Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [151]
“I’m going to lower my gun,” I said.
“Your choice.”
I watched his eyes, and maybe because he knew I was watching them, he gave me nothing but an opaque, even gaze.
I raised my gun and slipped my finger off the trigger, held it up in my palm and climbed up the last few steps. I stood on the light gravel dusting the rooftop and looked down at him, cocked an eyebrow.
He smiled.
He lowered his gun to his lap and leaned his head against the vent.
“You paid Ray Likanski to draw Helene out of the house,” I said. “Right?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t have to pay him. Promised to let him off the hook on some bust somewhere up the road. That was all it took.”
I crossed until I was in front of him. From there I could see the dark circle in his upper chest, the place where the rose petals grew. It was just right of center, and it still pumped brightly but slowly.
“Lung?” I said.
“Nicked it, I think.” He nodded. “Fucking Mullen. Mullen wasn’t there that night, it would have gone without a hitch. Dumb-ass Likanski doesn’t tell me he ripped Olamon off. That would have changed things, I knew that. Believe me.” He shifted slightly and groaned from the effort. “Forces me—me, for Christ’s sake—to get into bed with a mutt like Cheese. Even though I was setting him up, man, that hurt the ego, I’ll tell you.”
“Where is Likanski?” I said.
He tilted his head up toward me. “Look over your shoulder and down to your right a bit.”
I tilted my head. The Fort Point Channel broke away from a white and dusty lip of land, rolled under bridges and Summer and Congress streets, stretched toward the skyline and the piers and the dark blue release of Boston Harbor.
“Ray sleeps with the fishes?” I said.
Broussard gave me a lazy smile. “’Fraid so.”
“How long?”
“I found him that night in October, right after you two came on to the case. He was packing. I interrogated him about the scam he ran on Cheese. Got to hand it to him, he never gave up the location of the money. Never thought he’d have that kind of spine, but two hundred grand gives some people balls, I guess. Anyway, he’s planning to leave. I didn’t want him to. Things got physical.”
He coughed violently, arching forward, and pressed a hand over the hole in his chest, gripped his gun tightly in his lap.
“We need to get you off this roof.”
He looked up at me, wiped at his mouth with the back of his gun hand. “I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere.”
“Come on. There’s no point in dying.”
He gave me that wonderful, boyish grin of his. “Funny, I’d argue the opposite about now. You got a cell phone to call for an ambulance?”
“No.”
He placed his gun on his lap and reached into his leather jacket, removed a slim Nokia. “I do,” he said, and he turned and tossed if off the roof.
I heard it shatter distantly as it hit the pavement seven stories below.
“Don’t worry.” He chuckled. “Fucker comes with a hell of a warranty.”
I sighed and sat down on the small tar riser at the edge of the roof, faced him.
“Determined to die on this roof,” I said.
“Determined not to go to jail. A trial?” He shook his head. “Not for me, pal.”
“Then tell me who has her, Remy. Go out right.”
His eyes widened. “So you can go get her? Bring her back to that fucking thing society calls her mother? Kiss my ass, man. Amanda stays gone. You got that? She stays happy. She stays well-fed and clean and looked after. She has a few fucking laughs in her life and she grows up with a chance. You need brain surgery, you think I’m going to tell you where she is, Kenzie.”
“The people who have her are kidnappers.”
“Ah, no. Wrong answer. I’m a kidnapper. They’re people who took a child in.” He blinked several times at the sweat bathing his face on a cool night, sucked in a long breath that rattled in his chest. “You were at my house this morning. My wife called me.”
I nodded. “She made the ransom