Howard Shrier - Boston Cream

I looked at Jenn, expecting to see relief, but she was looking at Lesley McConnell, her own eyes flooded. She said, “I’ll do it.”

At least three people in the room, me included, said, “What!”

“I want to do it,” she said.

I said, “Jenn, you can’t.”

“He’s right,” she said. “I’m a big strong farm girl from southern Ontario. Never been sick a day in my life. I’ve always taken it for granted and now I don’t.”

“You can’t decide this on the spot.”

“I was as good as dead an hour ago.”

“Ms.-God, I don’t even know your name,” Lesley said.

“Jenn Raudsepp.”

“Well, Ms. Raudsepp. Jenn. It’s an incredible thing for you to say, especially after what you’ve been through. But you can’t make a decision like this on the spur of the moment.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve had no time to think-”

“If I do I might change my mind.”

“Which is why you should.”

“If I may interrupt this noble gesture for a moment,” Stayner said. “What you’re contemplating is impossible anyway. We don’t know a thing about tissue or antigen matches. And this room is beyond non-sterile now. We’d be risking both of your lives.”

“Then I’ll come back to Boston,” Jenn said.

“You shouldn’t have to,” he said. “George Riklitis has already been found to be a perfect match for Mrs. McConnell, and has already agreed to be her donor. Only now we’ll arrange for it to be done at the hospital, Marc, totally above board, within the week. Your wife will get her kidney, I promise you. And the very best of aftercare. Beyond that, my advice as her doctor is to allow us all to pack up and get the fuck out of here.”

The McConnells left first; they had the most to lose if the place was raided. The congressman wouldn’t look at me or shake my hand, wouldn’t even look at Jenn, but Lesley threw her thin arms around Jenn and held her and whispered her thanks more than once before going off to change her clothes. I told McConnell to wipe down everything he and his wife might have touched.

Stayner left next, leaving his team to clean up without him. The rest of them got to work packing up their equipment. Ryan and I used alcohol wipes on all the surfaces of the locker room where Frank and the team members had changed.

When we were done, Ryan asked Jenn to stay with Frank and motioned me out into the hall. “How many are still alive?”

“Two,” I said. “The guy on the loading dock, Denny-”

“Don’t tell me his name.”

“And the one in the trunk.”

“We can’t leave them to talk to the cops.”

“They don’t strike me as big talkers.”

“With all these bodies, they’ll talk. The one with the leg, he knows your name, where you’re from. And I got a problem with that, since it could lead back to me. And I am not going to put my family at risk so two of Daggett’s fuckheads can come after them.”

“The guy on the dock only saw me with a mask on. And he never saw you.”

“Bet he still knows your name. Look, I did everything you asked, Jonah. I dropped everything and came down to help you. I stood with you. I fought with you to get Jenn back. I killed again. And again.” He pushed past me and went out toward the loading dock. I wouldn’t hear the silenced weapon from where I stood. But I knew the spitting sound would echo in my mind long after it died out.

Two nurses trudged out into the hall weighed down by large cases, followed by James Reimer and the anesthesiologist, similarly encumbered. I had to flatten against the wall to let them all pass. Then I saw Frank tottering out of the room, Jenn beside him with a hand at his back. He didn’t look steady but he was walking under his own steam, keeping one hand against the wall for support.

“What do we do with Victor?” he asked.

“He has to stay here.”

“No. No way.”

“Anywhere you take him, any hospital, any funeral home, you’d have to explain the gunshots.”

He gave me a long look, nothing moving in his face, before saying, “He’s my brother. I’m not leaving him here with the people who killed him.”

“Where would we take him?”

“Just get him in the car. I have a place.”

When Ryan came back in, his gun tucked away, he wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I told him Frank’s plan. He shrugged and said, “Fine.” We went back to the foyer and lifted Victor’s body by the wrists and ankles onto a spare bedsheet we’d found in the surgical suite. We carried him out and laid him gently into Riklitis’s trunk and eased it closed. Then I drove Frank and Jenn around to the front and parked well away from the building on the grass near the gate while Ryan went back inside Halladay’s once last time to carry out the final act of a grievous night.

He was gone about three minutes. Then he came jogging out, got into the passenger side and said, “All the chemicals in that place, we have about half a minute before it goes up.”

Go up it did, not much more than thirty seconds later, a fireball that topped about four storeys and ensured that firefighters, not police, would be the first responders. Fingerprints and forensic traces would be hard to collect, thanks to Ryan’s conjuring. No bodies would be identified until we were well out of the country. They would all be ashes, just like Harinder Patel and whoever else had run afoul of Sean Daggett.

To our surprise, the Charger was still in the lot of the cemetery where we had left it, neither ticketed nor towed. Jenn and I got in the front; Ryan took the wheel of Riklitis’s car and led the way back to Jamaica Pond, where we would help Frank slip Victor’s body into the cold black water stocked with all the fish he had named.

Frank insisted he was okay to drive Riklitis’s car home from Jamaica Pond.

“You got shot in the head,” I said.

“This is Boston. Who the fuck’s gonna notice?”

Off he went with a short blast of his horn. Ryan drove Jenn and me back to our hotel and went off to see if Lugo would buy the guns back at a discount. “We can’t take them home,” he said, “and I could use some of that cash back. Plus I hate to waste good weapons.”

Jenn didn’t want me to rent another room for her. “I can’t be alone,” she said. The reality of what had happened to her, and all around her, was sinking in. She started to shake and cry again as soon as we were by ourselves. She knew bad things had happened to her. “What if the fucker didn’t use a condom?” she cried. I ran a hot bath for her, waited until she got in, ran down the hall to get ice, and poured two bottles of vodka out of the mini-bar over some cubes in a water glass. While she soaked and drank and cried over the phone to her partner, Sierra, I sat just outside the bathroom with my phone, listening to a tirade that Mike Gianelli had left on my voice mail.

“You useless bastard,” he said. “You cowardly piece of shit. I told you David Fine was dead and did you even have the decency to call me back? I’ve had his father in my office the last two hours, crying his fucking eyes out, wondering where the hell you are and what the hell you’ve been doing all this time he’s been paying you. Not only that, one of David’s co-workers also turned up dead, a lab tech at Sinai. Beaten to death and dumped in a park. The Boston PD is handling that one, but there’s all kinds of things I’d like to ask you if you have the nerve to call. Only I don’t think you do. Man, I had you wrong. I thought you were better than this. I thought you were stand-up. Ron Fine sure didn’t get his money’s worth when he hired you.”

Who said he had?

The next message was from Ron himself, asking me to call him at the Marriott at Copley Place. “The police got me a room here,” he said. “They have a corporate rate for-for families of victims of crime.”