The Pariot GAme

by George V. Higgins

  “Sort of a cop, is it now?” the voice said. The other two men at the table smiled at the voice. “Sort of a cop. You mean, a private eye? One of them jamokes?”

  “Yeah,” Riordan said, his face showing consideration of the idea. “Private eye.”

  “Got a license?” the voice said.

  “License,” Riordan said reflectively, “oh, sure License. I got a license.”

  “Private eye license, I mean,” the voice said.

  “Private eye license,” Riordan said. “Sure. I got privates eyes’ licenses. Yeah.”

  “Let’s see it,” the voice said.

  At the front of the bar, two men in gray sweaters came in. Riordan saw them from the corner of his left eye, but gave no sign. He saw Patrick incline his head to his left. The men walked down behind Riordan’s stool and took a table behind it.

  Riordan shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Secret. Secret license. Can’t show it, anybody. ’Gainst the law.”

  “Let’s see where it says on it you can’t show it to anybody,” the voice said.

  Riordan broke into a big grin. He extended his right forefinger and shook it at the voice. “Uh-uh,” he said, “you’re tryin’, trick me. Too smart for you.”

  “Got a gun?” the voice said.

  “Sure,” Riordan said, “got a gun. Big gun.”

  “You can show us that, can’t you,” the man next to Riordan’s left elbow at the aisle said. He had iron-gray hair, a big belly, and thick, tanned forearms. The left one was tattooed with a fouled anchor. “Uh-uh,” Riordan said. “Secret gun. Very secret. Lookin’ for somebody. Can’t show gun.”

  “Well,” the man said, “maybe we can help you. Whore you looking for?”

  “Secret too,” Riordan said triumphantly. “Secret party.”

  “Okay,” the man said, “nice talking to you, big fella. Go have your beer with Clement there. Everything’ll be all right in the morning, ‘cept for maybe your belly.”

  “Yup,” Riordan said. He wove around the bar to his stool. There were four full glasses in front of it, in addition to the half-glass he had left. “Hey,” he said, “Patrick. Where’d all these brews come from, huh?”

  The bartender came around to Riordan’s side of the bar as he clambered onto the seat. The two new customers were behind him now. “Your new friends over there,” Patrick said. “Told me they decided after you went in the head, they’d been too rough on you.”

  “Gee,” Riordan said. He raised his voice. “Hey, fellas,” he said, “thanks, thanks a lot.” He waved.

  “Thing of it is,” Patrick said, “they insisted, but the way you’re goin’, if I was you I don’t think I’d drink them things. No supper and everything, you know? You’re gettin’ pretty stiff. You got to drive somewhere or something, you know?” Riordan heard the two gray-sweatered men behind him stirring in their chairs. “Nah,” he said, waving his left hand and picking up the half-glass first. He drained it. He put it down and picked up the first of the four full glasses. He drained that. He put it down. “Insult guy like that, buy you drinks. Can’t do that. Finish these. Go home. Honest. Perfectly fine.” He belched. He leaned forward over the bar and beckoned Patrick closer. “Say,” he said, whispering, “confidentially, you ever hear a guy named Scanlan around this neighborhood? Just asking, huh? Don’t tell anybody.”

  “Scanlan the guy you’re looking for?” the bartender said.

  Riordan nodded. “Scanlan,” he said. “Dunno his first name, where he lives. Gettin’ sick of this, runnin’ around night after night, Cambridge, Charlestown, Somerville, lookin’ for Scanlan. Wanna go home.”

  Patrick straightened up. “Never heard of no Scanlan in this neighborhood,” he said, in a normal tone of voice.

  “Shh, shh,” Riordan said. “Maybe he lives here, you just don’t know him. Could be.” The gray-haired man got up from the end of the corner table across the bar.

  “Hey, Patrick, see you for a minute,” he said. Then he stared at Clement across the bar. From the corner of his eye, Riordan could see Clement put down half a glass of beer and slide off the stool. Patrick crossed behind the island in the bar.

  Clement walked rapidly up the aisle. Riordan heard the two chairs scrape again behind him. Clement brushed behind Riordan’s back, then stopped at his left shoulder and put his right hand on it. “Hey, mister,” he said.

