Angie looked up, her eyes red but dry. She pointed at the file. “No matter what, we take them down.”
I nodded. “Going to have to take it to them.”
She shrugged and leaned back against the baptismal font. “Oh well.”
I took one photo from the folder—one that showed the act—the boy, Socia, and Paulson’s body but not his head. Socia was Devin’s, maybe, but Paulson was mine. I took the rest of the folder to one of the rear confessionals, stepped through the heavy burgundy partition, and bent by the floor. I used my penknife on a square of marble that’s been loose since I was an altar boy. I lifted it out and placed the folder down in the two-foot hole. Angie was behind me now, and I held out my hand. She placed her .38 in it and I added the nine millimeter, then closed the hole back up again. The square fit neatly, without any noticeable gaps, and I realized then that I’d co-opted one of the great Catholic traditions: concealment.
I stepped back out of the confessional and we walked down the center aisle. At the door, Angie dipped her fingers into the holy water and blessed herself. I thought about it, figuring I’d need all the help I could get on this one, but there’s one thing I hate more than a hypocrite: a pious one. We pushed open the heavy oak doors and stepped into the late afternoon sunlight.
Devin and Oscar were parked out front, leaning over the hood of Devin’s Camaro, a spread of McDonald’s food in front of them. They didn’t so much as look up at us before Devin said, around a mouthful of Big Mac, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Hand me those fries, partner. You have a right to an attorney….”
It was well into the next morning before they finished with us.
Devin and Oscar were obviously taking a lot of heat. Gangland shootouts in Roxbury or Mattapan are one thing, but when it rises from the ghettos and rears its ugly head in the heart of the city, when Joe and Suzy Citizen have to stumble over their Louis Vuitton luggage to duck out of the way of gunfire, then there’s a problem. We were cuffed. We were booked. Devin took the photo from me without a word before we got to the station, and they took everything else shortly after.
I stood in a lineup with four cops who didn’t look remotely like me, and stared into a white light. Beyond it, I heard a cop saying, “Take your time. Look closely,” followed by a woman’s voice: “I didn’t really get a good look. I only saw the big black guy.”
Lucky me. If there’s gunfire, people usually see the black guy.
Angie and I met up again later when they sat us down on a bench beside a mangy wino named Terrance. Terrance smelled like a banana stew, but he didn’t seem to mind. He gladly explained to me, while brushing his teeth with his index finger, why the world was so out of control. Uranus. The good green folks who inhabit this planet don’t have the technology to build modern cities; Terrance told us they can build farmhouses that would make your mouth water, but skyscrapers are beyond them. “But they want ’em bad, you see?” Now that we’d built all those skyscrapers, the Urani were ready to take over. They pissed through the rain, filling our water supply with a violence-inducing drug. Within ten years, Terrance confided in us, we’d have all killed each other off and the cities would be theirs. A big green party in the Sears Tower.
I asked Terrance where he’d be then, and Angie elbowed me in the ribs for encouraging him.
Terrance stopped brushing his teeth for a moment and looked at me. “Back on Uranus, of course.” He leaned in close and I almost passed out from the smell. “I’m one of them.”
I said, “Of course you are.”
They came and got Terrance a few minutes later, took him off to his spaceship or a secret meeting with the government. They left us where we were. Devin and Oscar walked by a few times without glancing our way. A lot of other cops did the same, not to mention some hookers, an army of bail bondsmen, a bunch of PDs with awkward briefcases and the lean faces of those who don’t have time to eat. As darkness fell, then deepened, a lot of hard-looking guys, built like Devin—powerful and low to the ground—headed toward the elevators, bulky Teflon vests under dark blue windbreakers, M-16s in their hands. The Anti-Gang Task Force. They held the elevators until Devin and Oscar joined them, then they all went down in two cars.
They never offered us a phone call. They’d do that just before or within the first few minutes of our interrogation. Someone would say, “What, nobody told you you could make a phone call? Jeeze. All our lines must have been busy.”
