“What are you doing, Marc?” Stayner asked.
“Be quiet. I want all of you behind the table. Now!”
There was no point in any of us drawing on him. In the crowded room, a crossfire would be deadly. Slowly we moved to the far side of the table where Frank lay.
“Get him off the table,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“We came here tonight to save my wife. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Marc,” Lesley said. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about her,” McConnell said, pointing the gun at Jenn. “Daggett was going to kill her, wasn’t he? He was going to take all her organs and sell them. Right?” He kept the gun trained on Jenn and looked at me. “Right?”
“Right.”
“I don’t want to kill her,” he said. “And I don’t want all her organs. Just the one. One kidney. She can live with one. Without it, Lesley is going to die.”
“You can’t do this,” Lesley said.
“Yes I can.” He swung the gun back at me and said, “Get him off the table or I’ll shoot your friend, I swear.”
“You do that, you’re dead,” Ryan said. “Before you get a second shot off.”
“I don’t care. If Lesley dies, I might as well too.”
“Marc, please,” his wife said. “This isn’t the way.”
“What is? To keep waiting for a phone call that never comes? To watch you get thinner and paler and weaker? Tired all the time, thirsty all the time. You’re still young, Les, you don’t deserve this.”
“No one does,” she said. “But what does that change?”
“Look at her,” he said, pointing at Jenn. “She’s probably never been sick a day in her life. From the time I first saw you, Les, first fell in love with you, you were battling. You were under ninety pounds before your lung transplant, remember?”
“Of course I do.”
“Lugging around that oxygen tank wherever we went. And then you got healthy again and you were the most beautiful woman in the world, and you still are, but look at you, honey, you’re dying again. Day by day, inch by inch, you’re slipping away from me and I can’t watch it happen again.”
“Put the gun down,” she said. “Before you hurt someone.”
“I can’t …”
“Put it down. We’ll find another way.”
“No.”
“Marc!” Her voice got harsher. “Put it down now.” Her hand reached out and snatched a scalpel from a tray covered in green cloth. She put its tip to the vein in her wrist and said, “I’ll cut myself open if you don’t.”
His eyes, already tearing, widened in disbelief. “No.”
“I’ll do it, Marc. I’d rather die right now than go slowly without you. With you locked up in jail for this.”
She pressed the scalpel harder. The skin around the tip went white as pearl. “Oh, God,” McConnell said, and his gun hand came down. Ryan stepped forward and took it from him.
I looked at Jenn, expecting to see relief, but she was looking at Lesley McConnell, her own eyes flooded. She said, “I’ll do it.”
At least three people in the room, me included, said, “What!”
“I want to do it,” she said.
I said, “Jenn, you can’t.”
“He’s right,” she said. “I’m a big strong farm girl from southern Ontario. Never been sick a day in my life. I’ve always taken it for granted and now I don’t.”
“You can’t decide this on the spot.”
“I was as good as dead an hour ago.”
“Ms.—God, I don’t even know your name,” Lesley said.
“Jenn Raudsepp.”
“Well, Ms. Raudsepp. Jenn. It’s an incredible thing for you to say, especially after what you’ve been through. But you can’t make a decision like this on the spur of the moment.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve had no time to think—”
“If I do I might change my mind.”
“Which is why you should.”
“If I may interrupt this noble gesture for a moment,” Stayner said. “What you’re contemplating is impossible anyway. We don’t know a thing about tissue or antigen matches. And this room is beyond non-sterile now. We’d be risking both of your lives.”
“Then I’ll come back to Boston,” Jenn said.
“You shouldn’t have to,” he said. “George Riklitis has already been found to be a perfect match for Mrs. McConnell, and has already agreed to be her donor. Only now we’ll arrange for it to be done at the hospital, Marc, totally above board, within the week. Your wife will get her kidney, I promise you. And the very best of aftercare. Beyond that, my advice as her doctor is to allow us all to pack up and get the fuck out of here.”
