Apparently, three of the Roxbury campers snuck out of their cabin during the night. The only thing the staff, the State Police, and the local ME could figure was that they encountered an animal, possibly a bear. What they never figured out was why the bear ripped those kids into chunks but didn’t bother eating any.
That morning, Twitch’s shoes had an awful lot of mud on them. And his face had an awful lot of smile.
To this day, I believe Twitch gives me far too much credit for his safety at St. Gabe’s. I have no doubt of his love for me and Junior; his devotion to us is absolute. Twitch would die for us, if it came to that. So despite him being a sociopath, a borderline psychopath, and pretty much any other path I can think of, his was the safest place I could think of to deposit Kelly until we could get shit cleared up.
Thank god the teenage Puerto Rican gang that lived on the floor below Twitch wasn’t home when we got there. I had Phil haunting the front of my house; Twitch had Boriquas. Nothing had ever escalated into physical conflict, but they got their ya-yas making visitors uncomfortable through stare-downs and low-voiced Spanish threats. Kelly was already at nerves’ end, and I didn’t need a tête-à-tête with those punks to bring the rest of her roof crashing down.
Twitch jumped out of Junior’s car as we pulled up. “Um, could you wait here a sec?”
“What’s up?” I asked.
A blush crept up Twitch’s pale neck as he cast a nervous glance at Kelly. “It’s, um, kinda messy up there, and I want to straighten it up a bit. I wasn’t expecting company.” Twitch’s eyelid had been stuttering nervously for the entire drive.
“No more than five minutes,” I said tossing an obvious glance with raised eyebrows to the empty front porch.
When he was out of earshot, Kelly gave me a watery-eyed look so full of tension it broke my heart. “What am I doing here?”
I took her hand in mine, trying to meet her eyes with a hard confidence I wasn’t feeling. “Listen, sweetie. Me and Junior need to get this straightened out.”
“But the police—”
“No. The police don’t give a shit. This is between me and…” I didn’t have a way to finish that sentence without letting Kelly in on more than I wanted. “I just need you to stay here with Twitch. You’ll be safe here.” Relatively speaking.
“For how long?”
“I need you to stay with him for a couple days until we can figure out exactly what’s going on.”
Her eyes glistened, and she hugged me hard. Fear radiated off her skin.
“I’m sorry I got you into this mess,” I said. “Until we fix this, I need to know you’re protected. You’ll be safe here.”
Kelly squeezed my hand and nodded. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I trust you.”
Holy Moses on a trampoline, I wished I felt like I knew what I was doing.
“Hey,” Junior said. “How come nobody’s apologized for perforating my fucking arm?”
She laughed through her teary eyes. “Junior, I am heartily sorry for having perforated your arm.” Then, mockingly sweet, “You want me to kiss it better?”
“Nah. Probably try to bite it off.” Junior turned to cover his smile. He sniffed and rubbed his flattened nose. “Loony broad.”
Twitch’s apartment was the second floor walk-up of a two-family house. We marched up the thin stairway like a line of ants, with me on point. I was as nervous as Twitch was about the condition of his apartment. At least I could poke my head in first to see if he’d missed anything incriminating. Like a body or two.
Much to my surprise, not only was the apartment in fair order, but it was pretty clean as well.
Spartan would be the best way to describe Twitch’s decor. A small color TV on a footlocker stood as his entertainment center. For furniture, he had a leopard print futon and a blue futon mattress rolled up against the wall.
Twitch smiled nervously as Kelly gave his apartment the feminine once over. “Anybody want a soda?” he offered, his tic working so hard it nearly caused a breeze. Poor Twitch. He wasn’t exactly a masterful conversationalist and entertainer. Maybe I should have brought Pictionary.
Kelly stared at Twitch’s fish tank and the one fish inside. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the edge of aSwank magazine poking out from under a closet door. As smoothly as I could, I stepped over and nudged the corner back under with my cane.
“This fish is beautiful,” she said.
Twitch beamed, his face that of a little boy at show-and-tell. “He’s a Siamese fighting fish. Named him Roadhouse.”
