Then it was time to go to work on Frank.
“Admit it,” I said. “You look more like a Riklitis than any of us do.”
“You’re still fucking nuts.”
“You’re the closest to his age and size.”
“I don’t care if I’m his identical twin, go fuck yourself. I’m not doing it.”
“Don’t make me say this,” Victor said.
“I’ll kill you if you agree with him,” Frank said. “Flat out kill you.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what? You agree?”
“I agree having a guy inside from the start gives us an edge.”
“And?”
“And it might be easier for you to go in that way than, you know, slipping through the hoarding or running in behind a car.”
“What are you saying, Victor? You saying I put on weight?”
“You don’t exactly slip anymore, Frank. It’s more like you barge.”
“All right, now I’m back to killing you.”
Brothers.
“Just give it some thought,” I said. “If you could get in there with a gun, find Jenn and give us the word, it could all be over in a minute.”
“Yeah, it won’t be you they’re shaving.”
“Stayner would tell the team members at the right time. If necessary, they can stall. Fake an anesthesiology breakdown. We’d make sure you never went under. And Stayner will have a second gun in his gear as backup, in case you have to ditch the one you have.”
“Daggett knows Riklitis. He’ll know I’m not the guy.”
“That’s if he shows up,” I said. I knew in my heart he’d be there for Jenn’s surgery but getting Frank to buy into this was hard enough as it was.
“He’ll be there,” Frank said. “And didn’t Stayner say the donor goes under before he gets there? That throws off the whole trunk scenario.”
“We’ll get him to come in early. Time everything to go off around nine-thirty. I can get Stayner to tell the others to come early too.” My own excitement was starting to build as I began thinking this might actually work.
“Didn’t you tell the congressman you’d wait until after the surgery?” Frank asked me. His protests were getting weaker; I had him.
“I said we might, if it gave us the advantage. But we can’t wait. This is our shot and we have to take it. What do you say, Frank?”
“Can I bring the pump gun in?”
“Only if you can fit it under a gown,” Victor said.
We took the Charger to a nearby mall and split up in search of what we needed: plain black track suits, balaclavas, thin gloves, gym bags, black shoe polish, a crowbar. Prepaid cellphones from Circuit City. When we were back in the car, we divvied up the goods so each of us had what he needed for the night.
Ryan and I headed back to our new hotel to check in. I needed some time with him to go over the finer points of the plan. Sometimes two voices were easier to bring into harmony than four.
Frank and Victor left to visit the East Boston home of George Riklitis and impress upon him that if he showed up tonight, it would be as a cadaver donor, not a live one. And to borrow his car, which was the make and model the guards would be expecting.
We were coming up Massachusetts Avenue, just crossing Columbus, when I heard an engine kick into a higher gear behind us and saw a van swinging out to pass me on the left. Its side door was open and a gun barrel was sticking out. As soon as the front end came level with our rear, I swung the wheel hard and clipped his bumper. The van lurched to the left, almost hitting a southbound car, then veered back into its lane and kept coming. I floored it, wishing now we had the hemi-V8 engine Ryan had wanted.
Ryan levered his seat back so he could scramble into the rear. He kept his head down and Glock up as he lowered the rear window, leaned his arm out and fired out of it. The van braked and went into my blind spot momentarily. Then I could see it again in the rear.
“Hang on,” I yelled, and spun the wheel right, sending us sliding through the intersection. Half a dozen horns blared in concert as I corrected the skid and took off eastbound.
“They make the turn?” I yelled.
“Just now.”
I had the bigger engine but it wasn’t like we were on a highway; it gave us no real advantage. There were cars in front of me doing moderate speeds-maybe ten miles over the limit. We were screaming along twice as fast with the van on our heels. Ryan leaned out the window and fired again, then ducked back in.
“You hitting anything?”
“Old ladies in crosswalks.”
“Use the shotgun.”
“We’ll go fucking deaf in here.”
“I don’t care,” I yelled. “Get them off our tail.”
He racked the shotgun and was bringing it to bear out the window when I saw brake lights going on in front of me in the lineup for a red light. I hit my own brakes and Ryan flew forward between the headrests. His head slammed into the back of mine, sending pain shooting straight through to my eyes. I kept my foot down hard, looking for a turn I could make. There was none. The van was coming up closer behind us.
“He’s going to hit us,” Ryan said.
“The fuck he is!” I waited as he grew closer in my mirror, shifted my eyes to the opposing traffic, then hit the gas as I spun the wheel to the left. As I cut sharply across the westbound lanes, the van crashed into the rear of the car that had been in front of me. I saw the driver’s door start to open so I braked and threw it into reverse and slammed the Charger’s rear end into the driver’s side, staving in his door. Then I put it back in drive and leapt ahead of the oncoming cars into a fierce, fuck-all-of-you kind of U-turn. I got a full brass section of horns in reply, plus a clutch of Boston middle fingers, ignored them and wrenched the wheel and floored it the other way, watching in my rearview as a man yanked away at the door of the van, having no luck opening it.
“You okay?” I asked Ryan.
“I’m the one should be asking you. You bleeding?”
