Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “But then again, maybe we don’t. Maybe we don’t say that. We take a look at what we got and say: ‘Hey, he’s all right. True, he does kill guys for money, but look at the guys he kills: very lousy, low-rent guys. “Riffraff,” you might say. If he didn’t kill them then we’d have to deal with them, and look what that would cost. And plus he’s good to his brother. Get Joey onna telephone, I wanna talk to him. I think I see a way here, Commonwealth can save some money, we throw him a little work.’ ”

  “Okay, you wise prick,” Brennan said, “turn off the faucet, okay? At least get a look at the guy this morning, I know you’re not goin’ off blind on this thing I been workin’ so hard for so long.”

  “Tell you what,” Dell’Appa said. “If and when the guy does show up this morning, I will take a good look at him, all right?”

  “That’s all I am askin’ from you,” Brennan said. “That is all I am askin’ from you here.”

  “And if he doesn’t,” Dell’Appa said, “if he doesn’t, well then, I won’t.”

  2

  “You know, I got to really say, Harry,” Brennan said, “I really got to say I think you must’ve gotten outta the western part the state there just about the nick of time. Is all I got to say.”

  “Why?” Dell’Appa said. In front of them to the south, on the other side of the bridge, informal, irregular processions had begun, plainly purposeful men and women long experienced in the workday routines, advancing down the hill without expressions on their faces, clustering obediently though restively at the traffic light on the curb at the corner where Dockett Street intersected with a four-lane boulevard connecting to the east with Route 9. They waited there until the crossing signal lighted, advancing en masse when the white light said WALK as though blissfully convinced that no Massachusetts driver had ever disregarded a stop light or would run that one that day.

  Brennan was drinking coffee. He furrowed his brow over the Dunkin’ Donuts cup, but he did not lower it from his mouth. Behind the Blazer to the north, more commuters just as impassively trudged up the rise to the crest of the bridge, the minority choosing to walk in the street, eddying around the Blazer, and then down toward the inbound-train platform.

  “I said: ‘Why?’ ” Dell’Appa said.

  Brennan lowered the cup perhaps an inch from his lower lip and said: “I heard you.” He raised the cup again and resumed drinking.

  The night before, Dell’Appa had told his wife over a dinner of roast chicken at their kitchen table that Brennan had not changed. “He hasn’t changed a bit,” Dell’Appa had said. “Two weeks ago today, I come back. I’ve been away eleven months, give or take a week. Far as Bob’s concerned, I might as well’ve been away eleven years, or’ve just stepped out for eleven minutes and come right back in again. Wouldn’t make any difference to him. I went in there two weeks ago, everybody else’s givin’ me the meet-’n-greet; ‘Hey, whaddaya say, huh?’ ‘Glad you’re back’; ‘How was it out there?’; ‘Feel good and so forth?’ Not Buffalo Bob, not him. Comes in, sees me, says: ‘Harry,’ and goes into his office. Next time I see him: this morning. Not one other time until today, not once in the past two weeks.

  “Today. Comes in ten minutes late, that’s also still the same. Says: ‘Mornin’, Harry,’ to me. Puts his coffee on the table—there’s always a pot making, and he always brings his own in—hangs his raincoat up, sits down and has it while he scans the night shift’s raw stuff for anything that might be good. When he finishes, he leans back, looks at me and says: ‘Gotta see a man today. Couple guys, in fact. Nothin’ to do with what we got, what we’ll be workin’ on. Prolly just as well, you think? Give you a better chance to read the files, get you up to speed. Listen the tapes, if you wanna.’

  “I don’t know what the hell,” Dell’Appa had said to his wife, “what the hell in God’s sweet name he thought I’d been doin’ for the past two weeks while I waited around for him to hand over the Mossi case, if I wasn’t reading it. Brushing up on my Shakespeare, perhaps? Not that it still wasn’t just fine by me, another day without him. A day without Bob Brennan, any reason at all, is a day full of sunshine, made by the Lord. But apparently my last for a while. He’s pickin’ me up at the office tomorrow at oh-six-ten-oh-my-Gawd hundred hours—that’s six-ten A.M. to you slugabed civilians—to go to a place that’s about an eight-minute drive away and stake out a train stop where our wary quarry’s not very likely to be—is, indeed, almost certain not to be, at least according to the files that Bob Brennan had much to do with creating—until sometime not too soon after seven-thirty A.M. So what’s the explanation, if there is one, for this transparently irrational behavior on the part of two highly trained, genuine crack troops—none of your recent merger assimilees from the Registry and elsewhere, but the real-McCoy, honest-Injun, Massachusetts State cops?

