Authors: Duane Swierczynski
Canary (40 page)
“We didn’t want you to worry.”
“Congrats, Dad. I didn’t worry. Not until she was already dead, and now I worry all the time. Worry about what you’re not telling me. About what Sarie’s not telling me. What’s next, huh? Well, I’m tired of that shit. I went looking for the answers myself. And I found them.”
Dad looks like he’s about to cry or explode. Marty’s not sure which. What does it matter? He’s not going to start telling the truth now, anyway. He swears, if he ever has children—and that’s a big if, knowing the track record of this family—he’ll never tell them a single lie. No matter how hard it is. He will only deal in truth. He won’t put them through this. Ever.
“Your mother was not a drug dealer,” his father says quietly. “What she was … was beautiful. Her parents were poor, but they scraped together enough money to enter her in a few pageants. She kept the family afloat for quite a while, appearing in those things. But then she was caught somewhere she shouldn’t be, in some cartel business, and now they had something over her head, over her entire family’s head. Cartels are like that. They don’t care about who they’re using or hurting. If you serve a function, they’re going to use you. Anyway, she was forced to do things.”
“Like muling?”
Kevin blinks, surprised to hear the word come out of his twelve-year-old son’s mouth. But then again, he shouldn’t be surprised.
“Yeah, muling.” And worse. Forgive me, Laura. He wasn’t supposed to know any of this. Guess this is punishment for The Fiction—having your face stomped into the curb of The Truth.
“So you rescued her from the cartel?” Marty asks, and Kevin is tempted to deliver more Fiction here. Yes, son, I rescued your mother from the evil drug cartel, gun in my hand, bowie knife strapped to my belt, smuggling her over the border with bullets flying over our heads. But that would dishonor her strength.
“She escaped and somehow found her way to the DEA. I met her in the retreat where I was working. The feds wanted her cleaned up so she could testify.”
Marty catches on instantly. “She was on drugs?”
“Yes.”
But then he tells his son that while his mother was born beautiful, she was like a zombie when they brought her in for treatment. That was the thing nobody understood. Wow, Kev, you lucked out, got yourself a Mexican beauty queen. He didn’t fall in love with her because of her looks. It was her strength. She could survive anything.
“I was in complete awe,” Kevin says.
“Then Sarie will be okay, too,” Marty says, believing it for the first time.
Man, the ex looks like shit, thinks Rem Mahoney as he rubs his hands together, watches her. He’s been out here for a couple hours now—where else is he supposed to go, with the entire world blowing up around him? No word from Frankenstein or Lisa confirming the body dump, news of the so-called Melrose Diner Massacre (seriously, folks, two people ain’t a massacre) spreading everywhere, his man Bird apparently flying the coop … Mahoney thinks maybe his ex-wife is, shockingly enough, his last chance.
Look at her shuffle into her apartment. Hair looking like it hasn’t seen shampoo since the previous weekend, bags under her eyes. You should take a nap, sweetie.
But no, no nap for Katrina. Just a cup of coffee, which sends her pacing around her place like a tiger down at the zoo. She’s trying to figure out where it’s all going wrong.
How about I come in and tell you.
A minute later Rem is knocking on her back door, and the ex panics and pulls her gun, so Rem ducks his smiling face into the window and waves. The look on her face: almost worth all of this effort. When she recovers, she wearily unlocks the back door and lets him in.
“Nice place.”
Not that he hasn’t prowled this place a thousand times already. But it’s weird, actually being invited in. Weird, too, the way she sits on her couch and sighs as if she’s been expecting him.
“That motherfucker Wildey called you, didn’t he? Jesus, he didn’t waste time.”
Oh, this is too good!
“Yes, Wildey did call. We had a very interesting conversation. Oh yes.”
“Don’t listen to a word of his bullshit. He’s the fucking leak in my department!”
“Actually, no, he’s not.”
“What? You can’t think that I’m behind this! Look, Rem, whatever fucked-up shit there is between us, you know me, you know I couldn’t possibly—”
Rem laughs. “Oh, Kaz, honey, you should see yourself. I’m really going to enjoy listening to this later.”
Come on, sweetheart, you can do it. You can figure it out now, can’t you? Because it won’t be any fun if he has to spell it out for her. Judging by the expression on her face, yeah, she’s getting it. Eyes darting all over her apartment, as if she’ll somehow be gifted with fucking X-ray vision and see all the bugs Rem planted in the walls. That’s right. You’ve totally got it now.
At their wedding, some asshole Russian disc jockey did this stupid thing where he forced Rem to sit in a chair while Kaz lifted his arm.
Ladies and gentlemen, take a good look, because this is the last time Rembrandt here will have the upper hand, har har har,
all her fucking Russian mob family laughing their asses off. Well, who has the upper hand now, my bride?
“Now, here’s how we’re going to proceed.”
As it turns out, Kaz has her own ideas about how to proceed. She pulls her gun and aims it at her ex-husband.
I break into Wildey’s home shortly after 5:00 a.m. The block looks abandoned at this hour.
If I’m going to have any prayer of staying alive and keeping Dad and Marty safe, I need proof. The proof has to be somewhere inside this house. Maybe it’s stacks of cash, maybe it’s another burner phone, maybe it’s a bunch of files. I don’t really have a plan other than gathering up whatever it is, carrying it down to the El, and taking it right to the D.A.’s office in the Widener Building. On my way here, stomping around in my too-tight boots and thin hoodie, I briefly considered going straight to the D.A., camping out in the doorway if I had to. But without proof, did I really have a prayer at untangling a massive police conspiracy?
Hence the need to break into Wildey’s house.
