Bosstown

by Adam Abramowitz

  Now there’s a slatted boardwalk running alongside the Fort Point Channel and the view of the downtown skyline is magnificent. But when I accompanied my father just after it was built, after the Parkinson’s had morphed into early-onset Alzheimer’s and it was suggested that Zero and I take him to familiar places, he became agitated and sweaty, his tongue darting between his teeth and lower gums, the scar beneath his lower lip protruding as his tongue pushed at the crosshatched lines of a talentless stitching job.

  When I asked him what was wrong, he spat into the water but wouldn’t speak, and I realized I’d made a mistake bringing him there—nothing was the same in my father’s world anymore. The Boston of his youth had been demolished to make way for the iron behemoth of Interstate 93, and then the Boston of his adulthood reconfigured once more, rendering him a stranger in the city where he’d lived his entire life.

  The rain’s coming down in sideways panels as I roll across the bridge’s black pavement, the stolen Trek painting a wet stripe up the middle of my bag and across my back. The Boston Wharf sign glows like a red beacon atop 263 Summer Street, its letters taking on the impression of movement as the rain sweeps across its front. In passing, I can see the boardwalk below, usually busy at this time of night but empty now except for an old man limping slowly with his cane, trying to get under the bridge and out of the downpour, and the dark figure of a woman leaning against the railing, seemingly oblivious to the rain soaking her short jacket, long limp hair covering her downturned face.

  I can’t tell if it’s my heart thumping inside my chest or just the Doppler vibration of my wheels across the Harborwalk slats, but when I’m maybe twenty yards away, the woman turns to look at me, and I see a waxen face of crosshatched scars, which is to say, I see Leila Markovich as Sid described her to me. She opens her mouth when she sees me, but I don’t hear her words until it is too late, see the plastic cuff hooked around her wrist attached to the railing, the old man losing his stiff-caned hobble as if touched by the dry lightning of an evangelical miracle, his cane slashing through the night rain across the back of my neck, an unnatural heaviness to the blow like the end’s been weighted with metal ball bearings.

  I think Leila Markovich yells, “You’re not supposed to be here.” But her words sound like a cartoon character talking underwater, her voice popping out of air bubbles breaking the surface. I’m on the boardwalk, my legs tangled in the bike, as the cane comes down again and a red mist explodes in my eye. I feel a pressure in my ears, followed by a small pop, and suddenly everything’s hyperamplified, the heavy rain machine-gunning the boardwalk loud as golf balls peppering the hood of a car.

  Devlin McKenna straddles me standing, thin silvery hair like matted foil crowning a face assembled from a toolbox: rusted screws for eyes, a crowbar mouth with nails for teeth. McKenna uses his cane to raise my chin, squints in the rain to bring me into focus, and rears back laughing, a look of sheer malevolent delight in his face. Blood and water drip off the cane onto my neck.

  “Just as I’ve been cursing the fates,” McKenna sneers, “they turn around and give me the proverbial son. Oh, I would have much preferred your bitch mother, but this will have to do. How does that song go, Leila? It was a lovely tune, something about a reunion.”

  “Fuck you, Devlin,” Leila says from a crouch, her tethered hand extended above her head.

  “You can’t remember either? So we’ll skip the reminiscences, then. Where’s my money, son of a cunt?”

  “Not here,” I say, tasting familiar blood, a heavy gob dropping to the boardwalk over numb lips.

  Devlin McKenna drives the butt of the cane into my front teeth; the back of my head bangs off the slick wood. I turn my head and spit sharp fragments onto the boardwalk.

  “Now, isn’t that a familiar look. Son, is your entire family made up of degenerate gamblers like your mush-brained daddy? I’m done playing games.” McKenna presses something in the rounded handle of his cane, and a blade snicks out the end, its shiny point catching the red reflection of the Wharf sign high above his shoulder.

  “Medicare covers that?” I say through the blood rushing inside my mouth. I turn my head away from the blade, but keep my eyes on it through the rain. I can feel the gun through my bag, wedged into my lower back. “Does your walker come with a machine gun?”

