Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [71]
A single tear fell to her breast, and after a moment it slid over the nipple and fell to my chest, already cold by the time it hit my skin.
“I know that,” she said. “But be that as it may, I want your child. Not today, maybe not even next year. But I want it. I want to produce something beautiful from my body that is us and yet a person completely unlike us.”
“You want a baby.”
She shook her head. “I want your baby.”
At some point we dozed.
Or I did. I woke a few minutes later to find her gone from the bed, and I got up and walked through the dark apartment into the kitchen, found her sitting at the table by the window, her bare flesh paled by the fractured moonlight cutting through rips in the shade.
There was a notepad by her elbow, the case file in front of her, and she looked up as I came through the doorway and said, “They can’t let her live.”
“Cheese and Mullen?”
She nodded. “It’s a dumb tactical move. They have to kill her.”
“They’ve kept her alive so far.”
“How do we know? And even if they have, they’ll only do so, maybe, until they get the money. Just to be sure. But then they’ll have to kill her. She’s too much of a loose end.”
I nodded.
“You’ve already faced this,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So tomorrow night?”
“I expect to find a corpse.”
She lit a cigarette, and her skin was momentarily flushed by the lighter flame. “Can you live with that?”
“No.” I came over to the table by her, put my hand on her shoulder, was aware of our nakedness in the kitchen, and I found myself thinking again of the power we held in our bed and our bodies, that potential third life floating like a spirit between our bare skin.
“Bubba?” she said.
“Most certainly.”
“Poole and Broussard won’t like it.”
“Which is why we won’t tell them he’s there.”
“If Amanda is still alive when we reach the quarries, and we can locate her, or at least pinpoint her location—”
“Then Bubba will drop anyone holding her. Drop ’em like a sack of shit and disappear back into the night.”
She smiled. “You want to call him?”
I slid the phone across the table. “Be my guest.”
She crossed her legs as she dialed, tilted her head into the receiver. “Hey, big boy,” she said, when he answered, “want to come out and play tomorrow night?”
She listened for a moment, and her smile widened.
“If you’re particularly blessed, Bubba, sure, you’ll get to shoot someone.”
17
Major John Dempsey of the Massachusetts State Police had a wide Irish face as flat as a pancake and the wary, bulging eyes of an owl. He even blinked like an owl; a sudden snap of the ocular muscles would clamp his thick lids down over his eyes, where they’d remain a tenth of a second longer than normal before they’d snap back up like window shades and disappear under the brows.
Like most state troopers I’ve encountered, his spine seemed forged of lead pipe and his lips were pale and too thin; in the flat whiteness of his face they appeared to have been etched into the flesh by a weak pencil. His hands were a creamy white, the fingers long and feminine, the nails manicured as smooth as the edge of a nickel. But those hands were the only softness in him. The rest of him was constructed of shale, his slim frame so hard and stripped of body fat that if he fell from the podium I was sure he’d break apart in chips.
The uniforms of our state troopers have always unsettled me, and none more so than that of the upper ranks. There’s something aggressively Teutonic in all that spit-polished black leather, those pronounced epaulets and shiny silver brass, the hard strap of the Sam Browne as it clamps across the chest from right shoulder to left hip, the extra quarter inch of height in the cap brim so that it settles over the forehead and shrouds the eyes.
City cops always remind me of the grunts in old war movies. No matter how nicely dressed, they seem one step away from crawling on their bellies up the beach at Normandy, wet cigar