A kid in patrolman’s blues brought us some lukewarm coffee from a machine. The old cop who’d taken our prints stood across from us behind a desk. He stamped a stack of papers, answered the phone a lot, and if he remembered us at all, he was doing a good job of hiding it. At one point, when I stood up to stretch, he half-glanced my way and out of the corner of my eye I saw a cop appear in the hallway on my left. I got a drink from the water fountain—not an easy thing to manage with your hands cuffed—and sat back down.
Angie said, “They won’t tell us about Bubba will they?”
I shook my head. “If we ask about him, it puts us at the crime scene. If they tell us before we ask, they lose everything, gain nothing.”
“Pretty much what I figured.”
She slept for a while, her head on my shoulder, her knees close to her chest. The weight of her body probably would have cramped a muscle after a while if there’d been any left to cramp; after nine or ten hours on this bench, a simple stretching exercise would have been orgasmic.
They’d taken my watch, but the darkest blue of night had already begun to give way to the first false light of early morning by the time Devin and Oscar returned. I guessed it was around five. Devin said, “Follow us, Kenzie,” as he passed.
We peeled ourselves off the bench and staggered down the hallway after them. My legs refused to straighten completely and my lower back felt like I’d swallowed a hammer. They led us into the same interrogation room where’d we’d met about twenty hours before, let the door swing back into my face as I approached. I pushed it open with my cuffed hands and we did our Quasimodo imitations through the doorway.
I said, “You ever hear of the ACLU?”
Devin tossed a walkie-talkie down on the table in front of him. He followed with a huge ring of keys, then sat back in a chair and watched us. His eyes were ragged and red, but darkly vibrant, an amphetamine vibrancy. Oscar’s looked the same. They’d probably been up forty-eight hours straight. Someday, when all this was over and they were both spending Sundays in their La-Z-Boys watching football games, their hearts would finally play catch up, do what no bullet had ever managed. Knowing them, they’d probably go the same day too.
I held out my hands. “You going to take these things off?”
Devin looked at my wrists, then at my face. He shook his head.
Angie sat down. “You’re an asshole.”
“I am,” Devin said.
I took a seat.
Oscar said, “Case you two are interested, they upped the ante in the war tonight. Someone fired a grenade through the window of a Saints’ crack house. Took out damn near everyone inside, including two babies, couldn’t have been more than nine months, the oldest. We’re not positive yet, but we think two of the dead might have been white college kids, there on a buy. Probably the best thing could have happened. Maybe somebody’ll care now.”
I said, “What’d you do with that photograph?”
“Filed it,” Devin said. “Socia’s already wanted for questioning on seven deaths in the last two nights. If he ever comes to ground, that photo will be one more thing to nail him with. The white guy in the photo, the one on top of the little kid—somebody tells me who he is, maybe we can do something about it.”
“Maybe if I was allowed back out on the street, I could do something in ways you couldn’t.”
Devin said, “Like shoot up another train station?”
Oscar said, “You wouldn’t last five minutes on the street anymore, Ken
zie.”
Angie said, “Why’s that?”
“Because Socia knows you have incriminating evidence on him. Hard evidence. Because your main protection, Patrick, ain’t in the game anymore and everyone knows it. Because your life ain’t worth a nickel bag as long as Socia’s still walking around.”
“So what’s the charge?” I asked.
“Charge?”
“What’re you charging us with, Devin?”
Oscar said, “Charging?” Couple of parrots, these two.
“Devin.”
“Mr. Kenzie, I have nothing to hold you on. My partner and I were under the impression that you might have been involved in some nasty business down at South Station early yesterday afternoon. But, since no witnesses can place you there, what can I say? We fucked up. And we’re too sorry about it, believe me.”
Angie said, “Take the cuffs off.”
“Would that we could find the key,” Devin said.
“Take the fucking cuffs off, Devin,” she said again.
“Oscar?”
Oscar pulled out all his pockets.