I touched the back of my head. The pain was immediate but there was no broken skin or blood. “No. An icepack and two gelcaps and I’ll be fine.”
“Usually not my own fucking head I crack.”
I turned south off Albany onto Southampton Street and parked. We got out of the car and checked the damage. Another rental car, another crumpled rear end. I knelt down and checked the underside for a transponder.
“Anything?” Ryan said.
“No.”
“At least there are no bullet holes in the car.”
“When that’s the best thing you can say, you know you’re pretty well fucked.”
We got back in and took a circuitous route back to the hotel.
“Man, Daggett played me,” I said. “He had me so focused on tonight, I didn’t think he’d try to hit us today.”
“Let’s see who plays who in the end.”
“Think we should change hotels again? In case they know where we’re going.”
“Fuck that,” Ryan said. “I’m tired and I’m armed and I’m in a mood like I got PMS. If I was them, I’d leave me alone right now.”
CHAPTER 36
The Bay State Hotel was a find Jenn would have been proud of, right across from the great reflecting pool of the Christian Science complex. As her face came into mind, I felt a hot surge of rage through my body. Helpless at not being able to get her right now, this minute, to see her unharmed and throw my arms around her and carry her to safety like a damsel. Instead my visions were of her tied up, twisting to get free of her bonds, maybe being questioned by Daggett, being slapped or punched if he didn’t like her answers. I got out of the car clenching and unclenching my own fists, trying to breathe the coiled tension out of my body. Some of it went. Most stayed.
The hotel was a two-storey ell set back in a parking lot, with a small pool and a few shaded tables in a fenced-off area. Our room was in the wing that faced the great dome of the Mother Church. It was a small, very basic space that hadn
’t been designed with two grown men with big guns in mind. We put most of the gear in the closet and sat across from each other across a small marble-topped table, where I uploaded all the photos DeMaurice Simms had taken to my laptop so we could zoom in on every entrance, window and alarm junction. We pored over the landscape, noting the best places to try to get in, whether through the hoarding, over it or via the trunk of a car.
I called Stayner to get a description of his assistant, James Reimer: a tall man, mid-forties, wore wire-framed glasses, balding but trying to hide it with plugs.
“Beard? Facial hair?” I asked.
“No, he’s clean shaven.”
“When you say tall …”
“About six-one, I guess. A good few inches taller than me, at any rate, and I’m five-nine.”
“Okay, I’m six feet. If I had glasses on, and a cap and mask, could I fool someone?”
“Maybe for a minute, if they didn’t look too close. He doesn’t carry himself like you do. He’s not athletic at all. He stoops a bit.”
I asked Stayner if his key fob would work from inside the trunk.
“How on earth would I know that?”
“Test it.”
“You expect me to get inside?”
“You have a second set of keys?”
“Of course.”
“Then have your wife stand by to let you out if it doesn’t work.”
“If I do this, any of this, you have to promise you’ll get Daggett.”
“I already have promised,” I said.
“To whom?”
“Me.”
“It’s early yet,” Ryan said. “Not even dark. We could mount up right now and hit him at home.”
“Daggett?”
“Someone has to know where he lives. The four of us could crash his house.”
“He has a wife and kids.”
“Makes him all the more vulnerable. Bust in and put guns on anything that moves. Make him give up Jenn.”
“We haven’t scouted it,” I said. “We don’t know what security he’s got.”
“You don’t like the idea?”
I loved Jenn so much. There was no one closer to me now. But to train shotguns and automatics on a woman and children who had nothing to do with Daggett’s depraved business … I could see Victor squeezing the trigger of his Uzi too tightly and ripping fire across one of the kids.
“We can’t,” I said. “Kids have no place in this.”
“Even though it’s Jenn?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I had to ask.”
“Would you do it?”
“You didn’t call,” he said. “You don’t get to see my hand.”
We went back to planning: reviewing the sketches and notes from Stayner. The make of each car that was due to arrive. We put all the photos on slideshow and played a game, seeing who could identify the view first as each photo came up.
“South-side entrance!”
“East-side camera!”
“Coal chute door!”
We crammed like students before a big exam, quizzing each other, no notes, challenging each other to come up with something new, just one more thing we hadn’t thought of yet.
The plan we finally drafted went like this. Frank would arrive a little earlier than expected, around eight-thirty, posing as the donor, George Riklitis, saying things were crazy at his house, he needed to relax before the procedure, get his head around it. He’d stash his gun in the operating room and, if possible, do a walk-through and see if he could find Jenn. If anyone recognized him, he’d have to shoot his way out. This, we hoped, was a light percentage.
The anesthesiologist would arrive first. He also drove the biggest car, a Navigator. When the gate was opened for him, Victor would slip in behind his car and hit the ground along the hoarding, work his way along it toward the rear.
That left Ryan and me. The nurses were coming in a Mazda 3, too small to get in behind, so we decided Ryan would pry back the hoarding in the southwest corner, farthest from any camera, and slip through there. I would get in the trunk of Stayner’s car. Ryan had made me get into the trunk of a car once before, so technically it was his turn, but he insisted, as only he can, that there was no point breaking in someone new.
