No Good Deeds Part 25

He's giving me instructions, Crow realized-and maybe risking his own life in the process.

33.

Was that him?" Barry Jenkins asked when Ed Keyes hung up the phone.

"Was that who?"

"Edgar Ransome-the young white man who's traveling with a young black man who happens to be a person of interest in the murder of a federal prosecutor. You've practically been harboring a fugitive, Mr. Keyes. How did a former cop get mixed up in something like this?"

Jenkins and Collins had arrived at Keyes's trailer-park address just after ten. It had been Collins who pointed out that it would look weird, calling in sick and then going to arrest the suspect in the Youssef case. This way they could say honestly that they'd followed up on a lead that Dalesio had shared with Collins before he died. But Jenkins always forgot how long it took to cover the 130 miles between Baltimore and the Delaware beaches, even in the off-season. The first hour flew by, making you c.o.c.ky, but then came Delaware and the long, dark stretch of 404, a two-lane road where one stubborn farmer could bring the average speed down to forty-five miles per hour. At night the landscape seemed desolate and eerie, the kind of countryside where people broke down in horror films. And Collins, so bold in every other respect, was restrained behind the wheel of a car. That probably came from a lifetime of DWB.

They could have left earlier, but Jenkins wanted to go through the motions, walk through the steps that they would later claim to have taken. One less lie to keep track of. They had even gone by Gabe's house, although they didn't need to go in. After all, Gabe had already told Collins what they needed to know-the name of the likely contact, his address over in Delaware. They were almost to the Bay Bridge when that c.u.n.t called, suddenly ready to play, and Jenkins had agreed to meet her rather than let her know that he was nowhere nearby. She wouldn't be the first woman he'd stood up.

Once they arrived in Fenwick, they had decided not to go straight to the ex-cop's trailer. They chatted up some neighbors in the trailer park. They were skeptical types, but again official ID and badges worked wonders, and they eventually loosened the jaw of one old biddy, who had noticed a strange young man hanging around.

"White or black?" Jenkins had asked.

The woman had cast a nervous look toward Collins, as if unsure of the propriety of referencing race in his presence.

"Why, white," she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. "He sat outside and drank a beer with Ed on Sunday, bold as you please."

Bold because it was Sunday, because it was beer? Jenkins wasn't sure of her logic.

"You get a name, or any information about him?"

"I think Ed said he's a seasonal worker, helping him out at the park."

"The park?"

"You know, the place he runs down to the boardwalk."

Of course Jenkins didn't know. But she volunteered the info eventually, in her own scattered way. So while Jenkins was sitting with Ed Keyes, sharing a beer with him and trying to get him to open up about his "seasonal worker," Mike Collins was already en route to FunWorld to make his acquaintance.

Then the phone rang. Jenkins wasn't fooled. He knew what the old guy was trying to do-but he also knew he was too late. Collins probably would have shot the old guy, but Jenkins was trying to do this right for once.

Mike Collins sat parked outside the shuttered amus.e.m.e.nt park, trying to figure out where all the entrances were. Fearlessness had always been his greatest strength-and his largest liability. He never doubted that he could outrun, outshoot, outfight anyone. Outthink? No. But in any physical contest, he would win.

But that was in Baltimore, on occasion Prince George's County, places where it was never truly dark. Off-season, the town of Fenwick sat in inky blackness, clouds blotting out whatever light the stars might have provided tonight. The ocean, which Collins could hear but not see, should have been a comfort. Wherever they went, they couldn't go east. That was one direction he didn't have to worry about. Still, it bothered him, this unknown territory. He saw only one door, in the center of a clown's leering mouth, but what about all those garage-type entrances? He had to get the kid now or risking losing him, losing everything.

Just the kid, Jenkins had said over and over, as if Collins were stupid. Just the kid. Take him into custody, and we'll stage our final act out on the road. Jenkins's idea was that they would stop for a bathroom break somewhere, or so they would tell folks later on. That lonely stretch of 404, the bypa.s.s around Bridgeville. The kid would demand a chance to whiz on the side of the road, and Jenkins would join him, then the kid would go for Jenkins's gun, and Mike would have to shoot him. Would they throw down the knife, too, or was that overkill? Collins was fuzzy on that part.

