Pulse

by Michael Harvey

  She never said a word, just slipped off him in one impossibly graceful movement, switching off the overhead so all that was left was a night-light by her feet and their breath stoking the darkness between them. Footsteps came from the front of the apartment, one, two, three. Whoever it was, and Barkley sure as fuck had a good idea who it might be, made his way to the kitchen, where he started to yell.

  “Katie. Fucking Katie.”

  Tommy Dillon didn’t sound drunk, but he didn’t have to be. It was five steps from the kitchen to the bedroom. Maybe seven on a good day, which this clearly wasn’t. Barkley was on his feet by the second stride. Katie had pushed the door shut and for the first time Barkley noticed the small latch—a dangling hook with an eye socket for when they wanted to keep the kids out. Tommy kept coming down the hall. Three strides, four. Katie was still naked, the curves of her body soft in the fuzzy glow coming from near her feet. She put a finger to her lips and slipped the hook on. Five strides, six. Tommy pulled at the knob.

  “Fucking shit.”

  Barkley watched the hook bounce in the eyelet. Up, down. Up, down. If it stayed in place, maybe he wouldn’t wind up shooting his partner. If it didn’t . . . Barkley backed away from the door, eyes fixed on that goddamn hook as it danced. He’d gotten dressed somehow. Somehow pulled his gun and held it in his right hand. Katie motioned with her eyes toward a closet. Barkley ducked inside and closed the door until it was open just a crack. In one motion, the beautiful poetry of an all-state point guard maybe a half step past her prime, Katie slipped on her nightgown and called out to her husband, voice doused with the perfect amount of sleep.

  “What the Christ do you want?”

  Tommy’s reply came from a bedroom down the hall. “Where are the girls?”

  More footsteps, another wrench on the door and the heroic latch. “Katie, let me the fuck in. Now.”

  Still she took her time, pulling on her robe, cinching it and running hands through her hair. “Jesus, I sent them over to Loretta’s. Hold on.”

  “Why do you got the fucking door locked . . .”

  “Quit pulling at the thing and I’ll open it.”

  Tommy stopped tugging, and Katie slipped the latch free. Then he was in the room, shoulders and back filling Barkley’s vision.

  “Why did you lock the door?”

  “Cuz I felt like it.”

  The blow came quick and flat, practiced and mean, the back of his hand slashing across the side of her cheek, lifting Katie onto the bed, where she banged off the headboard and wound up on her knees, hands in fists clutching the bedsheets.

  “I’m sorry,” Tommy said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  Fresh marks mingled with the not-so-old and there was a tickle of blood on her lip. Katie licked at it, then wiped at it with her hand. “You wanna know why I locked the door?”

  “Katie . . .”

  “You wanna know why I sent the kids away? You wanna let them see their mom like this? Is that what you fucking want, Tommy?”

  He moved toward her.

  “Touch me again and I swear you’ll have to kill me.”

  Tommy stopped in his tracks. “K—”

  “I fucking mean it.”

  He sank to the floor, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, curling up into less than nothing as he started to cry, wet, heaving, choking sobs dredged up from some place of pain that made Barkley wonder even more about his partner and how deep a hole he’d dug himself. Katie crawled off the bed, making small animal sounds in her throat as she settled close by her husband, taking his head in her lap and kissing the tears and salt off his face, stroking his cheeks and his temples, closing his eyes with her fingers and staring across the room at Barkley in the closet. For all his years in interrogation rooms, talking to every lowlife, psychotic motherfucker Boston had to offer, Barkley couldn’t read a word of what was going on inside the woman’s head. She lifted her husband’s face and framed it in her strong, perfect hands. She kissed him and held him, all gentle now. He mumbled his apologies and tried to touch her cheek, but she wouldn’t let him. She walked him back to the bed, undressing him as they went, and made love to him amid the warm wrinkles of the sheets Barkley had felt against his own skin. He watched and knew it was how it had to be because the relationship was a prison and an addiction and would always be for her no matter what might follow. And when it was done and Tommy had stopped crying and grown again from child to man, he told her he had to leave. And she didn’t try to stop him, kissing him like it was the last time, in front of the dressing table where Barkley could watch in the reflection of the mirror if he chose, and then Tommy left, taking his gun with him. Katie sat quietly at the table as Barkley came out of the closet.

