“The woman who called this in, she saw this guy getting beat up yesterday?”
“Yes, sir. Said she saw it out of her window.”
“She say anything about him getting a nail put through his hand?”
“I didn’t ask her.”
“Why the fuck would you?”
“Sir?”
“The puncture wounds were covered up by the bandage. Besides, if she’d seen something like that, she probably would have mentioned it.”
“Yes, sir. I think the detectives are planning to interview her.”
“Where does she live?”
Clavell again pointed toward the fence line.
“Show me.” DeMateo started to walk across the lot as fat drops of rain began to fall. Clavell fell in step. It was five minutes before anyone realized they were gone.
30
THE SKIES opened just as he ducked inside. Bobby let the door swing softly behind him and started up the darkened staircase that led to his apartment. From somewhere above came the scuff of leather on wood. Bobby took out the nickel-plated nine he had stuck in his belt. It didn’t figure that Cakes had moved that quickly, but who else would be paying him a visit at three in the morning? Halfway up the first flight, he heard a second sound, this time a sniff, followed by a wet sigh. A woman’s sigh. Bobby thumbed on the safety, slipped the gun inside his coat, and climbed the rest of the way. Her face was cut in half by light filtered from the street. Rain drummed on a skylight overhead, a muffled sound making Bobby feel like they were the only two people in the world.
“Did you get wet?” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
He opened the door to his apartment and Colleen Carson followed him in. She perched on the edge of a chair, clutching a large black bag in her lap and taking a slow look around. “This is nice.”
“Spare me.”
They’d never talked much after she got married. Then he’d started dating Bridget, and they’d never talked at all. Bobby cracked a window and felt the wind and rain sucking at his fingers through the gap. He could smell her scent mingled with the storm and thought about fifteen years ago and an Irish bar on Harvard Avenue called Toner’s.
Happy hour. Some guy with a nicked-up guitar playing Neil Diamond on a small wooden stage as if his life depended on it, which it probably did. Everyone was stiff as fucking doorknobs, hooked arms and red, sweaty faces, singing and dancing and drinking fifty-cent drafts, doing all the Boston shit everyone thinks is so great, but only up close or from a great distance. Colleen Pearce sat at a table with a handful of beer mugs, two cigarettes boiling in ashtrays, and a girlfriend keeping a close eye on who was where, what, and when. The last time Bobby had seen Colleen she’d been maybe fifteen. Not anymore. Guys came up to the table. Guys left. Finally, her friend went to the ladies’ room and Bobby slipped into the empty chair. He asked if she was a Pearce even though he knew damn well she was. Colleen smirked and wondered aloud if it always took him that long to make a move. They talked—easy, fun, stupid talk. Thrilling talk. Young talk. She smoked and he watched her smoke, committing every gesture to memory, stringing them together like pearls. They had a couple more drafts, just enough so it was good. At some point the friend returned and disappeared again. They swayed and sang along with everyone else to Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” She covered his hand with hers like they were an old married couple and it was the most natural thing in the world. When they left, the city seemed mellow and scratchy after the smoke and noise of the bar. They got a pizza at Pino’s in Cleveland Circle and watched the Green Line rumble past and talked about the stuff they’d been waiting to talk about their whole lives, but never found the exact right person who’d know when to talk and when to listen. It could have gone anywhere from there, but Bobby knew better. He’d already dug his trenches and built his walls, strung long, looping runs of razor wire around his heart. So he dropped her off at Champney around two in the morning and watched her go into the house. She called a couple of times after that, but he ignored them. Two nights before Christmas, he saw her through a window downtown. She was with a college-looking guy, sitting at a table in a restaurant. Colleen was laughing with her chin up and covering the man’s hand with hers. Just like an old, married couple. Bobby felt a pull inside that surprised him. A year later, she married Scott Carson. And life moved along.
“You know I wouldn’t come unless it was important,” she said, something anxious eating at the edges of her eyes.
“What do you want?”
“I’m not exactly sure.”