  “Simple: Robert Brennan happens to be one of these crack troopers, and he’s in charge of this little outing. Robert likes irrational plans. Robert’s the strangest piece of work that’s walked the earth in all the years since Grendel’s dear old mother died. If in fact she did die, now that I think of it. Maybe there’s something to this reincarnation stuff. She came back in a Brennan-suit for this life, to rest up for her next confinement.”

  Gayle had laughed. “No scoffing, now,” Dell’Appa had said. “It could be, you know. There are more things in heaven and earth than’re dreamt of in your philosophy. There have to be. That’s the only way anyone could possibly and plausibly account for the existence of Bob Brennan.”

  She studied him for a while. “It could be he knows, you know,” she said. “It could be he’s figured it out. Oh, not exactly what, of course, what is going to happen to him. But that something probably is. Something probably is.”

  “What,” he said, but it was not really a question. “I never said I was going to do anything to him.”

  “No, you haven’t,” she said. “No one ever said you weren’t careful.”

  So Brennan was not yet ready to answer. This meant he would not speak again until he had “done some thinking.” He had once excused himself from responding at once to a staff meeting speaker’s request for suggestions and comments on a new proposal by explaining soberly that he had always “had trouble every time I triedah think an’ talk at the same time, and I would like to think some about this, if that’s okay with you. Before I talk.” No one else at the meeting had disputed Brennan’s admission that he found it difficult to think while simultaneously doing anything else. “Such as, for example,” Dell’Appa had said to Gayle that night, “chewing gum. Smoking. Or walking.” Thinking for Brennan was a task that could require considerable time; Dell’Appa therefore looked at his watch.

  It was a stainless-steel-braceleted Seiko quartz chronograph with a tachymetre bezel and three small dials inset: three timers, with a stopwatch, each function activated or concluded by means of a button on the side of the case. He had bought it for $250 ($100 off usual price, according to the Filene’s Basement ad in the Boston Commoner) at an after-Christmas clearance sale three Januaries before, while still righteously seething at having been measlied the previous Christmas Eve when the gifts were handed out. Having decided to get even, but having been quite unable to think of a suitably expensive present that he had truly coveted without even knowing it existed, and therefore indisputably should have received, complete with a big red bow attached (though probably not the Porsche 911 Carrera 2, German racing silver, that in fact he really did want; as grouchy as he was, he was prepared to concede that the price, around $73,000 the way he wanted it equipped, made any expectation of that particular gift at least arguably unreasonable), he had waited for a sign that would show him what to do, waiting as patiently as a prudent soothsayer would cast lots repeatedly, seeking absolute confidence that success would certainly result from the crucial military action he would then recommend to his short-tempered, homicidal emperor.

  He was cautious about such matters for a reason. Friends from work and college clas
smates after they first met Gayle often complimented Harry later on having married well above his station, relying on nothing more than the incontestable fact that she was so extremely smart and cheerful that five minutes after they’d been introduced to her the eighteen-or-so extra pounds she had accumulated at her hips and on her chin, neck, and upper arms (mostly during the complete inactivity medically enforced upon her during her pregnancy with Roy but had never seriously addressed since) had vanished in the magic of her wit. Their good-natured insults were meant to chafe him a little, but not to mask their genuine envy, in which both Gayle and he later wallowed.

  But still, while it was never easy being married to a clinical psychologist whose father, a university hospital chief and professor of orthopedic surgery, permitted his affectionate family (there were four more doctoral degrees, all Ph.D.’s in the liberal arts, among Gayle’s siblings; her mother’s was in biology) to refer to him at festive gatherings as “the family mechanic,” defending himself by terming them collectively “my home-bred, muzzy-headed coven,” it was especially hard for Harry when striking back at any slight, real or imagined, inflicted by one of them. He managed generally to hold his own, being faster if not as profound, but he did so only by always taking great care. The choice of retaliatory action had to be precisely perfect. Otherwise his just resentment, and he along with it, would be made into objects of still more and further fun.

