Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [49]
“You’ll trade the money for Amanda,” she said.
Poole nodded.
“And she’ll be alive.”
“That’s the hope.”
“And I have to do what again?”
Broussard lowered himself to his haunches in front of her. “You don’t have to do anything, Miss McCready. You just have to make a choice right now. Us four here”—he waved his hand at the rest of us—“happen to think this might be the right approach. But if my bosses find out I plan to do it this way, I’ll get suspended or fired. You understand?”
She half nodded. “If you tell people, they’ll want to arrest Chris Mullen.”
Broussard nodded. “Possibly. Or, we think, the FBI might put the capture of the kidnapper before your daughter’s safety.”
Another half nod, as if her chin kept meeting an invisible barrier on its way down.
Poole said, “Miss McCready, the bottom line is, it’s your decision. If you want us to, we’ll call this in right now, hand over the money, and let the pros handle it.”
“Other people?” She looked at Broussard.
He touched her hand. “Yes.”
“I don’t want other people. I don’t…” She stood up a bit unsteadily. “What do I have to do if we do it your way?”
“Keep quiet.” Broussard came off his haunches. “Don’t talk to the press or the police. Don’t even tell Lionel and Beatrice what’s going on.”
“Are you going to talk to Cheese?”
I said, “That’s probably our next move, yeah.”
“Mr. Olamon seems to be holding the cards at the moment,” Broussard said.
“What if you just, like, followed Chris Mullen? Maybe he’d take you to Amanda without knowing it?”
“We’ll be doing that as well,” Poole said. “But I have a feeling they’ll be expecting it. I’m sure they have Amanda well hidden.”
“Tell him I’m sorry.”
“Who?”
“Cheese. Tell him I didn’t mean nothing bad. I just want my kid back. Tell him not to hurt her. Could you do that?” She looked at Broussard.
“Sure.”
“I’m hungry,” Helene said.
“We’ll get you some—”
She shook her head at Poole. “Not me. Not me. That’s what Amanda said.”
“What? When?”
“When I put her to bed that night. That’s the last thing she said to me: ‘Mommy, I’m hungry.’” Helene smiled, but her eyes filled. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. You’ll eat in the morning.’”
No one said anything. We waited to see if she’d crumble.
“I mean, they’d have fed her, right?” She held the smile as tears rolled down her face. “She’s not still hungry, is she?” She looked at me. “Is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
12
Cheese Olamon was a six-foot-two four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who’d somehow arrived at the misconception that he was black.
Though his flesh jiggled when he walked and his fashion sense ran toward the fleece or thick cotton sweats favored by overweight men everywhere, it would have been a large error to mistake Cheese for a jolly fat guy or confuse his bulk with a lack of speed.
Cheese smiled a lot, and there was a very real joy that seemed to overtake him in the presence of some people. And for all the wincing that his dated, pseudo Shaft-speak could induce in people, there was something strangely endearing and infectious about it. You’d find yourself listening to him talk and you’d wonder if his adoption of a slang very few people—black or white—had ever truly spoken this side of a Fred Williamson/Antonio Fargas opus was misplaced affection for black ghetto culture, deranged racism, or both. In any case, it could be damn catchy.
But I was also familiar with the Cheese who’d glanced at a guy in a bar one night with such self-possessed malevolence you knew the guy’s life expectancy had just dropped to about a minute and a half. I knew the Cheese who employed girls so thin and skagged out they could disappear by ducking behind a baseball bat, took rolls of bills from them as they leaned into his car, patted their bony asses, and sent them back to work.
And all the rounds he bought at the bar, all the fins and sawbucks he pressed into the flesh of broken rummies and then drove them to get Chinese with it, all the turkeys