That was a lie. She knew what she wanted. If you weren’t making a bet, it was the only reason to pay Bobby a visit. He was the guy everyone grinned at uncomfortably in the street and avoided until that moment when they needed someone to take out the trash cluttering up their lives. It was his thing, why he walked like he did.
“Where’s your husband, Coll?”
“He’s got guns.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Gone. He keeps a shotgun in the house and some sort of machine pistol.”
Scott Carson was a smug, arrogant prick who treated Colleen like a piece of townie ass. That was Bobby’s take, not that anyone ever asked him. And that wasn’t Scott’s only problem.
“Tell me about the drugs.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Bobby got up and opened the door. “If you’re gonna lie to me, there’s not much I can do.”
“Bobby.” She had so little and thought it mattered so much. And she’d use whoever was around to keep it safe. He could blame her, but why bother.
“Tell me what you know, Coll. It goes no further.”
“Fine.” Her voice had turned quick, defiant, skipping over words like a stone across a shallow, green pond. “I know he’s been dealing.”
Bobby closed the door and leaned up against it. “How long?”
“I’ve known for six months.”
“Did he tell you where he was getting his product?”
She shook her head. “We needed the money. Fucking bills in Newton, Conor’s school. But the guns and the rest of it. Christ, I’m afraid he’s gonna come in one night and kill us.”
Bobby walked to the window and shut it. Then he pulled up the shade so he could get a better look at her in the patches of light. Her sweater was thin cashmere, and her collarbones stuck out like fish ribs. Bobby noticed swelling along one heavily powdered cheekbone. His eye tracked down to a faint necklace of fingerprint bruises around her throat. He moved closer and touched them with his finger.
“He’s got girlfriends, Bobby. Little girls he fucks in a hotel downtown. Last week I sat in the lobby and watched him walk in with one of them. Then I went into the ladies and got sick.” A single, tardy tear slipped from the corner of her eye, trickled down a sticky cheek and into the side of her mouth. “What happened there?” She pointed to the bandage on his hand.
“Nothing. Where’s his stash, Coll?”
“Stash?”
“The drugs. Money.”
“Scott doesn’t let me see that stuff.”
Bobby sat down again and leaned forward, hands clasped loosely between his knees. He was in no hurry and they both knew it. She pulled a small cigar box from her bag and pushed it onto the table. The inside was stacked with cash, twenties, fifties, hundreds, sorted into neat bundles, each bundle wrapped in a piece of paper covered with figures and names. Underneath the cash was a Ziploc bag containing twenty or thirty lottery tickets, folded in half and paper clipped. In the crease of each ticket was powdered cocaine—looked like teeners and eights. Bobby took a quick peek at the names on the money wrappers. Then he put the cash and drugs back in the box and closed it.
“There’s a little more than four thousand,” Colleen said. “I don’t know what the drugs are worth.”
Bobby tapped his fingers on the table. Outside the wind and the rain took turns banging dr
unkenly against the side of the building. “Pick up your son tonight. Get all your shit together and get out of the house.”
“But . . .”
“No ‘buts.’ Pick up Conor and leave.” He scratched out a name on a piece of paper. “This is a long-term hotel in New Hampshire. Get yourself a room and lie low until you hear from me.”
“You just took all my money.”
He walked over to his suitcase and returned with a thousand in twenties and hundreds. “This’ll keep you for a while.”
She grabbed at the money and stuffed it in her bag. “What if he tries to find us?”
“Scott won’t be bothering you anymore.”
“Really?” There was a crack in her voice, a glimmer underneath of something shiny and hard and mean.
“You should get moving, Coll.”
“He’ll be at the Royal Hotel this morning. I mean, I think he’ll be there. He usually gets a room.”
Bobby didn’t respond. She stood up to leave, pulling on her coat, suddenly anxious to be as far from whatever she’d set in motion as possible.
“One more thing,” he said. “Don’t tell your sister about any of this.”
“I can tell her I’m leaving for a while . . .”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Cuz she likes to talk. Cuz she doesn’t like you. And cuz she can be pretty fucking nasty when she wants to be.”
Colleen eased back into her seat. “There’s something else we should probably talk about.”
