CHAPTER 25
I waited in Ziggy while Ruby went inside Giovanni’s liquor store, carrying an envelope we had stuffed with three hundred dollars in cash. His money, plus what we could afford as a hardship gift. Ruby would say that she took up a collection from concerned local citizens. It was the morning after the robbery, but I measured time in the number of days before Uretsky would try to make me commit another crime. That would be a little less than two, assuming he started the clock after I robbed the store.
The news was on the radio. I listened to yet another report on the strange kidnapping of Dr. Lisa Adams. Naturally, Ruby and I had been listening all morning. Adams didn’t know where she’d been taken, who took her, or what her kidnapper wanted. All she knew was that one moment she was tied to a chair, and the next she was back in her bedroom. There was no evidence of sexual assault. No physical assault, either, aside from several rope burns. Dr. Adams was free to get a lifetime of therapy for no other reason than she knew us. At least she was alive.
We both had strength, but it was like a faucet—off and on. One moment we’d be fine; the next one of us would break down. We’d think about Rhonda. We’d think about what happened to Dr. Adams. We’d feel guilty and trapped, but we also knew we had to carry on. We didn’t see an alternative.
I watched through the front window as Ruby talked to Giovanni. He talked back to her, his hands contributing equally to their conversation. I saw him shooing her away, not angrily. He kept bowing his body, waving with his hands, gestures that implied “Thank you, but no thank you.” Ruby tried twice more to give him the envelope, but each time Giovanni shook his head.
Now, Ruby has one of the best puppy dog looks going. I swear that look is like a siren’s song when she wants it to be. So I’m pretty sure she flashed Giovanni one of her finest, because he touched his hand to his heart and then put both hands on her shoulders. He smiled—a resigned-looking grin—made several successive head nods, and motioned for the envelope. Ruby gave it to him, waved good-bye, and headed for the front door.
However, something made her stop. I assumed Giovanni called for her attention, because he held up a finger and was making a “Wait here” gesture. He vanished from my view but reappeared moments later, holding a bottle of wine. With the roles reversed, it was now Ruby who tried to refuse the offer. Giovanni insisted and Ruby relented.
She left his store and walked to the corner as we had planned. I started up Ziggy, made a U-turn, and picked Ruby up where Giovanni couldn’t see us. She climbed in and handed me the bottle of wine.
“He says it goes great with fish,” Ruby said.
“What else did he say?” I asked.
“If he could find the guy who robbed him, he’d give him a hug for saving his life.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Then he said he’d get his bat out and finish what he started.”
I laughed, but only a little.
We drove in silence awhile. Then I said, “It’s making me sick.”
“What is?”
“Rhonda Jennings.”
Ruby got quiet. “Me too,” she said. “But what could you have done? How could we have known?”
“I just wish, is all . . .”
“Wish what?”
“That there was something I could put inside an envelope and make that right, too.”
We stopped by Dr. Lee’s office on the way home. Ruby needed more Verbilifide, and we decided to keep using the Uretsky name to get it. In for a penny, in for a pound, or so the saying goes. We had enough stress, and to add to it by coming up with another way of getting Ruby her meds just didn’t make any sense. We also figured Uretsky already knew about Dr. Lee, same as he did Dr. Adams. What could we tell her? “Be careful”? “Look out for strangers wearing masks”? Right now we just needed to get the drugs and get out of there. Soon we were back inside the cramped examination room, which had become as familiar to us as our bedroom—at either apartment.
Dr. Lee, looking professional in her white lab coat, surveyed Ruby underneath the harsh glare of the overhead fluorescent lighting and didn’t take long to make her assessment.
“Are you feeling all right?” she asked. Her worried tone concerned me.
“I’m okay,” Ruby said.
“You don’t look very well,” Lee said.
“It’s just a bug,” Ruby said. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”
Lee made a “hmmm” sound as her practiced eyes continued to study Ruby’s face. She looked over at me. “John doesn’t look so great, either,” she said.
Ruby nodded toward me. “Yeah,” she said. “It seems like we’ve both caught the same thing.”
