, my will, my ability to think. I flailed about, slapping at the water, but couldn’t find my bundled coat. Panic was as near to me as the pounding of my own heart and I felt it about to pull me under. Then I thought I heard a splash behind me. The distraction saved me for a brief moment as my increasingly heavy arms and legs kicked and pushed the dense, unforgiving water. But I could feel myself failing, slowing down, falling under the soulless water’s icy spell. There wasn’t enough adrenaline in all of Suffolk County to keep me afloat any longer. Then something grabbed me and just like a drowning victim in a Learning To Swim video, I went bonkers. I swung my arms wildly, striking out into the blackness. Something, the back of a hand, a clenched fist, something, slammed into my face and stunned me. I was no longer flailing.
“Moe, relax! I’ve got you. Relax!” a voice screamed to me from beyond the fog in my head. “Come on, we can do this.” It was Paul Stern. “Can you swim at all?”
“Yeah, I’m all right now.”
“Okay.”
He grabbed me by the belt and urged me forward. When I started stroking and kicking again, he let go and we made it to the opposite dock. He got out first and then helped me out of the frozen water. I was so cold, it burned. Now I knew what a steak forgotten at the back of the freezer felt like. Paul and I stood there shivering, teeth chattering. The surging water had pushed us a house or two north of Jimmy’s. This house was dark and quiet as well.
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