Brothers and Bones (20 page)

We left the pipe and walked through an industrial area. I still didn’t know where I was. Bonz obviously knew a side of Boston I’d never seen. We saw no one. A few minutes later we came to a litter-strewn alley between two warehouses. My Corolla was behind the Dumpster, where we’d left it.

With Bonz directing me, I drove us out of the industrial area. Soon after, we’d made our way to the Charles River and across into Charlestown. Even though we were only a mile or two from Boston, I felt better putting even that distance between us and Angel’s killer. On the drive, I tried to pry answers out of Bonz.

“Why Charlestown?” I asked.

“I know a place.”

I waited for more, didn’t get it, then moved on to more important things.

“So who was that at my apartment? Who’s after me? And why?”

Silence but for the growl of my anything-but-smoothly-running engine, and that occasional knocking coming from somewhere, like something was hanging off the bottom of the car and bouncing off the road now and then. I wished then that I’d listened to Jessica and gotten a newer car at some point.

When it became apparent that Bonz wasn’t going to answer my questions, I pressed. “Look at me, Bonz,” I said sharply. He shifted his eyes in my direction, just his eyes. I imagined myself through those eyes. I imagined I looked determined, confident, like a man on a mission, a man not to be underestimated. I might have
just
been imagining all that. I might have looked to Bonz like a scared bunny. But I certainly felt all those things.

“Listen, I have a truckload of questions,” I said, “and I know you have a lot of the answers. For whatever reason, it appears we’re in this together, so it’s time to tell me what the hell’s going on.”

He looked at me for a moment, kind of sideways, then said, “I was just thinking about it all, Charlie,” he said, using my given name for the first time. “How to tell it.”

“Okay,” I said. And then a thought came to me, one that should have come to me sooner. I kept my eyes focused on the road as I said, “Why don’t you start by telling me why you’re suddenly so…well, how is it that you’re able to…I mean, when you used to be a little—”

“You want to know why I don’t seem as crazy as I did.”

I wouldn’t have put it that way. It was exactly what I was thinking, but I wouldn’t have dared to put it that way.

Bonz said, “Like I think I told you in the diner, for a long time my mind was…broken. Hardly knew my own name. Couldn’t think straight. My mind was gone for, it turns out, thirteen years.
Thirteen years
of my life just fucking gone.”

Thirteen years. The same amount of time Jake had been missing.

“I was nuts. I know that. I knew it at the time, too, and knowing made me crazier.”

I thought about the times I’d seen him panhandling, yelling obscenities at strangers, arguing with invisible enemies, chuckling to himself about something he could have heard only in his head.

“Fucking frustrating,” he said. “They say truly crazy people don’t know they’re crazy. Bullshit. I was as crazy as they come and I knew it but couldn’t do a fucking thing about it.”

God, that sounded horrible.

“Every now and then,” Bonz continued in uncharacteristically verbose fashion, “I’d remember something, a piece of my past. I’d think clearly for a moment. But that was rare for me. And then, like I already told you…when I first saw you, well, things started coming together in my mind. Pieces of my past, memories, came
rushing
at me. Like a fucking tidal wave. I couldn’t stop them. It was too much. I thought I was going even crazier. But then things started making more sense. Memories began to fall into the right order. And I started really remembering.”

That Bonz, the man of so few words, was speaking to me like this, opening himself up like this, was remarkable to me.

“I don’t know why, Charlie, but it was seeing your face that started it all. And then there was no stopping it. It took a little time, but large pieces of my mind seemed whole again.” He paused. “Then, tonight, when I saw the guy in your apartment, well, that was almost like the last piece of the puzzle. When I saw him, I…”

Panicked?
Because that’s what it looked like to me.

Bonz finished his thought. “I remembered even more. Terrible things. And I was almost healed. Or maybe as healed as I’ll ever be.”

He fell silent. In the little time I’d known him, Bonz had been a man of very, very few words. I wanted to keep this unprecedented river of information—well, it was more of a brook, I guess—flowing, so I quickly said, “And what happened to you? I mean, thirteen years ago, to make you…like you were?”

