The Third Brother Read online

  The passenger door opened. “What the hell?”

  I turned but was too late. Renner. Hands like bear mitts hooked my shoulders and dragged me away from the boy. He was stronger than he looked, but fanatics usually are. I grabbed the steering wheel, and then the seat, and then several straws of my imagination, but the strength of the man pulling me was too great. He had the fire of heavenly ideology in his loins; I had the headache and bruises from hell. I was extracted from the front of the truck like a late October apple plucked from a low-hanging branch. I slid out and landed in a tumble on the ground. I looked up to see Renner scrambling back into the truck.

  “Those are innocent people!” I shouted.

  “The war is beginning,” Renner said.

  I stood up, hearing the rising voice of the crowd several blocks down. A chorus of anticipation. And another sound now, of the truck being slammed into gear. It started to move. Renner leaped out, his eyes gleaming, cell phone in his hand. In the dark, I could see the green disk under his thumb, waiting to place the call of mass destruction. To summon the fire of pure white flame.

  54

  WHAT WAS THAT NONSENSE OTTO MULLIGAN spouted? The day I met him at Jury of Your Pours? The insignificant play he recalled from the Michigan State game, the one that preserved a first down in the fourth quarter with us up by twenty and nothing on the line. Who remembers that shit? Two of us, I guess.

  I rolled left, juked, scrambled, and plowed into Renner. Caught in his dreamlike rapture of end times and war, he didn’t react quickly enough and went down hard, losing the cell phone as it clattered onto the pavement. I held my breath, waiting for an explosion that didn’t come. I gave the phone a nudge with my foot, spinning it out of Renner’s reach, and ran.

  Ran—not the way I run around Schiller Park, which is to speedy running as ketchup is to five-alarm hot sauce, but like a man possessed. Like a man about to lose everything.

  I caught up as the truck passed the Athletic Club by Fourth. Glanced briefly at the name emblazoned on the side of the blue truck: David’s Desserts. I leaped onto the passenger side running board, swung the door open, was nearly flung off as the truck juddered over a manhole cover, regained my balance, and hurled myself inside. We were moving straight ahead. Renner had calculated it well. In front of me I saw wooden traffic barricades and police officers staring at us, realizing something was wrong. Behind them hundreds of people—thousands—with no idea at all that things were amiss.

  We passed Chase Bank, then the Rhodes Tower, with its statue of the late namesake governor James Rhodes, briefcase in hand, as he strode toward another workday, and started to gain on Jack & Benny’s all-night diner, filled with patrons.

  A hundred feet to Broad and High.

  Fifty feet.

  Police officers screaming at me, guns in hands.

  The crowd screaming too, but oblivious to the approaching danger. People’s eyes heavenward. “Five! Four! Three! . . .”

  I mashed myself against Abdi and cranked the steering wheel as hard as I could. I willed myself to become part of the truck as it veered left, left, left, so reluctantly, with such motorized intransigence, a heavy-laden boat being asked to divert from its expected mooring at the end of a long voyage. Tires screeched in protest and the cops’ yelling intensified and Abdi suddenly moaned and the truck ran up onto the corner by the old Huntington Bank building and rumbled back down onto High, bump, bump, bump.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Night became day as fireworks filled the sky and cut sharp shadows across downtown. Above me, exploding over the Scioto River, brilliant pinwheels of red, white, and blue lights.

  The show had begun.

  I hit the gas and drove all the way down the middle of the street, past the Huntington Center and the Riffe Center and a guy and a girl arguing about something at a bus stop and brought the truck to a halt at the far southwest corner of the Statehouse grounds. I threw it in park and opened the driver’s door and clambered out over Abdi. I stood there, breathing hard, listening to the explosions overheard. I turned and saw men and women in uniforms sprinting toward me.

  “Hands up! Don’t move!”

  “Get away from the truck!”

  “Get down on the ground!”

  “The phone!”

  The phone?

  I looked to my right and saw JaQuan Williams sprinting down the sidewalk, chasing Trey Renner, who was limping toward us with the phone in his right hand, raised high.

