Brothers and Bones (19 page)

TWENTY

September’s a strange month for weather in Boston. You never really know what you’re going to get from day to day. The day might be sweltering midsummer-hot or cold and overcast, a taste of November come early. Living my entire life in the Boston area, I knew this. What I never had cause to know before, but found out that night, is how cold storm drainage pipes can be on late-September nights in Boston. Luckily, there hadn’t been much rain lately, so the water running past my feet was barely more than a trickle. I had no idea where we were, other than that we were somewhere in the city under some road in some concrete pipe. I squatted on my haunches, my butt against the cool curvature of the pipe at my back, its cold seeping through my thin T-shirt and into my skin. To my right was the yawning darkness of the pipe. I could just make out an old tire a few feet away and the jagged sheen of broken beer bottles here and there. To my left, the pipe opened onto ground level. Bonz squatted across from me, looking much less uncomfortable than I felt.

We sat in silence. I was torn by doubt. Had I done the right thing running from my apartment? It was risky. If I’d stayed, perhaps I could have made the cops believe my story. But as Angel’s killer had helpfully noted, the evidence against me was impressive. The fact was, if I’d waited for the police, I’d be sitting in a jail cell right now with no way to prove that I’d been framed. And no way to get to the bottom of all of this. Nonetheless, I still wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake.

“Where are we?” I finally asked Bonz.

He was staring at his hand, the one with the missing finger.

“Bonz?”

He blinked hard and looked up. “Drainpipe.”

“Thanks for clearing that up. Have you spent much time here?”

“During the summer. Dry and warm then.”

I nodded. “Can they find us here?”

“They won’t. Not here.”

Well, that was good. So I’d just spend the rest of my life in this pipe and I’d be fine, at least until the rains came. Until then, maybe I’d set up a little cot over there, add a few throw pillows to add some color.

“Why did you burst into my apartment?” I asked.

“To save you.”

“Oh.”
Did
he save me? Or did he make things worse? I wasn’t sure. I
was
sure that I hadn’t been having any fun back in my apartment with the killer. At least Bonz wasn’t a murderer. Or was he? I realized I had absolutely no idea who this guy was. Maybe he wasn’t just
a
murderer, but the baddest, craziest, most sadistic murderer Boston had ever seen, and he’d left a trail of as-yet-undiscovered bodies lying in storm drains all around Boston. He seemed relatively sane at the moment, though, which made for a nice change. Actually, other than a few facial tics and some hand-staring, he’d seemed close to normal since we’d left my apartment, or as close to normal as I could imagine he ever got. I wondered, of course, why that was.

A cold wind blew down the pipe and I shivered involuntarily. I was still wearing nothing but my tux pants and a T-shirt stained with Angel’s blood, which had dried to a deep brown. Bonz looked at me.

“Can’t stay in those clothes,” he said. “Too…conspicuous.” He frowned, then nodded, satisfied and maybe pleased that he’d picked the appropriate word from the vocabulary jumble I imagined he carried in his head.

“Well, I’m not going naked,” I replied. “Too cold.”

He stood and took off his ratty, stained overcoat. Underneath he still wore his dirty Harvard sweatshirt. He tossed the coat to me. I had no desire to wear it, but didn’t want to insult him. I still didn’t know exactly how sane he was. I stood and pulled it on. The smell it gave off made my eyes water.

“Thanks.”

He pushed himself to his feet and was about to say something when I said, abruptly, “Do you know what happened to my brother?”

Bonz turned away from me and started toward the world outside the pipe. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder.

“Stop.” He didn’t. “I said
stop
, goddamn it!” My voice echoed off the cold concrete, into the dark hole to my right.

Bonz stopped, paused, then turned. Dark though it was outside, the big circle of open space behind him was lighter than the tunnel. Bonz stood in silhouette, his face lost in blackness. He waited, silent.

“Tell me.”

“Later,” he finally said.

“It
is
later. It’s thirteen goddamned
years
later. I think I’ve waited long enough.”

He just stood there, motionless. Then his head twitched, a small but violent motion. Finally, I thought I saw him nod, just once.