Just the kid.

Well, he'd do his best.

He eased out of the car and positioned himself in a doorway opposite the side entrance to the amus.e.m.e.nt park. Could they raise those big shutters? Not quickly, he guessed, and not without a lot of noise, chains rattling and s.h.i.t. d.a.m.n, he wished he knew the layout of the place inside. Maybe he should wait for Jenkins so they could control for someone trying to go out the windows. Maybe- But here they were. Two men, about the same height and build, moving silently and quickly toward an old Jeep. He was on them before the driver was in the car, his gun in the guy's back. Normally he would have roared, too, used the adrenaline-fueled bl.u.s.ter he'd been trained to employ in such situations. But it was almost as if the guy expected him. His hands went up in automatic surrender. A civilian, as Jenkins had predicted. A candy-a.s.s.

"Mike Collins?" the man asked.

"Yes," he said automatically even as he thought, How? How do you know my name? The girlfriend, s.h.i.t, the girlfriend- "Run, Lloyd!" the man screamed. "Run!"

And the boy took off toward the ocean of all places, ran toward the sound of that angry surf. Surprised, then furious, Collins caught the man across the face with his weapon, then hit him again, and he would have kept going if he hadn't remembered that the man, infuriating as he was, wasn't the quarry. Just the kid, Jenkins had said. Should he finish the man off, was he still off-limits? No, he had to chase and catch the kid. He'd have to do the throw-down on his own. Jenkins would understand.

The kid had a good head start, and it took Mike a moment to realize he'd have to shuck his shoes if he wanted to be compet.i.tive on this wet sand and surf. Still, the kid was just a runt and a slacker, underfed and underexercised. He had no chance. The distance between them was closing, and the stretch of beach ahead was increasingly desolate. Mike wouldn't even try to catch him until they got past that last line of houses, where he could be sure that they were alone, unseen.

Lloyd thought briefly about Crow's advice that he should learn to swim. If he could get out in the ocean, would he be safer? Guy was a brother, maybe he couldn't swim either. Too late now, and he'd freeze to death in that water anyway. His lungs were on fire, his legs felt like lead, churning in the sand, but he had to keep going, not daring to look back. He was pretty sure that cops, even dirty cops, couldn't shoot you in the back. Someone had told him that. Who?

Le'andro. f.u.c.k.

He wished he could take it back, every bit of it. Rewind his life as if it were a video, go to that night before Thanksgiving. No, Le'andro, I can't help you out. No, Le'andro, I'm not going to hide here and listen to what this guy tells you to do, then do it for you.

Two hundred dollars and a North Face jacket. Crow was right. It was a p.i.s.s-poor payment for one's life.

The houses seem to be giving way, disappearing. He was now on an open stretch of beach, and he could hear that guy grunting behind him, steady as the Terminator. Crow was wrong. He shouldn't have run. Guy might not have killed him in front of a witness, but he'd sure as h.e.l.l do it out here in the middle of nowhere. Crow was just protecting his own a.s.s, maybe, like in Robocop, where all those guys keep running from the guy that the machine had targeted for a.s.sa.s.sination. f.u.c.k Crow. f.u.c.k everybody. Lloyd could sense the other man gaining on him, and he was beginning to think he couldn't go another step when light flooded the open beach and that pathetic ugly Jeep crested the dunes just ahead of him.

Crow hadn't abandoned him after all. But what could Crow do anyway?

Crow's nose was broken, he was pretty sure of that, and something felt off in his cheek. Whatever had happened, it was the worst pain he had ever known, worse even than being stabbed, because at least then he had gone into shock, been beyond pain.

