Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“Fuck you, Cheese.”

“What?”

I said it again, very slowly.

Then I said, “I came to you two days ago and begged for the life of a four-year-old girl. Now she’s dead. Because of you. And you want mercy? I’m going to tell Bubba you apologized for having him piped.”

“No.”

“Tell him you said you were sorry. You’ll make it up to him somehow.”

“No.” Cheese shook his head. “You can’t do that.”

“Watch me, Cheese.”

I took the phone away from my ear and reached out to hang it up.

“She’s not dead.”

“What?” Angie said.

I put the phone back to my ear.

“She’s not dead,” Cheese said.

“Who?” I said.

Cheese rolled his eyes, tilted his head back in the direction of the guard standing watch by the door.

“You know who.”

“Where is she?” Angie said.

Cheese shook his head. “Give me a few days.”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t have a choice.” He looked back over his shoulder, then leaned in close to the window and whispered into the phone. “Someone will contact you. Trust me. I got to clear some things first.”

“Bubba’s very angry,” Angie said. “And he has friends.” She glanced around the prison walls.

“No shit,” Cheese said. “His pals, the fucking Twoomey brothers, just got dropped for a bank job in Everett. They’ll be rotating in here next week for processing. So stop trying to scare me. I’m scared. Okay? But I need time. Call off the dog. I’ll send a message to you, I promise.”

“How do you know for sure she’s alive?”

“I know. Okay?” He gave us a rueful smile. “You two don’t have a clue what’s really going on. Do you know that?”

“We know it now,” I said.

“You let Bubba know I’m clean when it comes what happened to him. You want me alive. Okay? Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone,” he sang.

I leaned back in my chair, studied him for a minute. He looked sincere, but Cheese is good at that. He’s made a career out of knowing exactly which things can hurt people most and then identifying the people who want those things. Need them. He knows how to dangle bags of heroin in front of addicted women, make them blow strangers for it, and then only give them half of what he promised. He knows how to dangle half-truths in front of cops and DAs and get them to sign on the dotted line, before he delivers a facsimile of what he originally promised.

“I need more,” I said.

The guard rapped the door and said, “Sixty seconds, Inmate Olamon.”

“More? The fuck you need?”

“I want the girl,” I said. “I want her now.”

“I can’t tell—”

“Fuck you.” I banged on the glass. “Where is she, Cheese? Where is she?”

“If I tell you, they’ll know it came from me, and I’ll be dead by the morning.” He backed up as he spoke, palms-up in front of him, terror filling his fat face.

“Give me something hard. Something I can follow up, then.”

“Independent corroboration,” Angie said.

“Independent what?”

“Thirty seconds,” the guard said.

“Give us something, Cheese.”

Cheese looked over his shoulder desperately, then at the walls holding him in, the thick glass between us.

“Come on,” he begged.

“Twenty seconds,” Angie said.

“Don’t. Look—”

“Fifteen.”

“No, I—”

“Tick-tock,” I said. “Tick-tock.”

“The bitch’s boyfriend,” Cheese said. “You know?”

“He blew town,” Angie said.

“Then find him,” Cheese hissed. “It’s all I got. Ask him what his part was the night the kid vanished.”

“Cheese—” Angie started.

The guard loomed up behind Cheese, put his hand on his shoulder.

“Whatever you think happened,” Cheese said, “you’re not even in the ballpark. You guys are so offtrack, you might as well be in motherfucking Greenland. Okay?”

The guard reached over him and pulled the phone from his hand.

Cheese stood up, allowed himself to be tugged toward the door. When the guard opened the door, Cheese looked back at us, mouthed one word:

“Greenland.”

He raised his eyebrows up and down several times, and then the guard pushed him through the door and out of our sight.

The next day, shortly after noon, divers in Granite Rail Quarry found a torn piece of fabric impaled on a sliver of granite that jutted out like an ice pick from a shelf along the southern wall, fifteen feet below the waterline.

At three o’clock, Helene identified the fabric as a scrap of the T-shirt her daughter wore the night she disappeared. The scrap had been torn from the rear of the T-shirt, up by the collar, and the initials A. McC. were written on the fabric with a felt-tip pen.

After Helene identified the shirt fabric in the living room of Beatrice and Lionel’s house, she watched Broussard as he placed the pink scrap back in the evidence bag, and the glass of Pepsi she’d been holding shattered in her hand.

“Jesus,” Lionel said. “Helene.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Helene squeezed her hand into a fist and drove the shards of broken glass deeper into her flesh. Blood fell in fat parachutes to the hardwood floor.

“Miss McCready,” Broussard said, “we don’t know that. Please let me see your hand.”

“She’s dead,” Helene repeated, louder this time. “Isn’t she?” She pulled her hand away from Broussard, and blood sprayed the coffee table.

“Helene, for God’s sake.” Lionel put one hand on his sister’s shoulder and reached for her damaged hand.

Helene spun away from him and lost her balance, fell to the floor, and sat there cradling her hand and looking up at us. Her eyes found mine, and I remembered telling her in Wee Dave’s house that she was stupid.

She wasn’t stupid, she was anesthetized—to the world at large, the real danger her child had been in, even the shards of glass digging into her flesh, her tendons and arteries.

The pain was coming, though. It was finally coming. As she held my gaze, her eyes paled and widened and the truth found them. It was a horrible awakening, a nuclear fusion of clarity that found her pupils, and with it came the awareness of what her neglect had cost her daughter, of how vile and acute the pain had probably been for her child, the nightmares shoved into her small skull with pistons.