“How do you know he’s a he?”
“Got a huge cock.”
Junior howled a laugh.
I winced so hard, I nearly cramped up.
To my surprise, Kelly guffawed. My respect for the girl kicked up another notch. I suppose I still had some residual filter on her from my first impression.
“Excuse me,” Kelly said, “but where’s the ladies room?”
“Down the hall on the left,” Twitch said, pointing.
I leaned over to him and said under my breath, “You do have TP, right?”
“We’re in luck. Just got a fresh roll yesterday.”
The last time I’d visited the apartment, I made do with an old Boston Globe. The fewer indignities Kelly had to suffer, the better. Wiping with the comics page is a pretty big one, in my book. Unless you’re using Cathy.
A shriek pierced the air, rising in pitch like an air-raid siren. We all bolted down the hallway to find Kelly waving her hands and dancing a heebie-jeebie in the doorway on the right.
“Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod,” she babbled, her face the color of pasta dough.
“Wrong door! Wrong door!” I yelled.
One of my greatest hopes had been that she could spend a day or two without finding the pet room. Instead, she stumbled into it in less than thirty seconds.
In that wrong room, Twitch had two ball pythons and a six-and-a-half-foot long albino boa. Iggy, the iguana, rounded out the zoo.
And then there were the rats.
To feed his babies, Twitch kept a large fish tank full of rats that he bred himself. The tank was brimming with squirming rodentia that day. They all moved in one big, putrid mass of red eyes, oily fur, and teeth. Kelly gasped and made a horrified gurgling sound.
I knew how she felt. My skin crawled just looking at the snakes, never mind the rats. The first time I’d been shown the collection, I let out a scream just one octave down from hers.
“Uh, the bathroom is on the other left,” Twitch said.
“Can I tell you how much I hate rats?” Kelly’s teeth chattered as she sipped from the tea Junior was kind enough to go get at the packie for her. At least she’d stopped rocking and hugging her knees.
Junior stayed with her when Twitch motioned me into his room.
“Ollie’s working research on your shooter,” Twitch said.
“What kind of research?”
“He’s checking newspaper records, police records. Cross-search kinda stuff. If he is who I think he is, you might want some of this.” He lifted his mattress off the box spring. Sandwiched between the two was a selection of armaments that would have made Tom Clancy skeet in his boxers. Besides an assortment of handguns, I recognized an AK-47, a sawed-off Mossberg, a small Uzi, and some type of high-tech sniper rifle, laser sight and all.
“Jesus, Twitch, you expecting an ATF raid or just Armageddon?”
“I expect everything.” He waved his hand over the guns like a game show host displaying his fabulous, fabulous prizes. “Take your pick. They’re all untraceable.”
Against my better judgment, I had the gun Twitch had snuck into the hospital tucked in the back of my pants. “I’m good with the one I got.”
Junior walked in and picked up a nasty-looking Ruger revolver. Junior’s no better with a gun than I am. Either of us were more likely to shoot ourselves or each other than an attacker.
In an effort to cut down our odds of unintentional murder-suic
ide, I said, “I already got a gun, Junior,” hoping he would the put the damned thing down. Instead, he picked up an automatic, comparing their heft in his hands.
He looked at me, and for the first time, I could see the wear on him. Worry lines creased his face like they’d been etched there with a tattoo needle. He opened the gun. “I don’t.”
Of course, the gun was already loaded.
Kelly gave me a tight hug like I was leaving for Iraq. As far as I knew, we were going to war. Or starting one. Junior went down to start the car. Twitch looked around the room uncomfortably. Kelly took my face in her hands and gave me a slow, warm kiss. I didn’t say anything, but she answered the question she read on my face.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “You come back as soon as you can.”
As I turned to walk out, I wondered just how fine she would be. The last thing I heard was Twitch clapping his hands together and saying, “So, who wants to feed the snakes?”
It was going to be a long night.
Junior got in the car and reached over to unlock my side. I climbed in and waited for him to start the engine. He just sat behind the wheel, chewing on the filter of his cigarette.
