“Where’s my cell phone?”
Buda looked at Prek, who shrugged.
“May as well let her have it. Just don’t turn it on till we’re done here.”
“I won’t.”
Prek took Pia’s cell phone, student ID, and wallet she used for her credit card and cash out of his jacket and gave them back to her.
“I’ll be outside,” Pia said. “It stinks in here.” Without another word, she went outside, slamming the door behind her hard enough to shake the house.
Burim shook his head. “She is her mother, exactly.”
“We should go out there-she might call someone,” Prek said.
“She won’t,” Buda said. “She’s Albanian, she promised.”
“She’s half Albanian,” Burim said. “And half Italian. I better go.”
The men laughed.
Standing on the other side of the van, Pia had turned on the phone and it flooded with messages and e-mails and texts. She saw there was a text from Lesley Wong.
“God bless you,” it read. “Praying for Will’s recovery.”
“Pia?”
It was Burim. She shut off the phone and emerged from behind the van.
“We’re leaving,” Burim said.
Pia had but one thought. Recovery? Could Will possibly be alive?
62.
GREEN POND, NEW JERSEY MARCH 26, 2011, 12:03 A.M.
Buda gave his men their marching orders. He would drive back to the Bronx with Prek and Genti, while Neri would remain at the house and clean it and the van thoroughly to erase all traces of Pia’s stay. Buda was quite specific about what products Neri would use and how long he should spend on each part of the task. Buda emphasized what a good job he wanted Neri to do and that it would take him the entire weekend to complete. That would give Buda time to figure out what to do with Neri. Before he left the house, he put the van’s keys in his pocket. Fatos had to drive Drilon back to the parking lot at the restaurant to pick up his car because Pia flatly refused to get into a car with Drilon. She wasn’t about to explain why.
Pia sat in the front seat of Burim’s vehicle and stared straight ahead as the men said their goodbyes in the driveway. Burim and Pia set off, heading for Weehawken. Burim turned up the heat for Pia’s benefit.
“What’s your problem with Drilon?”
“I’m not going to talk about it,” Pia said.
“I hope you will later. So, tonight we’ll go to my house.”
Is he kidding? thought Pia. She was desperate to get away from this man.
“No, I want to go back to the hospital.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Burim said.
“Sure you can,” Pia said. “I promised not to meddle any more and I’m not going to. You’ll have to trust me. It’s the same tonight as it will be in a week, in a month. I have to check on something.”
“The place will be swarming with cops.”
“I’ll have to talk to them eventually. Or do you think I’ll move in with you and live in New Jersey and play happy family? Because that’s not happening. You can’t just walk back into my life, don’t you understand that? We have an arrangement, that’s all. You have to trust me, I have to trust you. We shook hands, remember?”
“You can’t tell the cops anything, obviously, you know that. Anything about Buda or his men or about seeing me and Drilon.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t be difficult to forget you.”
Burim ignored the barb.
“So we have to come up with a story for what happened to you,” he said.
“The police will know as much as I do, about the polonium. But I don’t know who did the killing, I just know the why.”
“The less I know the better too.”
“They’ll find my system was full of drugs, I imagine,” Pia said. “So I’ll say I was drugged, then I was held in a house outside the city, but I escaped.”
“So how did you get back to New York?”
“Okay, I woke up in New York, and I don’t know where I’ve been.”
“Where did you get the clothes?”
“I don’t remember where I got the clothes and that’s the truth.”
“So it’s this: You were out of it, drugged. Some guys drove you around, but you never saw their faces. Then they stopped in a house somewhere, and you were given different clothes. Then they drove again and let you off in Manhattan. I can’t drive to the hospital myself, I can’t risk being seen. You better get in the back, stay out of sight of the cameras on the bridge. I’ll drop you at the top of Manhattan, on Broadway somewhere. You can take a cab from there.”
“All right.” Pia climbed into the backseat and curled up. She was exhausted and still shivering.
“Pia, we have to stay in touch. What’s your cell phone number?”
Pia figured he could find out if he wanted to so she told him, and Burim said he would remember it. He didn’t bother telling Pia his number.
Burim continued to talk, telling her little anecdotes about times he remembered from when Pia was a child. Burim convinced himself that his memory was correct, that these things had happened the way he remembered them. He concentrated on the road, and he knew Pia probably wasn’t listening. He would try to reach out to her, but he wasn’t confident she’d respond. After a while he stopped talking, and they rode in silence.
After forty minutes, Burim reached Broadway at the very tip of Manhattan. In the middle of a quiet block, he slowed down and Pia hopped out of the car without saying a word and didn’t look back. Burim stopped the car and watched as Pia walked to an intersection and held out her hand to hail a taxi. A gypsy cab pulled over, and Pia leaned toward the window and told the driver something. Before she got in the car, Burim thought she looked small and vulnerable in her crazy mismatched outfit. But he had a feeling she’d be okay.
63.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER NEW YORK CITY MARCH 26, 2011, 1:00 A.M.
Pia asked the car to drop her off as close as he could get to her dorm building on Haven Avenue. There was still a police presence with artificial lighting at this location of the abduction and shooting. The fare was $12, and she gave the driver the twenty Burim had given her and didn’t stop for change. On the ride down, Pia had concentrated her thoughts on Will, ignoring her father, who was jabbering away in the front seat. She tried not to think about her ordeal; at least she was safe now. Pia had no thought about whether or not she was going to try to establish a connection with her father, but she did know she’d have nothing at all to do with Drilon. The few things she remembered about him were all painful.
Pia focused. She wasn’t worried about talking to the police-after all, it wouldn’t be the first time. She’d build a wall around what happened at the house and not recount any of it; in all other aspects, she could be truthful. And there were some truths she was still determined that everyone know. There would be no possibility of a cover-up.
Pia walked up to the front desk in the dorm. There were two uniformed cops by the elevator, but Pia hoped that her strange garb and the fact that she’d bunched her hair up under a baseball cap would throw off a casual onlooker. Despite the late hour, students were coming in from studying at the Health Science Center or from a night out. A few others were on their way out, having been called to the hospital for emergencies.
Pia knew the person staffing the front desk and asked him about Will McKinley.
“Pia, is that you?” the young man said. “Cops are looking for you. They said you got kidnapped or something crazy.”
“No, I’m fine. Will-tell me about Will.” Pia gestured with her index finger over her lips to silence the man from calling attention to her presence.
“Oh, man, I heard he got shot in the head, but he survived. He was taken over to the Neurological Institute, and he had surgery. One of the other fourth-years said he’s in Intensive Care.”
Without another word, Pia turned and walked away from the desk and made her way over to Neurosurgical Intensive Care. She saw plenty of cops and security guards, but they were on the lookout for a woman with long black hair, not someone wearing a New York Jets sweatshirt to mid-thigh, soccer socks, and a baseball cap. She looked like a cheerleader.