father's side," he said. "What up?"
"Remember Amanda McCready? Little girl went-"
"Missing, what, five years ago?"
"Twelve."
"Shit. Years? How old are we?"
" 'Member how we felt in college about old geezers who talked about, like, the Dave Clark Five and Buddy Holly?"
"Yeah?"
"That's how kids today feel when we talk about Prince and Nirvana."
"Naw."
"Believe it, bitch. So anyway, Amanda McCready."
"Yeah, yeah. You found her with the cop's family, brought her back, everyone on the force hates your guts, you need a favor from me."
"No."
"You don't need a favor?"
"Well, I do, but it's directly connected to Amanda McCready. She went missing again."
"No shit."
"No shit. And her aunt says no one cares. Not the cops, not you guys."
"Hard to believe. Twenty-four-hour news cycle and all? These days we can make a story out of anything."
"Explains Paris Hilton."
"Nothing explains that," he said. "Point is-a girl disappears again twelve years after her first disappearance brought down a gang of cops and cost the city a few mil during a bad budget year? Shit, that's news, white boy."
"That's what I thought. You almost sounded black there, by the way."
"Racist. What's the aunt's name, uh, bitch?"
"Bea. Well, Beatrice McCready."
"Aunt Bea, uh? Well, this ain't Mayberry."
***
He called me back twenty minutes later. "That was simple."
"What happened?"
"I talked to the investigating officer, a Detective Chuck Hitchcock. He said they investigated the aunt's claim, went to the mother's house, poked around, and talked to the girl."
"Talked to the girl? Amanda?"
"Yeah. It was all a hoax."
"Why would Bea make up a-?"
"Oh, Bea's a champ, what she is. You know Amanda's mother-what's it, Helene?-she's had to take out a couple restraining orders on this woman. Ever since her kid died, she left the reser-"
"Wait, whose kid?"
"Beatrice McCready's."
"Her kid didn't die. He's at Monument High."
"No," Richie said slowly, "he's not at Monument High. He's dead. Him and a few other kids were in a car last year, none of them old enough to drive, none of them old enough to drink, but they did both anyway. They blew a stop sign at the bottom of that big-ass hill where St. Margaret's Hospital used to be? Got pancaked by a bus on Stoughton Street. Two kids dead, two kids talking funny for the rest of their lives but not walking while they're doing it. One of the dead was this Matthew McCready. I'm looking at it in our Web archives right now. June 15, last year. You want the link?"
Chapter Five
I exited JFK/UMass Station and headed for home, my head still buzzing. I'd hung up the phone and clicked on the link Richie sent me, and there it was-a page 4 story from last June about four boys who took a joyride in a stolen car and came flying down a hill stoked on pot and Jager. The bus driver never had time to hit his horn. Paralyzed from the waist down, Harold Endalis, 15. Paralyzed from the neck down, Stuart Burr-field, 15. Dead on arrival at the Carney ER, Mark McGrath, 16. Dead on scene, Matthew McCready, 16. I descended the station stairs and headed up Crescent Avenue toward home, thinking about all the stupid shit I'd done at sixteen, ten or twelve ways I could have died-probably should have died-before seventeen.
The first two houses on the south side of Crescent, a matching pair of small white Capes, were abandoned, victims of the wonderful mortgage crisis that had spread such cheer across the land of late. A homeless guy approached me in front of the second one.
"Yo, bro, you got a minute to hear me out? I'm not looking for a handout."
He was a small guy, wiry and bearded. His baseball cap, cotton hoodie, and battered jeans were streaked with grime. The ripe odor coming off him told me it had been a while since he'd bathed. He didn't have nut-bag eyes, though; there was no meanness in him, no crackhead edge.
I stopped. "What's up?"
"I'm not a beggar." He held out his hands to ward off my assumptions. "I want to make that clear."
"Cool."
"I'm not."
"Okay."
"But I got a kid, you know? And there ain't no jobs. My old lady, she's sick, and my baby boy he just needs some formula. Shit's, like, seven bucks and I-"
I never saw his arm move, but he snatched my laptop bag off my shoulder just the same. He took off with it, tear-assing for the back of the nearest abandoned house. The bag held my case notes, my laptop, and a picture of my daughter.
"You dumb shit," I said,