Dennis Lehane - Moonlight Mile

“Don’t call her my mother, if you please.”

“Fine. No due process for Helene. No representation of her side of the story. Nothing.”

“My uncle Lionel had watched Helene ‘raise’ me, for lack of a better word, for four years. I’d say she was the beneficiary of four years of due process and due diligence on his watch.”

“Then he should have filed charges with DCF and asked a court for the right to raise you. It worked for Kurt Cobain’s sister, and she went up against a celebrity with money.”

She nodded. “Nice. When it comes to-what’d you call it?-societal ethics versus situational ones, Patrick Kenzie invokes the memory of Kurt Cobain to represent the interests of the state.”

Ouch. Direct hit.

Amanda leaned forward. “Because here’s what I heard about you many years later-I heard that the child molester you killed while you were looking for me? What was his name?”

“Corwin Earle.”

“Right. I heard-from impeccable sources-that he didn’t have a weapon when you shot him. That he posed no direct threat to you.” She sipped her tea. “And you shot him dead. Shot him in the back, wasn’t it?”

“The back of the neck, actually. And his hand was touching a weapon, technically speaking.”

“Technically speaking. So, you come upon a child molester who poses no direct threat to you, at least not by the state’s definition if they had investigated very hard, and you deal with this by firing one hell of a situational ethic into the back of his head.” She raised her cup to me. “Well done. I’d clap, but I don’t want to wake the baby.”

We sat in silence for a bit and she never took her eyes off me. Her self-possession was, quite frankly, a bit scary. It definitely didn’t fill me with feelings of warmth. And yet, I liked her. I liked that the world had given her a raw deal and she’d dealt with it by playing the world’s game right up to the point where she raised her middle finger to it and walked away from the whole sham. I liked that she refused to wallow in self-pity. I liked that she seemed incapable of asking for anyone’s approval.

“You’ll never give that baby up, will you?”

“They could break every bone in my body, and I’d continue fighting them with whatever muscle I got left. Cut out my tongue or I’ll never stop screaming with it. And if they lose sight of me for one second, I’ll sink my teeth into their eyes.”

“Like I said, you’ll never give up that baby, will you, Amanda?”

“And you?” She smiled. “You would never let me fight the fight alone, would you, Patrick?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But I’m not leaving Sophie out there to die or be shipped to the basement harem of some emir in Dubai.”

“Okay.”

“But Yefim’s going to want a baby.”

“We might be able to stall him on that if he gets the cross.”

“Yeah, but he won’t give us Sophie. He’ll just let us live another day.”

“That twit.”

“Who?”

“Sophie. You know I sent her to Vancouver right after, well, after-”

“Dre told me all about the bloodbath with Timur in the birthing room.”

“Ah. Yeah, so after that, I send Sophie to Vancouver with impeccable paperwork. I mean, flawless. The kind people pay six figures for. I rebirthed her.”

“But the new birth canal led right back to the Russian mob.”

“Yeah.”

I watched her for a bit, looking for some kind of uncertainty, even a hair of it, to creep into those placid eyes. But it never happened.

“Are you ready-I mean, really ready-to give up all you’re giving up here?”

“What am I giving up?” she asked. “You mean, like, Harvard and all that?”

“For starters.”

She widened her eyes at me. “I’ve got five ironclad identities. One of them, by the way, is already enrolled in Harvard next year. And one is enrolled in Brown. I haven’t decided which one I want yet. A real degree from either of those schools, or any school for that matter, is no better than a fake one. And in some cases, it’s worse because it’s less malleable. There’s an eighth continent now, Patrick. It’s accessed by a keyboard. You can paint the sky, rewrite the rules of travel, do whatever you want. No boundaries and no border wars because very few people even know how to find this continent. I do. Some other people I’ve met do. The rest of you remain here.” She leaned forward. “So, yes, playing by your rules, I’m Amanda McCready, an about-to-turn-seventeen high school dropout. According to my rules, though, Amanda McCready is just one card in a thick deck. Look at it like-”

She pushed back her chair, her eyes on the window that faced the street. She grabbed the bag at her feet and tossed it onto the table. I followed her gaze and saw a car out front, one that hadn’t been there a minute before.

“Who is it?”

She didn’t answer. She dumped her leather bag on the dining-room table and pulled out of the pile two sets of the weirdest-looking handcuffs I’d ever seen. There was no chain between the cuffs. The base of each cuff met the base of the other. They were encased in hard black plastic. One cuff was standard size. On the other end, it was tiny. Small enough to cuff a bird maybe.

Or a baby.

“What the fuck are those?” I crossed the dining room and threw the lock on the front door.

“Don’t curse in front of the baby.”

The top of someone’s head passed beneath the dining-room window.

“Fine. What the heck are those?”

“High-security rigid handcuffs.” Amanda struggled into her Björn. “They use them to transport terrorists on planes. I had these modified. They kick ass, right?”

“They’re cool,” I said. “How many doors into the house?”

“Three if you count the cellar.” She unstrapped Claire from the car seat. The baby groaned and then huffed out several unhappy grunts. Amanda fit her legs into the holes of the Björn, slipped one flap over her shoulder, and buckled it as someone kicked in the back door.

Amanda snapped one cuff over her own left wrist, one over her right.

I pulled my.45, pointed it at the dining-room portico.

Amanda snapped one of the smaller cuffs over Claire’s left wrist.

A window broke in the living room, followed a second or two later by the sounds of someone climbing through it. I kept my eye on the portico, but now I knew they could flank me.

“A little help?” Amanda said.

I came over to her and she held her right arm up so that the smaller cuff hovered beside Claire’s left wrist.

“You bring game, sister.” I snapped the cuff closed over Claire’s wrist.

“In for a penny, in for a pound.”

Kenny came through the portico at the end of the room with a shotgun leveled at us.

I pointed my.45 at his head, but it was a hollow gesture; if he pulled that trigger from this distance, he’d kill all three of us.

I heard the racking of another shotgun, to my left. I glanced over. Tadeo stood where the living room met the dining room at the base of the staircase.

“You just ejected a shell trying to make a cool sound,” I told him.

He turned a bit red. “Still got one to put in your chest.”

“Dang,” I said, “that gun’s almost as big as you.”

“Big enough to cut you in half, homes.”

“But the recoil will blow your ass into the front yard.”

Kenny said, “Put your gun down, Patrick.”

I kept my gun where it was. “You Mexican, Tadeo?”

He nestled the shotgun stock into his shoulder. “You damn right I am.”

“I never had a Mexican standoff with an actual Mexican. There’s something cool about that, don’t you think?”

“Sounds racist to me, homes.”