Brothers and Bones (40 page)

“Hello?”

“Hello, Charlie.” It was Lippincott’s voice. “Don’t hang up,” he said quickly. He must have gotten this number from Jessica. I hadn’t had time to call her again to try to convince her that her father was somehow dirty. And when he asked her if we’d been in contact, she probably gave him the number, hoping he’d have more success talking me into turning myself in than she’d had.

Lippincott said, “If Mr. Bonzetti is there with you right now, pretend this call is for the person from whom you stole that phone.”

“Why should I?”

“Charlie, I advise you to listen to me.”

“I advise you to stick whatever phone you’re holding up your ass.” It felt strange to be speaking to Lippincott like that. And pretty good, actually.

“Charlie, I don’t want Bonzetti to become suspicious. I just want to tell you that we haven’t yet removed you from the office’s web-based e-mail system.”

“So?”

“There’s an e-mail waiting for you. Something you need to see. I assume you can get access to a computer.”

“You think I’m stupid? You want me to sign on to a computer somewhere, log into our e-mail system, and you guys track me to my location. You might even be pinpointing where I am during this call.”

“Then hang up. Right now. But you really should check your e-mail. And you definitely shouldn’t tr—”

I took his advice, at least with respect to the part about hanging up.

“Charlie?” Bonz called from the other room. His mouth sounded full again and I could only assume he was into his second sandwich. “How’s it going in there?”

“Uh, fine. Just fine. A few more minutes.”

What would really be the harm in checking my e-mail? They couldn’t lock onto our location in the amount of time it took to read a single e-mail. Could they? I really doubted it.

I opened a new screen and typed the address for the U.S. Attorney’s web-based e-mail site into the browser and waited for the little hourglass icon to disappear. Finally, the Department of Justice’s seal appeared—an eagle with arrows clutched in one claw and a branch of some kind in the other, perched on a shield decorated with stars and stripes in the usual patriotic, tricolored scheme—and I navigated to our e-mail system. I entered my user name and password and found eighty-one new e-mails waiting for me. I scanned the “re:” lines. The first half or so seemed to deal with legal matters, the Redekov trial chief among them. Most of the remaining ones had subject lines like “Holy cow, Charlie!” or “What happened?” or “Are you okay?” or “Did you kill him?” My eyes fell to the most recent e-mail. It was from Andrew Lippincott. The subject line read, “Who to trust?” I thought that, grammatically speaking, it probably should have read “
Whom
to trust?” and I got a tiny little kick out of Lippincott’s unprecedented grammatical error. If, in fact, I was right, which I wasn’t positive about.

I hung the cursor over the e-mail and hesitated, wondering again if by clicking on it I would lead Siracuse right to our door. But I had to see it, whatever it was. I double-clicked on the e-mail, knowing I was playing right into Lippincott’s hands, and it opened. The text read simply, “Watch this. You know how to reach me.”

Included in the e-mail was a hyperlink to a video file stored somewhere out there on the Internet. Lippincott clearly wanted me to watch it. What could be on it? Whatever it was, did I want to see it? Could I even stop myself? The answer to the final question turned out to be negative.

I clicked on the hyperlink and, a moment later, a video viewing box popped onto the screen. At the bottom of the box were buttons like those on a DVD player—pause, play, stop, fast forward, rewind. Another moment passed before an image appeared in the box. It was black and white and slightly grainy, but it was clear enough.

The video showed a room with cinder-block walls and no visible windows. A basement, probably. A table sat near the center of the room. On it were various objects, some sharp, some blunt—lead pipes, small clubs, shiny metal things with nasty-looking pointed ends. The camera that had taken the video seemed to have been placed near the ceiling in one corner of the room. All of this registered in a blink before my eyes were drawn to two figures in the middle of the room. One figure, a man, was sitting in a straight-backed chair. His arms hung limp at his sides. His face was plainly visible to the camera. It was horribly bruised. A line of blood ran from his nose and over his lips, which were open, his lower jaw hanging slack. His eyes were glassy. With a jolt the intensity of a lightning strike, I realized the battered face belonged to my brother, Jake. The room spun. Not on the computer screen, but the one in which I was sitting. Blood pounded in my ears. An ache pounded my heart. I wanted to cry. I cried.