Back at the apartment, Ruby held fast to her suspicions about David Clegg, and I couldn’t make her think otherwise.
“Who else could have known that you were talking to Clegg?” Ruby asked. “It had to be the guy David arrested—the guy in the back of his police car. Think about it, John.”
“I have thought about it,” I said. “And we’ve got to find Uretsky without alerting the police. Clegg is the only person who can do that for us.”
“By doing that, you could be alerting Uretsky. That’s what I’m saying.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t do it.”
“What should we do?” I asked, tossing my hands in the air. “Just sit and wait for him to call us with the next crime to commit? Do we sit, or do we fight?”
“You don’t know the consequences,” Ruby said. “You’ll be violating the rules of his game.”
“It’s a risk,” was all I said.
“Well, I don’t like our odds,” she said.
I called Clegg, anyway, while Ruby went to the bedroom to rest. I wasn’t worried about Uretsky overhearing my conversation. Ruby had smashed what I believed to be the only listening device planted in the apartment. If there were leaks, some way for Uretsky to learn of my inquiry, I would be found out regardless if I contacted Clegg by phone or in person. What I wanted was an answer to my question, and I wanted it now.
Clegg sounded glad to hear from me. We chatted about his divorce, the apartment in Hingham he had found, and Ruby’s health prognosis. He didn’t bring up climbing, but I could hear in his voice that he had a trip planned. It’s like a jealous intuition that I have. I used to get that same squeak of excitement before departing on a major expedition myself.
I got to the point. “I need a favor,” I said.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I’ve got a problem with one of my game players.”
“What sort of problem?”
“He’s just harassing some other players. Nothing too horrible.”
“Kick him off,” Clegg said.
“He’s threatening to hack me,” I said.
I had thought for all of six seconds about what lie I’d tell, and this one seemed to work just fine.
“So what can I do?” Clegg asked.
“Tell me if he’s ever been arrested for hacking.”
“I could look him up if you give a name and address.”
I gave Clegg the name Elliot Uretsky, spelled it for him, too, along with the address I gave UniSol to help steal the same man’s identity. Clegg keyed in the information, and I waited.
I sat at the kitchen counter, refreshing YouTube on the laptop, watching my video stats skyrocket. In the time it took for Clegg to come back on the line, another fifty thousand people had witnessed me—ski mask and all—save a man from choking to death while a little old lady beat me silly with her purse. Hell, I’d have watched it, too.
“I got nothing,” Clegg said.
“Nothing,” I repeated.
“No priors. No arrests. No speeding tickets. This guy is clean. So if he’s a hacker, he’s never been busted for committing any computer crime. At least not in Massachusetts.”
“Is that the only place you can check?”
“I didn’t look for outstanding warrants,” Clegg said. “That’s in LEAPS—our Law Enforcement Automated Processing System.”
“Can you look?”
“Sure thing, buddy. Hang on.”
Clegg put me on hold. Instead of Muzak, the Boston PD played PS announcements about drinking and driving and the importance of wearing a seat belt. Ginger wove in and out between my legs like a slinky slalom skier while I waited.
“Lucky cat,” I said, scratching her head. “You don’t have anything to worry about. All you have to do is be a cat.”
Ginger meowed as if she understood and agreed wholeheartedly. Within a span of five minutes, I had become jealous of both Clegg (for climbing) and a cat (for its peaceful existence). I checked the video and groaned. Forty thousand more views. Damn, this thing was going to make the national news.
Clegg came back on the line. “Well, I got something,” he said.
My pulse jumped, and my leg involuntarily kicked out and sent Ginger scampering away.
“Tell me.”
Clegg said, “Nothing about his hacking chops, but if your game buddy is plotting an attack, then he’s going to do it from the shadows. It looks like the report was filed a couple months ago by a neighbor.”
“What report?” I asked.
I felt a sick drop in my stomach. That was around the same time I’d become Elliot Uretsky.
“You’ll be surprised,” Uretsky had said to me.
You’ll be surprised.
Clegg said, “A neighbor of his filed a ‘be on the lookout’ message about three months ago with the Medford police.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means somebody wants to know where the Uretskys are, and nobody has seen them.”