Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [0]
LEHANE
GONE, BABY, GONE
To my sister, Maureen, and my brothers, Michael,
Thomas, and Gerard:
Thanks for standing by me and
putting up with me.
It couldn’t have been easy.
And to
JCP
Who never stood a chance.
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PART ONE: INDIAN SUMMER, 1997
1 Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported…
2 From a detective’s perspective once you rule out running away…
3 Helene McCready was watching herself on TV when we entered…
4 The section of Dorchester Avenue that runs through my neighborhood…
5 When we stepped out of the bar into the alley,…
6 The Astros were playing the Orioles in a sunset game…
7 After the game, we stopped in the Ashmont Grille for…
8 After her estrangement from Phil and before she and I…
9 Amanda McCready wasn’t smiling. She stared at me with still,…
10 When Winthrop and the original settlers arrived in the New…
11 “Gee two hundred?” Angie said.
12 Cheese Olamon was a six-foot-two four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who’d some…
13 Broussard caught up with me as we made our way…
14 I’d heard about Chris Mullen’s banker’s hours, his determination to…
15 An hour later, Angie opened the passenger door of the…
16 One of the things that happens when you follow scumbags…
17 Major John Dempsey of the Massachusetts State Police had a…
18 If you head south out of my neighborhood and cross…
19 We landed on the bunny slope of the Blue Hills…
20 When dawn arrived, we were still there as the tow…
21 “DEA?” Angie said. “You’re kidding.”
22 The sleet that had visited us briefly last night had…
PART TWO: WINTER
23 Five months passed, and Amanda McCready stayed gone. Her photograph—in…
PART THREE: THE CRUELEST MONTH
24 By early April, Angie was spending most nights with her…
25 “Ange!” I called, as Bubba and I came bounding into…
26 It took twenty hours to confirm that the body in…
27 It was one very drunk cop I met in the…
28 I sat for a long time in the ashen, half-dark…
29 It seemed like every other guy on the Narcotics, Vice,…
30 In the blind hope that it might make a difference,…
31 “Lionel’s gone,” Beatrice said.
32 At the end of an April day, after the sun…
33 I followed Broussard’s trail across Broadway and up C Street,…
34 “…at which point the man later identified as Detective Pasquale…
35 “Before forming CAC,” Oscar said, “Doyle was Vice. He was…
Epilogue
The Mother and Child Reunion, as the headline of the…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Dennis Lehane
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Anyone familiar with Boston, Dorchester, South Boston, and Quincy, as well as both the Quincy quarries and the Blue Hills Reservation, will realize that I have taken enormous liberties in describing their geographical and topographical particulars. This was wholly intentional. While these cities, towns, and areas do exist, they have been altered according to the demands of story, as well as my own whims, and therefore should be regarded as entirely fictitious. Further, any similarities between the characters and events in this narrative and real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Port Mesa, Texas
October 1998
Long before the sun finds the Gulf, the fishing boats set out into the dark. Shrimpers mostly, an occasional pursuer of marlin or tarpon, the boats are filled almost exclusively with men. The few women who do work the shrimpers keep mostly to themselves. This is the Texas coast, and because so many men have died hard over two centuries of fishing, their offspring and surviving friends feel they’ve earned their prejudices, their hatred of the Vietnamese competitors, their mistrust of any woman who’d do this ugly work, fumble in the dark with thick cable and hooks that slice through knuckles.
Women, one fisherman says in the black predawn, as the captain cuts the trawler engine to a low rumble and the slate sea roils, should be like Rachel. That’s a woman.
That’s a woman, all right, another fisherman says. Goddamn, yes, sir.
Rachel