Boston Cream

by Howard Shrier

  “You live upstairs?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Anyway, sometime in January, he seemed to feel better. There was one day it was just the two of us in the store—Mum had a doctor’s appointment—and we were in between customers, as is usually the case, and he said better times were coming. That his business acumen was greater than we gave him credit for. Why do you ask?”

  “Sammy, this is going to sound …”

  “Sound what?”

  “Weird. Maybe totally out of left field.”

  “Please. If there’s anything at all, just say it. Anything is better than this limbo we’re in.”

  “Do you think your father would have sold a kidney to pay off some of your debt?”

  He looked at me with a mixture of astonishment and anger. “What kind of question is that? Is this some Indian stereotype of yours?”

  “I told you that David Fine was a transplant surgeon. Our investigation is leading in that direction.”

  “What direction exactly?”

  “Doing surgery off the books. Getting organs to people who don’t like their odds on a waiting list. We think someone at Sinai Hospital might have been using the gene study records to find matches for these recipients. And I happened to read an article about people in Madras who would donate organs to pay off debts.”

  “But that’s over there. This is America.”

  “Suppose someone approached him. Told him he was a match for a recipient. Was your father desperate enough to do it, you think?”

  “What kind of money are we talking about?”

  “I’m not sure. Say ten or twenty thousand. Maybe more. Would that have made a difference to your situation?”

  “Ten wouldn’t have done much. Twenty would have helped. More than that, I might sell one. But the whole notion sounds incredible. Impossible. Do you have any proof, anything you can take to the police?”

  “We’re working on it. In fact, we’re going to see someone this morning who might confirm it. So what do you think? Would he have done it?”

  “Is it a risky procedure? He’s not the bravest of souls.”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “The donor is left with a few small incisions, a stitch or two each, and recovery time is minimal. Two days in a clinic and back to normal strength within a month or two.”

  Sammy leaned against a wall and rubbed the back of his neck. “This store meant everything to him, and to my mum. I told you last time, it wasn’t the best investment. The location and all. He worked so hard to keep it going. And the harder he worked, it seems, the harder we all worked, the closer we got to the brink. Maybe he would have done it if someone offered. He was already giving his blood, sweat and tears. Why not a kidney too?”

  I screwed up on the way to the Monsignor O’Brien Highway. Canadian drivers are used to kilometres; the GPS spoke in miles. It told me to turn right in 0.3 miles. It didn’t sound like much, so a minute later, when a right turn came up, I took it—too late to see the sign that said No Exit.

  “Recalculating,” the GPS said.

  Bitch.

  I started up the road, looking for a place to turn around. There were no driveways. The whole block on the right side was the back of a manufacturing plant, lined with tall cyclone fencing topped with coils of razor wire. The other side was a wrecking yard where dozens of crushed and mangled cars sat atop each other, also fenced off. I started a three-point turn. I was backing away from the left-hand curb when I heard another engine and saw a black muscle car turn up the street. An old Monte Carlo, polished and pinstriped. The driver didn’t hesitate, as I had when I’d realized I was going into a dead end. He came full throttle toward me. I had nowhere to go but out the passenger side and into the street.

  Two men got out of the car. The driver was around forty, lean and hard-looking, with dirty blond hair hanging down to his collar, all in black like a roadie or guitar player. But instead of an instrument he carried a sawed-off pool cue.

  The passenger was bigger, way bigger, and carried a baseball bat.

  Jesus Christ, my head. I was going to have to deck one of them fast and hope the other one didn’t get a clean shot at me. I was too far from Francis Street and its hospitals to let that happen. And so fucking rusty. But my mouth wasn’t. I said, “Which one of you is Sean?”

  The smaller one cocked his head and grinned. “Who?”

  “Sean Daggett.”

  He smiled and tapped the pool cue against his empty palm as he moved up on my right. “My friend here prefers a baseball bat. It suits his build and he has a sweet swing, as you’ll see. But me, I carry this cue—you know why? ’Cause a pool cue’s the first thing I ever swung at another man with real intent. Sixteen years old and I cracked his fucking skull. Made him bleed out his ears. Left him about fifty per cent dumber than he was before. And over the years I’ve always found it’s not only good for cracking heads, it also works pretty good on wrists and knees, arms and ribs. Pretty much anything. Can even shove it up a man’s ass if I want to make him cry.”

  I was trying to visualize a kick I could deliver hard enough to put him down before he could swing at me.

  “So someone hired you to find the runaway doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “You anywhere close to finding him?”

  “Not very. But I know a lot about you, Sean, and so do the cops.”

