Chapter 22
I wasn’t sure if what I was doing qualified as a working vacation. But my chief wasn’t too pleased about me putting in for one just when the task force was getting into full swing, if you can call a bunch of guys following one dead lead after another and literally chasing ghosts “full swing.” Luckily, he knew about the hard time Beatrice and I had had after Chaz’s death and everyone in the department knew that she often suffered from depression for which no pharmaceutical company had developed a pill. So he had no choice but to accept my half-true excuse that I was taking vacation for personal reasons.
Strictly speaking, I was telling the truth in a warped sort of way. For some reason, and maybe Chaz has something to do with this, the Moss kid just had a way of getting under my skin and if anything had happened to him after everything that had already happened to him, I would take it very personally, indeed. I didn’t feel the need to justify that. All the same, I hated myself a little for using Chaz or at least leading my coworkers and superiors into believing that his abrupt death and its belated effect on my wife and me was the reason I had to take a week off.
I knew exactly where to find the kid after they took off with him in Quincy. On Halloween night I bribed a bellhop to call me if he saw anyone suspicious enter the hotel or the penthouse and I went back to my office to find a message from him waiting for me. When I called him on his cell, the bellhop said he saw a tall black guy, “a smoking hot blonde with a nice rack” and some Emo kid. I’m glad he called me but on reflection I’m wondering which one he considered suspicious in a five star hotel: The kid with the Emo hairdo, the hot blonde with the big tits or the black guy.
Whatever his reason for calling me, I couldn’t believe my good luck. When I told the tall kid in the organ grinder getup to tip me off to anyone suspicious (he held out his hand, apparently not happy that I crossed his palm with just my calling card), I wasn’t thinking of anyone from the government. Hell, back on Halloween, I didn’t know any of the three existed. But when you’re stymied with a case that doesn’t want to be solved, sometimes it’s best to go back to basics, like the elementary rule of criminology of the criminal always returning to the scene of the crime (which isn’t even remotely true, by the way, even if you take into consideration all the home games played by the Red Sox since the ’86 World Series or the trips Bush made to Iraq).
So far I was one for one and that alone emboldened me to push my luck and to keep following the kid. I knew they were planning on taking him to the mother ship and I was bound and determined to hitchhike on the tractor beam. The only problem was getting into their headquarters without being seen or recognized, especially since both Laura and Blood had already met me.
Then I realized that may be immaterial as I saw the three of them walk out of the front door of the Ritz Carlton.
I looked at Laura as we came down the elevator. Oliver Blood was standing to my right and I glanced at his fuzzy reflection of the shiny gold doors. I wanted to talk to my sister in private ‘cuz I was still way short of trusting this Blood dude enough so that I could comfortably rap with Laura in the open. Besides, a ghost at that café told me I couldn’t trust him. I never saw that ghost before or since but they generally don’t lie like we living folks do.
The double doors parted and we took a few steps before I deliberately stepped on one of my shoelaces and undid the knot. I bent down knowing that Laura would stop. Blood took a couple of more steps before he realized we weren’t with him and he stopped and turned around.
“Go on ahead. I have to retie my shoe.” He looked at Laura and slowly walked down the lobby but stayed clear of the revolving door. I looked up at Laura as I fooled around with my laces. “Mom and Dad aren’t coming, are they?”
Laura sighed and looked at Blood, who sat down while keeping an eye on us. She partly turned her back to him so he couldn’t read her lips. “No, Adam, they’re not.”
“So when am I gonna see them again?”
“I don’t know.” Looking at Blood again. “Look, Bro, Oliver didn’t want me to tell you this so soon but we had to take Mom and Dad into protective custody.”
“What?!” I had to remind myself to continue fiddle-fucking with my shoelaces. “Waddya mean, ‘protective custody’? Protect them from what?”
“We had to take them to a safe house. Just as a precaution.”
“Why? Where are they?”
“Just as a precaution, Honey. No one’s threatened them. But after what happened to the Christiansons, we can’t take chances.”
