Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [152]
He shrugged, looked off at the skyline. “You at my house,” he said. “Christ, that pissed me off.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “You see my son?”
“He’s not yours.”
He blinked. “You see my son?”
I looked up at the stars for a moment, a rarity in these parts, so clear on a cold night. “I saw your son,” I said.
“Great kid. Know where I found him?”
I shook my head.
“I’m talking to this snitch in the Somerville projects. I’m alone, and I hear this baby screaming. I mean screaming like he’s being bitten by dogs. And the snitch, the people walking down the corridor, they don’t hear it. They just don’t hear it. ’Cause they hear it every day. So I tell the snitch to beat it, I follow the sound, kick in the door of this shit-smelling apartment, and I find him in the back. The place is empty. My son—and he is my son, Kenzie, fuck you if you don’t think so—he’s starving. He’s lying in a crib, six months old, and he’s starving. You can see his ribs. He’s fucking handcuffed, Kenzie, and his diaper is so filled it’s leaking through the seams, and he’s stuck—he’s fucking stuck to the mattress, Kenzie!”
Broussard’s eyes bulged, and his whole body seemed to lunge against itself. He coughed blood onto his shirt, wiped it with his hand, and smeared it on his chin.
“A baby,” he said eventually, his voice almost a whisper now, “stuck to a mattress by his own bedsores and fecal matter. Left in a room for three days, crying his head off. And nobody cares.” He held out his bloody left hand, let it drop to the gravel. “Nobody cares,” he repeated softly.
I placed my gun on my lap, glanced over at the city skyline. Maybe Broussard was right. A whole city of Nobody Cares. A whole state. A whole country, maybe.
“So I took him home with me. I knew enough guys who’d forged fake identities in their time, and I paid one off. My son has a birth certificate with my surname on it. The records of my wife’s tubal ligation were destroyed and a new one was created, showing she consented to the procedure after the birth of our son, Nicholas. And all I had to do was get through these last few months and retire, and we’d move out of state and I’d get some lame security consultant job and raise my child. And I’d have been very, very happy.”
I hung my head for a moment, looked at my shoes on the gravel.
“She never even filed a missing person’s report,” Broussard said.
“Who?”
“The skaghead who gave birth to my son. She never even looked for him. I know who she is, and for a long time I thought of just blowing her head off for the fuck of it. But I didn’t. And she never looked for her child.”
I raised my head, looked into his face. It was proud and angry and profoundly saddened by the depths of the worlds he’d seen.
“I just want Amanda,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s my job, Remy. It’s what I was hired to do.”
“And I was hired to protect and serve, you dumb-ass. You know what that means? That’s an oath. To protect and serve. I’ve done that. I’ve protected several children. I’ve served them. I’ve given them good homes.”
“How many?” I asked. “How many have there been?”
He wagged a bloody finger at me. “No, no, no.”
His head shot back suddenly, and his whole body stiffened against the vent. His left heel kicked off the gravel and his mouth opened wide into a soundless scream.
I dropped to my knees by him, but all I could do was watch.
After a few moments, his body relaxed and his eyes drooped, and I could hear oxygen entering and leaving his body.
“Remy.”
He opened one weary eye. “Still here,” he slurred. He raised that finger to me. “You know you’re lucky, Kenzie. One lucky bastard.”
“Why’s that?”
He smiled. “You didn’t hear?”
“What?”
“Eugene Torrel died last week.”
“Who’s…?” I leaned back from him and his smile broadened as I realized: Eugene, the kid who’d seen us kill Marion Socia.
“Got himself stabbed in Brockton over a woman.” Broussard closed his eyes again and his grin softened, slid to the side of his face. “You’re very lucky. Got nothing on you now but a worthless deposition from