“Okay,” Darryl says. “Go on.”
“Only whatever plan Gus and Britta had went south when the money hit the street. Maybe they just wanted me down so they could lift the cash, come back to you, and say, ‘Shitty break, Boston drivers.’ How’m I doing?”
“Fucked if I know.” Darryl shrugs. “There’s more?”
I step into a doorway as a cruiser passes, leaving Darryl to absorb their drive-by eye-fuck on his own, a world away from the pickup games we play three times a week with as diverse a group of guys gathered in a city known as much for its racial and ethnic divisions as it is for its historic and crooked streets.
That Darryl’s turned out to be a corner kingpin neither disturbs nor surprises me. The scourge of hard drugs on inner city neighborhoods is an ethical weight Darryl has to deal with on his own, and I’m pretty sure that he tells himself if it wasn’t him running corners, it’d be someone else, the game unstoppable, no matter who’s calling the shots. In the time I’ve known him, I figure he’s smart enough to realize his shelf life is limited, prison or an early grave waiting for him somewhere down the line, which might account for the business sermon handed down to his lieutenants, diversification and expansion obviously carrying its own growing pains.
“You can come out now.” Darryl thumb texts briefly on his cell.
“So.” I get back to it, trying to keep the story straight. “The money’s everything, right? You’re running blow through Black Hole.”
“Like hell I am. I told you I was diversified, Z. Why would I mix my corners with Black Hole and draw that kind of heat? Two different worlds, kid.”
Well, not entirely, considering the money I lost pulled in a couple of robbery homicide detectives working the Wells Fargo job. Only I have a hard time picturing Darryl and his crew going from corner-slinging on their home turf to taking down an armored car in broad daylight. So what’s the connection?
“There any real money in the record business, Darryl?”
“Might be with the right band. I thought maybe Gus was that golden goose, but it looks like he done fucked that up. Anyhow, this is where the real money’s at, Zesty.” Darryl spreads his arms above him. “You just got to open your eyes to the possibilities.”
“Real estate?” I say, incredulous.
“Real estate.” Darryl relishes the word. “Brick and mortar, baby. I mean, look around. The Cathedral Projects are right there. Villa Victoria just down the block a ways, projects left and right, but the Big Dig’s changed everything. Soon there won’t be an empty lot or broke-down building for a mile. My corner boys are steel, but they’ve got fear in their hearts because the big boys are coming and they know there’s no stopping them. Forget rock, forget heroin and meth and all that other shit. Soon niggas gonna be speaking Starbucks I-talian, grande this and venti that, hooked on lattes and raspberry scones, and, Zesty, you know how many calories in one of them fucking scones? It’s going from coca to coffee beans around here, and this is one nigger who is not gonna be left behind. Are you, Zesty?”
“Am I what?”
“Are you in or out?”
“You offering me Gus’s account, D? I’m gonna be your messenger boy now?”
“Why not? I can use a set of eyes and ears I can trust. Why you laughing?”
“You might want to check my references first.”
“So that’s a no?”
“It’s more like I prefer being my own boss, D. I think you can understand that.”
“And what, you expect me to just let you walk away, knowing what you know? ‘Thanks for the offer, D, but I gotta decline’? We still in the street, Zesty. I mean, I know I got to deal with Zero if I feel like I gotta take you out of the equation, and that’s a whole ’nother set of complications right there, frankly, I ain’t too keen to take on right now. The operative words being right now. Like Cedrick said, and I’m gonna paraphrase a little here, I gotta do what I gotta do.”
“Like you did Collin Sullivan, D?”
“Say that again.” Darryl’s nostrils flare.
“The money,” I say, instead.
“Aw shit.” Darryl darkens. “See, there you go, Zesty. Stepping over lines that should not be crossed. You don’t know shit about Collin Sullivan, Zesty. Not a damn thing.”
“I know the money I got hit with—according to you, your money—bought me a visit from a couple of homicide cops working the Wells Fargo heist. You telling me that’s a coincidence? Black Hole’s books in good enough shape for a police audit?”
