The Drop

by Dennis Lehane

He looked out at the channel for a bit. Nadia patted his hand once and looked out at the channel too and they stayed that way for some time.

  BEFORE WORK, BOB DROPPED by Saint Dom’s and sat in an empty pew in the empty church and took it all in.

  Father Regan entered the altar off the sacristy, mostly in street clothes, though his trousers were black. He watched Bob sit there for a bit.

  Bob asked, “Is it true?”

  Father Regan walked down the center aisle. He took the pew ahead of Bob’s. Turned and slung his arm over the back. “The diocese feels we could better meet our pastoral commitments if we merged with Saint Cecilia’s, yeah.”

  Bob said, “But they’re selling this church,” and pointed down at his own pew.

  Father Regan said, “This building and the school will be sold, yeah.”

  Bob looked up at the soaring ceilings. He’d been looking up at them since he was three years old. He’d never known the ceilings in any other church. That’s how it was supposed to be until the day he died. How it had been for his father, how it had been for his father’s father. Some things—a few rare things—were supposed to stay what they’d always been.

  Bob said, “You?”

  Father Regan said, “I haven’t been reassigned yet.”

  Bob said, “They protect the kid-diddlers and the douche bags who covered up for them but they haven’t figured out what to do with you? That’s fucking wise.”

  Father Regan gave Bob a look like he wasn’t sure he’d met this Bob before. And maybe he hadn’t.

  Father Regan said, “Is everything else okay?”

  “Sure.” Bob looked at the transepts. Not for the first time he wondered how they’d had the wherewithal back in 1878—or 1078, for that matter—to build them. “Sure, sure, sure.”

  Father Regan said, “I understand you’ve become friends with Nadia Dunn.”

  Bob looked at him.

  “She’s had some trouble in the past.” Father Regan patted the top of the pew lightly. The pat turned into an absent caress. “Some would say, she is troubled.”

  The silent church towered over them, beating like a third heart.

  Bob said, “Do you have friends?”

  Father Regan’s eyebrows arched. “Sure.”

  Bob said, “I don’t mean just, like, other priests. I mean, like, buddies. People you can, I dunno, be around.”

  Father Regan nodded. “Yeah, Bob. I do.”

  “I don’t,” Bob said. “I mean, I didn’t.”

  Bob looked around the church some more. He gave Father Regan a smile. He said, “God bless,” and left the pew.

  Father Regan said, “God bless.”

  Bob stopped at the baptismal font on his way out the door. He blessed himself. He stood there with his head down. Then he blessed himself a second time and left through the center doors.

  CHAPTER 10

  Whoever Is Holy

  COUSIN MARV STOOD IN the doorway to the alley, smoking, while Bob gathered up the empty trash barrels from the night before. As usual, the barrels had been tossed all over the alley by the garbage truck guys and Bob had to range a bit to get them.

  Cousin Marv said, “It’s too much for them to just put them back down where they found them. That would require courtesy.”

  Bob stacked two plastic barrels together, brought them over to the back wall. He noticed, propped against the wall between the barrels and a rat trap, a black plastic trash bag, the kind used on construction sites, extra heavy duty. He hadn’t left it there. He was familiar enough with the businesses on either side of them—Nails Saigon and Doctor Sanjeev K Seth—to know what their trash usually looked like, and this wasn’t it. He left the bag there a moment and went into the alley for the last barrel.

  Bob said, “If you’d just pay for a Dumpster—”

  Cousin Marv said, “Why should I pay for a Dumpster? I don’t own the bar anymore, remember? ‘Pay for a Dumpster.’ Ain’t your bar Chovka took.”

  Bob said, “That was ten years ago.”

  Cousin Marv said, “Eight and a half.”

  Bob brought the last barrel to the wall. He walked over to the black plastic bag. It was a forty-five-gallon bag, but far from full. Whatever was inside wasn’t big, but the bag jutted at the sides, so whatever was inside was a foot to eighteen inches long. A length of pipe, perhaps, or the kind of cardboard tubing posters came in.

  Cousin Marv said, “Dottie thinks we should visit Europe. That’s what I’ve become, kinda guy goes to Europe with his sister, hops on fucking tour buses with a camera around my neck.”