“Before I start this car, you gotta promise me that you will at least attempt to cut the bullshit.” He stared out the windshield.
“What shit are we talking about now?”
“The martyr shit. I heard you apologize to Kelly for getting her into this. You need to understand that this isn’t your fault. None of this is. We got called into this game way late in the fourth quarter, Boo.” Junior popped the dash lighter and lit his cig. “We got the ball when the game was pretty much played.”
“Yeah, but we can still kill the spread.”
“Okay, too much football. Let’s just say, and I’m only saying, as a theory—”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe we did make a bad situation a little worse.”
“I like your freewheeling use of the word ‘little.’”
“Hey, it’s a theory, ass.” He jabbed at me with the cigarette. I plucked it from his fingers and jumpstarted my own.
“Can we, in theory, start the car and go?”
“In theory, yes.” He didn’t start the car. “The point I’m trying to make here is that the situation was already bad, the game was fixed, and we were just playing the game we knew how to play. We got the girl. The rest is prologue.”
“Or epilogue.”
“Which one is before?”
“That’s prologue”
“That one.”
“So we’re in the epilogue, then?”
“No… we’re… shut the fuck up and listen to me. The main word here is ‘we.’ I hear one more line about your situation and your problems, I’m going to hurt you in the groinal area, buddy. A lot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Shut the fuck up.” He turned the key and Miss Kitty, our war engine, roared. We could have used a better name for our war engine.
There he was. My heartbeat tripled its tempo, breath short in my chest. I’d never had a panic attack before, but I felt close to having one. It wasn’t easy looking into the face again. The last time I’d seen it, I thought I was seconds away from a bullet to the skull. The picture was a low-res scan, grainy, but the loose, friendly smile was there, the oyster of a blind eye.
“This the guy?” Ollie asked, looking from the computer screen and back to me. I think my expression was answer enough.
Something spiky had nestled in my throat so I just nodded limply.
“Who is he, and where do we find him?”
Junior was ready to go out and draw some payback. Junior hadn’t seen the guy. How coolly he’d pulled the trigger on me. How casual it would have been for him to put another bullet into my skull.
Ollie grimaced. “See, now this is where we may run into some trouble.”
“How’s that?”
“This is a blowup from a picture I found in the Herald’s archives. The guy’s name is Louis Blanc.”
Louis Blanc. The name scratched at the back of my memory.
“Do I know that name?” asked Junior. “Why do I think I know that name?” He tapped a finger on the glass of the computer screen. “I think I’d remember that face.”
“Please don’t touch the screen,” Ollie said impatiently. He pulled a wipe from a box sitting next to the monitor and rubbed the point of contact until it squeaked.
“The name sounds familiar. Why would I know it?” I asked.
“You would have heard it,” Ollie said, matter-of-factly. “Look at the rest of the picture.” Ollie tapped a few buttons on the keyboard and double-clicked his mouse to show us the full picture. “You tell me why we have a bigger problem than we may have suspected.”
The shot was of a restaurant opening in Southie. An Irish Shebeen called Conor’s Publick that got a lot of press when it opened. The restaurant was bought for and operated by one Mr. Conor Cade. In the picture, Louis was standing behind the owners. Conor’s son had his arm draped around the old man, smiling. The only other face I recognized in the shot was Conor’s son, Francis.
Frankie “the Mick” Cade.
“Aw, fuck me,” Junior and I said at the same time.
“His nephew?”
“It’s pretty simple, Boo,” Ollie said. “Mr. Cade’s sister let a guy named Bevilaqua stick his pee-pee in her. They had a bouncing baby Bevilaqua. Named him Derek.”
“I was being rhetorical, prick.”
“So, Snake is The Mick’s nephew?” Junior was having no easier a time than I was processing the information.
“Supposedly, it was a bit of a controversy within the ethnic circles when an Irish lass got herself knocked up and married to an Italian.”