“Don’t make a difference.” Darryl shrugs. “Ain’t nothing with my name on it up there. Any heat gonna come down on Ray Valentine, not me.”
“And you don’t think Valentine’ll flip if he’s staring down time?”
“For what?”
“Oh, I don’t know, money laundering?”
“Not if he enjoys breathing. And anyhow, Valentine doesn’t know shit. Far’s he’s concerned, he living out his rock-and-roll fantasy, bankrolled by some cagey nigger who doesn’t know the music biz from his A-hole.”
“It’s that simple, huh?”
“It ain’t simple, Z. It’s just business.”
“Not if it includes the Wells Fargo job, it isn’t. That’s murder, D.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t got nothing to do with it. I hold down corners, and I deal in money, Zesty, like a regular businessman. I don’t ask where the money comes from, just like J. Crew doesn’t grill their customers where they got five hundred dollars for a pair of shiny-ass shoes. Sale’s a sale.”
“And all sales are final?” I say, thinking of Sullivan lying stone cold in the morgue, a marked-down tag dangling off his blue toe. “You know, D, you think you’re a player now? You’d be ten times more dangerous armed with an MBA.”
“Shit, Zesty, I already got that. It’s called a Masters of Bitch Ass.”
“Right, from the University of the Berry. And you majored in streets. I get it. I just don’t get why you’re washing someone else’s money, then.”
“Come again?”
“You just told me corners and cash, but that money I got hit with, at least some of it, must have come from the Wells Fargo job, or why else would the police come see me? You say you got nothing to do with it, you’re just plowing money into Black Hole. That’s good enough for me, but I gotta wonder how you got hold of it and why you’re not asking the question you really need answered.”
“Which is what?”
“How come the money I got hit with pulled the cops in so fast? Somebody not doing their job, D? Good help that hard to find?”
Darryl chews the inside of his lower lip, giving that some thought.
“And I only got hit with, what, fifty Gs? That’s a lot of coin left over from that haul, but you don’t have it. That’s what Cedrick and O are looking for, right?”
Darryl ponders my question, looking over my shoulder.
“You think Britta and Gus stole it? Is that it?” But then why is Gus looking for Britta too? Is there nobody in this fucking city who isn’t trying to screw somebody over?
“This conversation’s over, Zesty.” Darryl steps to my inside as the Pathfinder glides to the curb.
“I thought you were staying in town,” I say, swinging my bag over my shoulder, but not quick enough. Darryl hits me with a forearm clothesline, knocking me toward the car, where Cedrick reaches out the window, wrapping his thick arm around my neck as O comes loping around the fender holding a bright-yellow-handled lock cutter, its metal pincers wide open and hungry.
“Change in plans,” Darryl says.
NINETEEN
Will and Diane have just returned from the banks of the Charles River, leaving behind the nearly half million revelers who’d gathered along its shores anticipating the moment when the Boston Symphony Orchestra would launch into Weber’s Jubilee Overture, followed by Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. It’s a special Boston night, but they’ve seen the show before; they’ll catch the fireworks from the roof.<
br />
That had been the plan—at least before Will recognized the specter of Richie Ritter loitering like a bad infection on the front stairs and walked in to find Devlin McKenna sitting at his kitchen table, the obvious bulge of a holstered gun under his shamrock Members Only jacket.
Will is there again now, back in the game.
“I hear congratulations are in order, William. Would this be the new missus now? So, is it Mrs. Meyers now, Diane? Or in the privacy of your own home do you prefer to be addressed by your maiden name, the one the boys at the Federal Bureau of Investigations use for you in your file?”
TWENTY
Darryl punches me in the stomach, my knees coming up too late to protect my midsection. I’d double over to puke, but Cedrick starts choking me, and whatever came up from my stomach is forced back down as I try to dig my chin under his grip, my bag pinned awkwardly at my side, my vision swimming.
O tosses Darryl the lock cutter. I claw at Cedrick’s leather jacket, but it’s no use. His other arm comes across and traps my wrists at my neck, from a distance probably looking like I’m choking myself with my own two hands.
