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.”