  The watch was perfect. He had known it the instant that he saw the picture of it. He had gone and bought it gladly that same morning, before he went to work, so that he might accustom himself to its new heft on his wrist during the day, and then in the evening he had worn it casually but still ostentatiously home, having rehearsed precisely what he would say when Gayle spotted it and quietly reproached—not: bitterly scolded—him for having been financially so selfish.

  He had planned to reply calmly, but still to remind her firmly that for what had been the third year in a row he had laid out nearly nine hundred dollars on gifts for members of their family, every dollar of it plundered from cold, rainy, windy, dirty, highway-repair-detail overtime, stolen out of his limited free time (that would have to be done delicately, too; Gayle had been very reluctant to suspend her developing counseling practice when her ob-gyn doctor had placed her under pregnancy house-arrest by warning that she would almost surely miscarry, as she had twice before, if she did not accept confinement, and she remained extremely sensitive to the fact that following doctor’s orders, and then carrying out their own decision that she should stay home with the baby for the first three or four crucial years, had shoved all the family financial responsibilities onto Harry’s shoulders—but he would do it, nonetheless). From that family in return he had received a dark-blue terry-cloth bathrobe, three three-packs of Jockey shorts matched with three three-packs of Jockey vee-neck tee-shirts, and a set of long-handled, chromium-shafted, wooden-handled utensils for his summer use at the Charm-glo propane grille (the purchase of which had taken him four months to clear from the MasterCard statements), on the redwood deck he had built with his own cut and blistered hands (pre-fab lumber kit and other materials: ten deadly fatiguing months on the MasterCard) in the backyard of the house he owned with Gayle in Whitman, near the above-ground pool (on which he was still making monthly payments on the home-improvement loan from Southeastern Bank for Savings, and would be for another four years).

  “I know, I know,” he planned to say, wrapping up his defense, “my inner child slipped his restraints, went out to play today. But even an old mongrel dog gets to take a run off the leash now and then. Can’t keep him tied up all the time.”

  Gayle had noticed the watch the instant that he entered the kitchen that night, inspected it closely, pronounced it very handsome, kissed him on the cheek and said she was glad he had bought it, “since you really got stiffed this Christmas. Last couple or so Yules, in fact.” He had therefore kept his speech to himself. Gayle had outsmarted him again, but he was actually pleased. She was so quick and so good at it, finessing him like that, completely fair and square. Skill that great had to be admired, even by its victim, especially when the good-sport victim came out of the exchange with a fine new watch that helped to ease the pain.

  The watch read 6:55. Therefore none of the commuters converging on the bridge—most of them in tan raincoats, open, unbuttoned and unbelted in the unseasonably mild late-November morning, showing almost jauntily in the slanting sunlight of dwindling autumn solid red and plaid melton zip-in linings, backdrops for perfectly presentable, businesslike flannel suits, or sports-jacket-slack or -skirt ensembles, carefully purchased at discount stores and outlets located in the Boston suburbs alongside secondary four-lane feeder roads tied in to the southerly arc of Route 128—was likely to interest Brennan or therefore Dell’Appa. Another fifty-three minutes still remained before the scheduled arrival of the 7:48 that most days interested Short Joey Moss, a/k/a Short Joe Mossi; Joseph John Mossi; Joe the Moss. So it would be all right to stay relaxed for a while and heckle Bob Brennan some more. “Awww, ’d you miss me all that much? I’m real touched.”

  “You’re touched, all right,” Brennan said, “the same way my mother says my sister-in-law Laura’s touched. In the head. Six sandwiches short of a Holy Name picnic, three players short of a ball club. That Laura, boy, she is something. My youngest brother did all right, selling those computers I still don’t understand, even though I use the things—not because I like ’em, no; it’s because I hafta, just like everybody else that’s over forty, doesn’t like the things at all but also doesn’t have no choice—and they got this real nice house over Quincy. Bought it when the price was right, and I mean: really right. Back the late Seventies, you know? Before everything explodes there, prices go right through the roof; then ten or twelve years later, after all the suckers pay them, get in hock up past their balls, down the prices come again, ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom. And now the banks’re goin’ under; we’re all really inna shit. It doesn’t make no sense to me. Makes no sense at all.

