Dennis Lehane: Moonlight Mile

“Remember Amanda McCready? Little girl went-”

“Missing, what, five years ago?”

“Twelve.”

“Shit. Years? How old are we?”

“ ’Member how we felt in college about old geezers who talked about, like, the Dave Clark Five and Buddy Holly?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s how kids today feel when we talk about Prince and Nirvana.”

“Naw.”

“Believe it, bitch. So anyway, Amanda McCready.”

“Yeah, yeah. You found her with the cop’s family, brought her back, everyone on the force hates your guts, you need a favor from me.”

“No.”

“You don’t need a favor?”

“Well, I do, but it’s directly connected to Amanda McCready. She went missing again.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. And her aunt says no one cares. Not the cops, not you guys.”

“Hard to believe. Twenty-four-hour news cycle and all? These days we can make a story out of anything.”

“Explains Paris Hilton.”

“Nothing explains that,” he said. “Point is-a girl disappears again twelve years after her first disappearance brought down a gang of cops and cost the city a few mil during a bad budget year? Shit, that’s news, white boy.”

“That’s what I thought. You almost sounded black there, by the way.”

“Racist. What’s the aunt’s name, uh, bitch?”

“Bea. Well, Beatrice McCready.”

“Aunt Bea, uh? Well, this ain’t Mayberry.”

He called me back twenty minutes later. “That was simple.”

“What happened?”

“I talked to the investigating officer, a Detective Chuck Hitchcock. He said they investigated the aunt’s claim, went to the mother’s house, poked around, and talked to the girl.”

“Talked to the girl? Amanda?”

“Yeah. It was all a hoax.”

“Why would Bea make up a-?”

“Oh, Bea’s a champ, what she is. You know Amanda’s mother-what’s it, Helene?-she’s had to take out a couple restraining orders on this woman. Ever since her kid died, she left the reser-”

“Wait, whose kid?”

“Beatrice McCready’s.”

“Her kid didn’t die. He’s at Monument High.”

“No,” Richie said slowly, “he’s not at Monument High. He’s dead. Him and a few other kids were in a car last year, none of them old enough to drive, none of them old enough to drink, but they did both anyway. They blew a stop sign at the bottom of that big-ass hill where St. Margaret’s Hospital used to be? Got pancaked by a bus on Stoughton Street. Two kids dead, two kids talking funny for the rest of their lives but not walking while they’re doing it. One of the dead was this Matthew McCready. I’m looking at it in our Web archives right now. June 15, last year. You want the link?”

I exited JFK/UMass Station and headed for home, my head still buzzing. I’d hung up the phone and clicked on the link Richie sent me, and there it was-a page 4 story from last June about four boys who took a joyride in a stolen car and came flying down a hill stoked on pot and Jager. The bus driver never had time to hit his horn. Paralyzed from the waist down, Harold Endalis, 15. Paralyzed from the neck down, Stuart Burr-field, 15. Dead on arrival at the Carney ER, Mark McGrath, 16. Dead on scene, Matthew McCready, 16. I descended the station stairs and headed up Crescent Avenue toward home, thinking about all the stupid shit I’d done at sixteen, ten or twelve ways I could have died-probably should have died-before seventeen.

The first two houses on the south side of Crescent, a matching pair of small white Capes, were abandoned, victims of the wonderful mortgage crisis that had spread such cheer across the land of late. A homeless guy approached me in front of the second one.

“Yo, bro, you got a minute to hear me out? I’m not looking for a handout.”

He was a small guy, wiry and bearded. His baseball cap, cotton hoodie, and battered jeans were streaked with grime. The ripe odor coming off him told me it had been a while since he’d bathed. He didn’t have nut-bag eyes, though; there was no meanness in him, no crackhead edge.

I stopped. “What’s up?”

“I’m not a beggar.” He held out his hands to ward off my assumptions. “I want to make that clear.”

“Cool.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“But I got a kid, you know? And there ain’t no jobs. My old lady, she’s sick, and my baby boy he just needs some formula. Shit’s, like, seven bucks and I-”

I never saw his arm move, but he snatched my laptop bag off my shoulder just the same. He took off with it, tear-assing for the back of the nearest abandoned house. The bag held my case notes, my laptop, and a picture of my daughter.

“You dumb shit,” I said, not sure if I was talking to myself or to the homeless guy, maybe to both of us. Who knew the fucker had such long arms?

I pursued him down the side of the house through knee-high weeds and crushed beer cans, empty Styrofoam egg containers, and broken bottles. It was probably a squatters’ house these days. When I was a kid, it was the Cowans’ house, then the Ursinis’. A Vietnamese family bought it next and did a lot of rehab on it. Just before the father lost his job and then the mother lost hers, they’d begun remodeling the kitchen.

It was still missing the back wall there; some of the plastic tarps nailed to the framing flapped in the afternoon breeze. As I reached the backyard, the homeless guy was only a few feet ahead and about to be slowed by a chain-link fence. I sensed movement to my left. A plastic tarp parted and a dark-haired guy swung a length of pipe into the side of my face and I spun into the plastic and fell into the unfinished kitchen.

I’m not sure how long I lay there-long enough to notice, as the room shook behind watery waves of air, that all the copper had been stripped from beneath the sink and behind the walls. Long enough to feel reasonably certain my jaw wasn’t broken, though the left side of my face was simultaneously numb and on fire, and blood leaked steadily from it. I got to my knees and a nail bomb detonated in my skull. Everything that wasn’t directly in front of my nose vanished behind black cloaks. The floor shimmied.

Someone helped me to my feet and then pushed me into a wall, and someone else laughed. A third person, farther away, said, “Bring him in here.”

“I don’t think he can walk.”

“Lead him, then.”

Fingers vise-gripped the back of my neck and guided me into what had once been the living room. The black cloaks receded from view. I could make out a small fireplace, the mantel torn away and probably used as firewood. I’d been in this room once before, when a bunch of us sixteen-year-olds followed Brian Cowan in here to raid his father’s liquor cabinet. A couch had sat under the windows facing the street. A garden bench sat there now and a man sat on it, his eyes on me. I was dropped on the couch across from him, a ratty orange thing that smelled like the Dumpster behind a Red Lobster.

“You gonna puke?”

“Curious about that myself,” I said.

“I told him to trip you, not hit you with a pipe, but he got a little excited.”

I could see the guy with the pipe now-a slim, dark-haired Latino in khaki cargo pants and a wife-beater. He gave me a shrug as he tapped the pipe back and forth in his palm. “Oops.”

“Oops,” I said. “I’ll remember that.”

“You won’t remember shit, pendejo, I hit you again.”

Hard to argue with logic. I took my eyes off the help and considered the boss on the bench. I would have expected prison-lean and prison-mean, gin-pale eyes. Instead, the guy wore a yellow-and-green-plaid shirt under a black wool sweater and a pair of tan corduroys. On his feet were a pair of canvas Vans with a pattern of black and gold squares. His red hair was a little on the longish side and flyaway. He didn’t look gangsta; he looked like a science teacher at a prep school.