“So where the fuck are they?” I looked up at that Blood dude and, yep, he was still staring at us like we were a hooker and a john and he was the hotel dick. I switched to the other shoe to buy us some more time.
“I… I’m sorry, Hun, I can’t tell you that.”
“You’re not…?” I lowered my voice, kept my head down and hoped my long bangs hid the anger on my face. “You won’t tell me where you stashed our own mother and father?”
“Adam, it’s for your and their own good. It’s best you don’t know. That way they can’t get their location from you.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Whoever.” Now I know why it drives my Mom crazy every time I saw “Whatever” to her. Somehow, I knew my sister was talking about that Dietrich asshole who obviously sent Field Marshall Yodel to off the Christiansons just to make a point to me. “Look, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t know, either. That way, nobody can use me to get to them, either.”
“’Cuz they’re my Achilles heel, right?”
“Exactly. And your reaction to this is the reason Oliver didn’t want you to know about this so soon. But Mom and Dad are just fine. We have them in one of the safest, most secluded safe houses in the country.”
Blood got up from the chair and began walking toward us again. I tied my right sneaker with the blood stain on the instep and got up. I tossed my bangs out of my eyes and gave her a blank stare that only she could decipher. It’s the kind of sociopathic look that I give someone just before I fuck ‘em good. I gave Oliver the same look as I passed him.
I was parked in my Crown Vic on the other side of the toney Mass Ave and 45 minutes into playing a game called, “Who’s Got an Older Shitbox Than Me?” The count was somewhere at zero when I saw the Moss kids and Oliver Blood materialize from the revolving door. On account of those ridiculous bangs and the traffic that intermittently obscured my view, I couldn’t make out Adam’s face that well. But his body language and the way he set his mouth all but convinced me that he wasn’t too thrilled about something.
I began to wonder where their parents were and if that had anything to do with how grim he looked. After all, the kid was at first the prime suspect then a material witness in a double homicide that practically called for two body bags and two bowling bags. Even though the kid was now 18, he was still living at home and you’d think his folks, after hearing about it, would want to have a word or two with the pertinent police authorities. Unless Elle Moss and her creepy boss whisked them somewhere else, which would make the Moss kid’s involvement a little more interesting.
Then Adam tossed his bangs out of his face, immediately locked eyes with me even across four lanes of busy traffic and completely freaked out.
I knew that Laura and her boss both met Coffey but as far as I knew, neither of them had any clue what car he drove. But when I threw my hair out of my eyes I just happened to see him across Mass Ave in his shitbox. Blood and Laura were in front of me and I just somehow knew it wouldn’t be cool if they saw him, too. So, good idea or bad, I did the only thing I could think of on the spot- I spazzed out in front of about a hundred strangers, my sister and her boss.
“Leave me the fuck alone!” I screamed. It’s kinda fucked up but Laura and Blood were almost the only two people who bothered to pay any serious attention to me.
“Adam, what’s going on?” my sister asked while looking around. Not that she would’ve seen anything even if I was seeing ghosts. The truth is, I hadn’t seen one since Commandant Yodel flew through the Christianson’s ceiling after offing the whole fucking family. I don’t know what creeped me out more- When my personal space became Ghost Central or when they avoid me.
“It’s… it’s them!” I yelled, pointing every which way but where Coffey was parked. I was hoping my act wouldn’t make him sit there and gawk at me but make him move so that Laura and Blood wouldn’t see him. “Get away from me!” Oliver suddenly appeared and grabbed my arm like a vise.
“We’ve got to get him out of here. He’s exposed.”
“Adam, Honey, who is it? What do you see?”
“I… I dunno. I never saw them before.”
“We can ask him later, Moss. Let’s move.” He pushed me toward some shiny black SUV near the hotel entrance and shoved me in the back seat. Laura then slid next ti me. As Blood got behind the wheel and turned the key, I looked across the street. Coffey was gone.
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