  “But this place that Doug has got, over Quincy there, it’s really a beautiful setup. A truly elegant setup. Like something outta one of those magazines, you know? The shrubs and the trees, and all kinds of flowers? Just by lookin’ at them you could tell: they’d be worth all kinds of money today, even if prices are down. Just by themselves, they’d be worth the big money, ’f you went out and tried to buy them now. So, they had this house a few years, much too big for just them, and then finally they had a family, Laura finally admitted it: Yup, they saved up dough enough so that even if Dougie does keel over with the heart attack—Doug’s thirty-eight, and a heart attack for him’s about as likely as Arnold Hammenegger gets one; kid’s in the gym and on the treadmill every single day, watchin’ his diet like he was one of those bony fashion models with no tits at all and less ass—well, Laura and the new Dougies will be perfectly all right. Financially, at least.

  “Before that it was like … before that she was obsessed or something, saving up their money, every dime she got her hands on. Which was every dime he made, unless he went haywire out on the road and had a cup of coffee and a sandwich or something. Because otherwise he brought every penny home—and Doug, like I say, makes good money. So that was quite a few dimes there.

  “Now, you got to let me put this in perspective here. As long as I remember, the one thing Doug’s always really wanted, ever since he was just a little kid, was a little powerboat. Not like the rest of us: cars. Trans Ams, the IROC Camaros, what-have-you. Later on, of course, Lincolns, Cadillacs. Nope, what Dougie wants is a boat. Not a great big one now; one of those things that looks like it has to belong to some billionaire Greek or something, screwin’ the movie stars on it. Nope: This’s the kind you keep onna trailer, under a tarp, ’side the garage—got the neon-blue finish with the sparklies all through it—’til it’s summertime again, and it’s time for boats again. Then you hitch it up the car, the weekend, take it down the ramp, put it inna water and you cruise aroun
d all day. Sun starts going down, you bring her in again. Put ’er onna trailer, take ’er right back home. You don’t actually ever go much of anywhere, so the fog comes in or it starts to rain or something, well, there’s no real problem; you just turn ’er around and go home like a bat outta hell.

  “Myself, I got to say it looks pretty boring to me, but Doug’s the guy who’s paying for it, right? With his money that he earned himself? Should be all right if he likes it, and he does. Hell, he loves it. So, what’s the damage, huh? Nobody gets hurt. Just riding around like that—heck, it’s basically the same thing we did with our first cars, back when we were stupid teenagers. We filled them up with gas and drove around town all night, split a couple six-packs, maybe, sure, three or four of us, but we didn’t get shitfaced and we didn’t get stopped by the cops, and we talked about how we’d been getting laid. Which of course we hadn’t been; we were all just talking, lying to each other. We’d’ve been actually doing that, actually out getting laid, well, that’s what we would’ve been doin’ those nights. ’Stead of spendin’ them all, ridin’ around, wastin’ gas and tellin’ big lies.

  “But: we all knew, we all understood what was going on, and that’s why we didn’t mind it. That’s what made it all right. When we said how we were getting laid, and how we got into Joanie’s pants, what we were really sayin’ was that we sure would’ve rather been getting Joanie’s pants off and getting into Joanie ’n riding around with a bunch of the other guys that also weren’t gettin’ laid, drinkin’ the beer and tellin’ the lies, but Joanie, any Joanie, wouldn’t even go out with us, any one of us. And we all knew it. Hell, we knew it so good we never even bothered asking her, any Joanie, even to go out. So what it was, it was: ‘Just shut up and gimme another Bud there, okay?’ Right? But, if there was no way inna world that you were ever gonna fuck Joanie, at least the other guys you knew weren’t fuckin’ her either, weren’t doin’ any better with the girls that they didn’t dare ask out, and you weren’t by yourself every Saturday night, without a damned thing to do.