Still, he knew he had to get to Lloyd. He didn't even take time to deflate the Jeep's tires, not caring if it got stuck in the sand. The thing was to get there, to be present, to bank on the fact that a witness would take the air out of this scheme. He raced up the stretch of Highway 1, wishing that the summer speed traps were there so he could lead them into the chase, pulled into the parking lot of the public beach, and then rammed up the path used by the surf fishers. His headlamps picked up two running figures. The one in front looked ragged, on the verge of collapse, while the other moved with a brisk, confident stride.

"Stop!" he screamed. "We'll come with you together! We'll both-"

To his amazement, the man on the beach turned and fired straight at him, hitting the Jeep. The lights probably made it hard for him to aim with any accuracy, but now he was approaching, coming toward the Jeep's side, his weapon drawn. And for the first time in his life, Crow understood that he was in danger, that he could be killed. Lloyd, yes. Lloyd, sure. Lloyd, of course. He had been protecting Lloyd all along. Lloyd was vulnerable because he was the kind of disposable kid whose death no one would notice, as long as it was under the right circ.u.mstances. But not him. People like Crow didn't get killed, not by cops, no matter how crooked and desperate.

Yet here was a man approaching him with a gun, a man who was going to shoot him and then Lloyd. How would he explain it? Crow backed away, moving behind the car, but it seemed unlikely that they could maintain this game of ring-around-the-rosy, like in some old retro movie where the boss chased the comely secretary around the desk.

"You can't," he shouted to Mike Collins. "It's over. You can't-"

Yet the man's very posture made clear that he could, that he would. Crow bent down and grabbed a handful of sand, flung it in Collins's face. It wasn't clear if he hit his eyes as he had hoped, but Collins flinched instinctively, and it was all Crow needed. He dove into the Jeep and grabbed the gun he'd taken from Tess, the .38 Smith & Wesson that she retired when she bought her Beretta. Lloyd, as if sensing his plan, threw himself on Collins from behind, knocking him down in the sand. Like a child, at once single-minded and unfocused, Collins turned his attention on Lloyd, pushing him off, positioning himself in the sand, taking a two-handed grip on his gun and aiming straight at Lloyd's forehead.

"Don't!" It was unclear if the man could hear, if he ever heard, if he understood anything other than his own need to survive. Lloyd closed his eyes, surrendering, ready to die.

Lloyd opened them again at the sound of the gunshot, watched in seeming amazement as Collins crumpled. Crow, who hadn't handled a weapon since he earned a merit badge in riflery, had made the first shot count, because he knew this was not a night for second chances.

Jenkins wasn't surprised when he heard the knock at Ed's trailer door. He had been expecting Mike to come back and tell him the boy was safely in tow, that they needed to head back. In fact, he wasn't sure why it had taken this long.

He was surprised to see the two men he'd been searching for. They had become abstract to him, somehow, objects, one with a name and one without. He knew the one face, from driver's-license databases, although it had been far more handsome in that official photo, without the nose bloodied and crooked.

"Call the police," Crow said to Ed. "And then I need to call a lawyer."

"Did you...?"

"I can't talk to you. You're FBI, right? Barry Jenkins. Tess sent us pictures of you. Are you crooked, too? Were you part of this?"

Jenkins took out his service weapon.

"s.h.i.t," Ed said. "Give it up, man. It's over."

Jenkins could blame it all on Collins, of course. Pretend ignorance. Say he'd been duped as everyone else had, that it was Youssef's plan and Collins had killed him. That had been built into the equation from the beginning. No one could link Barry Jenkins to anything directly-not Bennie Tep, not Youssef, no one. True, he'd been there the night Youssef died, driven behind Collins up the highway to the turnpike exit where they dumped the car, and the very setup suggested an accomplice. But no one could prove it was him. Except Collins.

"Is he dead?"

The boyfriend, what's-his-name, considered the question and nodded.

"How?"

"I'd prefer to wait for the local police and an attorney before I say anything else." Even now the old man was moving toward the phone. Like Jenkins gave a s.h.i.t.

Jenkins pointed his gun at the boy. "Tell me your name."

