game on! Thatta boy, Johnny! Now, listen to me, and listen close, because I’m not going to repeat myself.” Uretsky’s voice had dipped in volume, a return to the serious business of the game. “There’s a warehouse in South Boston, on the corner of West Third and B Street. It’s in a part of town that doesn’t see a lot of foot traffic. Across from that warehouse is a single-story brick building with a Dumpster in the back parking lot. You’re going to go Dumpster diving. Inside that Dumpster, you’ll find three five-gallon canisters of gasoline buried beneath the rubbish. You’re going to take those gas cans over to the warehouse and enter through the green door, which I’ve left unlocked for your convenience.”
I could feel my insides shriveling up into nothing. “Then what?” I asked.
“Then I want you to use the accelerant to soak a pile of wood pallets on the first floor. I suggest you save some gas to make a trail to the door. You don’t want to be close to those pallets when they go up in flames.”
“You want me to start a fire inside the warehouse?” I said.
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do. Strike a match and start a fire. I have a scanner, so I’ll know when the fire department gets the call. I have other ways of knowing you’ve followed my instructions to the letter.”
Cameras. He’s got cameras in there. No way to fake it. No way out. Do what he says.
“Escape without getting caught,” Uretsky continued, “and I’ll let Winnie go. If you fail in any way, Winnie will look a lot like Jenna, maybe even worse. That’s the deal, and it’s nonnegotiable.”
“Let her go first and I’ll do it,” I said.
“Nonnegotiable,” Uretsky repeated. “You have one hour from this very moment to become an arsonist. Best of luck.”
CHAPTER 36
Ziggy no longer had the familiar feel of just being our car. It had transformed into something sinister when it became our getaway vehicle for the Giovanni robbery. It sickened me to put Ziggy into ignoble use once again, but it was “game on” and I had to play. For Winnie’s sake, I had to play.
I plugged the address Uretsky had provided into my GPS, and soon we were on our way to the site of a future arson incident in South Boston. I had divided the allotted time into three critical sequences : thirty minutes to reach our target (morning commuter traffic would still be a problem); ten minutes to get the gas canisters; twenty minutes to spread out the fuel and strike a match. I might have had a plan in place, but my thoughts were with Jenna and Winnie.
Ruby’s pale complexion and her body’s persistent trembling suggested that she was thinking the same.
“What are we doing?” Ruby said, her voice cracking from the strain. “What the hell are we doing?”
“We’re going to save your mother.”
Ruby held her head in her hands, her body convulsing. Her face flushed as she began to sob so hard, she could barely breathe. “What he did to that poor woman. How could he do that? How?”
“We can’t think about that right now,” I said. “We’ve got to think about your mom.”
“Every time I close my eyes, all I see is what he did to Jenna. That image—it’s never going to go away. Never.”
Somehow I managed to navigate my way through the barrage of traffic without getting into an accident. But Ruby was right. The image of Jenna would last us a lifetime. My eyes saw the road, but my heart saw only blackness, death, and Jenna’s bloody fingers. What I’d once thought to be our incorruptible morals turned out to have all the flexibility of a pipe cleaner—with disastrous or near disastrous consequences.
For Rhonda Jennings, who would never marry.
For Giovanni Renzulli, who almost choked to death before two million YouTube viewers.
For a redheaded prostitute named Jenna, whose mutilated body had yet to be found.
We had saved Dr. Adams’s life. How far would we be willing to go to save Winnie’s—or our own, for that matter? At what point would we be asked to do something we’d simply refuse to do? How far could we be bent before we broke?
I lost sight of myself, my morals, the moment I became Elliot Uretsky. What other crimes was I capable of committing? I wondered. I really didn’t know. That might have terrified me most of all. Uretsky didn’t know, either, but he was determined to find out.