The sudden shift should have bothered him. But it was Colleen, and he’d always been intrigued most by whatever came next.
“What is it?”
Her eyes moved to her bag. Thunder grumbled and a long fork of lightning lit up her face. Bobby saw Sal Riga there as well as the other dead man from the produce market, the one with dark eyebrows raised in double question marks. Then Colleen Carson reached into her bag and pulled out a gun.
31
LISA BLINKED her eyes open. The clock sunk into the dashboard read 6:00 A.M. She’d planned on getting a hotel room but wound up parked in front of their apartment, wrapped in the bigness of the storm as it rolled in off the ocean, staring up at the sleeping windows until she herself dropped off. More rain blew up Pinckney Street, pinging off the roof of the car and cascading across her windshield. A man stood in the doorway of a hat shop, smoking a cigarette and staring at the cold water as it collected in the gutters and washed back down the hill. Blurry lights came on in a café. A woman stuck her head out and pulled in a stack of soggy newspapers left by the front door. Lisa was her first customer, sitting in the front window with hot coffee as the rain tapered to a mist, then stopped altogether. The sun made a tentative appearance just as Kevin stepped out of their building—now his. He kept his eyes glued to the pavement and headed straight for his car, bumping down the hill with a look neither left nor right. Lisa waited ten minutes, then crossed over and walked up four flights. She could have put off things for a day or two, but something told her this needed to be done quickly. She let herself into the apartment and looked around. A still life of her time with Kevin looked back. On the mantel stood a reproduction of a New England whaling schooner etched in scrimshaw on a pale piece of bone. A cheap watercolor they’d bought in P-Town hung off the wall. Opposite it were framed pictures of them on the ferry to Nantucket and another watercolor, this one marginally better, of the Chatham lighthouse. She walked into the kitchen. Stuck to the fridge were ticket stubs from a Pats game and a single photo from last Christmas Eve. The snow had started falling in earnest around five. They’d filled a thermos with cocoa and walked through the city, sidewalks empty, bare black branches patterned against the low New England sky. As night fell, fresh light blazed from the windows of the Brahmin brownstones, illuminating stone steps and carved archways dressed in thin coats of white. They got a drink at the bar in the Ritz and listened to the carolers in the cold outside Arlington Street Church. Their night ended on a bench in the Public Garden. The snow had thickened, falling in sheets across the moonlight. An old woman took the photo, smiling at them as they smiled back and she remembered something lovely from her past. Lisa plucked the snapshot off the fridge and stuffed it in her pocket. She’d allow herself one.
In the bedroom, on the top shelf of the closet, were her suitcases. She pulled down the two rollers and filled them with clothes. Fifteen minutes later, she had her Civic loaded with everything she owned. And then it was time to leave. She leaned against the car and took a last look up and down the block. People were going about their business, doing what they did yesterday, would do tomorrow and the day after. She was the interloper, always had been, her life an exercise in make-believe, right down to the apartment in Beacon Hill and lily-white boyfriend. That was unfair to her, to Kevin, to their time together, but she felt it all the same and knew she always would. It was her greatest strength and biggest weakness—a solitude she wore like a second skin. And the unblinking mind that went with it. Lisa pulled out her car keys and bent to unlock the door. A woman wearing Wayfarer sunglasses brushed past, knocking her into the side of the Civic. Lisa whipped around, swinging a fierce elbow but missing as the woman walked off. Lisa took a deep breath and let herself settle. Then she was back in the car, possessions packed tightly around her, rolling out of Beacon Hill, rolling with regret, rolling with anger, but rolling just the same. A cell phone buzzed from somewhere deep inside her bag. It was Frank DeMateo. He wanted her to meet him at the morgue. Fuck him, too.
Bridget Pearce slipped the Wayfarers onto her forehead and watched the Civic until it took the corner at the bottom of the hill. Then she walked slowly up the block, past Kevin’s building, to her rental. Bridget wasn’t sure what she’d hoped to find at her brother’s place, but the girlfriend was nothing if not interesting. Maybe even useful. Bridget cruised back down Joy Street, flipping off a couple of tourists who’d wandered off the sidewalk to take a picture. Then she turned onto Cambridge and disappeared into the choke of traffic headed downtown.