On the screen, Jake stared dully ahead. The other figure on the video stood to one side of him, his back to the camera. He seemed to be staring down at the implements on the table. He walked in front of my brother. No sound accompanied the video, but it looked like he might have said something to Jake. Then he paced back toward the table, his eyes never leaving Jake, who shook his head slowly, eyes half closed. Then the man took two fast steps forward, grabbed Jake by his bloodstained shirt, and shook him. And continued to shake him. And my brother continued to stare vacantly, his eyes lolling lazily in their sockets. And my head continued to pound, my heart to ache.

After a few seconds, my brother’s lips seemed to move. A moment later, the other man let go of Jake’s shirt and took hold of my brother’s head, one hand on each side, paused, then gave a sudden, cruel twist. Jake’s head snapped violently up and to the side, then flopped, rag doll–like, to his chest at a sickening, unnatural angle.

The lightning bolt struck again, hitting me right in my heart. I wanted to scream.

My brother slumped in the chair, dead, dead in a cinder-block room, in a cold, windowless room, murdered by the man in front of him, who had held his head, twisted his head, broken his neck, killing my brother, killing me thirteen years later.

I nearly vomited.

The man on the screen turned from Jake’s body and walked toward his left, presumably toward a door off-screen. As he walked, he finally turned his head so his face was visible to the camera. And the video ended. The image froze with the face of the killer—my brother’s killer—crystal clear on the screen.

It was Bonz.

FORTY-THREE

From the computer screen stared the black-and-white face of Bonzetti, who saved my life—or maybe only claimed to, it occurred to me—with whom I had dined and rested, stolen and fought, who’d watched my back as I’d tried my best to watch his, who said he’d been a comfort to my brother…Bonzetti, who killed the most important person in the world to me.

Bonz’s face was different than the one I knew, pristine, as scar-free as when he entered this world, his nose good and straight. His hair was short and slicked back. He had no beard or mustache. But though the face was different, it was easy to recognize. I wished I could reach through the computer screen, across the Internet, across the years, and pulverize that face beyond recognition, smash it into worse shape than it was now in. He lied to me. He killed my brother and lied to me about it.

I stalked around the partition and into the living room. My eyes barely registered the bound figures, one on the floor, unconscious, the other sitting on the couch. Bonz was in the kitchen area, standing at the counter, stuffing his face.

Without really thinking about what I was doing, driven forward by anger and hate so hot I felt it searing my guts, I crossed the room in long strides, grabbed Bonz by the shoulder, spun him around, and slammed my fist into his nose.

As I said, I hadn’t thought things through very clearly, but as I’d marched across the room, facts and questions clawed at my mind at once, fighting for attention. Bonz was a tough customer. The toughest I’d ever seen. Or heard of. Or watched in action movies. And that was an understatement. He’d probably kill me. But if he’d wanted to kill me, he could have done so already. No, he wanted me to find the tape. Probably for Siracuse. He was still working for the mob, despite what they’d done to him. Maybe they’d promised to make him rich and that was enough incentive for him to push aside thoughts of revenge. As I charged through the red fog clouding my vision, I knew, somewhere deep in my mind, that if Bonz took me down now, I’d never find Jake’s tape, never find the answers, never expose Siracuse’s and Lippincott’s secret, never expose Bonz’s act of murder. Everyone would get away with everything.

But could I leave Jake’s murder unavenged? That’s the question that had clawed its way to the top of the heap. So despite some part of my brain telling me to run, to get away, to search for the tape, to find it, to bring them all crashing to the ground, to burn each and every one of them, my heart told me to grab the knife off the counter and shove it into Bonz’s throat.

But, as I said, I hit him first. As I’ve also said, I hadn’t had much real experience hitting people to date. I was unarmed. And unhinged. For a brief, crucial moment I forgot that Bonz was a machine without mercy. I forgot I’d seen him knock out Grossi with a vicious roundhouse in my apartment, and later bite off Grossi’s ear. I forgot I’d lain on the ground nearly unconscious watching him prevail over four thugs in Chinatown. And I forgot that my ribs were badly bruised and hurt every time I swung my arms. I forgot all those things as I punched Bonz as hard as I could in his face. Miraculously, the blow seemed to stun him, which absolutely stunned me. He stumbled back against the counter, without a hint of his almost unnatural agility. My thoughts were nothing but animal instinct—strike, hurt, and, yes, kill. I rained a storm of punches on Bonz’s face, ignoring the terrible, grinding-glass pain in my ribs. Somewhere in my brain was the knowledge that Bonz had a gun on him somewhere, but I focused on his face, which I kept battering. Every time I connected with my right hand, which I’d used for my initial blow, I wanted to scream. I wondered fleetingly if I’d broken it. If so, I hoped I’d have the chance to break my other hand, too, while also breaking every bone in Bonz’s face.