He stayed silent. In the dim light of the car, I could see that his eyes had grown cloudy, thunderheads where his irises used to be. Finally, he said, “Later.”

I didn’t know whether he was trying dam up the brook of information completely, or whether he simply wanted to hold off on telling me specifically about what happened to him until later. Two minutes ticked by in silence. Then I could wait no longer.

“Is Carmen Siracuse responsible for Jake’s death.”

Bonz hesitated before answering. “In the end, yeah.”

I knew it. I goddamned knew it. I’d known it for thirteen years. I’d never had confirmation, of course, never been able to find a shred of evidence, but I’d always known it. And I was right after all. But being right didn’t make me feel any better. Siracuse, that fat, lying sack of— “Hold on,” I said. “How do you know that? How do you any of this?”

He said nothing.

“Answer me!”

Bonz’s eyes slid my way. Have I mentioned how scary his eyes could be?

“Please,” I added.

He appeared to be considering how much to tell me. “I worked for Uncle Carmen. Muscle. Never killed anybody for him, nothing like that, but I put the screws to a few people. They were all lowlifes anyway, stupid bastards, shouldn’t have been dealing with Siracuse in the first place. Fuck ’em.” His eye twitched suddenly, violently, as if a bug flying full-speed had bounced off of it.

I wasn’t sure whether to believe that he’d never whacked anyone, but I chose to. It made me a tiny bit less nervous to be around him that way.

“Wait,” I said. “Back up a second. What the hell did you mean that Siracuse was responsible for Jake’s death ‘in the end’?”

Bonz paused again, like he seemed to do before every answer he gave, before every sentence he spoke on that drive. He really didn’t like to talk.

“They grabbed Jake,” he said.

“Grabbed him? You mean they kidnapped him?”

He nodded.

“But why? What for?”

“To question him.”

“About what?” I added in exasperation, “Jesus, Bonz, can’t you be a little more forthcoming here?”

He ignored my tone. “They wanted to know about a tape.”

“An audiotape,” I said and Bonz nodded. “What’s on it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“No.”

He clammed up again. The guy offered up nothing easily. You’d think he was giving me chunks of his flesh rather than information. Getting anything out of him was like pulling teeth—only not nice, clean oral surgery. No, it was like I was sitting on his chest with a pair of pliers, twisting and yanking on impacted molars. It took all my experience questioning hostile witnesses in court to drag the story out of him. Eventually, though, I think I got most of it.

What I learned was that there existed a tape of a conversation. Someone—Bonz didn’t know who—had, for years, blackmailed Carmen Siracuse with it. Jesus. Carmen Siracuse himself! The head of the Italian Mafia in Boston. Whoever it was, the guy’s balls must have been as big as watermelons and hard as titanium. But good old Uncle Carmen never found out who he was. He paid as instructed. Then, apparently, Jake started asking questions around town, questions that got back to Siracuse, questions that told the Mafia scumbag that Jake knew his secret, the secret that lived on that tape. So they kidnapped Jake and questioned him.

“Questioned him?” I asked. “Do you mean torture?”

Bonz paused, then nodded.

I felt sick. I wanted to pull the car over and throw up. Dear God, not my sweet brother. Not Jake.

Bonz wouldn’t go into details, but I learned—through considerable effort—that they held Jake for nearly two weeks, questioning him in brutal fashion.

“Why…why so long?” I asked.

“It took time, I guess. They needed to know exactly what he knew. Who else he’d told. Most importantly, whether he had the tape and, if so, what he did with it.” For a few seconds there, it had practically been a geyser of information gushing out of Bonz. Then he fell silent again, waiting for me to dig back in with my pliers.

Apparently, Jake eventually talked. He didn’t tell them everything they wanted to know, it seems, but he talked. He told them that he’d received a call someone who claimed to have a tape that would incriminate Siracuse. The guy apparently was dying of throat cancer, had only days to live, and didn’t want to find himself at the Pearly Gates with the tape still in his back pocket. He wanted the world to know what was on it. So he bought a newspaper, saw Jake’s byline on some investigative piece, and called him. Gave Jake the tape just before he died. And unfortunately, instead of going right to the cops, Jake looked into things on his own for a little while, making sure he had all the facts, that this wasn’t a put-on. He was probably angling for the big story. Anyway, he tried to be discreet. He wasn’t discreet enough. Siracuse found out and had him picked up. And the torture began. Almost two weeks of it. Jesus Christ.