32
SCOTT CARSON climbed the back stairs of the shit bag Royal Hotel one lousy fucking step at a time. Nick had given him a room on the fourth floor looking out over an alley. Prick was actually pleasant, smiling and calling him Mr. C. as he handed over the keys, telling him he could have the room for the rest of the day even though Scott had only paid for the morning. Ass wipe. Scott stopped once on the climb up, sitting in a stairwell and smoking a cigarette as the blood thundered in his ears and a cockroach the size of small beagle crawled past him on the wall. He pushed into his room at a few minutes before seven, immediately cracking open both windows in a futile effort to remove the stink of whoever had been in there before. In the bathroom he wiped the sweat off his face and touched at the puffiness in his cheeks and eyelids. He was overdue for a vacation. Maybe Vegas. Suck up some sun, pool time, a little gambling. Fuck knows he deserved it. But first, there was the matter of his wife. He’d figured it was gonna be difficult to get rid of her. Then he got the call. And just like that Colleen wasn’t a problem anymore. It bothered him if he thought about it too much so Scott decided not to. He found a water glass on a shelf over the toilet and pulled a flat bottle of scotch from a paper bag. The girl he’d hired for the morning was listed as eighteen, but the guy at the service assured him she was fourteen. Tight. That was what the guy had said. And insatiable. Nice word, insatiable. Scott poured himself some whiskey and bolted down a handful of Vicodin. Then he took a blue pill. Followed by a second. What the fuck, why risk it when you can be thick as a barn post all morning? There was a small knock on the door. Scott drained what was left in the glass and checked himself again in the mirror, pushing at the loose folds of skin under his chin and carefully rearranging random strands of hair on his head. Another knock. Scott felt himself getting hard even as he walked across the room and gave himself a quick adjustment so she wouldn’t see the boner first thing.
“You’re early . . .” His mouth opened
and closed once, dick shriveling, balls sucking up into his stomach. His guest took a step into the room and closed the door. Scott’s face crumbled into soft pieces. “What are you doing here?”
The first shot felt like a bee sting. Scott looked down at the hole in his shirt and thought it should hurt more than it did. He coughed and saw the hole bubble with a froth of blood. Another pop and a second hole joined the first. Scott had somehow found his way to the floor, looking up at stains on the ceiling and wondering if they were some sort of Olympic-sized cum shots. He could hear his heart now, rasping in his chest. There was something liquid between his lips. He wiped them and his sleeve came away red. The toe of a shoe brushed his nose as someone stepped over his body. Rough hands on his clothes and in his pockets. He turned his head and watched a dark figure climb out of the window and onto a fire escape that ran down the side of the building. Then Scott was alone. He tried to yell but only managed the bones of a dead man’s whisper. Nick was probably outside in the hall, listening at the door and having a good laugh. Let him laugh, the fucking loser. Scott coughed again, the blood like thick syrup in his throat, filling his lungs, drowning, choking. Word around Brighton had always been not to fuck with the Pearce girls. Scott smiled a sticky grin. He’d never paid the talk any mind. Lesson fucking learned. He coughed a final time, blowing what was left of his life in bright blood all over himself. It was barely seven when he turned his head toward the morning sun and died.
33
BOBBY ROLLED into the abandoned lot at exactly 7:40, listening to the engine tick in the morning quiet before getting out. He worked quickly and calmly, stripping the grimy plates off his Jeep with a flat-head screwdriver and tossing them into the backseat of a blue Toyota. The cars were parked side by side next to a field ugly with hunks of grass and rock. Bobby’s suitcase followed the plates, along with a small black gym bag. The Toyota turned over on the first try, its engine settling into a soft, efficient hum. Bobby pulled out of the lot and drove a mile and a half, parking on a side street a block from Saint Andrew’s. He walked back to the church with his head down and the gun in his pocket. Best he could tell, no one had followed him. And no one had seen him.
Brighton Page 19