  McKenna looks to the sky and drives the blade into my shoulder, a spastic fire erupting through me as I scream into darkness, blood flooding slick through my fingers clutching the hole as the blade exits.

  “I’m sorry, boyo, did you say something? I promise you, I’ll only ask this question one more time, and it just might be the last thing you ever hear if I don’t like your answer. Where’s my fucking money?”

  “Darryl Jenkins,” I groan.

  “What? What the fuck did you just say?”

  “Darryl. He has your money now.”

  “I’m not talking about that money, you fucking cocksucker. I want the money your parents have been stealing from me all these years.” McKenna drives the blade into the boardwalk by my face and leans contemplatively on the cane end. “Oh, lordy.” He turns to Leila. “Nobody told him?”

  “He’s not a part of this,” Leila says. “Enough.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Zesty, is it? Is that what Leila called you? Oh my, this will be hard to hear; I’m so glad I didn’t kill you yet like I did Agent Chink Lee. Ah, yes, I see it now—you have your mother’s eyes, you know that?”

  “No.”

  “No, I suppose not. How could you, she’s been gone so long. Life is cruel, and the truth only makes it that much crueler. Well, let me make this as painful as possible before you go, Zesty, seeing as you’re the loyal son. Your parents are a couple of lying thieves, and your oatmeal-for-brains father robbed Bank of Boston for me twenty years ago and then stole my money whilst your mother robbed me blind one dollar at a time.”

  “You’re a fucking liar.” Dark shadows close in around my eyes. I start shivering, the raindrops slivers of sharp ice.

  “Am I? Tell him, Leila, before I slit his throat and have him drinking channel water through his fucking neck. Tell him how his father looked driving a getaway car in drag, another family trait maybe, a little homo running through your genes, boy? Tell him!” he roars.

  “It’s true,” Leila says, but there’s a measure of triumph in her smile even with the blood streaked across her teeth. “But not in the way McKenna wants you to believe it. Your father drove, but only to take your mother’s place. As for the extended larceny, well, there’s more truth to that, I’m afraid. Your father was beholden to McKenna and hid his money as McKenna padded his eventual run.”

  “But why?” Half my body feels like it’s packed in dry ice, but I manage to roll onto my side, the bag coming along.

  “I had to trust somebody, boyo, didn’t I? I knew I wouldn’t be on top forever in this town full of rats and backstabbers. Even Richie gave me up, and once I was so sure he’d go down in a hail of bullets before betraying me.”

  “You should know about rats.” I can feel the heft of the gun shift, no longer pressed against me.

  “Yes, well, survival of the slickest. And you know what they say about keeping your enemies closer. What I should have done was kept a closer eye on your father. But your father was sly, or maybe just lucky. I have to give him credit for that. He was also playing the long game and figured right I didn’t intend to let him or your mother live once I’d decided I had enough stashed away. As for torturing a confession out of him? My, but I would have enjoyed that, only it wasn’t possible either.”

  “LP Enterprises,” I rasp, my voice going.

  “Ah, so we’re wasting time. You know all this. What your father and I ended up with was what you might call a stalemate.”

  “It was better than that,” I can hear Leila Markovich say from far away. “As long as your mother stayed safely out of McKenna’s reach, your father would release one more location to him. You know what LP stands for? It was the d
esignation given to long-playing records when they first came out. That’s what your dad designed, the long play, the endless automatic payments to those storage units that housed McKenna’s blood money. Also, your mother once told me that, knowing your dad, LP also probably stood for ‘lucky pull,’ something he hated to find himself relying on but at some point did. Finally, when it was McKenna’s turn to run, your dad was, in effect, communicating with two of Boston’s most wanted, and McKenna, too long the alpha dog, was now on your father’s leash. You want to know how your father bluffed so well, Zesty, how he lied to everyone? He wrapped the lie in a little bit of truth is how. Bank of Boston was your father’s lie, and it was also his payback for the exile McKenna forced on your mother. But McKenna kept tracking me. He found Rachel Evans, thought once that he’d found your mother in Los Angeles and killed an innocent girl.”

  Jane Orr, the alias my mother had once used.

