up at the guy’s building, Malone’s got an empty backpack with him. I didn’t ask questions about it—hardly noticed it. He says all he needs me to do is guard the lobby, so I do just that. He goes up to the apartment, and after a while he calls me in a panic. The guy is there. Malone was sure he wasn’t, but he came out of a back bedroom and Malone’s holding a gun on him. I go up there and … ” I took a breath. The words were tumbling out of me, bottled up for too long. “I just lost it.”
“What did you do?” Susan asked.
“Look, I had a case when I was a brand-new officer. Boston cops are walk-around cops. The brass like you to be seen out there on the streets, you know? Out of the cars and talking to the people. Well, one day, Malone and I are running down the street responding to reports a guy and his girlfriend are fighting outside a café. As we turn the corner to break up the fight, he’s got her by the hair. She frees herself and runs away from him—right into the path of a city bus.” I exhaled slowly. “I didn’t see a lot of bad shit in my time on the beat. I was pretty lucky. But that was bad.”
Susan reached over and held my hand. I squeezed her fingers.
“So, in the apartment with Malone, I beat this guy up,” I said. “I admit it. I mean, I broke bones. I thought he had been whaling on his girlfriend and he’d put the icing on the cake by threatening to ruin her life. Malone tried to stop me, but I really did a number on him. And then as we’re leaving, I see Malone’s backpack is full.”
“Oh no,” Susan said. Her voice told me she could see ahead, into the depths of my downfall.
I continued. “In the hall I say to Malone, ‘What’s in the bag?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know which device the kid’s got the tape on. I took laptops, tablets, hard drives, everything. I’ll find the file, delete it, and send the stuff back.’ Already I’m fuming, because this is not what I agreed to. We go our separate ways that night, and the next morning Malone’s on top of the world. I figure the girl and her mother must have thanked him, and the boyfriend had taken the beating and maybe learned from it. It must have all gone perfectly.”
I gripped the steering wheel hard, trying to shut down all the screaming voices in my head, the thoughts about what I could have and should have done to stop what happened.
“Turns out there was no girl,” I told Susan. “No sex tape. It was all lies.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
“THE APARTMENT MALONE robbed—that I helped him rob—belonged to Ivan Pilkos, an illegal arms dealer in Boston,” I said. “Malone took a quarter of a million bucks from the guy, and then I go in there and bash his head in about some girlfriend and some tape that never existed. Pilkos was just some low-level scumbag Malone had heard was all cashed up. He’d never even met the guy. He was asleep on the couch when Malone walked in.”
“Oh my God.” Susan covered her mouth. I nodded.
“What Malone didn’t realize,” I said, “is that across the street from the apartment building was a private storage facility. A big, expensive, highly exclusive private storage facility. This place has storage boxes and vaults for rich people who don’t trust banks, and it has cameras all over the front of the shop.”
“But surely he looked for cameras,” Susan said.
“There were obvious ones and hidden ones,” I said. “Malone thought he was taking us in at the right angle so the cameras couldn’t see us, but he didn’t know about the hidden ones. The firm was so paranoid, they had cameras all over the street. Sure, they wanted to get video of the robbers when they were inside the facility, but they also wanted video of their car, their escape route, their getaway driver. The cameras got Malone and me outside the apartment building. They got video of us in the lobby. They even got a shot through the apartment window of Malone stuffing his backpack with stacks of cash. A rooftop camera. Clear as day. It was unbelievable.”
I sighed, exhausted.
“The people who worked for the secure facility thought we were common burglars, and they turned