Page 98 of I Will Find You

Chapter

28

When I wake up, I’m wearing handcuffs.

I’m also seated on a small airplane.

It’s over.

Skunk or the Fishers had sold me out to the cops. I’m an idiot. Truly. What had I expected? They’d set me up to take the fall for the murder of my own son—why would I be dumb enough to think they wouldn’t sell me out to put me back behind bars?

I try to crane my neck to look behind me. It’s hard because I’m also cuffed to an armrest. Two goons—plainclothes cops or federal agents or marshals, I don’t know which—sit in the back and fiddle with their smartphones. Both are bald with black tees and blue jeans.

“When do we land?” I ask.

Without glancing up from his phone, the one sitting in the aisle says, “Shut the fuck up.”

I decide not to antagonize. No point. We land half an hour later. When the plane comes to the proverbial full stop, the two goons unbuckle their seat belts and come toward me. Without warning, one goon throws a black bag over my head while the other snaps off the arm rail restraint.

“What’s with the blindfold?” I ask.

“Shut the fuck up,” Goon One says again.

The plane door opens. I rise. Someone pushes me forward, and I know something is very wrong—even before we reach the tarmac, even with the bag totally blacking out my vision.

We are not at Briggs.

I’m immediately perspiring. It’s hot. It’s humid. I may not be able to see the tropics, but I can smell, taste, and almost touch them. The sun is strong too, slicing through the black bag.

This isn’t Maine.

“Where the hell are we?” I ask.

No answer, so I say, “Aren’t you supposed to tell me to shut the fuck up?”

The two goons push me into the back of a vehicle with the air-conditioning cranked up. The drive is maybe ten minutes, but it is hard to figure out time when you have no watch and are blindfolded and think you may be headed back to prison for the rest of your life. Still, the ride doesn’t feel long. When the vehicle—I’m up high so it must be some kind of SUV—stops, the goons push me out. There is pavement beneath my feet, and it’s so hot I feel the heat coming up through my shoes. Music is playing. Awful music. Some kind of instrumental country-rock mix, like something a Carnival cruise band would play during the poolside “hairiest chest” contest.

I know I seem glib right now. Oddly enough, that is how I feel. Part of me is crushed, of course, because I failed my son again. Part of me is depressed because I seem headed back to prison or worse. Part of me is scared-yet-curious because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing in the tropics.

But part of me, maybe the biggest part, is—just for this moment—letting it all go.

I hopped on this crazy ride when I broke out of prison, and the ride is going to take me where it takes me. Right now, I don’t control it and I’m accepting that.

I wouldn’t say I’m not concerned. I am just doing a major mental suppression. Maybe it’s a survival instinct. The two goons—well, I assume it’s the same two goons, I’m still blindfolded—take my arms and drag-escort me indoors. They throw me onto a chair. Like the vehicle, this room also mercifully has the air-conditioning set on Hi Frost. I almost ask for a sweatshirt.

Someone grabs my wrist. I feel the pinch before the handcuffs slide off me.

“Don’t fucking move,” Goon One says.

I don’t. As I sit in this non-cushioned chair, I try to plan my next move, but the options before me are so grim my brain won’t let me see the obvious. I’m doomed. I can hear people moving around, at least three or four from the sound of it. I still hear the awful music in the background. It sounds like it’s coming over a loudspeaker.

Then, again without warning, the black bag is pulled off my head. I blink through the sudden onslaught of light and look up. Standing directly in front of me, mere inches from my face, is a wizened old man who looks to be in his eighties. He wears a straw hat and a yellow-green Hawaiian shirt blanked with jumping marlins. Behind him I see the shaved-head goons from the plane. Both have their arms folded across their chests and now wear aviator sunglasses.

The wizened man offers me his liver-spotted hand. “Come on, David,” he says in a voice that sounds like threadbare tires on a gravel road. “Let’s go for a walk.”

He doesn’t introduce himself, but I know who he is, and he knows I know. In most of the photographs I have seen of him over the years, he’s a robust man, usually in the center of groups of men, looking more like an explosive device than a human. Even now, with the years shrinking him down, he still has that incendiary air about him.

His name is Nicky Fisher. In another era, he’d have been called a godfather or don or something like that. When I was in school, his name was whispered in the same way a later generation of children would whisper “Voldemort.” Nicky Fisher ran the crime syndicate in the Revere-Chelsea-Everett area from the days before my father joined the force.

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