I could only imagine. The only people Boston’s tried and true Irish hated more than the Italians were… well, they hated everybody. “So, we put the rings to the nephew of this town’s top organized criminal. That’s just peaches.”
“And probably I’m next on the hit list,” Junior said. A brief flash of pleasure passed over Junior’s face. I think he’d always dreamed of making somebody’s hit list. Then the blunt rock of reality bounced off his skull. “Aw shit. I don’t wanna get shot.”
“Guess what, Junior. It wasn’t part of my life’s ambitions either.” I grabbed Ollie’s phone and dialed Twitch.
“County Morgue.”
“It’s Boo. How much do you know about Louis Blanc?”
“Wow! I was right! So it was Lou Blanc. I mean… wow!”
Great. I’d been shot by the right-hand man of the local Irish kingpin, and Twitch was star-struck. Too bad I hadn’t had time to ask for an autograph. “Yeah, it was a real honor, Twitch. Maybe I’ll have the bullet bronzed.”
Twitch chuckled. “You have no idea. Blanc is as cold-blooded as they come. Completely heartless son of a bitch. Like I told you earlier, you’re one lucky bastard you even got to ID him. There’re about three dozen others under construction sites around town who never got the chance. Lou Blanc. Wow.”
I gritted my teeth with impatience, sending a bolt of pain into my skull. “Hey, Twitch, you want to go jerk Blanc off or you want to tell me what you know?”
“He’s Cade’s numero uno enforcer. Has been since the late eighties. Nobody knows for sure why, other than Blanc is still standing and so is Cade, which means he does his job well. Pretty much everyone agrees Blanc’s got more balls and brains than Cade and the old guard put together.”
“Why isn’t he boss, then?”
“There are two rumors on that one.”
“And they are?”
“One is that Cade’s pop saved Blanc’s on the islands during Dubya-Dubya Two. You know, the old Irish code of honor bullshit.”
“What’s the second?”
“The second is the one I’m more inclined to believe. And it’s that Blanc just likes doing what he does. Bosses don’t get their hands dirty, and that’s what Blanc likes to do.”
An entire flock of geese and a fair-sized turkey walked over my grave as I remembered the cool gunmetal pressing against my head and the words that followed.
Be easy…
“Another popular belief is that the guy’s got something seriously wrong with his head.”
“No shit.”
“Seriously. Urban legend is the bullet that creased his head took out something in him. Like the part of his brain that controls remorse and stuff.”
And stuff. Well, wasn’t that just ducky. “Thanks, Twitch.” I was cold all over.
“There is a silver lining, though.”
“What is that?”
“Death is expensive, even for these guys. This was light retribution. They probably just wanted to give you back a taste of what you served the nephew. Because, believe you me, Boo. And if you’ve ever believed anything I’ve ever said to you—ever—believe this. If they wanted you out, you’d be wearing a toe tag right now. It’s probably over.”
The fuck it was.
Junior parked on the opposite side of the street, parallel to the long windows of Conor’s Publick. I could clearly see Cade leaning over a plate at a table in the back. I guess when you’re the last man standing like Frankie was, you didn’t have to worry as much about sitting at dark and secluded tables like the old guard used to. A cherry-colored Caddy was parked in front, a dinosaur in a cheap suit leaning on the hood.
Lou Blanc was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t help but contrast the pair of duos we’d dealt with. Donnelly and Barnes. Cade and Blanc. On one side of the law, the brains ran the show, the muscle performed the errands. From what I knew about Cade’s side of the fence, the vulgar strength called the shots. It bothered me to recognize which side I lived on.
We decided it would be just the two of us. Ollie never was much of a tussler, and I couldn’t trust Twitch not to pull the trigger on Cade simply because the opportunity arose.
We also decided, much to Junior’s dismay, that it would be me who went in. Alone. I’d already been shot. I was walking wounded. If something went horribly wrong and I didn’t come back out of Conor’s, Junior was more physically able to enact the retaliation that would follow. We may have been understaffed for an all-out street war against the Irish, but my army would at least make sure Cade followed me soon after.
The Hard Bounce Page 21