“So let me guess,” I said. “They eventually figured they wouldn’t get the tape from him so they took their chances that he’d told no one and they killed him?”

“Not really.” Bonz went on to tell me—or rather, I went on to painfully extract from him—that Jake had admitted under interrogation that he hadn’t told anyone else about what he’d learned. And that would have been the end of it, and the end of Jake, but for the fact that, near the end of a long torture session one day, after a week of interrogation, Jake let slip that he’d taken out an insurance policy. He’d done something with the tape, something to ensure his safety. And he wouldn’t tell them precisely what.

“No matter what they did to him, Charlie,” Bonz said, “and I hate to say it, but they did things that would have broken almost anybody else…well, he wouldn’t tell them where the tape was.”

I closed my eyes but I couldn’t stop my mind from showing me pictures, images of what I imagined Jake had endured. Tied to a chair. Fists. Implements. Pain. Again, I wanted to pull over and puke, but while that might have emptied my stomach, it wouldn’t have cleared my head of the images Bonz and my imagination had teamed up to put there.

Bonz continued. “Here’s the thing. Jake told them that he had what he called a ‘brilliant plan’ in place—” I heard quotation marks in Bonz’s voice “—and if anything happened to him—and to
you
, Charlie—then soon after, the tape and his notes would automatically come to light. It couldn’t be stopped.”

I looked away from the road, at Bonz’s dark face. “Me?”

“Yeah, you. I thought he might be bluffing, just to protect you, but I didn’t know for sure, and neither did they. He had to know that they’d come for you after he was out of the picture, in case he’d given the tape to you. But Jake said he had this plan in place that would ensure the tape’s disclosure if anything happened to you, and they couldn’t take any chances.”

“His plan would kick in if something happened to the both of us?”

Bonz was quiet. I looked over and saw him staring down at his maimed hand again. His head twitched once, then again.

“Bonz?”

He blinked and looked up. “Yeah, he figured that would prove it was mob-related. The odds were against you both disappearing or turning up dead from natural causes. So if that happened it would trigger the plan and the tape would be revealed. At least that’s what your brother said.”

“And what was the plan?” I asked.

“No idea. Your brother just said it was brilliant. They never got the details out of him. I assumed he gave the tape to a lawyer somewhere, or maybe to a fellow reporter, with instructions to release it if anything happened to both you.”

“They believed him? About this brilliant plan?”

“Well,” Bonz said, “he first mentioned it under…uh, strong persuasion. And they went at him for days on that fact alone. In the end, I guess they figured he couldn’t have been lying, not with what they were doing to him.”

I shuddered. “And was he lying?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Smart if he was. Protected you. He knew he was a goner, probably, and the tape hadn’t come out in public during the time they had him, so he couldn’t say the plan was to reveal it if he alone disappeared.”

I said, “And if he said it would only be revealed if something happened to me alone, they’d never believe that—that he wouldn’t bother to protect himself at all. So he told them the trigger was something happening to both of us. Clever. If he was lying, of course, and there’s actually no plan.”

I realized that Siracuse couldn’t take the chance that Jake was telling the truth and, after they had Jake, and the tape didn’t make its way to the authorities or the media, and as more time went by with me going on with my life and the tape staying hidden, they probably thought maybe, just maybe, Jake
had
been telling the truth. I thought about Jake and the possibility that he’d made up the story of his “brilliant plan.” And them torturing him mercilessly about it. That meant, after he’d already suffered untold agony, he endured several days more of it just to keep me safe. Even after what he’d been through, he was protecting me. I rubbed wetness from my eye. I wanted to just let myself cry. Not long ago I might have taken the time to do just that. But I’d changed. While Old Charlie might have indulged in a few minutes of proper grief, New Charlie had to prepare himself for a mission. He had to be strong now. There would be time for proper tears later.

I looked at Bonz. He knew a lot about all this, more than I’d expected him to. “Tell me again how you know all this.”