"I'm calling 911," the old cop roared, grabbing the phone. "Don't think that I won't."

"Just your name. That's all I want. Tell me who you are."

"Lloyd Jupiter," the boy whispered. He was trembling, the little s.h.i.t.

Jenkins thought fleetingly of going outside. But Jenkins was afraid he would lose his nerve if he took another step, and he was determined to do the right thing, the honorable thing, as awful as it was.

"Lloyd Jupiter," he echoed.

With that, Barry Jenkins nodded, put his weapon in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

MAY.

34.

I almost made it," Tess says to me, perhaps for the twentieth time. It's something of a sore point.

"Almost," I agree, crushing the Metro section of the Beacon-Light into a ball and tossing it into a trash can. Two men were killed in Baltimore yesterday, their deaths dutifully reported on page B-3. Meanwhile City Man is on the cover of the Maryland section again, arrested by federal agents for alleged ties to terrorists.

In other words, in the immortal words of the Talking Heads-same as it ever was. But Tess can't let go of that night in particular, or the past in general. That's what makes her a true Baltimorean.

"The thing is, there's this sign, at the intersection of 26 and 20, tells you to go right to Fenwick? But 20 takes you around to the south end. I would have been better off going through Bethany and then heading down the coastal highway. And I still got there before the Delaware police, although not before...''

"Uh-huh."

We're sitting on the steps of Holy Redeemer, as we've done every Monday, hoping to get lucky. The afternoon lunch service has just started, and the line is long, because Holy Redeemer is serving chicken and word travels fast. People come from as far as West Baltimore on Chicken Day.

"I mean, I thought it out. I had a plan. They were going to be in Baltimore, waiting for me, while I went and got you. I kept trying to call you, too, just in case anyone beat me there-but your G.o.dd.a.m.n cell phone was off."

"It lost the charge."

"Whatever. All that folderol with the phones, and do you realize we never once spoke on them? That they were off, or out of range, or out of juice-"

"I know, Tess. I overthought it."

It isn't-for once-that she has to prove she's right. Tess needs absolution. She feels bad about my nose, which is healing just fine with no damage to the sinuses, and that's all I care about. It isn't quite as straight as it once was, but I like the b.u.mp. Makes me look like more of a tough guy. It was just that night, seeing me all b.l.o.o.d.y and f.u.c.ked up in Ed's trailer, that threw Tess. She came galloping in, gun drawn, not even two minutes after Jenkins killed himself, frantic because she recognized the boxy sedan parked outside. Now you know how it feels, I wanted to say.

And I know how she felt, so it all evens out.

My nose is just a portion of Tess's guilt. She thinks this is all her fault. If she hadn't decided to track down Lloyd and force him to tell what he knew about Greg Youssef, none of this-the deaths of Gabe Dalesio and Le'andro Watkins-would have happened. But if I hadn't brought Lloyd home in the first place...if Lloyd hadn't slashed my tire...if I hadn't borrowed the Lexus that day because the brakes on my Volvo were squishy...if I hadn't concealed my inheritance from Tess, making it difficult to explain to her how I could afford to fix my squishy brakes. The bottom line is, if it doesn't snow on that particular Monday in March, none of this happens. But it did, and it has, and that's that. We'll keep circling back to the subject again and again, each making the case for our central role. My fault. No, my fault. But I also know that there is as much ego as guilt in this argument, and time will wear it down. Eventually. If you think about it, Tess and I actually came in at the end of this story. The people who should feel guilty aren't alive. And I don't think Mike Collins ever felt much of anything, although there was something akin to remorse and sorrow in Barry Jenkins's face that night.

The question is whether he felt it for himself and the failure of his grand scheme or for the people who had died because of it. I suppose it could have been both.