The McConnells left first; they had the most to lose if the place was raided. The congressman wouldn’t look at me or shake my hand, wouldn’t even look at Jenn, but Lesley threw her thin arms around Jenn and held her and whispered her thanks more than once before going off to change her clothes. I told McConnell to wipe down everything he and his wife might have touched.
Stayner left next, leaving his team to clean up without him. The rest of them got to work packing up their equipment. Ryan and I used alcohol wipes on all the surfaces of the locker room where Frank and the team members had changed.
When we were done, Ryan asked Jenn to stay with Frank and motioned me out into the hall. “How many are still alive?”
“Two,” I said. “The guy on the loading dock, Denny—”
“Don’t tell me his name.”
“And the one in the trunk.”
“We can’t leave them to talk to the cops.”
“They don’t strike me as big talkers.”
“With all these bodies, they’ll talk. The one with the leg, he knows your name, where you’re from. And I got a problem with that, since it could lead back to me. And I am not going to put my family at risk so two of Daggett’s fuckheads can come after them.”
“The guy on the dock only saw me with a mask on. And he never saw you.”
“Bet he still knows your name. Look, I did everything you asked, Jonah. I dropped everything and came down to help you. I stood with you. I fought with you to get Jenn back. I killed again. And again.” He pushed past me and went out toward the loading dock. I wouldn’t hear the silenced weapon from where I stood. But I knew the spitting sound would echo in my mind long after it died out.
Two nurses trudged out into the hall weighed down by large cases, followed by James Reimer and the anesthesiologist, similarly encumbered. I had to flatten against the wall to let them all pass. Then I saw Frank tottering out of the room, Jenn beside him with a hand at his back. He didn’t look steady but he was walking under his own steam, keeping one hand against the wall for support.
“What do we do with Victor?” he asked.
“He has to stay here.”
“No. No way.”
“Anywhere you take him, any hospital, any funeral home, you’d have to explain the gunshots.”
He gave me a long look, nothing moving in his face, before saying, “He’s my brother. I’m not leaving him here with the people who killed him.”
“Where would we take him?”
“Just get him in the car. I have a place.”
When Ryan came back in, his gun tucked away, he wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I told him Frank’s plan. He shrugged and said, “Fine.” We went back to the foyer and lifted Victor’s body by the wrists and ankles onto a spare bedsheet we’d found in the surgical suite. We carried him out and laid him gently into Riklitis’s trunk and eased it closed. Then I drove Frank and Jenn around to the front and parked well away from the building on the grass near the gate while Ryan went back inside Halladay’s once last time to carry out the final act of a grievous night.
He was gone about three minutes. Then he came jogging out, got into the passenger side and said, “All the chemicals in that place, we have about
half a minute before it goes up.”
Go up it did, not much more than thirty seconds later, a fireball that topped about four storeys and ensured that firefighters, not police, would be the first responders. Fingerprints and forensic traces would be hard to collect, thanks to Ryan’s conjuring. No bodies would be identified until we were well out of the country. They would all be ashes, just like Harinder Patel and whoever else had run afoul of Sean Daggett.
To our surprise, the Charger was still in the lot of the cemetery where we had left it, neither ticketed nor towed. Jenn and I got in the front; Ryan took the wheel of Riklitis’s car and led the way back to Jamaica Pond, where we would help Frank slip Victor’s body into the cold black water stocked with all the fish he had named.
CHAPTER 40
Frank insisted he was okay to drive Riklitis’s car home from Jamaica Pond.
“You got shot in the head,” I said.
“This is Boston. Who the fuck’s gonna notice?”
Off he went with a short blast of his horn. Ryan drove Jenn and me back to our hotel and went off to see if Lugo would buy the guns back at a discount. “We can’t take them home,” he said, “and I could use some of that cash back. Plus I hate to waste good weapons.”
