Brothers and Bones (22 page)

Bonz’s voice came from a small distance away. “When you’re done window-shopping and calling attention to yourself, why don’t you follow me?”

He was twenty feet away, standing at the entrance to an alley running beside the shop. I hurried over to him and slipped into the alley. I didn’t think anyone saw me.

“Sorry,” I said.

We walked to a small, deserted parking lot at the back of the building. A few windows from neighboring buildings looked down on us, but they were all dark. We’d have to take our chances.

Bonz walked over to the back door of the thrift shop and examined it. There was only one window back here. It was directly above the door and you could see that it tilted outward.

“We’re going in through that window,” Bonz said.

“Why?”

“Door might be alarmed. I doubt that window is.”

“If you’re wrong?”

“We run.”

“Good plan.”

“Boost me up.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Don’t be a pussy. You can hold my weight.” Bonz opened the little canvas tool kit, took out a wrench, and slid it into his back pocket.

I looked around and saw nothing tall enough for Bonz to stand on to help him get through the high window, so I laced my fingers together and he stepped into the support. Then, quickly, with startling agility, he clambered up me and was kneeling on my shoulders. The guy really could move with astonishing speed and grace when he wanted to. Nonetheless, he still weighed over two hundred pounds, every one of which was pressing down onto my shoulders. I grunted and prayed he’d hurry. Though the pressure was on my shoulders, I felt it strongly in my damaged ribs.

“No alarm,” he said. “At least I don’t think so. Watch out.”

There was a crash as Bonz broke the window with, I guess, the wrench. Glass fell into the store. Then there was a tinkling sound as tiny bits of it hit the pavement. Bonz was using the tool to knock out the shards remaining in the window frame.

I said, “We needed to smash a car window with a brick and steal a tool set just so you could use the wrench to smash another window? Couldn’t you have just used the brick on
this
window and left the car alone?”

“Thought we might be able to break in more quietly, picking a lock, something like that. Thought the tools might come in handy. And they did, as it turned out. Broke the glass just fine. Okay, here I go.”

The pressure on my shoulders suddenly increased for a painful moment, then disappeared as Bonz, without a word, pulled himself through the window. I imagined he did a cool midair flip of some kind and landed on cat’s feet inside the door. I heard a deadbolt snap to the side and the door opened. Old Charlie might have balked at entering the shop, knowing he was just compounding his problems, adding to his list of crimes. New Charlie stepped right inside, completing his criminal act of breaking and entering.

“Yeah, no alarm,” Bonz said, looking around. “At least, I didn’t see a panel. I think we’re okay.”

He walked into the heart of the shop. He stopped at one of the several clothing racks in the place and began to search through the garments hanging there.

“Find something your size,” he said.

I passed Aunt Fannie’s electronics section, which consisted of a table holding an old record player, a handheld voice-activated tape recorder, and a dented boom box, and went to another clothing rack, which I flipped through for a few seconds until I realized that I was looking at skirts and blouses. I casually moved to another rack, hoping Bonz hadn’t seen. I held up a man’s Hawaiian shirt covered with little hula dancers and palm trees and wondered if it was my size.

“So who was that in my apartment?” I asked.

“This isn’t the time for talk. We’re stealing here.”

“What,” I asked, “you can’t multitask? Talk
and
steal? Who was he?”

He paused in his browsing and looked at me. I hung the Hawaiian shirt back on the rack—it was pretty ugly, I realized—and stared at him, waiting. He shook his head.

Finally, he said, “His name’s Grossi. They call him Hammer. He’s a sadistic piece of shit and you have no idea how lucky you are to have met him and walked away to talk about it. He has no conscience, no fucking heart, likes to hurt people, and he’s as dangerous a man as I’ve ever met. Knows dozens of ways to kill people, with weapons and his bare hands.” He shook his head. “I should have killed him at your place.” His left eye spasmed involuntarily.

I almost asked why he didn’t, but I had a feeling I knew why, and I had an even stronger feeling that Bonz wouldn’t have wanted to talk about that. So I said, “Grossi? That’s the name of the guy you said—”

“Yeah, that’s right. He’s the motherfucker who tortured me for weeks. Tortured your brother, too.”