I didn’t say a word. I think I screamed a war cry of some kind, though. Bonz didn’t speak either. It would have been difficult for him, because one or the other of my fists was always in his mouth.

I’d hurt him, I thought. I’d actually hurt him. I knew I had to keep whaling away without pause if I was to have any chance of taking him out completely before he regained his senses.

I never saw the blow coming. I never knew what hit me. Fist? Elbow? Foot? Knee? No idea. I simply felt an explosion in my brain, one that turned out all the lights.

FORTY-FOUR

I was dreaming again. And, again, I knew I was. Because Jake is dead, I remembered that, yet there he was, twenty feet in front of me, standing on the altar at Saint John’s, smiling. I was walking up the aisle toward him.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I’m just Jake,” he said.

Suddenly, Bonz materialized out of the darkness behind him. I tried to scream but no sound came out. I was choking on my warning, which felt thick and dry and scratchy in my throat. I couldn’t breathe. Jake smiled on, until Bonz’s hands gripped the sides of his head and twisted, twisted sharply, and a
crack
exploded through the dark, empty church like a gunshot. Jake’s smile faded and his head fell bonelessly to the side. He should have collapsed on the altar, but he didn’t. He just stood there, his head hanging to the side, but his eyes, which somehow still had life in them, though just barely, were looking up, up at me, looking at me with disappointment, like I’d failed him, like I’d let him die.

I knew it was a dream and I badly wanted it to end.

Mercifully, an alarm clock’s ringing woke me up. I didn’t feel like opening my eyes just yet, though. The ringing continued. It was a strange ring, more of humming, really. Actually, it was a throbbing ring. It wasn’t an alarm clock, I realized. The ringing-throbbing-humming was in my head.

I opened my eyes. I’m not sure I’d ever accomplished a task so difficult. The pulsing in my skull pounded to the rhythm of the blood pumping through my veins.

I raised my head and let a wave of dizziness wash over me, then recede out to sea. I was in a big room. Where?

Something wasn’t right. I wasn’t lying in bed. I was sitting up. In a chair. In the center of the room. I was thirsty. I wanted a drink. I stood up to get myself a drink of water.

But I didn’t. I tried but I couldn’t move my legs. Or my arms, which were behind my back. My wrists were bound together, it seemed. I looked down. I was sitting in a chair. Silver duct tape encircled my torso. My ankles seemed to be taped to the chair legs.

I remembered. I’d attacked Bonz. I should have been cooler, tried to slip Bonz’s gun from his pocket, pointed it at him, and made him answer my questions. Then kill him, if that’s what I really wanted to do. But I’d attacked him with nothing more than my untrained, untried fists. Stupid. And I had a feeling I was going to pay for my stupidity.

Was Bonz still working for the mob? I didn’t know. Was he dangerous? Yes. Did he already kill my brother? Yes. Did he want to kill me? Well, if he hadn’t when he woke up this morning, he probably did now. He had me taped to a chair for some reason.

I closed my eyes. Damn it, wasn’t there
anything
I could count on in my life to be what I thought it was. I was tired of the dominoes falling one after another. First Angel, then the private detectives following me for thirteen years, then Fielding, followed by Lippincott, and now Bonz, whom I had trusted with my life, who I thought had befriended Jake and become the only light in his final, dark days, who, it turned out, had murdered my brother. And now might murder me, though I thought it more likely he’d deliver me to Uncle Carmen. If I was lucky, he wouldn’t torture me first. The only thing in my life that still any chance at all to be what I thought it was, what I’d hoped it would be, was Jessica. And, I hated to admit, there was still that seed of doubt about her deep down in the soil of my mind. I didn’t want it to be there, I felt disloyal with it there, but there it was. I simply didn’t know what to believe about anything anymore, least of all whether I even needed to be worrying about any of this, seeing as I might soon be in the hands of the mob and, once they learned whatever they needed to know, Grossi would probably pound a three-inch nail into my forehead and leave me in a Dumpster somewhere.