  “Like what?”

  “The organ ring you’re running. The one David was involved in.”

  “The cops know fuck all and you know less. You’re not talking your way out of this, boy. Unless you know where the doc is.”

  “No.”

  “Then this is going to hurt like hell.”

  They were each about a yard away from me and moving in, brandishing their weapons, when an engine roared and a car burned up the street. It was another Dodge Caliber, gold instead of white, and Jenn was at the wheel. And she wasn’t stopping. We all backed off. She steered right at the bigger man, the one with the bat, and hit him hard enough to drive him windmilling into the air. He slammed into a parked car and crumpled onto his back, his left leg bent at a ninety-degree angle. I took two quick strides and snatched up his baseball bat. Jenn got out of the car with a tire iron in her hand and we moved in together toward Daggett two on one, the odds suddenly reversed.

  “All gratitude aside,” I said to Jenn, “what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I followed you.”

  “Why?”

  “In case something like this happened.”

  “All right,” I said. “We will talk about it later.”

  “Much later,” Daggett said. He was pointing an automatic pistol at me. “Jesus, you didn’t think I’d come to a fight with just a cue. My father raised me better than that.” He slipped the shortened cue into an inside pocket of his jacket and said, “Lay them down. Both of you. Now.”

  I dropped the bat. Jenn let the tire iron fall. He moved quickly to Jenn and said, “Keys?”

  “In the car.”

  He turned to me, the gun at Jenn’s head, and said, “Go get the keys out of your car. Fast. You try anything, I’ll kill your girl.”

  If the gun had been pointing at me, I could have taken it from him. Krav Maga teaches that well. But it was aimed at Jenn’s head, not mine, so there was nothing worth trying. I went and got the keys and flipped them to Daggett, who slipped them in his pocket.

  “Now go get her keys,” he said. “Same way.”

  When he had both sets of keys, he bunched his fist in the hair at Jenn’s nape and started backing the two of them up toward the Monte Carlo. Her face was stretched in pain as she stumbled to match his stride while going backwards.

  When he got to the car, he said, “Here’s the deal. I need that Jew doctor. I need him to come in from wherever he is and fast. Six p.m. Monday latest. That gives you two days to find him and bring him to me.”

  “I swear I don’t know where he is.”

  “Then find him. Because your girlfriend is sitt
ing on a gold mine, and I’m not talking about her pussy, sweet as it probably is. You say you know what I’m doing, then you know what Blondie here is worth. Two young healthy kidneys? These sweet blue corneas? Find him by Monday, boy, or the next time you look in her eyes, they’ll be in someone else’s face.”

  He bunched her hair again. I could tell by her look he wasn’t hurting her badly, just keeping tight control, the gun pressed into her neck where any shot would kill her. He backed up to the trunk of his car and told her to use one hand to unlatch it and raise the door. She did as she was told. He made her get in and shut the trunk and leaned back against it, the gun in his hand pointing idly at the ground.

  “You’re at the Sam Adams, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m calling there Monday morning. Sometime after nine, in case I sleep in.”

  I wanted to hurl myself at him and tear out his throat with my teeth. I said, “Why Monday?”

  “Just have my Jew for me. And don’t call no cops. Not in Brookline or the BPD. You’re on your own, boy. Prove you’re good enough.”

  He took my keys out of his pocket and threw them twenty yards up the road where they landed in low brush along the fence. The second set landed about ten feet farther.

  He said, “You want to make any speeches about not harming a hair on her head, chasing me to the ends of the earth if I do, etcetera, now would be the time.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “You call that a speech?” he said with a laugh. Then he opened the rear door and tucked the gun in his belt and pulled his buddy to his feet, surprisingly strong for someone his size. The man was groaning, a long string of glassy snot hanging from his nose like a third-grader’s. As Daggett angled the big man into the back seat of the Monte Carlo, I took a step forward but he whipped the gun out and fired it in one motion, the round spitting up dirt a few feet to my left. He grinned as I froze in place. Then he finished loading the man in, closed the door and got in on the driver’s side. I just stood there as he backed up, then wheeled around past me, spitting gravel as he headed out toward the highway.

  My partner, my best friend in the world, taken by a gangster counting useful body parts. No way of knowing 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 drive, which gets me there more like midnight.”

  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.

&
nbsp; “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 entrance to shake hands with well-dressed men and women who looked like they represented the museum. Someone’s aide grouped them together for a photo. McConnell wore a navy blazer and tan slacks, as opposed to the dark suit in his website photo. I guess a day at the museum, especially a contemporary art museum, called for something less formal.