  “McKenna’s evil, make no mistake about that, and we’re sullied in association with him, but we were forced into Bank of Boston, and though I had access to McKenna’s blood money and sometimes used it—”

  “You stole from me, cunt.”

  “Yes.” Leila smiles satisfaction. “It’s a shame I could easily manage to live with.”

  “Dream on, bitch.”

  Leila shrugs noncommittally. “With your mother taking her cut, Devlin’s money ran out early—he was never hoarding to share, remember—and so he returned to pursue me and the Bank of Boston cash when he saw the parole board was granting me an early release. By this time he must have realized I’d only taken a small cut of the BOB money when I ran to Diane for protection. Your mother had maintained her underground connections, while I tended to burn my bridges in the movement. I had nobody—”

  “She helped you.”

  “Against her better judgment. She saw me through at the beginning—documents, let me in on some of McKenna’s money.”

  “You fucking cunt. I’ll be taking my time with you.”

  “The rest I can only guess, Zesty, but once your father’s Alzheimer’s worsened the communiqués to McKenna and your mother must have stopped. Lee lured McKenna back to Boston dangling me, figuring the same thing that McKenna did, that I had the rest of the Bank of Boston money stashed somewhere because that’s what your father told him. But he got greedy again and sped up the timetable on something he’d concocted much like the BOB robbery, with throwaway players. Am I getting this part right?”

  “The Wells Fargo truck,” I barely manage to get out, the blood in my mouth tasting like a fistful of loose change.

  “Your father would have referred to that play as a side pot,” McKenna sneers. “A little something on the back burner while I was in town.”

  I moan, blinking water out of my eyes, having trouble just keeping them open. The bridge overhead is a black line over the channel, an occasional streak of light, followed by a hiss of wet tires crossing over the top. McKenna follows my gaze to the bridge.

  “Don’t believe in miracles, cuntboy. Like I said, your Chink’s already leaking stomach bile into the channel and if the stick didn’t do the job, he’s bound to choke on one of Gillette’s billion razor blades they dumped in there. Stop struggling with the cuff, Leila. You’ve never proven yourself to be one of those mother-bear types who’d chew off her arm to save her own cubs, let alone someone else’s.”

  “Go to hell, McKenna.”

  “Only after you, darlin’. But let’s complete this story first, no? Hey, stay awake, Zesty, I’m getting to the punch line.”

  I cough up blood.

  “I can’t tell you how disappointed I was, letting your parents get the edge on me and now letting that nigger Jenkins screw me, even after I gave him solid points on cleaning the cash. But what choice did I have? I’m not spending marked money and leaving a trail of bread crumbs for the FBI to peck at. They’d be happy if I never showed my face again, but they’d have no choice but to follow if things were that obvious. And I’ve some years left in me still. What a hassle this homecoming’s been. Least I get to finish things here. Eeny, meeny, miney, moe.” McKenna starts waving the gun between us. “Catch a—”

  “I can get you your money.”

  “Tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go.” The gun stops on Leila. “My, that would be an interesting turn of events. But I don’t believe a word either of you say. So, where was I? Oh yes.… choose the very best one and you are—”

  I’m already rolling over, trying to burrow my way between the boardwalk’s slats, as Leila Markovich screams and McKenna swings the gun in my direction, firing two shots into my back, snapping my ribs with the force of a mule’s kick. My breath’s gone out of my body, the sound of Leila’s scream stopped like someone’s pulled my plug, and I can’t hear her, can’t hear the rain or feel its touch as it falls into my open eyes as McKenna rolls me over and says something, the gun pointing at my face.

  What do people see when they die a violent death? Their lives flashing before their eyes? Loved ones who’ve already passed to the other side? Or does a final drop blur their vision, a mixed blessing of blood or tears thrown up to shield them from the horror of what’s happening?