Strange to say, the worst part of the whole ordeal wasn't that night on the beach, when I at least had adrenaline on my side. The scary part was the three days when I was held for the death of Mike Collins. Killing a DEA agent is serious stuff, even if you can persuasively make the case that he was going to execute an innocent kid in front of your eyes, even if you had good reason to think he was going to kill you as well. No one believes in law and order more than those charged with keeping it, and things were rough for Lloyd and me those first seventy-two hours in Delaware. But Tess's call to Martin Tull proved helpful, along with the information about how hard Jenkins and Collins had pressed her for Lloyd's name. Turns out Jenkins had wormed his way into the Youssef investigation, but Collins had no official role, and it was beyond bizarre that an FBI agent and a DEA agent were working together. Nothing to get a bureaucracy's attention like the flouting of its own precious rules.

And when investigators started discovering the a.s.sets in the two agents' names, it began to come together. Wilma was the one who delineated it for us, who saw how easy it would be for federal agents to blackmail a drug dealer who was at no risk of indictment. They were stickup men with badges instead of guns. Wilma made a semiclean breast of things, telling investigators she had found fifty thousand dollars in a safe-deposit box in her husband's name. "Triple that," Tess told me, but she kept still. Me, I think that Wilma's motive wasn't greed so much as spin. The smaller the amount, the more likely it was that her dead husband was a blackmailer instead of a full-fledged coconspirator. It may seem like a silly distinction, but I'm not going to begrudge her that. We all need certain myths to get by.

"Are you going to tell Lloyd about the money?" Tess asks me. "Your money, I mean."

"First I just want to find him."

Secrets are corrosive. Remember that. Oh, I suppose it's okay to conceal birthday gifts and Christmas and other pleasant surprises, but every other deception leads to rot. If I had told Tess about my inheritance when I came into the trust at the beginning of this year, then it wouldn't have mushroomed into such a big deal. But I hated the money, loathed the very thought of it. It was blood money twice over, and I couldn't bring myself to speak of it.

The first part of the story, Tess knew. Years ago my grandfather had disinherited my mother for running off with my father. Grandfather-and it was always "Grandfather," nothing shorter or sweeter-saw money as a cudgel, a whip, a means of control. He thought he could bend my mother to his will with it. Much to his surprise, my mother was perfectly happy with her life as a professor's wife. But after I was born, she sent me to her father in the summers, an olive branch of sorts, an indication that she was willing to make amends if he would meet her halfway. Unfortunately, my grandfather saw me as another weapon, another way to punish my mother. He made me heir to a trust that she had to administer, thinking that would shame and hurt her. My mother didn't mind, but I did. I hated being a p.a.w.n in the old man's game.

And that was before my mother told me last fall, just before I came into the trust, that it was time I knew the origins of the family's fortunes.

"Whaling," I said. "Grandfather never shut up about it." My Nantucket summers had included a lot of briefings on my ancestors.

"Whaling in the nineteenth century," she said. "But earlier, in the eighteenth...well, they had started with a very different kind of cargo."

"Oh."

Growing up in Charlottesville, I had gone to schools with various Lees and Jacksons and Stuarts, marveled at cla.s.smates who actually looked forward to joining the Sons of the Confederacy. I always wondered how they lived with their family's legacies. And now it turned out my own history was just as complex. A million dollars. Did time wash money clean of its sins? Was I culpable for my ancestors' moral relativism, in which the men enabled the slave trade and the women then protested it, achieving some kind of karmic equipoise? And wasn't I guilty of the same kind of hypocrisy, giving it away a dollar a time but not ready to relinquish it whole? My very approach to philanthropy was cavalier, ill-conceived. My Monday-morning food drive, which recycles food from area bars and restaurants? Pure bulls.h.i.t. I drive down to the wholesale market in Jessup and buy what I think the soup kitchens can use. Without me there is no Chicken Day at Holy Redeemer. I was straddling, too.

Charlotte Curtis, the director at Holy R, says Lloyd is in the wind again. He tried to go home, but it was the old Thomas Wolfe story. Within days he and Murray had clashed and he was back to his old life-scamming, loafing, scrounging. Lloyd turns seventeen this summer, and he missed most of tenth grade. How can anyone reasonably expect to help Lloyd if he won't help himself?