It’s the nicest one on the block, but that’s not saying much. Like the one good tooth in a meth addict’s smile. Most of them have been demolished, leaving muddy, weedy lots in their place. Others are still standing but with little more than old paint, grime, and a prayer keeping them up. On the sides of those surviving houses, you can see the phantom images of their former neighbors. Pink paint where a bathroom used to be. Pale green where a kitchen once stood. Then I notice an odd feature on the freestanding houses. Something that would be fine if this were a full block.
Wildey’s car isn’t out front or anywhere on the block. No doubt he’s out there somewhere looking for me, making sure I’m really dead.
Still, I probably don’t have much time.
The house has a neighbor on each side, but both of those buildings are obviously abandoned. I choose the one on the left and make my way through the empty living room, heading upstairs to the back bedroom, where I find a closet. I open the door, and a horrible smell punches me in the nose; something died here a long long time ago. But I hold my breath, step over the carcass (pigeon? squirrel?), and feel the back of the closet. Drywall. At some point these houses were connected by doors; instead of bricking them over, construction crews just put up a sheet of drywall.
Which I now kick through, using my would-be killer’s boots.
The room on the other side—in Wildey’s house now—is jammed with filing cabinets and plastic crates full of albums. Jesus, what a hoarder. This is going to make the search for proof a little tricky. And I have no idea how much time I have left when I hear a voice to my right:
—Jesus Christ!
Wildey is in the door, slightly crouched, pointing a gun at me.
I scream and dive back toward the closet, pushing through old clothes in a frenzy, but I can’t move fast enough. Rough hands grab me, pull me back out.
Wildey yells it over and over again,
I’m not gonna hurt you, I’m not gonna hurt you!,
hoping that it will sink in before some neighbor calls the police. Finally the words sink in and she stops fighting him. They move back into the back bedroom, which is where he keeps all of his dad’s old shit. Wildey eases back onto a stack of crates while Sarie sits on the one open space on the floor, hugging her knees, staring at nothing in particular.
“I didn’t think you’d be home. Didn’t see your car.”
“I use a lot of different cars. How the hell did you get in here?”
But she ignores the question.
“You said you’d be listening,” she says quietly. “Where
were
you?”
“We were both set up. My lieutenant … she’s crooked. She’s going to pay for what she’s done. You can help me do that.”
“No.”
“I know you’ve been through a living hell, Sarie, but listen to me, you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Lieutenant Mahoney is not the one leaking the information. Her ex-husband was spying on her. Had her apartment bugged. He knew about all of your CIs. Gave their names to the mafia who are muscling into the drug market.”
Wildey feels the onset of a crushing sensation in his chest.
“Ex-husband? You’re telling me Captain Rem Mahoney, of Internal fucking Affairs, is behind this?”
“He’s the one calling the shots, Peter D’Argenio was his second-in-command. D’Argenio’s dead. You can find his body and the missing confidential informants down at Pier Sixty-three, under the abandoned tracks.”
That crushing feeling only intensifies, like a fucking heart attack, but Wildey knows it’s something else. “Fuck me,” he says, standing up. “Don’t move. Promise me you won’t move until I get back!”
Sarie doesn’t reply; she rests her head on her knees.
The moment the door slams shut, I start crying again.
For me, for Wildey, for Dad and Marty, for you, for this whole fucked-up situation.
But mostly I cry for Drew—his name was Drew Pike, and I think you would have liked him, Mom. We thought we could save each other, but we underestimated this city and its cruelty.
Wildey didn’t set me up, but that’s no real comfort. Because the danger’s still out there.
There’s only one play left, and it makes me sob even harder just thinking about it.
Wildey kicks in the back door—the wood around the knob splinters. He goes in, gun first. But there’s no real need, because his lieutenant is already dead and her killer, Captain Rembrandt Mahoney, is hopelessly drunk and sobbing and mumbling,
I only wanted to see what she’d do, I just wanted to see what she’d do, just wanted to see her …
They’re sitting together on the couch, Kaz with her head tilted to one side, Mahoney pressed up against her, like they’d just been watching TV. There are two bullet wounds in the lieutenant’s chest and one in Mahoney’s right arm.
Wildey calls it in and places Mahoney under arrest.
By the time Wildey returns home later that morning, he finds two notes. One, slid into his mail slot, is from Kevin Holland:
Officer Wildey, please contact me immediately. Phone number below. This is in regards to my daughter. If you do not contact me I will be forced to be in contact with your supervisor.
Sincerely,
Kevin Holland
The other is a note placed where Sarie had been sitting, held in place with the corner of an album crate.
Wildey,
I had to leave. You’ll understand why soon enough. PLEASE:
- Do not tell anyone I am alive
- Keep the burner with the number I know
- Destroy this note after you read it
I will explain later. Sorry I doubted you. Also, I took one of your burner phones and some clothes. It’s cold out there.
#137
The memorial service is bullshit.
Not that it isn’t nice or that the university hasn’t put real effort into it (even the student choir showed up to the tiny chapel in the basement of College Hall). But Kevin Holland knows it is bullshit because a) his daughter is not dead, he just
knows
it, and no, this is not another case of The Fiction, and b) his daughter is not a criminal, even though this is how she’s being presented.
The “official” story from the Philadelphia Police Department is that Serafina Holland was busted while transporting drugs for her boyfriend, Andrew Pike, and agreed to work as a confidential informant to avoid prosecution. Holland also embezzled $2,000 from the bursar’s office to help Pike pay off a drug debt. However, Pike’s dealer, real estate agent Charles Chaykin, became aware of Holland’s status as a CI, and is believed to have ordered the murder of Andrew Pike, whose body was found in a stash house in Pennsport on Friday, December 13. Holland is missing and presumed dead. Chaykin is the prime suspect and is actively being sought by authorities.