Once we were all inside the compound, we’d wait for Frank to advise the surgical team of what was happening. Stayner would send Jim Reimer out on a phantom errand, say to pick up some crucial piece of equipment that had been left behind. No surgeon would ever do that because they’d no longer be sterile but we doubted anyone inside would know that. I’d be waiting in the trunk, in a surgical outfit identical to Reimer’s. Reimer and I would switch places. I’d let Ryan and Victor into the loading area. Inside, in the improvised operating room, Frank would be reaching for his gun.
We would take down anyone in our path, find Jenn and bust out in Reimer’s SUV.
That was the plan; that was my promise to Jenn, sure and silent in my heart.
Jews say that when man plans, God laughs. Even though I’m an atheist, I kept an ear cocked for the sound of faraway laughter.
Kieran was driving Sean crazy. He had slept all day, drugged to the tits, but now he was awake and restless and up Sean’s ass. He couldn’t pace because of his leg, so he sat on a stool at the kitchen island, swivelling it this way and that to keep Sean in his field of vision as Sean moved back and forth trying to get dinner together for the kids. Bev was upstairs getting ready for a night of cosmetic sales with a dozen fortysomething women, something she did to make her own spending money, or at the very least get all this high-end facial shit for free. Unbelievably expensive little tubes and jars full of Dead Sea mud.
Sean was putting salmon fillets in the oven, rinsing lettuce for their salad, setting out juice and cut-up celery and carrots. He didn’t want his kids eating junk and getting fat like some of their friends, barely into their teens and already out of shape, out of breath, with the same prison pallor as guys at Cedar Junction. He wanted them strong and straight. No one, especially Michael, would ever go near his business. They’d go to school and find their own lives and careers.
“Can’t these kids feed themselves?” Kieran said. “Christ, when we were their age, we were getting drunk and stealing cars.”
“I told you when we’re leaving, okay? Be patient. You’ll have plenty of time-four, five hours till they’re ready for her. Jesus, how much do you think she can take?”
“We’ll find out.”
“We who? This is your thing, pal, not mine.”
“Like you’ve never taken anyone out to the garage, tuned them up until they would talk or deal.”
“Not for fun, I didn’t. And never a woman.”
“She destroyed my fucking leg. If it was a guy who done it, believe me, he’d have the same shit coming. Worse. Except I wouldn’t plan to fuck him. She looked real nice, what I saw.”
“She’s even better up close. A real honey.”
“Now that’s unfair, man. You’re teasing me.”
Daggett sighed. “Okay, we can go in fifteen minutes.”
“How long to get there?”
“Half an hour.”
“And how long till she’s clear-headed?”
“Also half an hour.”
“Then call Freddie now, tell him to take her off the drip. I want her up before we get there. Wanna call her on the phone and tell her what she’s in for.”
Damn it. Sean had called Freddie from the road and told him they were on their way. Take her off the drip, Sean had said, even though the girl wasn’t scheduled to go under the knife for another few hours. Freddie knew why. Kieran was pissed about his leg and wanted to take it out on her. Freddie could understand that, sympathize with it, but it still pissed him off. The girl’s body was fucking magnificent. Playboy material. And now he had to put the catheter back in so Sean wouldn’t know he’d been into the goods. Wipe her up. Work the gown back over her limbs.
What a waste, he thought. A firs
t-class piece of ass she was, even asleep and unresponsive. But when Kieran got through with her, pieces was all she would be. He took one more long look at her, wishing he had a better camera than the one in his phone. He took a few more snaps.
Look at her.
If he stopped the drip right now, she’d still stay out for at least fifteen minutes or more. And Sean and Kieran would take at least that long to get there from Framingham. He decided he had enough time to play one more game, nothing long and drawn out, just a quick little sketch that was forming in his mind.
Freddie and the Maiden, part three.
CHAPTER 37
A light rain began to fall as we drove along Huntington Avenue past Northeastern University. Keep it coming, I thought. Rain would obscure vision, make guards hurry in and out of doorways that much faster. Make them hunch, maybe jam on a ball cap, make it harder for them to see.
“Feel it?” Ryan asked.
“What?”
“The adrenalin.”
“I guess.”
“You guess? Your left foot is pumping like a heavy-metal drummer.”
“Okay, I feel it.”
“Don’t fight it, use it.”
“I know.”
“You need to go over the guns again before we meet Frank and Victor?”
“I’m good. Your in-room seminar was excellent.”
We met Frank and Victor at a Chinese restaurant on Brookline Avenue. Easy for us out-of-towners to find; plenty of on-street parking. Ryan made sure my gun was in my back waistband before we went in. But no one pulled on us when we walked in. We were shown to a table where the boys were waiting. They didn’t pull either. No one poisoned the spring rolls or the hot-and-sour soup; all it did was make my nose run.
Everything had gone smoothly with Riklitis, Frank said. “I mean, he was disappointed and everything that he wasn’t going to be collecting the rest of his payment, but when I told him it was that or get a bullet up his ass, he calmed down.”
“How much were they paying him?”
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