Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“Killing,” I said.

“That’d be my guess,” she said.

“So,” Oscar said, “if he’s been forced to take a vacation for twenty years—”

“No way he’d make it,” Devin said. “No fucking way.”

“But he hasn’t been calling attention to his kills,” Bolton said.

Angie lifted a stack of flyers. “Until now.”

“He’s been killing kids,” I said.

“For twenty years,” Angie said.

Erdham came in at ten to report that a man wearing a cowboy hat and driving a stolen red Jeep Cherokee had blown a red light at an intersection on Wollaston Beach. Quincy Police had given chase and lost him on a steep curve of 3A in Weymouth, which he maneuvered and they didn’t.

“Chasing a fucking Jeep on a curve?” Devin said in disbelief. “These Mario Andrettis slide out, but a somersault machine like a Cherokee holds the curve?”

“That’s the size of it. Last seen heading south over the bridge by the old naval yard.”

“What time was that?” Bolton said.

Erdham checked his notes. “Nine thirty-five on Wollaston. Nine forty-four when they lost him.”

“Anything else?” Bolton said.

“Yeah,” Erdham said slowly, looking at me.

“What?”

“Mallon?”

Fields stepped into the kitchen holding a stack of small tape recorders and at least fifty feet of coaxial cable.

“What’s that?” Bolton said.

“He bugged the entire apartment,” Fields said, refusing to look at me. “The recorders were fastened by electrical tape to the underside of the landlord’s porch. No tapes inside. The cables fed into a junction port up on the roof, mixed in with the cable TV and electrical and phone lines.

He ran the cables down the side of the house with the rest of the wires and you’d never notice unless you were looking for it.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

Fields gave me an apologetic shake of his head. “’Fraid not. By the amount of dust and mildew I found on these cables, I’d say he’s been listening to everything going on inside your apartment for at least a week.” He shrugged. “Maybe more.”

26

“Why didn’t he take off the cowboy hat?” I said as we drove back to Angie’s.

I’d left my apartment behind gratefully. Currently it was filled with technicians and cops stampeding around, ripping up the floorboards, covering it in a cloud of fingerprint dust. One bug was found in the living room baseboard, another attached to the underside of my bedroom dresser, a third sewed into the kitchen curtain.

I was trying to distract myself from the deep incision made by my total lack of privacy, and that’s when I fixated on the cowboy hat.

“What?” Devin said.

“Why was he still wearing the cowboy hat when he blew the light in Wollaston?”

“He forgot to take it off,” Oscar said.

“If he was from Texas or Wyoming,” I said, “I’d say okay. But he’s Brockton boy. He’s going to be aware of a cowboy hat on his head while he drives. He knows there’re Feds after him. He’s got to know that once we found the eyes we’d figure he was impersonating Lyle.”

“Yet he’s still wearing the hat,” Angie said.

“He’s laughing at us,” Devin said after a moment. “He’s letting us know we’re not good enough to get him.”

“What a guy,” Oscar said. “What a swell fucking guy.”

Bolton had his agents stashed in the apartments on either side of Phil and in the Livoskis’ house across from

Angie’s house and the McKays’ behind it. Both families had been paid well for the imposition and put up downtown at the Marriott, but even so, Angie called them both and apologized for the inconvenience.

She hung up and took a shower while I sat in the dining room at her dusty table with the light off and the shades drawn. Oscar and Devin were in a car down the street and they’d left two walkie-talkies behind. They sat on the table in front of me, hard and square, and their twin silhouettes looked like transmitters to another galaxy in the soft dark.

When Angie came out of the shower, she wore a gray Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School T-shirt and red flannel shorts that swam around her thighs. Her hair was wet and she looked tiny as she placed ashtray and cigarettes on the table and handed me a Coke.

She lit a cigarette. Through the flame I had a momentary glimpse of how drawn and afraid her face was.

“It’ll be okay,” I said.

She shrugged. “Yeah.”

“They’ll get him before he ever comes near this place.”

Another shrug. “Yeah.”

“Ange, he won’t get to you.”

“His batting average has been pretty good so far.”

“We’re very good at protecting people, Ange. We can protect each other, I think.”

She exhaled a missile of smoke over my head. “Tell that to Jason Warren.”

I put my hand on hers. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with when we pulled out of the Warren case. We do now.”

“Patrick, he got into your place pretty easily.”

I wasn’t prepared to even think about that right now. The violation I’d been living with since Fields held up those tape recorders was total and ugly.

I said, “My place didn’t have fifty agents—”

Her hand turned under mine so that our palms met and she tightened her fingers around my wrist. “He’s beyond reason,” she said. “Evandro. He’s…nothing like we’ve ever dealt with. He’s not a person, he’s a force, and I think if he wants me bad enough, he’ll get to me.”

She sucked hard on her cigarette; the coal flared and I could see red pockets under her eyes.

“He won’t—”

“Sssh,” she said and removed her hand from mine. She stubbed out the cigarette and cleared her throat. “I don’t want to sound like a wimp here or the pathetic little woman, but I need to hold someone now and I…”

I came out of my chair and knelt between her legs and she wrapped her arms around me and pressed the side of her face against mine and dug her fingers into my back.

Her voice was a warm whisper in my ear. “If he should kill me, Patrick—”

“I won’t—”

“If he should, you have to promise me something.”