  Riordan hunched over the bar. He nudged the ale glasses away from him, up to the edges of the rubber mat. He turned his head to Clement. “Yeah, old pal?”

  “Listen,” Clement said, wetting his lips, “I gotta go home now, all right?”

  “Home?” Riordan said. He fumbled at his cuff and peeked at the Rolex without showing it. “ ’S only little after ten-thirty. Patrick told me, you never leave ’fore midnight, these days. Got lots of time. Guys buying drinks’n everything. Nice place. Stay awhile.”

  “No,” Clement said, “listen. Why’ncha go home now, all right? Like me. Go home, sleep it off. Be all right in the morning.”

  Riordan saw the gray-haired man straighten up. Patrick ducked under the bar and went into the back room, the door swinging shut behind him. The gray-haired man nodded. Riordan heard the chairs scrape fast behind him. He saw Clement’s face change before he fled. The heel of a hand snapped down against the base of Riordan’s skull. His face slammed down against the bar, his nose striking the rounded rim. As he hit, another hand grabbed him by his left shoulder and began to spin him toward the door.

  Riordan ignored the blood streaming from his nose onto his shirt and coat. He let the momentum of the turning stool go into the leverage of his right leg, the knee locked, as he brought the heavy boot up from the floor into the crotch of the man who had grabbed him. As the kick landed, he brought his left fist back over his right shoulder, swung it back in a flat arc and caught the left side of the jaw of the man who had rabbit-punched him. The hinge of the jaw broke loudly. The puncher was stunned. He reeled off to his own right, into the tables. The man on the floor was screaming and holding his testicles. Riordan bent down, grabbed him by the gray sweater, hoisted him up, held him with his left hand and used the flat of his right fist to break the right hinge of the grabber’s jaw. The man screamed again. Riordan dropped him to the floor. He took the rabbit-puncher out of the tangle of tables and chairs, stood him erect, spun him around so that he was back-to, yanked his hands down from his jaw, brought them behind the man in a double lock, and jacked them upward together until the elbows shattered. The rabbit-puncher screamed for the first time. Riordan threw him on the floor. He turned toward the door. The grabber was lying on the floor, whimpering. He held his hands up before his face. Riordan raised his left leg about eighteen inches and stomped down on the man’s knee, breaking most of it. The man gave a garbled scream through his shattered jaw.

  “Souvenir, shitbag,” Riordan said. “Something to tell your fuckin’ grandchildren. What a tough guy you were, the night you and your buddy got wrecked tryin’ to roll one stupid drunk. Tell ’em what you got isn’t quite as good as the one the drunk had, but it was all they had available at the store. You’ll still know when it’s gonna rain, though. Shitbirds.” Riordan looked around. Except for the three of them, the bar was empty.

  He reached over the bar and found a clean dry towel. He dipped one end of it in the soapy water and washed the blood off his hands. He dried his hands on the other end. He reached into his breast pocket and took out a Ray-Ban case. He opened it and took out clear aviator glasses with oversize lenses and frames. He put the case back into his pocket. He reached inside his jacket and drew the magnum. He checked the load, and snapped the cylinder shut. He carried the gun in his right hand. He looked at his watch. It was 10:46.

  Riordan opened the outside door slowly, letting his left arm hang slack in the opening. After a few seconds, he dragged his body around the edge of the door. Carrying his right arm stiffly against his side, with the gun against his pant leg, he limped slowly out into the street, his head down, hi
s left leg dragging slightly. When he reached the illumination from the street light, he paused as though out of breath. He raised his head back, displaying the blood, and used his left hand to massage the neck and the base of the skull. He staggered now and then, weaving also, sometimes quite abruptly, although he looked as though he was walking slowly. There was no one in sight when he reached West Broadway. Dangling his right arm in his own shadow, so that it would seem useless, he crossed on the southerly side of the intersection to the other side of West Broadway. He kept well away from the parked cars and doorways. He lurched back and forth. The curtains billowed out of the windows, and the light from television screens flickered against the curtains from the inside.