  Bob stood over the bag. It had been knotted at the top, but knotted so loosely it would take nothing but a light tug for the bag to open like a rose.

  “Back in the day,” Cousin Marv said, “I wanted to go on a trip, I went with Brenda Mulligan or Cheryl Hodge or, or, remember Jillian?”

  Bob took another step closer to the bag. Now he stood so close that the only way to get closer would have been to climb in. “Jillian Waingrove. She was pretty.”

  “She was fucking smoking. We went together that whole summer? Used to go to that outdoor bar in Marina Bay. What was that called?”

  Bob heard himself say, “The Tent,” as he opened the bag and looked in. His lungs filled with lead and his head filled with helium. He turned away from the bag for a moment and the alley canted to the right.

  “The Tent,” Marv was saying. “Right, right. That still there?”

  “Yeah,” Bob heard himself say, his voice reaching his ears like something from a tunnel, “but they call it something else now.”

  He looked over his shoulder at Marv, let Marv see it in his eyes.

  Cousin Marv flicked his cigarette into the alley. “What?”

  Bob stood where he was, the flaps of the bag in his hand. An odor of decomposition floated out of the bag, a smell similar to raw chicken parts left in the sun.

  Cousin Marv looked toward the bag then back at Bob. He remained in the doorway.

  Bob said, “You need to—”

  Cousin Marv said, “No, I don’t.”

  Bob said, “What?”

  Cousin Marv said, “I don’t need to do anything. Okay? I’m standing right fucking here. I’m standing here because—”

  Bob said, “You need to see—”

  “I don’t need to see anything! You hear me?” Cousin Marv said, “I don’t need to see Europe or fucking Thailand or fucking whatever’s in that bag. I’m standing right here.”

  “Marv.”

  Marv shook his head violently, the way a child would.

  Bob waited.

  Cousin Marv wiped at his eyes, suddenly embarrassed. “We were a crew once. ’Member that? People were afraid of us.”

  Bob said, “Yeah.”

  Marv lit another cigarette. He walked toward the bag the way you’d approach a stunned raccoon in the corner of your basement.

  He reached Bob. He looked in the bag.

  An arm, hacked off just below the elbow, lay in a small pile of bloody money. The arm sported a wristwatch that was stopped at six-fifteen.

  Cousin Marv exhaled slowly and kept at it until there was no breath left in his lungs.

  Cousin Marv said, “Well, that’s just . . . I mean . . .”

  “I know.”

  “It’s . . .”

  “I know,” Bob said.

  “It’s obscene.”

  Bob nodded. “We gotta do something with it.”

  Cousin Marv said, “The money? Or the . . . ?”

  Bob said, “I’m betting the money adds up to whatever we lost that night.”

  Cousin Marv said, “So, okay . . .”

  Bob said, “So we give the money back to them. It’s what they expect.”

  “And that?” Marv pointed at the arm. “That?”

  “We can’t just leave it here,” Bob said. “It’ll bring that cop right down on us.”

  “But we didn’t do anything.”

  “Not this time,” Bob said. “But how
do you think Chovka or Papa Umarov are going to feel about us if the cops take a special interest?”

  “Yeah,” Marv said. “Sure, sure.”

  “Need you to focus, Marv.”

  Marv blinked at that. “You need me to focus?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Bob said and carried the bag inside.

  IN THE TINY KITCHEN, next to the four-burner grill and the deep fryer, was a prep station where they made the sandwiches. Bob laid some wax paper on the counter. He pulled shrink-wrap from a dispenser above the counter. He lifted the arm out of the sink where he’d rinsed it and rolled it in the shrink wrap. When it was tightly wrapped, he placed it in the wax paper.

  Marv watched from the doorway, a look of repulsion on his stricken face.

  Cousin Marv said, “Like you’ve done this a thousand times.”

  Bob shot him a look. Cousin Marv blinked and looked at the floor.

  Cousin Marv said, “You wonder if you hadn’t mentioned the watch, maybe—”

  “No,” Bob said, a little sharper than he meant to. “I don’t.”

