The van skidded to a halt on the loose gravel. Stojan turned to face his boss. “Open the door for the kid.”
Arakel pulled the handle and slid the side door open. Chris Grimm stepped out into the open from the side of the metal shed and hopped into the van. He grinned at the sight of Arakel and slid the door shut behind him. The van started moving almost immediately. The grin slid right off the kid’s face at the sight of the men up front. Arakel noticed.
“Don’t worry about them,” he said, patting Chris’s shoulder, smiling. “They’re here to protect you. No one will bother us with them around. Come on, once we get out of town, we’ll get you something to eat. You haven’t eaten all day, have you?”
The kid relaxed. There it was, Arakel’s talent on display. In spite of Chris’s troubles and fear of the men in the front of the van, Arakel had put him at ease.
“Stojan, stop at a McDonald’s or a place like that once we get out of Paradise.”
“But—”
“Do not defy me,” Arakel said, not quite believing he talked to the brute that way. “We have time for the boy to eat.”
The big man shrugged.
“So, Chris, where have you left your stash? Will the police find it in your home if they search?”
The kid smiled at him. “I’m not stupid. No. I have a storage unit that I pay for with some of the money I make.”
Arakel raised his eyebrows. “Can we stop there and pick up the stash? We do not want to leave anything that might incriminate you here. This way, the police can prove nothing when you come back to town.”
“Okay, sure.”
“Good. Good. We get your stash and then you eat.”
Two hours later, Chris was very grim indeed. He was tied to a chair in a warehouse Stojan and Georgi used for such things. Chris’s face was a bloody, pulpy mess covered in tears and snot. Unconscious, his eyes were already purple and swollen shut. The thugs had first broken all of his fingers, then worked their way up his legs. But Arakel put a stop to that when Stojan took out his knife and threatened to emasculate the boy.
“No!” he had shouted. “You will not do that.”
“We will know the truth,” Stojan said, as if he were about to cut the heel off a loaf of bread.
“We already know the truth. He never spoke with the cops and he’s told us the names of the people who knew he dealt.”
“You are being a foolish, foolish man, Boss,” Georgi, the quieter of the two enforcers, said. “We have to be knowing if anyone knows people more than him. Is he telling anyone about you? This we must be sure of.”
Arakel couldn’t argue with Georgi’s logic. If Chris had shared anything with his clients about Arakel, it could be a major problem. “All right, but not that,” he said, pointing at Stojan’s blade. “Not that.”
Again, Stojan and Georgi shook their heads at him. Stojan closed his knife, and that was when they went to work on the boy’s face. After a half-hour of that, it seemed to Arakel that the two thugs were hurting the kid more for their own amusement than to get anything more out of him.
“I swear. I swear,” the boy had said a hundred times. “I didn’t tell anybody anything.”
No matter how they hurt him, he kept repeating it. Arakel believed it the first time he said it. Stojan and Georgi didn’t believe it or didn’t want to believe it regardless.
Stojan looked at his phone for the time, looked at Chris, then nodded to Georgi. He said something Arakel understood, even if he didn’t speak their language. They were going to wake the kid up and start in on him again. Two thunderous explosions echoed in the cavernous warehouse. It was only after some of the smoke had cleared that Arakel realized the pistol Mehdi had given him was in his shaking hand and that he had ended Chris Grimm’s suffering forever.
Stojan took the weapon from his hand and thumped him on the back. “You are having more balls than we thought, Boss.” He waved to Georgi. “Get the bottle. Someone is needing a drink.”
Twenty
After his meeting, Jesse stopped by Gabe Weathers’s stakeout across the street from Chris Grimm’s house.
“Anything?”
“Nothing,” Gabe said. “No sign of the kid.”
“Parents?”
“Home.” Gabe picked up a pad on the seat next to him. “Mother got home at six-fifteen. The father got in about twenty minutes later. That’s his truck in the driveway.”
“Good work. Head back to the station, pick up your cruiser, and go back on patrol. Let Perkins know what’s going on.”
“You taking over here?”
“I’m going to talk to the parents. I think the kid’s in the wind.”
“Why’d he split, do you think?”
“Same reason everybody runs. He has something to hide.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll know more after I talk to the parents.” Jesse slapped the doorsill on one of Paradise’s two unmarked cars. It was an old Honda Accord the Staties had seized in the process of breaking up a criminal enterprise and sold to the Paradise PD for a pittance. “Get a move on.”
Jesse waited for Gabe to leave and turn the corner before approaching the Grimms’ house. The darkness covered up the multitude of sins the exterior displayed in the daylight. It was like many of the houses in town: a simple two-story with a detached one-car garage, a small front lawn surrounded by a low picket fence, and a small backyard. When he had stopped by earlier, Jesse noticed the clapboards were five years past needing a new coat of paint, the roof was sagging like the seat of an old chair, the windows rattled in a light breeze, and the garage was already partially collapsed. The lawn was more weeds than grass and more dirt than either. The letters WE were worn out on the front mat, the C, too, so that it read L OME. He got the sense that the original sentiment on the mat was now an afterthought, if even that. There wasn’t much welcoming about the place. He rang the bell twice but didn’t hear it buzz on the inside of the house, so he knocked long and loud.
A blowsy woman with messy black-and-gray hair answered the door. Dressed in a cut-sleeve sweatshirt and yoga pants, she was forty-five going on sixty. She had fading yellow bruises on her arms. Her face was lined and gaunt. A lit cigarette dangled from the corner of her yellow-stained lips. Her deep blue eyes gave her identity away, as they were the same shade and shape as her son’s. And those eyes got big at the sight of Jesse’s PPD hat, uniform shirt, and jacket. Then, almost unnoticeably, they became sneering and suspicious.
“What’d Chris do now?” she asked, voice full of resignation.
But before Jesse could respond, an unseen man called out from inside the house. “Who’s that? Is it your little fucking angel?”
She turned into the house. “It’s the cops.” When she faced Jesse again, her expression had changed. There was real fear in it. She said, “Well?”
“I’m Chief Jesse Stone.” He gave her a smile in hopes of keeping things calm. “I just want to talk with Chris, Mrs. Grimm.”
“Mrs. Walters. Grimm was my first husband’s name, the lousy prick. Chris kept the name just to spite me and his stepfather.”
“Is Chris in?”
She shook her head, but it wasn’t a protective gesture. Jesse already got the sense she wasn’t the maternal type who would lie for her kid or throw herself in front on an oncoming car to save his life. “Haven’t seen him. What’s this about?”
“You’ve heard about Heather Mackey’s death?”
“She was a little hottie. Too bad, Chris had a thing for her. But what’s this got to do with him?”
Jesse lied. “Probably nothing. I’m just talking to kids who knew her or were friends of hers.”
The mother wasn’t buying it. “Well, he ain’t here.”