  He was three cars behind his own when the passenger-side door of a dark sedan opened fast at the curb. The man in the gray scalley cap dove out of the door, in the act of turning and firing a single-shot sawed-off shotgun at Riordan. The range was too great for a sawed-off to do much damage. Some of the pellets spattered off the shooting glasses, but Riordan paid no attention to them or the ones that dug into his forehead and neck. He brought the magnum up precisely in his right hand, clamped his right wrist in his left hand, and fired one round that hit the man dead center on the sternum. He was not a very big man—the shot knocked him into the gutter, under the right front wheel of the car.

  Crouching, Riordan moved quickly between two parked cars and into the street. Lights were coming on in the apartments now. As he trotted down the street, outside the cars, he saw a muzzle flash above the trunk of his car, on the sidewalk side. He stopped in his tracks and counted to fifteen. He stood up just as the gray-haired man stuck his head up over the trunk of the car, the automatic gleaming in his hand. Riordan shot him in the face. A large red spray erupted from the back of his head, and he fell into Oakleigh Street, on his back.

  Riordan bent over and ran forward again. He was behind his own car when he saw a man in a brown leather scalley cap, barely visible in the area beyond the aura of the Oakleigh street lamp, pressing himself against the house at the corner next to Riordan’s car. Riordan stood up. “Scanlan,” he roared, “the great hero won’t use his own name. What is your name, you coward?” Scanlan made his position a little better, fired once with a 9mm. Walther PPK, hit Riordan in the musculature of the left side of the neck, and left his feet at the impact of the first bullet from the magnum. Riordan fired again as Scanlan’s body extended with the shock, the second bullet entering the torso one inch to the right of the one that exploded Scanlan’s left lung.

  Riordan could hear the sirens now, and then he could see the flashing blue lights. He stood there next to the car, using his left hand to explore the neck wound, not to see whether it was serious, but whether the bullet had passed through. He needed both hands, and he was feeling lightheaded. He holstered the gun and sat down in the yoga position in the street next to his car, under the light. He was still pawing the wound when the police came to him.

  He rode sitting upright in the ambulance, pressing a compress to his neck, to Boston City Hospital. He had preserved possession of his gun with his credentials. The oxygen which the attendant had given him brought him back to life.

  “Oh,” the cop said, leafing through the forms on the clipboard, “most people of course don’t know this, but it helps the medical examiner if you know what kind of bullets you were using, you know? So he can rule out whether anybody else did any of the shooting.”

  “Somebody else fuckin’ damned right did a little shooting,” Riordan said. “The three of those bastards that I shot. I don’t know what they were using. Cheap shit, though.”

  “Yessir,” the cop said, “but what’d you use? Standard government issue, maybe? If that’s what it was, we can find out easy enough for the report.”

  “No,” Riordan said, “hundred-and-ten grain slug. Twenty-point-four grains Hodgkin one-ten powder. Fifteen-hundred-fifty feet-per-second, muzzle velocity.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the cop said, “that’s the killer load.”

  “That’s one of them,” Riordan said. “That’s the one you fire from a revolver.”

  SHORTLY BEFORE 12:45 in the morning, Paul Doherty took the East Milton Square exit northbound off the Southeast Expressway. He waited in front of the fire station for the light to change, then drove up Granite Avenue toward Dorchester. He reached Gallivan Boulevard, stopped at the lights, and drove up through the business district on Dorchester Avenue until he reached the satellite parking lot for the J. J. Donlan Funeral Home one block up from the boulevard. He turned right into the dark and deserted lot and drove to the back row, under the overhanging branches of the maple trees that grew on the other side of the stockade fence. He backed the blue Aries into a space against the fence and shut off the lights and ignition. The engine ran on, shaking the car with its dieseling. “Junk,” Doherty said.

  There was nothing in the parking lot between Paul Doherty and the curb of Dorchester Avenue. There was one Oldsmobile parked at the curb on the other side of the street. It was a metallic chocolate Ninety-eight luxury sedan, and it was new. It partially blocked Paul Doherty’s view of the main entrance to the Bright Red Tap and Gentlemen’s Bar. The door was flanked with plate-glass windows which were heavily tinted smoke-gray. The plastic relief picture of the Budweiser Clydesdales, hung against the window on the left, was legible, and the Schlitz display sign against the window on the right was legible, but everything more than six inches behind the glass was indistinct. Paul Doherty could see human figures moving around in the dim light inside the bar, but he could not identify them. At one o’clock, the door opened and two men emerged into the warm, still evening. They stood and talked for a moment, and then separated and left in opposite directions, on foot. There was no observable activity in the bar for a few minutes. Then the lights that shone through the window on the left were extinguished. The light that illuminated the sign on the front went out. The door opened again and a figure emerged partway. The lights that shone through the window on the right went out. The beer advertisements remained illuminated. Paul Doherty could see one dim light over the bar as the door opened wider and the figure came out.

