“It’s helping you find your friend, of course. As long as we protect David too.”
She was sitting on the club chair, slim in jeans and a black sweater, feet up under her. I said, “The man who kidnapped my friend is a gangster named Sean Daggett, and he’s going to kill Jenn tomorrow unless I find David first.”
“I won’t let you turn David over to him, even to save her. If that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I just need to speak to him, face to face. Between us we’ll find a way out.”
“From a gangster? I don’t think David’s much of a fighter.”
“I am.”
“I know. My father told me a few things about you after you left Friday night.”
“What things?”
“That you were a martial artist and you’d been in the IDF. And …”
“You can say it.”
“That you’ve killed three people.”
“Did he tell you how?”
“They were all in defence of yourself or others.”
“That was nice of him.”
She sipped her wine. “I heard you discussing Abner, so I take it there was some grey area?”
“In one of them.”
“But you live with it.”
“For the most part.”
“You’ve been injured a lot.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The way you carry yourself.”
“It hasn’t been a great year in that way,” I admitted. “As my grandmother would have said, there was too much excitement.”
“Did you get injured helping people?”
“Mostly.”
She took a longer drink than before, a longer pause, before saying, “You’ll protect David? You won’t use him as bait?”
“Just a diversion. And I’m not alone. I brought someone down from Toronto who’s a fighter too. A frighteningly good one.”
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what happened.”
On the Friday morning after David’s flight from Summit Path, Sandy had woken at dawn and driven him to a place called Plum Island, accessible only via a causeway near Newburyport, an hour north of the city. Much of it was a nature reserve, she told me, with home ownership restricted to certain areas. A wealthy developer named Stephen Cooper, who attended Adath Israel and adored her father, had a retreat that he allowed Rabbi Ed to use from time to time, knowing his finances would never allow him a decent weekend out of the city. Sandy had always been invited too. “Normally,” she said, “a weekend with my dad after spending all week with him at home? No thanks. But Plum Island is magical. You see plants there you don’t see anywhere else around. Birds too. It’s a huge nature preserve, with all kinds of tidal flats and salt marshes. You see different water, and bluer skies. So I went a couple of times. Took a lot of long walks, tons of photos.”
“This is where David’s been the last two weeks?”
“As far as I know. Our agreement with David was we wouldn’t contact him. He threw away his cellphone. If he needed anything he would call from a pay phone in town. The house has no phone service in the off-season, no Internet, so we’ve had no way of reaching him, and he hasn’t called here. There’s also no electricity, water or heat. But I set him up with candles, blankets, a lot of canned food, bottled water. A camp stove he could use to warm up soups and meals, make coffee. I thought he would call after a few days, a week, for more supplies or cash.”
“But he hasn’t.”
“No.”
“You’ll take me there in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll need to leave early,” I said. “First light.”
She got up off the club chair and sat down next to me on the bed. Her hair smelled like green apple and the smell went straight to a sweet spot inside me, a welter of emotion and feelings that had been aboil far too long. I hadn’t held a woman with feeling in many, many months. I hadn’t had sex in the year since Camilla Lauder and I had split. And I hadn’t had anything remotely resembling good sex with the lovely Camilla for a year before that. I might have hooked up with Katherine Hollinger, a Homicide sergeant in Toronto, but my friendship with Ryan had cost me that one.
Now here was someone I found very attractive, close to me now-too close. As much as I wanted to take her clothes off and swarm her, my heart was with Jenn, wherever she was. My head was troubled by the danger she was in. I needed to stay focused on what was ahead of us. Like a fighter before a championship fight, the last thing I needed was wobbly legs.
“Go home, Shana,” I said. “I’ll pick you up around six.”
She leaned in closer. “Are you sure?”
“No,” I said. “Which is why you should go.”
Later, I went next door and told Ryan where David was.
“I should go with you,” he said.
“No.”
“You don’t worry it’s a trap?”
“The rabbi’s daughter?”
“She could be the pope’s mistress, I don’t give a fuck. It could still be a set-up.”
“It’s not.”
“Said Caesar to his wife. And what am I supposed to do while you’re out getting your throat slit?”
“We have two places to watch now. The mortuary and Williams Wharf.”
“I’ll take the Wharf, where us lean Italian guys blend in, hang there until I hear from you.”
“Maybe your guy will have news.”
“Maybe. Just watch your back on this island.”
“I will.”
“And if David won’t help?”
“He will. He has to. I’m not going to ask him to walk into Daggett’s arms, but there has to be a way we can use him.”
“My advice is drag him back here by the hair if it saves Jenn’s life. But I know you won’t do that.”
“No.”
“Take your gun.”
“I will.”
“And an extra clip.”
“Yessir.”
“All right. Thirty-four shots ought to get you through the morning.”
That’s the kind of send-off you get when you hang around Dante Ryan.
CHAPTER 26
I woke up at five-thirty, my head reasonably clear and free of pain. I had a light breakfast as soon as the hotel coffee shop opened and by six-thirty was on my way back to Brookline with my Beretta snug in its holster on my right hip. I was feeling a sense of excitement that bordered on hope. If David was still at the house on Plum Island, and if he agreed to help, I’d be one step closer to finding Jenn before Daggett could carry out his sick plan.
Shana was standing outside her house in a dark wool coat. She got in and directed me to the I-95; I realized I much preferred her voice to that of the GPS. I felt a twinge of regret that we hadn’t spent the night together. I certainly could have used the release. But it was the right decision and I shook my mind clear of it. “How far is this island?”
“About forty-five minutes to the causeway,” she said. “And another twenty or so from there.”
She fell into silence, looking out the window, twisting a strand of her hair around her fingers. I asked if she was okay.
“I’m just worried about what we’ll find,” she said. “Without heat, power and everything, it will have been hard on him these last two weeks. He’s not the hardiest of men.”
“You said he had plenty of supplies.”
“Still, it’s been cold at night. Colder up there, I imagine. But I suppose he’s also an ascetic kind of character. If anyone can get by on the bare minimum, it’s him.”
“From what I’ve heard of him, he’ll have written a new research paper on toilet paper by candlelight.”
We went past the exits to Lowell, Lawrence and Ipswich and got off on Scotland Road, which bent toward the sea and Newbury. The road went south and east around the wide mouth of the Merrimack River, then took us north on the Plum Island Turnpike, the river basin on our left, the ocean on our right. As the road became narrower. I cracked open my window and smelled salt and brine, only slightly tainted by diesel fumes.
“You should see it here in the spring,” she said. “Between the wildlife refuge and the tidal flats, more than three hundred bird species have been recorded. The spring migration here is one of the biggest in the world. Zillions of hawks, shorebirds, warblers. If you’re into that sort of thing.”