  Cousin Marv said, “Well, I do.”

  Bob taped the edges of the wax paper, and the arm was now somewhat disguised as maybe an expensive pool cue or a foot-long sub. Bob put it in a gym bag.

  He and Marv exited the kitchen into the bar and found Eric Deeds sitting there, hands folded on the bar top, just a guy waiting for a drink.

  Marv and Bob both kept moving forward.

  Cousin Marv said, “We’re closed.”

  Eric said, “You got any Zima?”

  “Who would we serve it to?” Marv asked. “Moesha?”

  Bob and Cousin Marv came around the back of the bar, stared at Deeds.

  Eric stood. “Your door was unlocked, so I thought . . .”

  Marv and Bob looked at each other.

  “No offense,” Cousin Marv said to Eric Deeds, “but get the fuck out of here.”

  “Definitely no Zima?” Eric walked to the door. “Good seeing you, Bob.” He waved. “You give Nadia my best, brutha.”

  Eric walked out. Marv ran to the door and threw the lock.

  Cousin Marv said, “We’re tossing the missing piece of the One-Armed Man back and forth like a fucking Hacky Sack, and the fucking door’s unlocked.”

  Bob said, “Well, nothing happened.”

  “But it could have.” He took a breath. “You know that kid?”

  Bob said, “That’s the guy I told you about.”

  “One claims the dog was his?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s fucked in the squash, that one.”

  Bob said, “You know him?”

  Cousin Marv nodded. “He’s from Mayhew Street. Saint Cecilia’s Parish. You’re old school—somebody ain’t from your parish, they might as well be fucking Flemish. Kid’s a piece of shit. Been to the joint a couple times, did a thirty-day in the cuckoo house, if I recall. The whole fucking Deeds family shoulda been Baker Acted a generation ago.” Cousin Marv said, “Word around a few campfires is he’s the one killed Glory Days.”

  Bob said, “I heard that, yeah.”

  Cousin Marv said, “Dispersed him from the planet Earth. That’s what they say.”

  “Well . . .” Bob said, and then, with nothing left to say, he took the gym bag and walked out the back door.

  After he left, Marv filled the bar sink with the bloody money. He engaged the tonic water button on the soda dispensing gun and sprayed the money.

  He stopped. He stared at all that runny blood.

  “Animals,” he whispered and closed his eyes to all that blood. “Fucking savages.”

  AT PEN’ PARK, BOB threw a stick and Rocco charged up the path for it. He brought it back, dropped it in front of Bob, and Bob threw it again, putting everything he had into it. While Rocco raced down the path, Bob reached into the gym bag and grabbed the packaged arm. He turned toward the channel and threw the arm like a tomahawk. He watched it arc high and tumble end over end before it reached its zenith in the sky and dropped quickly. It landed in the middle of the channel with a splash bigger than Bob would have predicted. Louder too. So loud he expected the cars driving past on the roadway on the opposite bank to all stop. But none did.

  Rocco returned with the stick.

  Bob said, “Good boy.”

  Bob threw the stick again and it bounced on the asphalt and then off the path. Rocco bounded across the park.

  Bob heard tires behind him. He turned, expecting to see one of the park ranger pickup trucks, but instead it was Detective Torres driving toward him. Bob had no idea if he’d seen anything. Torres stopped and he got out of his car and approached Bob.

  Torres said, “Hey, Mr. Saginowski.” He glanced at the empty bag at Bob’s feet. “We haven’t caught them yet.”

  Bob stared at him.

  “The guys who robbed your bar.”

  “Oh.”

  Torres laughed. “You remember, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Or have you been robbed so many times it all just blends together?”

  Rocco ran up to them, dropped the stick, panted. Bob threw the stick and Rocco ran off again.

  “No,” Bob said. “I remember.”

  “Good. So, yeah, we haven’t found them.”

  Bob said, “I assumed.”

  Torres said, “You assumed we didn’t do our job?”

  Bob said, “No. I always heard robberies were hard to arrest on.”

  Torres said, “So what I do for a living is pointless, what you’re saying.”

  There was no way to win in this conversation so Bob just clammed up.

