Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(122)

I tilted my head. The Fort Point Channel broke away from a white and dusty lip of land, rolled under bridges and Summer and Congress streets, stretched toward the skyline and the piers and the dark blue release of Boston Harbor.

“Ray sleeps with the fishes?” I said.

Broussard gave me a lazy smile. “’Fraid so.”

“How long?”

“I found him that night in October, right after you two came on to the case. He was packing. I interrogated him about the scam he ran on Cheese. Got to hand it to him, he never gave up the location of the money. Never thought he’d have that kind of spine, but two hundred grand gives some people balls, I guess. Anyway, he’s planning to leave. I didn’t want him to. Things got physical.”

He coughed violently, arching forward, and pressed a hand over the hole in his chest, gripped his gun tightly in his lap.

“We need to get you off this roof.”

He looked up at me, wiped at his mouth with the back of his gun hand. “I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere.”

“Come on. There’s no point in dying.”

He gave me that wonderful, boyish grin of his. “Funny, I’d argue the opposite about now. You got a cell phone to call for an ambulance?”

“No.”

He placed his gun on his lap and reached into his leather jacket, removed a slim Nokia. “I do,” he said, and he turned and tossed if off the roof.

I heard it shatter distantly as it hit the pavement seven stories below.

“Don’t worry.” He chuckled. “Fucker comes with a hell of a warranty.”

I sighed and sat down on the small tar riser at the edge of the roof, faced him.

“Determined to die on this roof,” I said.

“Determined not to go to jail. A trial?” He shook his head. “Not for me, pal.”

“Then tell me who has her, Remy. Go out right.”

His eyes widened. “So you can go get her? Bring her back to that fucking thing society calls her mother? Kiss my ass, man. Amanda stays gone. You got that? She stays happy. She stays well-fed and clean and looked after. She has a few fucking laughs in her life and she grows up with a chance. You need brain surgery, you think I’m going to tell you where she is, Kenzie.”

“The people who have her are kidnappers.”

“Ah, no. Wrong answer. I’m a kidnapper. They’re people who took a child in.” He blinked several times at the sweat bathing his face on a cool night, sucked in a long breath that rattled in his chest. “You were at my house this morning. My wife called me.”

I nodded. “She made the ransom call to Lionel, didn’t she?”

He shrugged, looked off at the skyline. “You at my house,” he said. “Christ, that pissed me off.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “You see my son?”

“He’s not yours.”

He blinked. “You see my son?”

I looked up at the stars for a moment, a rarity in these parts, so clear on a cold night. “I saw your son,” I said.

“Great kid. Know where I found him?”

I shook my head.

“I’m talking to this snitch in the Somerville projects. I’m alone, and I hear this baby screaming. I mean screaming like he’s being bitten by dogs. And the snitch, the people walking down the corridor, they don’t hear it. They just don’t hear it. ’Cause they hear it every day. So I tell the snitch to beat it, I follow the sound, kick in the door of this shit-smelling apartment, and I find him in the back. The place is empty. My son—and he is my son, Kenzie, fuck you if you don’t think so—he’s starving. He’s lying in a crib, six months old, and he’s starving. You can see his ribs. He’s fucking handcuffed, Kenzie, and his diaper is so filled it’s leaking through the seams, and he’s stuck—he’s fucking stuck to the mattress, Kenzie!”

Broussard’s eyes bulged, and his whole body seemed to lunge against itself. He coughed blood onto his shirt, wiped it with his hand, and smeared it on his chin.

“A baby,” he said eventually, his voice almost a whisper now, “stuck to a mattress by his own bedsores and fecal matter. Left in a room for three days, crying his head off. And nobody cares.” He held out his bloody left hand, let it drop to the gravel. “Nobody cares,” he repeated softly.

I placed my gun on my lap, glanced over at the city skyline. Maybe Broussard was right. A whole city of Nobody Cares. A whole state. A whole country, maybe.

“So I took him home with me. I knew enough guys who’d forged fake identities in their time, and I paid one off. My son has a birth certificate with my surname on it. The records of my wife’s tubal ligation were destroyed and a new one was created, showing she consented to the procedure after the birth of our son, Nicholas. And all I had to do was get through these last few months and retire, and we’d move out of state and I’d get some lame security consultant job and raise my child. And I’d have been very, very happy.”

I hung my head for a moment, looked at my shoes on the gravel.

“She never even filed a missing person’s report,” Broussard said.

“Who?”

“The skaghead who gave birth to my son. She never even looked for him. I know who she is, and for a long time I thought of just blowing her head off for the fuck of it. But I didn’t. And she never looked for her child.”