  “Go back!” I yelled at JaQuan.

  He stopped, confused.

  “Run!”

  I turned and tore the bindings loose from Abdi’s hands and hauled him out of the truck and threw him over my shoulder and thought just for an instant how light he was, a man in the body of a boy, like holding Joe that morning in my backyard as we sat in my Adirondack chair.

  “Run!” I yelled at JaQuan. He ran. And so did I, not away from but toward the police.

  “It’s a bomb it’s a bomb it’s a bomb get back get back get back!”

  They got back.

  Roy and Lucy said later they could hear the explosion at their house, nearly five miles up the road.

  55

  “YOU’RE ONE LUCKY SONOFABITCH, YOU know that?”

  “It’s funny, but I’m not feeling all that lucky.”

  “They would have totally been within their rights to shoot you.”

  “I appreciate their forbearance.”

  “Forbearance, my ass,” Henry Fielding said. The homicide detective whose beeper went off any time my name came over the radio was sitting inside a fire department squad truck as a paramedic poked and jabbed me with an iodine swab and other instruments of torture. It was not the first time Fielding and I had bonded over my medical treatment. I was guessing it wouldn’t be the last.

  “Then what?”

  “One of the sergeants recognized you at the last second. From the news.” He rolled his eyes. “Heard ‘bomb’ and saw you running away from the truck with that kid in your arms and put two and two together.”

  “And decided not to shoot me.”

  “Hell with you. Decided to look out for his own people and get them to safety.”

  “Same difference?”

  Fielding shook his head. “Lucky sonofabitch,” he repeated.

  Lucky, indeed.

  Startled by JaQuan’s yelling, Trey Renner tripped and stumbled at the last second, dropping the phone. Because he had a messianic complex and was prone to gibbering about history and war and pure white flames, and also because he was crazy, he managed to get up, find the phone, and dial the number that set off the bomb anyway. David’s Desserts. Cute, if not for the truck’s deadly intent. But by that time we—both JaQuan and me and Abdi and the cops and the couple arguing at the bus stop—were several hundred feet away. The blast wave sent all of us sprawling, but miraculously, there was only one fatality that night.

  Well, two, if you counted Dwayne the custodian.

  Not that there weren’t casualties. Dozens were injured in the ensuing panic as police tried to disperse a crowd bigger than the population of most Rust Belt cities in the midst of a fireworks display many of them had been patiently waiting for since early that morning. Nearly two hours passed before Fielding showed up and I persuaded him to let me use his phone to call Anne.

  “Oh my God,” she yelled in my ear. “Where have you been? Do you know what’s going on? They say there was a bomb—”

  “The boys—are they all right?”

  “Of course they’re all right! They were with me! I’m the one who had to pick them up after you just disappeared!”

  “I didn’t just—”

  “Oh, Andy. How could you?”

  It was a good question. One I couldn’t answer right then. So I thanked her, hung up, and hurriedly called Kym and Crystal, letting them know what was happening. I had a long list of other people to call, starting with Otto Mulligan and working my way down to Theresa Sullivan and my sister and parents and a se
cond cousin in Boulder I hadn’t seen for a while, but Fielding snatched the phone away.

  “Let’s get back to food trucks,” he said.

  “Fried kale balls. Not a positive trend.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Can I go home yet?”

  “In your dreams.”

  56

  ABDI MOHAMED WAS SITTING ON THE COUCH between his parents in the family apartment, looking at pictures of himself in the newspaper. His remaining brother, Aden, and his sister, Farah, were seated near him. Two days had passed. I sat on a chair across from him, balancing a cup of Somali tea on my thigh. Abukar Abdulkadir sat beside me, drinking his own tea. He looked tired and haggard, but his smile was genuine. Freddy Cohen stood behind us, bracing his back against the wall.

  “So how are you feeling?” I asked Abdi.