“You knew him, didn’t you?” I asked.

“I knew him.”

I could feel my heart between my damaged ribs, feel it beating in there, waiting, just waiting to burst out of my chest with joy…or to break yet again.

“Do you know if he’s alive?”

It was hard to tell, but I thought I saw him nod again. Then there was a long pause. A terrible, cruel pause. Then… “He’s dead.” The words echoed coldly around me. “He’s been dead for thirteen years.”

TWENTY-ONE

I dreamed of Jake.

It wasn’t much of a dream, really. Not much happened. Someone observing my dream through some kind of magic would have thought it terribly boring.

I was sitting in an empty church, the one my parents took Jake and me to before they died. I turned to see my brother sitting in the pew beside me, an empty fried chicken bucket in his lap. Stained-glass windows fragmented the late-afternoon sunlight, painting Jake in beautiful, kaleidoscopic colors. I was surprised to see him. I thought I was alone.

“How are you?” I asked. It was the same way I’d greeted him for years before his disappearance.

“I’m just Jake,” he said with a smile, the same way he always responded. He was saying he was just fine, as he always did when I asked, whether or not it was true. As I noted, this exchange was one of the little things we shared, it was just ours, like his nickname for me. “But you’re not, Wiley,” he added. “You’re not okay. You think about me far too much. You’ve wasted a lot of time.”

“No.”

“Yeah, you have. I’ve been gone a long time. You should have listened to Jessica by now. You should have moved on.”

“I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know for sure. I couldn’t give up on you. I’m still not sure I can.”

“You know that I’m dead, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I am, Charlie. Accept it. I want you to. I give you permission to do so. It’s okay, really. Believe it.”

“Okay.”

“Are you crying?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think what?” The voice wasn’t Jake’s. It was Bonz’s. Jake and the church and the beautiful light were gone, replaced by Bonz, the drainage pipe, and the dark night.

I guess I’d passed out. Maybe the confirmation of Jake’s death, which I had to confess wasn’t entirely unexpected, was nonetheless too much of a shock for me. Probably exhaustion played a part, the combination of the two finally dragging me into sudden slumber. I’d certainly been through a lot recently. Whatever the cause, I ended up unconscious, slumped in that drainage pipe, with water dribbling around my legs.

“What?” I asked, rubbing my eyes as I sat up, out of the water.

“You just said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

“Oh. What happened?”

“You passed out.”

“I gathered that. Thanks for pulling me out of the water, by the way.” He hadn’t, of course.

“You okay?” he asked gruffly—hell, he said everything gruffly—but he did seem mildly concerned.

“No, I don’t think I am.”

I’d spent thirteen years hoping, hoping hard that Jake was alive somewhere, refusing to believe he was dead, steeping myself in pure denial. It was hard to do, frankly. Everything pointed toward the obvious. Everybody assured me as sympathetically as they could that Jake was gone. Yet I struggled to keep him alive in my mind, as if by doing so I could reach across the miles, across the years, to wherever he really was, and keep his heart beating.

I felt empty. Hollow. And it wasn’t simply that I realized Jake really was dead. It was more than that. But what? Then I understood. I no longer had a purpose. Until that moment I hadn’t truly realized how all-consuming my desire to find Jake, and find him alive, had been. Since he disappeared, it seemed that nearly everything I’d done had been done in furtherance of that goal. I obtained a law degree and put away bad guys in the hopes that I’d one day use my contacts and skills to find and put away whoever was responsible for Jake’s disappearance. I hired an endless string of private investigators. I spent my free time doing what I could to find Jake, or find out what happened to him, and when I couldn’t actively do something, I sat and thought about what I could do, trying to remember something, anything, he might have said that would give me a clue as to what happened to him. With him truly gone now, my life suddenly seemed more like a movie set, full of painted backgrounds and props that had no real meaning for me. Nothing was as it had seemed. My best friend was not only dead, but he had turned out not to be such a terrific friend after all. The job at which I’d worked so hard suddenly meant very little to me. In the morning, I was supposed to show up in court again and get my case against Vasily Redekov back on track. And while I certainly didn’t want to see the slimeball get off, I had to admit that the trial was the farthest thing from my mind at the moment. It occurred to me suddenly and with surprising force that the only part of my life that mattered to me any longer was my relationship with Jessica.
She
was real.
She
moved among the props and plywood sets of my lonely soundstage of a life, a living, breathing, vibrant connection with the real world, a lifeline I needed to hold on to with all my strength.