“This might hurt a little, Zesty, but you’ll thank me for it later. Pin the muthafucka’s legs, O, he’s spazzing out. And don’t choke him to death, he’s turning colors!”
Cedrick loosens his grip and twists me sideways, while Darryl comes at my skull with a sweeping arc, raking the lock cutter across my scalp. My hair is pulled as much as cut off my head.
“No!” I gurgle.
“Got-damn, Zesty, hold still already. I gotta get the other side. Let’m breathe, C.”
I gag as Cedrick loosens his grip and O steps away, either afraid of getting thrown up on or realizing I’m not going to kick Darryl off. Half a haircut is not a look I’m likely to rock.
“Wait.” I hold out the hair for him. “At least try and make it straight.”
Darryl switches sides and cuts across the length, leaving me holding a clotted mess of long brown strands two feet long.
“There. Feel better now?”
“Fuck you. That took me three years to grow.” I’m not so much angry as relieved to still have both my ears attached to my head, only I’m not about to thank him for it. “What the fuck, D?”
“Change is good, Zesty.” Darryl steps back to admire his handiwork. I tuck what’s left behind my ears. “Look like a man now at least. And there goes the match the police are looking for, right?”
He has a point there. No bike, short hair, just another citizen blending into the brickwork. Except I need wheels like a baby needs his pacifier. I take a look around the empty street. “Let me borrow that a minute?”
“Yo, D!” Cedrick, on high alert, jumps out of the truck as Darryl hands me the lock cutter.
“What, you forgot about that Glock in his pack? He ain’t up to nothing.”
Well, not exactly nothing. There’s a gleaming silver Trek hooked to a no parking sign in front of a new luxury condo, the lock a rubber-coated Kryptonite that, purchased new, comes with more paperwork than a Russian adoptee. I fit the pincers where it meets the top corner and snap down hard; the cutter jumps out of my hands, only the rubber cut through.
“Gimme that.” Cedrick boxes me off the sidewalk and chomps down at the same spot, a vein bulging at his neck as he leverages his weight until the lock snaps and falls to the sidewalk. Cedrick spits on the ground, looks at me, and winks, his pupils suddenly coming up slot-machine question marks, the initial effects of Sam’s magic capsules hitting him. A bubble of spittle forms on his lower lip. His knees go wobbly as he stumbles back to the car, tosses O the keys, and throws up over the rear tire.
Darryl makes the universal if he keeps throwing up I’m going to throw up too face and says, “There, now we even for the bike we messed up.”
“Leaving only the fifty grand I owe you.”
“Zesty, haven’t you been listening? You’re off the books for the fifty.”
“What about Gus and Britta?”
“You ain’t responsible for them either. Never were.”
“I am for Gus.” I know it sounds corny before it leaves my lips, but I say it anyway: “He’s my friend.”
“Your friend!” Darryl’s eyes nearly pop out of his face. “Your friend set you up and ran over your ass!”
“Maybe.”
“No maybe about it. You explained it pretty clear.”
Darryl glances at the Pathfinder, where Cedrick is alternately laughing and crying, kissing the polished surfaces of the car and trying to wrap the vehicle in a hug. What the fuck! he mouths to O, who shrugs clueless somewhere deep in his sweats.
“We ate Thai tonight?” O says.
“How can I make things right?” I draw Darryl back to me.
“Make things right? Zesty, that greedy muthafucka maybe fucked up everything I worked my black ass off for. Him disappearing would make things right, but I’ll take care of that myself.”
“What if I could make that happen for you?”
“You shitting me? I just offered you a J-O-B, and you said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m going to have to decline.’” Darryl switches to his imitation white voice for that line. “And you gonna what, whack somebody for me now?”
“I didn’t say that. But what if I could make him go away? Britta too.”
“Now you dreaming. But hell, you want to be the Disappearing Man, be my guest, only it still doesn’t account for my money. I want my money, Z.”
“Whose money?”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay, fuck me. But if you get it back, you don’t need Gus and Britta, right? Everything washes out.”