Jenn didn’t want me to rent another room for her. “I can’t be alone,” she said. The reality of what had happened to her, and all around her, was sinking in. She started to shake and cry again as soon as we were by ourselves. She knew bad things had happened to her. “What if the fucker didn’t use a condom?” she cried. I ran a hot bath for her, waited until she got in, ran down the hall to get ice, and poured two bottles of vodka out of the mini-bar over some cubes in a water glass. While she soaked and drank and cried over the phone to her partner, Sierra, I sat just outside the bathroom with my phone, listening to a tirade that Mike Gianelli had left on my voice mail.
“You useless bastard,” he said. “You cowardly piece of shit. I told you David Fine was dead and did you even have the decency to call me back? I’ve had his father in my office the last two hours, crying his fucking eyes out, wondering where the hell you are and what the hell you’ve been doing all this time he’s been paying you. Not only that, one of David’s co-workers also turned up dead, a lab tech at Sinai. Beaten to death and dumped in a park. The Boston PD is handling that one, but there’s all kinds of things I’d like to ask you if you have the nerve to call. Only I don’t think you do. Man, I had you wrong. I thought you were better than this. I thought you were stand-up. Ron Fine sure didn’t get his money’s worth when he hired you.”
Who said he had?
The next message was from Ron himself, asking me to call him at the Marriott at Copley Place. “The police got me a room here,” he said. “They have a corporate rate for—for families of victims of crime.”
When Jenn got out of the bath, I got her to lie down in the bed farthest from the door and she was soon asleep. When her breathing had settled into a constant rhythm, I went online and booked three seats on the first Toronto flight I could find for the next morning. Once the bloodbath at Halladay’s was discovered, and Daggett’s body in particular identified, the cops would want another word with me. Jenn too. She and I needed to get back on Canadian soil; once we were there, they couldn’t make us come back to Massachusetts without a lot of delays and paperwork. We’d have time to rest and heal ourselves. To align stories and prepare affidavits. To try to forget the horrors we’d seen and committed. Who knew how that would go? We’d regret the work David Fine would never do and the lifelong pain his family was in for, but if we were smart, we’d also make ourselves remember the lives we had saved. Who knows who else Daggett would have killed along the way if he’d kept at his grisly business?
After I booked the flights, I waited for Ryan to get back. I didn’t want Jenn to find herself alone if she woke up. We didn’t say anything to each other when he came in. I just took the car keys from the counter where he’d put them down and left the room. I still had one thing to do tonight. Maybe the hardest of all.
Ron Fine’s room at the Marriott overlooked Copley Square, where far below crowds of people made their way in and out of bars and restaurants. He was wearing a white dress shirt, no tie and dark grey slacks. The fringes of his tzitzis hung down below his belt.
“They’re saying he’s been dead more than thirty-six hours, but they won’t release the body yet,” he said. “By our custom he should be in the ground already. But the state police are in charge, because it appeared to be a killing for hire, and they say it’ll be at least another day or two, maybe more. And if they mention an autopsy again, I swear I’ll blow my stack. I mean, whoever killed David blew his head off. What is there to autopsy?”
Looking at this broken, grieving man, I felt ever deeper shame and guilt over David’s death and how I’d used his body. All I said was, “Nothing.”
“Nothing. Not a thing. Which, by the way, seems to sum up your contribution. According to Gianelli, you were nowhere to be seen the last two days. You ignored messages. Changed hotels. Left it to him to call us. Maybe I put too heavy a burden on you, Jonah, telling you Hashem wanted you to find my son, but you accepted it, didn’t you? You accepted my money. Was there anything you did to earn it?”
His fists were bunched and his jaw muscles clamped together; his eyes hard and flat.
“There were things …” I said.
“What?”
“That I couldn’t tell Gianelli.”
He stepped closer, looking like he was considering taking a swing at me. “What are you saying? You’re not cooperating fully with the investigation?”
“There are things he cannot know.”