  After a while, Torres said, “What’s with the bag?”

  Bob said, “I keep leashes and balls and poop bags in there and stuff.”

  Torres said, “It’s empty.”

  Bob said, “Used my last poop bag, lost a ball.”

  Rocco trotted up, dropped the stick. Bob threw it and the dog took off again.

  Torres said, “Richie Whelan.”

  Bob asked, “What about him?”

  Torres asked, “You remember him?”

  Bob said, “His friends were in the bar last week toasting the anniversary.”

  Torres asked, “What anniversary?”

  Bob said, “The last time anyone ever saw him.”

  Torres said, “Which was at your bar.”

  Bob said, “Yeah, he left. Walked off to score some weed, I always heard.”

  Torres nodded. “You know an Eric Deeds? Blond guy?”

  Bob said, “I don’t know. I mean, maybe, but it’s not ringing a bell.”

  Torres said, “He supposedly had some words with Whelan earlier that day.”

  Bob gave Torres a helpless smile and a matching shrug.

  Torres nodded and kicked at a pebble with the toe of his shoe. “‘Whoever is holy, let him approach.’”

  Bob said, “’Scuse me?”

  Torres said, “Church’s position on who can receive Communion. If you’re in a state of grace, have at it. If not, repent and then have at it. But you still don’t take the sacrament. You forget to repent for something, Mr. Saginowski?”

  Bob said nothing. He threw the stick for Rocco again.

  Torres said, “See, me, I fuck up most days. It’s a hard path to walk. End of the day, though, I go to confession. It’s better’n therapy or AA. Come clean with God, next morning, receive Him at Holy Communion. You, though? Not so much.”

  Rocco brought back the stick, and this time it was Torres who picked it up. He held it in his hand for quite a while until Rocco started to whine. It was a high-pitched sound, one Bob had never heard before. But then he wasn’t in the habit of taunting his dog. Just as he was about to grab the stick from Torres’s hand, the cop cocked his arm and released the stick into the air. Rocco took off after it.

  Torres said, “Meaningful penance, Mr. Saginowski—you should give it some thought. Good-looking dog.”

  He walked off.

  CHAPTER 11


  All Die

  AFTER TORRES LEFT, BOB walked through the park for a bit but couldn’t really remember much of it before he and Rocco found themselves back by his car. He felt so light-headed he wasn’t sure he trusted himself to drive, so he stood by the car with his dog and looked at the hard winter sky, the sun trapped behind a wall of gray as thick as terry cloth. A few months from now, if the arm floated up somewhere along these banks, would Torres make the connection? Would he come for Bob then?

  He’s already coming for you now.

  Bob took a long breath, held it, and then exhaled. This time, it didn’t make him dizzy or pop the air in front of his face.

  He told himself it was all going to work out. It was.

  He got in his car and looked at himself in the visor mirror and said it out loud. “It’s going to be fine.”

  Not that he believed it, but what were you gonna do?

  He drove into Saint Dom’s Parish and over to his house to drop Rocco off. As they got out of the car, Nadia exited the house.

  Nadia said, “I came by to give him his afternoon walk. I freaked. Your cell on?”

  Bob looked at his cell. “On vibrate. I didn’t feel it.”

  “I called a bunch of times.”

  His screen read Missed Call Nadia (6). “I see that now.”

  She cocked her head slightly. “I thought you were working today.”

  Bob said, “I am. I just . . . Yeah. It’s too long a story to go into. But I should have called you. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no, no. Don’t worry about it.”

  Bob came up on the porch with Rocco, who rolled over at Nadia’s feet. She scratched his chest.

  Bob said, “You know an Eric Deeds?”

  Nadia kept her head down and continued scratching Rocco’s chest. “I don’t know-him-know-him, but I know him. You know, from around.”

  Bob said, “The way he said it, I figured you—”

  “Figured I what?”

  “Nothing. No. I don’t know what I—”

  Now she looked at him. Looked at him with something in her eyes he’d never seen before. Something that told him to turn and run as fast as he could.

  “Why’re you on my ass about it?”

  “What? I just asked a question.”

  She said, “You were insinuating.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”