“Naw, I see what you’re thinking, but it doesn’t work like that. That money, even if you end up getting it back, there are too many loose ends. I do something, put my mind to it, I like to lock it up tight. And hell, Zesty, what’s wrong with you? Gus and that bitch ran you down for a lousy fifty Gs, and you’re trying to negotiate some peace-loving exchange? They tried to kill you, boy! Ain’t you got some pride in you? Hell, if you anything at all like Zero, you’d have flames coming out your eyeballs right now.”
“The money for Gus and Britta,” I say, my hand slipping inside my pack, finding the waffled butt of the Glock, the curve of the trigger guard.
“Oh shit.” Darryl rears back. “You are out of your damn mind.” Our eyes lock for what feels like a long time before Darryl drifts his gaze toward O, who without my noticing, has edged to within three feet of me, his pistol aimed squarely at my head.
“We got ourselves a deal, Darryl?”
“Hell no, we ain’t got no deal! Now, take your hand out the fuckin’ bag before O shoots you for practice.”
I slip the safety off the Glock, Darryl hearing the click, a single line of sweat dropping down the side of his temple.
“Tell O to put down his gun,” a voice I don’t recognize says.
“Fuck you, Zesty.” Another line of sweat forms on Darryl’s other temple and runs its way past his ear. It’s a muggy evening, but I don’t think that’s what’s causing Darryl to sweat. “You ain’t gonna shoot me.”
“That a fact, D? Maybe I’ve got more of my brother in me than you give me credit for.” I let my index finger slide gently along the trigger, the curved metal warm to the touch, the gun having its own needs.
Shoot him! it screams.
I glance at O, who yawns and smiles without showing his teeth. If he shoots me in the head, he’ll be watching Netflix an hour from now, munching on Fritos. But as my father was fond of saying, you play the cards you’re dealt, or you fold and get out of the game. Only who listens to their parents?
“You talk about pride, D, righteous anger?” I say, manufacturing some on my own. “Let’s talk about nothing to lose instead. I got cops on my ass tied to this Wells Fargo thing, cops probably waiting for me at my place, covering my office, so I’m pretty much fucked already. I shoot you, at least one of my problems goes away. You feeling me, Darryl? You seeing things th
e way I’m seeing them? White-on-black crime, all things being equal now in the new South End.”
“Fuck you, Zesty,” Darryl says but he’s smiling now. O disappears his gun as quickly as he produced it—now you see it, now you don’t, those long fingers trouble in a card game.
“Fuck me indeed.” I let my finger slide from the trigger, as relieved as any finger’s ever been. “But we have ourselves a deal, right? The money for Gus and the girl?”
“Naw. No deal. More like an arrangement subject to change. And here’s the fine print for you. The money clean for Gus and the girl within twenty-four hours, or I do things my way. Washed, dried, and folded, because I’m not taking dirty money into my retirement years, no way, no fucking how. I want my million, and I want it untraceable.”
“Whose money?”
“Nah, I’m not going there. You want to play Monty Hall, be my guest, but we do it on my terms, you got that?”
“Sure. Why not?” I pull my empty hand out of my bag and extend it toward Darryl like I’ve done at the Y a hundred times before, win or lose; on the same team or as foes; blood, sweat, and fouls. Promise the stars, promise the moon, might as well throw in the sun as well.
Darryl takes my hand and pulls me off balance into a man hug, his other hand grabbing hard at the back of my neck but not meant to hurt.
“Gunner,” he whispers in my ear, his breath as clean as a summer’s breeze. “I always knew you had it in you.”
TWENTY-ONE
McKenna was not yet the reigning crime boss he would become, but he’d begun to branch out on his own, carve his slice of the growing city pie. Will learned this firsthand when McKenna tried to extort protection money from his nascent poker game, a nearly fatal miscalculation because Will was already paying tribute to the DiMasis to operate within their broad jurisdiction, already piecing off the action.
Will had compounded McKenna’s error with one of his own by complaining about the protection touch, prompting a Prince Street sit-down with McKenna’s principal employers. And though matters were squared, Will might as well have drawn a bull’s-eye on his forehead, judging by the way McKenna’s dead eyes bored into his.
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