And I thought I’d hated the brutally ugly killer before. What I felt for him in that moment was a hatred like none I could have imagined. It roiled in my gut like poison. I found that my hands were shaking.

Grossi? Hammer Grossi? Why hadn’t I ever heard his name? As a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s office, I should have been familiar with all the local major players. But despite my ridiculous memory, I didn’t recall ever hearing of a Hammer Grossi. I asked Bonz why he thought that was.

“I know they used to keep him below the radar,” he said. “Probably still do. He’s their best. Don’t want to lose him to the cops or a rival family or anything, so no one ever talks about him if there’s any chance someone outside the family will hear his name. They never used to contact him by phone in case of a tap. I don’t even think he lives in the city. I think they keep him somewhere else and just bring him in for important jobs.”

“So what’s he do for the mob?” I asked.

Bonz shrugged. “Whatever they want done. Threats, torture, executions, whatever.” He blinked once, violently, involuntarily.

I lifted a red-checked cowboy shirt off a rack, then immediately hung it up again. Two racks over, Bonz had taken off his ratty Harvard sweatshirt and was standing bare-chested, displaying an impressive physique, with hard, sinewy muscles. With respect to those muscles, at least, I couldn’t believe I was looking at a man in his late forties, a man who had spent so many hard years on the street. But there was more. The light spilling in through the front window wasn’t good but I thought I saw marks of some kind, scars maybe, crisscrossing his entire torso, before he slipped on one of Aunt Fannie’s slightly used T-shirts—a tan one.

An obvious question came suddenly to me. “How’d you know my name when you saw me the other day in the subway?”

“Your brother had a picture of you in his wallet. They taped it to the wall of the interrogation room. Made threats about you all the time. Jake kept saying that they couldn’t touch you because the tape would be released if they did. Anyway, I’d seen the picture a bunch of times. Must have remembered it over the years, even in my, uh, condition.”

I watched him tug a light, olive-green sweater over his T-shirt, then move off to a set of shelves a few feet away. I pulled a plain, white, long-sleeved shirt over my head, then found a decent navy-blue sweatshirt with a New England Patriots logo on it that seemed to be my size. It fit fine. I was amazed at how easily I’d slipped from a law-abiding, upstanding member of the Massachusetts legal community to a thief who was guilty of breaking and entering, burglary, and probably a dozen other little crimes I didn’t feel like enumerating in my head. Amazing how facing a murder rap and running for your life can change one’s priorities. I saw a well-worn, waist-length brown leather jacket and shrugged it on. It was a touch tight in the shoulders, but it would do. Sorry about all this, Aunt Fannie.

“What are you, size-eleven shoe?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

He tossed me a pair of Nike sneakers that used to be white but had turned gray. They weren’t in bad shape, though, and they were
so
much more comfortable than my dress shoes, which I dropped into a box of mismatched footwear on the floor. Bonz walked away from the shoe rack, apparently satisfied with the new boots he’d bought with the money he stole from me after saving me from the Chinatown thugs. He grabbed a thin, dark-brown suede jacket from a hanger and pulled it on.

“And the name Wiley?” I asked. “How’d you know that?”

“He called you Charlie most of the time, but when he was…uh, really of out of it…he’d call you Wiley. Usually after I took him back to his room.” He walked over to the cash register and I heard a
ding
, followed by the register drawer sliding open.

“Damn, only eighty bucks.” He paused, then said, “He talked about you all the time then, back in his room, after they’d been…hurting him all day. Kind of babbled, to be honest. What a great guy you are, how you’re this whiz-kid genius, shit like that. He was proud as hell, let me tell you.” I smiled wistfully. Bonz cleared his throat. “He, uh, really loved you.” It was strange to hear the word
love
come out of Bonz’s mouth.

“Right up until they killed him,” I said.

Bonz looked directly at me and said, “Yeah, right up till then.”

And his face became an iron mask. I could tell, somehow I just knew, that the open, sharing Bonz was gone. The man of few words was back.

TWENTY-FOUR

As I drove back toward Boston, outfitted in clothes that, while not very stylish, were pleasingly devoid of Angel’s blood, Bonz said from the passenger seat, “When we get back into the city, we have to dump this car. The cops will be looking for it, not to mention Siracuse’s men.”