  He took a moment to respond. He was even thinner than the photo Cohen had showed me a couple of weeks ago. Renner hadn’t starved the boy—far from it, from what investigators could tell so far. But Abdi had also been held in near darkness for weeks, with no clue as to what was happening and unbeknownst to him suffering the daily effects of ingesting depressants mixed into his food. His glazed eyes the night of the foiled attack were no accident. But already doctors were saying he could probably continue with his plan to attend college in the fall. And his smile was as ready as that photo had shown, and his eyes bright and liquid.

  “Pretty good,” he said. “I might be able to go see the Crew tomorrow. Right?” He looked at Farah, who returned a noncommittal smile.

  “DC United,” I said. “That could be a tough game.”

  “Yeah. But I think they can beat them, if they actually try.” He grinned. He could have been any teenage boy excited about his team.

  “Speaking of which.” I reached into the bag I brought with me. I pulled out the Juventus jersey I’d purchased online and had had delivered with rush service.

  “Oh, man,” Abdi said, his smile getting even bigger as I handed the shirt to him. “Are you kidding?”

  “I’ve got the impression that Mr. Andy Hayes doesn’t kid around,” Abdulkadir interrupted. Everyone laughed at that. Everyone but Cohen. For once I didn’t blame him. It had been a long forty-eight hours for him, haggling with the feds. But it was one of the reasons Abdulkadir was sitting beside us and not next to a seatless shitter in a cell in the Franklin County Jail. Brenda Renner wasn’t so lucky, and was sitting in a different unit in the same jail on suicide watch. Meanwhile, much to my amusement, Ronald McQuillen had apparently seen both a barber and a haberdasher and had become as ubiquitous on the Big Three cable news channels in the past few days as commercials for reverse mortgages and weight-loss formula. I’d even gotten a thank-you text from Lumberjack Man at Scarlet & Gray Grounds. The shop’s notoriety as the place Renner launched the Evil Twin attack that gave him access to Abdi’s virtual life hadn’t hurt, apparently. Business—most of it media, but they were paying customers too—was booming.

  “It’s good to see you’re OK,” I said to Abdi, as he held the shirt up for a round of cell-phone pictures. There was a burst of conversation in Somali, and Farah translated their parents’ appreciation for what I did. I told them it was nothing, which drew a small cough from Cohen. A minute later he cleared his throat and said, “You need to excuse me. I’ve got another appointment.”

  Over his protests, I walked the lawyer out to his car, on the pretense that I’d forgotten something in my van.

  “What’s the big rush?” I said, once outside. “The family’s genuinely grateful. To me but just as importantly, to you. Would it kill you to let them show their appreciation?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. You’re the one who put your neck on the line. I’m just the schmo taking their money.”

  “If that’s how you see it.”

  “What do you care how I see it?”

  “Listen—”

  “Don’t. There’s just no point.” He opened the door to the car. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He started to get in but froze as a spasm gripped his back.

  “You OK? Need me to drive you someplace?”

  “No.”

  “Back home?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes. I’m fine, goddamn it. Now get out of my way.”

  “OK, OK. Where’s the fire?”

  He turned and stared at me with rage in his eyes. “The fire, asshole, is the James Cancer Center at Ohio State, all right?”

  “The James? Are you—”

  “I’m fine, no thanks to you. It’s Ruth. She has breast cancer. I’ve been going to her appointments with her.” He paused. “She’s moved back in. Satisfied?”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Fred. But I’m glad you’re back together.”

  “I bet you are. Now would you please just leave me the fuck alone?”

  I did as I was asked. I stepped back and watched him pull out. I waved and got a stony look in return. But at least he didn’t give me the finger. It struck me as just short of a miracle that they were back together after I’d pulled the scab off their troubled marriage by discovering Ruth’s affair. Fred hardly struck me as the nurturing type, but perhaps Ruth’s cancer was the wake-up call he needed to set things right. I hoped it turned out well for both of them. When Cohen’s car made the turn out of the complex, I walked back to Abdi’s apartment. In fact, I probably had a few things to do myself. But right now I was in the mood for another cup of Somali tea.