“How can you hold anything back? My son is dead.”
I closed the space between us and put my hand on his arm. It was tensed as though he were gripping a racket.
“So is the man who killed him.”
“What!”
“You remember what my brother told you about me? That I don’t let go? I didn’t, Ron. Neither did Jenn. We saw it through to the end.”
He gripped my arms, both of them, and stared deeply into my eyes. “What exactly are you saying?”
“Is there anything to drink in your room?”
“That’s what you want, a drink?”
“Please, Ron. Pour us both one.”
He found an airline-size bottle of Scotch in his mini-bar and handed it to me. He took nothing for himself.
“There’s a lot I can’t tell you yet,” I began. “And even more that I can’t tell Gianelli.”
“Why?”
“Crimes were committed. By me. And a man whose help I enlisted.”
“And as a result the man who killed David is dead,” Ron said.
“Yes. His name was Sean Daggett. He’ll be all over the news tomorrow.”
“He killed David himself?”
“No. He hired whoever did.”
“And you know why.”
“Yes. He was selling organs on the black market.”
“And David was involved in this?”
“Very briefly. And completely against his will. He wanted to report Daggett to the police, but Daggett struck first, tried to abduct him. Made him run.”
“And you won’t tell the police any of this?”
“I can’t without incriminating myself. Just know that Daggett and his men are dead.”
“Did you kill him, Jonah?”
My neck muscles tightened as if a giant hand were bunching them together. “A sequence of events that he himself set in motion ran its natural course.”
“And that’s all you have to say?”
“For now.”
“How can you expect me to leave it at that? What do I tell Sheila?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Knowing the man is dead—that he’ll never come to trial—I don’t know what to feel. My first hope was always that you would find David alive and well and bring him home. My last hope, I suppose, was that if you
didn’t, and someone was held responsible, that I would attend every day of their trial and put on public record what a life they had wasted. I’ll never get the chance to do that now. I feel very conflicted.”
I couldn’t tell him how I felt without telling him more than he could know. All I could offer was the lame, “What had to happen happened.”
“None of us knows what has to happen, Jonah. That’s the exclusive province of Hashem.”
“I just wanted you to know that no one got away with killing David.”
“Of course they did.”
Ron walked over to the mini-bar, knelt in front of it and took out a bottle of Scotch, unscrewed the cap and drank about half of it down. Then he sank heavily into a club chair. “What I’ll always wonder,” he said, “is why Hashem wanted David to come to Boston. I mean, I know why David wanted to come. ‘It’s the hub,’ he’d say. ‘The hub of medical research.’ This was where he was going to make his mark. One of the last times I spoke to him, he told me the donor in the first-ever kidney transplant had passed away. He had given a kidney to his twin brother back in the fifties, in Boston, just up the street from Sinai. David said, ‘Dad, can you imagine the courage it took to donate a kidney when it had never been done before?’ ”
“David had more courage than you can imagine,” I said, thinking of how he’d protected Sandy Lerner on the beach.
“More than you can tell me now,” he said.
“Yes.”
He drank down the rest of the bottle and stared at the fridge as if deciding whether to have another. “You know Micah still doesn’t know his brother is dead? I wanted him to come down here with me and help me get the body home. But he’s off work for the weekend, out at some cabin without cellphone reception, playing guitar with his friends. That’s what I’m left with now, Jonah. A pot-smoking hippie who plays dumpy coffee houses. David is gone and Micah is left.”
Everyone counts, I wanted to say. Even we second sons, who sometimes disappoint our parents, frustrate them as we fail to live up to the achievements of our dominant older siblings. I sipped my drink and watched Ron’s face contort in grief, his chin puckered and shaking, eyebrows pulling down, tears falling anyway. I could only imagine what my mother would go through if Daniel died prematurely and she was left with just me. Would she howl and curse God for taking away the great lawyer and family man, leaving only the bachelor with the rent-controlled apartment and undistinguished life?
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