Chapter 13: The Doctor's Price

I didn't take it.

I stood beside the bed and looked at the tape on the hinge.

"You want me to do your job."

"I want you to have the man who sold you to your mother," Lucio said. "However you want him."

"And if I want him at the bottom of the bay?"

"Then that's what the Ferryman says."

He said it flat.

He wasn't joking.

I took the phone.

It was warm from his hand, and lighter than I'd expected for something that had moved people out of Providence for forty years.

The doctor's text was on the screen, sent through the old man at the pawnshop.

I need a ride across the river. As soon as possible. I can pay whatever is required.

Under it the old man had added two words of his own.

Scared. Sweating.

"How does he talk?" I asked.

"Who?"

"Your Ferryman. I've read him for three weeks. I want to hear you say how."

Lucio almost smiled.

"No contractions. Short. He never asks how anyone feels. He never says please."

"Why no contractions?"

"My father thought it sounded like a priest." He shut his eyes. "It does."

I sat down in the vinyl chair and typed with both thumbs.

I deleted it twice.

Then I sent it.

The fare is not money. The fare is the truth about Cranston. All of it, in your own voice. Then you ride.

The answer came in under a minute.

What truth?

You know which one. Sunday. Midnight. The back room. Come alone.

Lucio opened one eye.

"Not bad."

"Shut up and heal."

On Sunday night I borrowed one of his men and his black car and drove to Providence in the dark.

The man didn't speak the whole hour.

At the curb on Atwells he handed me a black hoodie out of the trunk without being asked.

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