But with everything that was going on, how long could I hope to hold her in my life? I knew she loved me, but the limits, if any, of that love would surely be tested over the coming days. The mere fact of our relationship would cause her no end of embarrassment and pain, both personal and professional. Could her feelings withstand the pounding they were going to take—from her father, her friends, the media? How many women would stand by a man in the face of the mountain of evidence they had against me? Would she listen to me, or would she listen to the rest of the world—to her father too, probably—when they said to her, “Don’t be stupid, it’s an open-and-shut case against him, don’t throw your life away on this?” Could I believe me if I were in her place? These questions forced me to consider other equally unpleasant ones. Would I ever even see Jessica again? If I did, would it only be through bulletproof glass during prison visiting hours?

I started to get angry. Not at Jessica, but at the people who deserved the blame. The people who would make her and the police and the people who watch the news and read the papers believe that I was a murderer. The people who ruined my life.

And, I realized, these same people were in all likelihood responsible for Jake’s death. So they had ruined my life, it seemed, long before tonight. And I hated them for that. I wanted a life again. Not my old cardboard cutout of one, but I wanted the chance to build a new one, a real one, with Jessica: a life free of prison food and large, tattooed cellmates, free of the uncertainty I’d lived with for so long, free of—God forgive me—Jake’s ghost. And that wasn’t enough. Not even close. No, I wanted the bad guys to pay. And I wanted to personally make that happen.

I realized that the emptiness I’d felt just moments ago was gone already. I had anger, and I had hatred, and they warmed me from the inside. But that wasn’t all that filled me. I also had a purpose again.

TWENTY-TWO

After so many years of not knowing for sure about Jake, I finally got my certainty. And it sucked. I wanted to grieve for him. He deserved it. I’d earned it. But this wasn’t the time. I’d grieve later, I knew, and grieve hard, but at the moment, I had to do what I could to avenge Jake’s murder. And, if possible, get my own ass out of trouble. In short, I had an audiotape to find and some very bad people to expose.

I opened my eyes to find Bonz squatting directly across from me. Half of his face was in black shadow, but I could see that he was staring down at his maimed hand again. He shook it, as if he was performing a magic trick and the missing finger would suddenly reappear, reattached, good as new, right where it should be. Then he grunted and dropped his still pinkyless hand into his lap. He looked at me and saw me looking back.

“So what’s it gonna be?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What’re you gonna do now? Run?”

“No. I’m not going to run. You’re going to tell me who killed Jake, and why, and I’m going to make sure they pay a very big price.”

It was hard to tell in the dim light, but it looked like he nodded. Or had one of his twitches.

“Come on, then,” he said as he stood and turned toward the mouth of the pipe.

“Wait a second. I thought you were going to tell me what this is all about.”

“Still have to get new clothes,” he said. “Both of us.”

I looked down at myself. Beneath Bonz’s big, ratty overcoat, I was still wearing tuxedo pants and a bloodstained T-shirt. I’d hardly blend into most crowds. Still, there were obstacles to solving that problem just then.

I said, “Well, seeing as it’s after midnight right now, I doubt we’ll find any stores open. Plus, my wallet is back in my apartment.” That was going to prove to be inconvenient, I realized. I doubted Bonz was wearing a money belt packed with twenties.

“Let’s move.” He began to walk away. I pushed to my feet and followed.

“Where are we going?”

“Shopping.”

“Shopping?”

“I told you. Getting us some clothes.”

I didn’t bother to ask how. “You’ll tell me what I need to know on the way?”

He nodded. I bet no one ever accused him of being chatty. You’d think it was costing him money to speak and he was paying by the word.