  57

  GANG MEMBER RECRUITED TO IMPERSONATE KIDNAP VICTIM

  I lifted my blueberry muffin, split it in two, dipped half into my coffee, took a bite, and checked out the latest headline popping up on my phone. I was at Stauf’s on Third around the corner from my house the next day, late in the morning. The story of how JaQuan Williams firebombed Mount Shiloh Baptist disguised as Abdi Mohamed was just now breaking. About time. JaQuan was in a lot of trouble, though not nearly as much had he not grown a last-second conscience and tried to chase down Trey Renner.

  I looked up as the door to the coffee shop opened. Helene Paulus stepped inside. She was wearing a yellow summer dress and an air of concern. I stood and waved her over to my table.

  “Please don’t get up. I mean, after everything . . .”

  “It’s good for the circulation. Plus I can check the status of the pastry tray like this.”

  She declined my offer to buy her a coffee. I sat down and waited while she went to the counter. She returned with something icy and creamy.

  “So,” she said, eyeing me like a museum piece she’d come grudgingly to admire. “Are you all right?”

  “Doing better than Trey Renner, I suppose.”

  “He’s the—?”

  “The one that started all this. And nearly finished it.”

  “And would have, except for you. Right?” she said, sharply.

  “Something like that.”

  “Yes, Virginia, private detectives really do save the day sometimes?”

  “Investigators. Whatever.”

  “One thing I still don’t understand.”

  “One thing? There’s two dozen I’m trying to figure out.”

  “The men in the parking lot. What did they have to do with any of it?”

  “Ah, yes. Well, it goes back to that old line: You can’t get good help anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ronald McQuillen was right. They weren’t directly involved in the kidnapping plot, but they were members of the ’76 Sentries group. They just didn’t have the sense to stay out of trouble. They were supposed to be picking up extra cash for Renner by shaking down casino winners. They’d been scoping the place out that afternoon. Afterward, they bought some beer at Kroger, had a couple, saw Kaltun Hirsi, and thought they’d have some fun. And they would have, if I hadn’t stumbled along and tried to be a hero.”

  “Tried?”

  “Anyway, it was pure chance that Abdi’s family caught wind of my derring-do and asked Freddy
Cohen to hire me to look for him. Once that happened, the two of them more or less signed their own death warrant. Renner couldn’t brook that kind of undisciplined behavior. Not with the operation he had planned.”

  “Which also explains the sister? What was her name?”

  “Patty Bowden. She’s lucky to be alive. I guess Yorkies are good for something after all.” I took another sip of coffee. “How’s Barbara doing?”

  “A wreck. But thanks to you, one that’s still afloat instead of lying at the bottom of the ocean. Your turn to forgive my metaphor, I guess.”

  “I’m just glad she’s OK.”

  Burke Cunningham was now representing Barbara Mendoza and Angela along with the city’s top immigration law attorney. The lawyers had suggested to the U.S. Attorney’s Office that the value of the counselor’s testimony as the feds probed the conspiracy to use Abdi as a human explosive device to start a race war outweighed Angela’s immigration status. Despite the angry rhetoric flowing from Washington these days, the wheels were turning in the girl’s favor.

  “One other thing I wanted to ask you. About that attorney—Cohen?”

  “Yes?”

  “At the news conference the two of you had with the family. I would have thought he’d have been more, well, thankful to you, or something.”

  “I think he is.”

  “Really? Because to be honest, he looked like he’d been forced to attend marriage counseling at gunpoint. Frankly, you both did.”

  “That’s not a bad analogy.”

  “So what was the deal, if I may ask?”

  I explained the assignment I’d taken on that led to the revelation of Ruth’s affair. How angry Freddy was at me over the whole thing—not without reason, I suppose.

  “That explains it, then.”

  “Almost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told her the rest of the story. How things got more complicated because Ruth had some underlying depression that helped precipitate the affair. How, when everything broke open thanks to me, Ruth came home and swallowed a bottle of pills. How the good news was that the Cohens’ daughter got back from school a little early that day and found her in time. But also how Freddy slipped on a patch of ice as he ran into the hospital where Ruth had been rushed and threw his back out.