I nodded. Frankly, I wouldn’t be sorry to lose it at this point. The engine was coughing like an emphysemic patient and the periodic knocking was driving me nuts.

As we crossed the Charles River again and headed into downtown—eyes widen open for cops—I thought about our situation. The mob found out Jake had come into possession of a tape, one that incriminated Siracuse for…something. They tortured Jake but he wouldn’t give it up. And he told them it would stay hidden as long as nothing happened to me. So they killed him and left me alone. And the tape stayed hidden, like Jake had said. Only now they were after me because Bonz, who they thought might have been dead, and who they feared had gotten some information from Jake about the tape’s whereabouts, had resurfaced and made contact with me. They worried that Bonz either knew where the tape was or had information that would mean something to me and therefore would lead me to the tape. So they set me up for Angel’s murder, telling me that they’d clear it up if I found the tape and gave it to them, along with Bonz, a loose thread they clearly wanted to take scissors to. Their plan was to make Angel’s body disappear and hang onto the evidence implicating me—and the body—to make sure I did as they wanted. But Bonz destroyed that plan when he crashed into my apartment and dragged me out, covered in blood, past at least half a dozen witnesses. Grossi had to chase us, so he didn’t have time to remove Angel’s body.

The evidence against me was strong. Very strong. Practically open-and-shut. They had motive—Angel’s embarrassing attack on me. They’d have the weapon, once Siracuse had it delivered to the cops, if he hadn’t already, along with the shirt they’d kept of mine, covered with Angel’s blood and, undoubtedly, my DNA. And they’d filled my apartment with incriminating things tying ownership of the gun and the sound suppressor to me. I was screwed. Unless…

Unless I found the tape somehow. If I did, I could give it to Siracuse before the went to the cops, and betray Bonz, and hope they’d keep their word that they would toss the gun and destroy my DNA-covered tuxedo shirt, because with those things gone the state would have a much tougher case against me. Of course, the mob keeping its word didn’t seem all that likely. Unless I made a copy of the tape as insurance. But giving in like that, making that deal, letting them get away with Jake’s murder, letting them dick around with my life, didn’t appeal to me. Frankly, neither did handing them Bonz, who’d already been through hell at their hands. He said he’d been kind to my brother, helped him when he could, and that his small acts of kindness had led to his own torture and maiming, his losing his mind for thirteen years—and that was assuming he’d gotten it all back even now, which I wasn’t sure of. No, I knew I couldn’t betray him. So what then?

I still had to find the tape, that’s what. If I could do that, I might be able to prove my innocence to the authorities. Even if I didn’t, even if the evidence against me was just too strong, I still might be able to repay Siracuse for what he did to Jake, for what he did to Bonz, and for what he’d done to me. If it was truly incriminating—and I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t, given the lengths to which Siracuse had gone in his efforts to obtain it—then he might be in serious shit if it came to light.

So, all I had to do was find the tape that Jake had hidden somewhere. And I had no idea how to do that. I turned to Bonz in the passenger seat beside me. His eyes were closed, but I didn’t think he was asleep.

“You said you were with my brother right before he died, that they thought maybe he said something to you about the tape.”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Yeah, but he didn’t.”

My heart sank. “He didn’t say anything at all?”

Bonz was quiet for a moment, then he grunted to himself. I looked over at him. His eyes were open now. He looked pensive. He frowned in deep concentration. He shook his head and I feared for a brief moment that the unbalanced, channel-changing Bonz had returned. But then he said, “You know, I think…yeah, I remember now that he did ask me to tell you something.”

“He did?” My heart, which had sunk, rose again and did a somersault in my chest. “What was it?”

Bonz was still frowning. “I didn’t pay much attention to it, you know? I figured he was just really out of it. And I sure as hell never thought at the time that I’d run into you someday. But Jake must have thought I would, somehow.”

I tried to hide my impatience. “But what did he say, Bonz?”

“I’m trying to remember. It’s not easy. It was right at the very, very end, right before he died. Before they did all this shit to me. Give me a second here.”