  Digger Doherty triple-locked the front door of the Bright Red and armed the burglar alarm so that the warning light glowed red over the keyboard. He put his keys in his pocket and stepped onto the sidewalk, into the light from the street lamp. He hitched up his green chino pants around his heavy belly and stuffed his white cotton shirt more deeply into the waistband. He patted his stomach while he looked up and down the street. He nodded at nothing in particular. He walked across the sidewalk and around the back of the Oldsmobile. He stopped at the driver’s side door and took from his pocket the same key ring he had used to lock the door of the saloon. He unlocked the car, got in, and reached under the dash to disarm the automobile burglar alarm. His left leg stuck out the open door and he had considerable difficulty compressing his belly enough against the steering wheel to permit him to reach the alarm lock. He got the key into it just as the siren began to sound, and shut it off before it had reached full blast. He straightened up in the seat and glanced into the Donlan parking lot as he shut the car door. He saw the Aries in the lot, but he could not see whether it was occupied.

  He closed his car door and started the engine of the Oldsmobile, settling his hams into the deep, loose, crushed-velvet seat cushions as the engine caught and purred, running his tongue over his teeth to root out the remains of the pastrami sandwich he had only nominally chewed before swallowing it as his dinner, gazing speculatively at the blue Aries in the Donlan parking lot. He kept his left hand on the steering wheel, where it would be visible in the light. He slid his right hand off the bottom part of the steering wheel and felt under the seat. By touch he located a cigar box. He pulled it out onto the floor mat under his thighs and opened it without looking down. He reached into the box and took out a 9mm. Luger. He slid the Luger under the cushion of the passenger seat, closed the cigar box, and slid it back under t
he seat. He turned on the headlights, shifted his gaze from the Aries, and put the Oldsmobile in gear.

  Digger Doherty headed south on Dorchester Avenue toward the Gallivan Boulevard intersection. There were no other cars on Dorchester Avenue behind him. He watched in the rear-view mirror and saw the headlights on the car that came out of the Donlan lot and turned left on Dorchester Avenue behind him. He did not have a green arrow for the right turn on Gallivan Boulevard, but there was no traffic approaching the intersection in either direction, and he made the turn without using his blinker. He shut off his headlights as he completed the turn. He did not straighten the wheels of the car, but pulled into the parking lot behind the branch of the Shawmut Bank beyond the intersection on the right, stopping just short of the chain that blocked through traffic. He put the car into reverse and backed up into the side street opposite the entrance, blocking a driveway which was shaded from the street lamp by three large maple trees. He kept the engine running.

  The Digger saw the blue Aries reach the intersection as the light turned green on Dorchester Avenue. It turned right on Gallivan Boulevard, without hesitating. The Digger put the Oldsmobile in drive and pulled out of the side street. At the corner of Gallivan Boulevard he paused, the headlights still off, and peered up the boulevard. The Aries was passing under the railroad bridge and heading up the hill. The Digger waited until it disappeared. Then he turned left on Gallivan Boulevard, ran the light at Dorchester Avenue again, turning left. He repassed the Bright Red and headed north four blocks. He took a left on a side street and varied his speed on several more intersecting and parallel streets, always proceeding in a generally westerly direction, until he reached the middle of the block on Moraine Street in Saint Gregory’s parish, where he lived.

  He did not pull out. He parked and shut off the lights. It was a neighborhood of cramped colonial three-bedroom homes, crowded together on small lots on a steep hill. His was three doors north of the intersection where he had stopped. He took the Luger out from under the cushion of the passenger seat and put it in his pocket. He got out of the car and shut the door. He locked it. Then he unlocked it. He reached in and set the alarm. He closed and relocked the door.