  This is what I see as I die: Leila Markovich thrashing at the rail, blood covering her wrist as she fights to free herself from the cuff’s restraints, her rain-soaked hair whipping around her head in a darkened halo. I see a lightning bolt rip the sky in two, black clouds roiling in their swirling fury, and I see the mirage of my father, a dripping shadow in darkness wearing pajama pants and unlaced tennis sneakers, welcoming me to the other side with arms extended, his shrunken frame illuminated like a strobe-lit angel first by the flash of the lightning and then once more by the bright fire leaping from his gun as he shoots Devlin McKenna again and again and again until the air above me settles into a mist of blood, the chamber of the gun clicking in silence, dry and empty until there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, left.

  EPILOGUE

  I lost consciousness after seeing my father shoot Devlin McKenna, I’d lost too much blood and had gone into full-blown shock, but I’ve since learned that when the police arrived, followed quickly by the FBI, who tried and failed to wrangle control of the crime scene from Detectives Brill and Wells, Leila Markovich was gone, the plastic cuffs dangling off the rail, washed clean of her blood by the pouring rain.

  Why had she run again? Perhaps to limit her prosecutable culpability to just the necessary tidbits implicating McKenna for Bank of Boston, or maybe to secure the file Lee had stolen from the bowels of the Boston field office, which ended up in Andrew Tetter’s capable hands. Perhaps to dispose of the .38 Darryl had loaned me, which had been damaged when the bullets from McKenna’s gun ricocheted off its barrel, drilled through my tin of weed and finally lodged into my lower back only millimeters from my spine.

  I don’t know if Leila tossed the gun into the Fort Point waters, but if she did, I’m pretty sure that’s where it’ll stay for another hundred years or until Boston’s civic trust decides to build another superhighway to replace the eleven-thousand-foot, eleven-lane tunnel now running beneath the Fort Point Channel—at two billion dollars, the most expensive highway mile anywhere in the world.

  Also, Leila being one of those stubborn yet practical-minded individuals, she probably wanted to surrender to the authorities with certain assurances already in place. And after she turned herself in, a year is what the court sentenced her to, and if I play my cards right, maybe I can get the same judge to take care of the thousand-dollar fine the Boston Licensing Board slapped me with for working under an expired courier permit.

  As for Darryl Jenkins, he did indeed have a Jew on retainer, and a pretty good one at that. Darryl is doing some jailing on laundering and tax-related counts, but something tells me his reintroduction to the hood will be a relatively smooth one—it seems my buddy Sam Budoff’s officially out of the hallucinogenic business, his secret formula sold to Cedric Overstreet, the new king of trip-hop, holding
it down for his homey at MCI.

  In a game of five-card poker, there are 2,598,960 possible combinations, the odds of making certain hands rising and falling depending on how many people are left in the game and what cards have already fallen. A player’s chances of, say, pulling an inside straight on the last card dealt—in poker parlance, on the river—is somewhere between 10 and 11 percent. In other words, as strategy, it’s an efficient way to go broke. Agent Lee, against all odds, was pulled out of the river with a winning hand. That is, still breathing. Not only did he survive the stab wound deep in his stomach, but all the diseases the channel waters could muster against him as well.

  For a short time, Lee and I shared the same floor in Beth Israel’s intensive care unit, and when we were downgraded and sent to our respective rooms, I would join him to watch the Sox snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the bullpen imploding on the rare occasions they carried a lead into the ninth. Needless to say, Lee’s room was cushier than mine, his nurses better-looking and friendlier, a fringe benefit of the FBI’s insurance plan and Lee’s newfound status as Boston’s favorite son. Never mind that the bullets pulled from McKenna at autopsy were from a different-caliber gun than Lee’s company-issued Glock 23, the only bullets that match Lee’s gun being the ones extracted from my back, which I now keep rattling around in the punctured tin that used to hold my weed.

  I can’t say I’m surprised. The FBI will always have its secrets; that’s the nature of the beast, and it hasn’t changed. But for public consumption, Lee’s a hero, and I was present when the director of the FBI, the mayor, and Governor Hibert bestowed upon him various accolades and a key to the city, the FBI director looking like he was sticking needles into his own eyes as he shook Lee’s hand for the photographers. But much later, well after visiting hours were over, there were only four of us gathered in his room, Brill and Wells opting to stand as Lee and I reclined in our recovery, all ears and narcotics.