Bubba knocked Manny and John cold again, and then he and Nelson and the Twoomey brothers drove them out to a section of urban waste under the Mystic River Bridge in Charlestown. They waited for them to wake up with their hands bound and their mouths gagged. Then they booted them both out the back of the van, fired a couple of rounds into the ground near their heads until John whimpered and Manny wept. Then they drove off.

“People surprise you sometimes,” Bubba said.

We sat on the hood of the Crown Victoria, parked by the side of the road in front of Plymouth Correctional. From here we could see the inmates’ gardens and greenhouse, hear the boisterous sound of men playing basketball in the crisp air on the other side of the wall. But one look at the Cyclone fence stretched, coiled and vicious, around the top of the walls or the silhouettes of guard and rifle in the towers, and you couldn’t mistake it for anything but what it was—a place that caged human beings. No matter how you felt about crime and punishment, that fact was always there. And it was an ugly one.

“She could be alive,” Bubba said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“No, seriously. Like I said, people surprise you. You two told me before those shitheads woke up in my place, she Maced some guy once.”

“So?” Angie said.

“So it shows she’s strong. You know? I mean, you got a guy sitting beside you and you pull out a can of Mace and shoot it in his eyes? You know what kind of strength that takes? That’s a girl with some spine. Maybe she found a way to get away from this guy, this Price shitbird.”

“But then she would have called her father. She would have made some sort of attempt at contact.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. You’re the detectives, I’m the moron going to jail for packing a piece.”

We leaned back against the car, looked up again at the granite walls and Cyclone fence, the hard, darkening sky.

“Gotta go,” Bubba said.

Angie hugged him tightly and kissed his cheek.

I shook his hand. “You want us to walk you to the door?”

“Nah. Feel like you were my parents on the first day of school.”

“The first day of school,” I said, “I remember you beat the hell out of Eddie Rourke.”

“’Cause he gave me shit about my parents walking me to the door.” He winked. “See you in a year.”

“Before that,” Angie said. “You think we’d forget to visit?”

He shrugged. “Don’t forget what I told you. They’ll surprise you, people.”

We watched him walk up the crushed shell and gravel walkway, his shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, the stiff breeze rising off the frozen furrows of vegetation in the fields and mussing his hair.