I dropped the bat. Jenn let the tire iron fall. He moved quickly to Jenn and said, “Keys?”
“In the car.”
He turned to me, the gun at Jenn’s head, and said, “Go get the keys out of your car. Fast. You try anything, I’ll kill your girl.”
If the gun had been pointing at me, I could have taken it from him. Krav Maga teaches that well. But it was aimed at Jenn’s head, not mine, so there was nothing worth trying. I went and got the keys and flipped them to Daggett, who slipped them in his pocket.
“Now go get her keys,” he said. “Same way.”
When he had both sets of keys, he bunched his fist in the hair at Jenn’s nape and started backing the two of them up toward the Monte Carlo. Her face was stretched in pain as she stumbled to match his stride while going backwards.
When he got to the car, he said, “Here’s the deal. I need that Jew doctor. I need him to come in from wherever he is and fast. Six p.m. Monday latest. That gives you two days to find him and bring him to me.”
“I swear I don’t know where he is.”
“Then find him. Because your girlfriend is sitting on a gold mine, and I’m not talking about her pussy, sweet as it probably is. You say you know what I’m doing, then you know what Blondie here is worth. Two young healthy kidneys? These sweet blue corneas? Find him by Monday, boy, or the next time you look in her eyes, they’ll be in someone else’s face.”
He bunched her hair again. I could tell by her look he wasn’t hurting her badly, just keeping tight control, the gun pressed into her neck where any shot would kill her. He backed up to the trunk of his car and told her to use one hand to unlatch it and raise the door. She did as she was told. He made her get in and shut the trunk and leaned back against it, the gun in his hand pointing idly at the ground.
“You’re at the Sam Adams, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m calling there Monday morning. Sometime after nine, in case I sleep in.”
I wanted to hurl myself at him and tear out his throat with my teeth. I said, “Why Monday?”
“Just have my Jew for me. And don’t call no cops. Not in Brookline or the BPD. You’re on your own, boy. Prove you’re good enough.”
He took my keys out of his pocket and threw them twenty yards up the road where they landed in low brush along the fence. The second set landed about ten feet farther.
He said, “You want to make any speeches about not harming a hair on her head, chasing me to the ends of the earth if I do, etcetera, now would be the time.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“You call that a speech?” he said with a laugh. Then he opened the rear door and tucked the gun in his belt and pulled his buddy to his feet, surprisingly strong for someone his size. The man was groaning, a long string of glassy snot hanging from his nose like a third-grader’s. As Daggett angled the big man into the back seat of the Monte Carlo, I took a step forward but he whipped the gun out and fired it in one motion, the round spitting up dirt a few feet to my left. He grinned as I froze in place. Then he finished loading the man in, closed the door and got in on the driver’s side. I just stood there as he backed up, then wheeled around past me, spitting gravel as he headed out toward the highway.
My partner, my best friend in the world, taken by a gangster counting useful body parts. No way of knowing where he was taking her.
It couldn’t be good, wherever it was.
I ran to where he had thrown my keys. When I saw them glittering in a clump of weeds, I knelt to pick them up. My head started to spin and I had to stay down on my knees, useless once again, until I felt strong enough to stand.
CHAPTER 19
I tell myself I am not a violent man. Yes, I have committed acts of violence in my life. I have killed three people but I don’t think of myself as a killer. I have hurt other people but I don’t think of myself as a thug or a bully. But the thoughts racing through my head as I got into the car were the darkest, bloodiest kind. I wasn’t seeing red-it was solid black. If Sean Daggett killed Jenn, I would kill him. I would do it with my hands and feet, a blunt instrument, a knife or a gun-whatever I could find. I would shatter his skull, choke him on his own teeth. Crush his throat. Explode his heart. Set him on fire and watch him burn and not even piss on him until he was a smouldering ruin. Even if he didn’t kill her: if he caused her any pain at all, just a bump or bruise, he would die. If he killed or hurt David Fine, he would die. I would do it on my own if I had to. But I didn’t.
When my hands stopped shaking, I took out my phone and tried to remember the number of a certain Italian restaurant in Toronto. I used to know it by heart. But since the concussion, my memory has been a little less sharp. I knew the area code and that it started with the same exchange as my brother’s downtown office. It was the last four numbers I wasn’t sure of. I punched in the first six, then added my best guess for the final four. I heard it engage, waited while it rang three times and sighed with relief when a woman said, “Giulio’s.”
“Hi, Monica,” I said. She was the daytime manager and nighttime hostess. “It’s Jonah.”
“Hi, hon,” she said. “I hope you don’t want to come in tonight, we got problems.”
“What happened? Is Dante there?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And up to his knees in water. A dishwasher hose broke last night and leaked through to the basement, which is presently flooded.”
“Tell him I need him.”
“All right. But his mood is trending shitty. It’s looking like the story of Jonah down there anyway. Hey, maybe that’ll get him to crack a smile. It would be the first of the day.”
My friendship with Dante Ryan is by far the weirdest in my life. Impossible to explain to anyone else because when I met him the year before, he was still killing people for a living and was considered by several police agencies and his peers to be one of the best around. A future Hall of Famer in his trade. Our paths crossed when he was given a contract he couldn’t bring himself to fulfill because it included killing a boy the same age as his son, Carlo, then turning five. He sought out my help and we saved a few lives, lost a few, took away a few between us. But we did it all together and it forged a strong, mostly unspoken bond between us.
He doesn’t mingle with any of my other friends, except Jenn. I have been to his house to meet his wife and son just once, and most of our meetings take place at Giulio’s, his restaurant on John Street in Toronto’s Entertainment District, still named after its corpulent former owner. The food is authentic southern Italian, and I drink and eat there free because Ryan says he would have none of it if not for me. It’s true so I take it.
“Hey,” he said into the phone. “You’re lucky you’re not the dead man who closed up and left last night before the dishwasher stopped. I was about to jump through the phone line and throttle you. Listen, can I call you back in a bit?”
“No, you can’t,” I said. “I need you.”
“Jonah, if you could see-”
“It’s Jenn,” I said. “She’s in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“She’s been abducted.”
“What! Where are you? My car’s right out back. I’ll be-”
“Ryan, we’re in Boston.”
“What!” Ryan and Jenn got to know each other pretty well during our trip to Chicago, and while he may not be up on all the latest nuances of dealing with a lesbian he finds attractive, his affection for her is clear.
“Boston. That’s where I am-where she was taken.”
“You know who by?”
“An Irish thug named Sean Daggett.”
“How long ago?”
“A few minutes.”
“Okay. Now think about this before you answer. Should I grab a cab to the island airport, which is like ten minutes away, and be there in under four hours? Or do you want me to drive, which gets me there more like midnight.”