“Oscar doesn’t have them either. We’ll have to call around.”
Oscar stood up. “Maybe I take a look around, see if I can scare them up.”
He left and we sat there, Devin watching us. We watched him back. He said, “Think about protective custody.”
I shook my head.
“Patrick,” he said in a tone my mother used to use, “it’s a rolling battleground out there. You won’t make it until sunrise. Angie, neither will you if you’re with him.”
She tilted her chair back, turned her beautiful, weary face toward me. She said, “‘Nobody hands me my guns and says run. Nobody.’” Just like James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven. Her full mouth burst wide, the smile that blew into my chest was devastating. At that moment, I think I knew what love was.
We looked at Devin.
He sighed. “I saw the movie too. Coburn died in the end.”
“There’s always reruns,” I said.
“Not out there, there isn’t.”
Oscar came back through the door. He said, “Well, lookee here,” and held up a small key ring.
“Where’d you find ’em?” Devin asked.
Oscar tossed them onto the table in front of me. “Right where I left them. Funny how that works sometimes, huh.”
Devin pointed at us. “They think they’re cowboys.”
Oscar pulled back his chair and settled heavily into it. “Then we’ll bury them with their boots on.”
26
We couldn’t go home. Devin was right. I had no more cards to play, and Socia had nothing to gain as long as I continued breathing.
We sat around for another two hours while they finished up some paperwork and then they took us out a side door and drove us a few blocks away to the Lenox Hotel.
As we got out of the car, Oscar looked over at Devin. “Have a heart. Tell ’em.”
We stood on the curb, waited.
Devin said, “Rogowski’s got a broken collarbone and he lost a shitload of blood, but he’s stable.”
Angie sagged against me for a moment.
Devin said, “Been swell knowing you,” and drove off.
The folks at the Lenox didn’t seem too pleased we’d chosen their hotel at eight in the morning, sans luggage. Our clothes, appropriately, looked as if we’d sat on a bench all night, and my hair was still speckled with chips of marble from the shoot-out at South Station. I gave them my Visa Gold Card and they asked for more ID. While the concierge copied the numbers of my driver’s license onto a pad of paper, the reservations clerk called in my Visa number for authorization. Some people you can never please.
After they ascertained that I was who I said I was and that we probably wouldn’t make off with much more than a bath towel and some sheets, they gave us a room key. I signed my name and looked up at the reservations clerk. “Is the TV in our room bolted to the wall or could it just roll on out of there?”
She gave me a very tight smile but didn’t answer.
The room was on the ninth floor, overlooking Boylston Street. Not a bad view. Directly below us wasn’t much—a Store 24, a Dunkin’ Donuts—but beyond, a nice stretch of brownstones, some with mint-green roof gardens, and beyond them, the dark, rolling Charles striped against a pale, gray sky.
The sun was rising steadily. I was dead tired, but more than sleep, I needed a shower. Too bad Angie’s quicker than I am. I sat in a chair and flicked on the TV. Bolted to the wall, of course. The early news was running a commentary about yesterday’s gang violence in South Station. The commentator, broad-shouldered with bangs that looked as if they’d been sharpened to points with a razor, was damn near quivering with righteous anger. Gang violence, he said, had finally reached our front doors and something had to be done about it, no matter what.
It’s always when it reaches our “front doors” that we finally consider it a problem. When it’s confined to our backyards for decades, no one even notices it.
I turned off the TV, switched places with Angie when she came out of the bathroom.
By the time I’d finished, she was asleep, lying on her stomach, one hand still on the phone where she’d hung it up, the other still closed around the top of the towel. Beads of water glistened on her bare back above the towel line, her slim shoulder blades rising and falling with each breath. I dried off and went to the bed. I pulled the covers out from under her and she groaned softly, raising her left leg closer to her chest. I placed the sheet over her and shut off the light.
I lay down on the right side of the bed, a few feet away from her on top of the sheet, and prayed she didn’t roll over in her sleep. If her body touched mine, I was afraid I’d dissolve into it. And probably not mind.
That being the major problem, right there, I turned onto my side, facing the wall, and waited for sleep.
Some time, shortly before I woke up, I saw the boy in the photos. The Hero was carrying him down a dank hallway, both of them enshrouded in shower steam. Water dripped steadily from the ceiling. I yelled something to the boy, because I knew him. I knew him in that dank hallway as his legs kicked out from under my father’s arm. He seemed small in my father’s arm, smaller still because he was naked. I called to him and my father turned back toward me; Sterling Mulkern’s face was under the dark fireman’s helmet. He said, “If you had half the balls your old man had…” in Devin’s voice. The boy turned too, the face craning around my father’s elbow bored and disinterested, even as his bare legs flailed. His eyes were empty, like a doll’s, and I felt my legs buckle when I realized nothing would ever shock or scare him again.
I woke up to Angie kneeling over me, her hands on my shoulders. She said, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” in a soft whisper.
I was very aware of her bare legs against mine as I said, “What?”
“It’s OK,” she said. “Just a dream.”
The room was pitch dark but light exploded behind the heavy curtains. I said, “What time is it?”
She stood up, still wearing the towel, and walked to the window. “Eight o’clock,” she said. “P.M.” She opened the curtain. “On the Fourth of July.”
The sky was a canvas of explosive colors. Whites, reds, blues, even some orange and yellow. A clap of thunder rocked the room and a starburst of blue and white ignited the sky. A shooting star of red rocketed through the middle and set off a smaller starburst that bled all over the blue and white. The whole display hit its peak then collapsed at once, the colors arcing downward and sputtering out in a cascade of dying embers. Angie opened the windows and the Boston Pops boomed Beethoven’s Fifth as if they had a wall of speakers wrapped around the Hub.
I said, “We slept fourteen hours?”
She nodded. “Shoot-outs and interrogations will do that to you, I guess.”
“I guess so.”
She came back to the bed, sat on the corner. “Boy, Skid, when you have a nightmare, you have a nightmare.”
I rubbed my face. “Sorry I woke you.”
“Had to get up some time. Speaking of which, do we have a plan of any sort?”
“We have to find Paulson and Socia.”
“That’s an objective, not a plan.”
“We need our guns.”
“Definitely.”
“Probably not going to be easy getting to them with Socia’s people all over the place.”
“We’re the inventive type.”
We took a cab back to the neighborhood, gave the driver an address about a half-mile past the church. I didn’t see anyone lurking in the shadows as we passed, but you’re not supposed to: that’s why there are shadows; that’s why they lurk. Some kids—ten or twelve years old at most—were shooting bottle rockets at the passing cars, tossing packs of firecrackers out into the middle of the avenue. The car directly behind us took a direct hit to its windshield and screeched to a halt. The guy jumped out running, but the kids were gone before he’d even reached the curb, hopping fences like hurdlers, disappearing into their own backyard jungle.
Angie and I paid the cabbie and walked through the backyard of the public grammar school—the “project” school we called it when we were kids, because only the kids from the housing projects went there. In the back of the schoolyard, hanging in a loose pack around the fire escape, twenty or so of the older neighborhood kids pounded back some beers, a boom box tuned to WBCN, a few passing around a joint. When they saw us, one of them turned the boom box up louder. J. Geils Band’s “Whammer Jammer.” Fine with me. They had already decided we weren’t cops and now they were deliberating how bad they were going to scare us for being stupid enough to walk through their hangout.
Then a few of them recognized us as we passed under a streetlight and seemed pretty depressed—can’t scare people who know your parents. I recognized their leader, Colin, right off. Bobby Shefton’s kid; good-looking, even if he was as obviously Irish as a potato famine—tall, well-built, a short-cropped head of dirty blond hair around a chiseled face. He was wearing a white and green BNBL tank top and a pair of pleated walking shorts. He said, “’S up, Mr. Kenzie?”
A Drink Before the War Page 19