  “If you’re gonna follow him, you better get a move on.” Her eyes were soulless, skyless windows, drained of everything now so all that was left was her. And she’d never been lovelier. Barkley turned to go.

  “Bark.”

  He stopped, knowing better than to look back.

  “You gonna kill him?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “The girls need a dad, Bark.”

  He left the room, striding down the hall to the front door. He gambled Tommy was headed for the expressway and picked him up just as he hit the ramp. Barkley stayed four or five car lengths back. His partner was in the left lane, cooking at ninety miles plus. Wherever he was going, Tommy Dillon was in a hurry.

  44

  THEY JUMPED off the expressway in Chelsea, bumping along Williams Street, then Beacham. On one side was a span of railroad tracks. Along the other, a string of truck bays sitting behind high fences and covered in layers of Chelsea grit and Mystic River grime. Barkley tucked behind a delivery truck with a huge head of lettuce and a bunch of baby lettuces painted on its side. He rolled down the window, smelling the sharpness of garlic mingled with the root smell of turnip and wondered where Tommy was headed. They drove for another mile, then the road hooked left, curling past the main entrance to the New England Produce Center. Fifty yards beyond the gate, Tommy eased into a lot. Barkley kept going, slumping down in his seat as he passed a two-story building with a couple of eight-foot-high naked women painted in dancing whitewash along the building’s face. It looked like someone had started to paint a third but gave up after half a head, one breast, and an elbow. Barkley drove another quarter mile and turned around, pulling into a gas station and parking so he had a view of the building and lot. Tommy was still behind the wheel, not moving, not doing a thing.

  It was another half hour before he got out, hands stuffed in the pockets of his black leather jacket. Barkley looked for the gun on Tommy’s hip, but it wasn’t there. He hunched his shoulders as he walked, past the twitchy dancing girls and behind the building. Ten minutes later, he appeared on the other side and went back to his car, opening the passenger’s-side door and getting in. A semi rolled past, this one featuring a row of smiling tomatoes that looked more like Mexican women than tomatoes, complete with rounded hips, straw hats, and plump red breasts. The semi slowed, then stopped, idling in the middle of the road and blocking Barkley’s view. The driver hung there for a couple of minutes, pumping his air brakes a half-dozen times, then rolled again, heading straight for the gates of the produce center. Behind the semi, the front seat of Tommy’s car was empty.

  Barkley got out and jogged across Beacham, cutting behind the building and coming up on the other side. He crouched beside a Dumpster fifty feet away and squinted against the glare of the sun, rising to his left and reflecting off the flat glass of the second-floor windows. A bank of clouds drifted overhead, cutting the glare for a moment, and Barkley blinked. The first set of windows at the back of the building looked empty. The second-floor window at the front corner, however, was a different story. Barkley could clearly make out the outline of a person sitting in a chair, staring down at the street below. There was something odd about the figure, the shift of the shoulders, the
way the head nodded forward. Barkley threaded his way along the edge of the lot until he was almost directly across from the window. The solitary figure was a dark blotch, not moving as the sun peeked out again, bathing the scene in a shiv of morning light, revealing everything Barkley had thought, everything he’d feared.

  He pulled his gun and began to run, past the window, around the corner, and through the front door. To his left was an old staircase winding up to the building’s second floor. Barkley took the steps two at a time, bursting through a blue door at the top. The first thing he saw was the back of Tommy Dillon’s jacket, faded leather wrapped around a torso rigged to the chair with a couple turns of rope.

  “Tommy . . .”

  Barkley holstered his gun and took three strides across the room, lifting the body’s head and staring into the blank eyes of another dead kid from Harvard. Barkley cut Zeus Sanchez from the chair and laid him out on the floor, checking in vain for a pulse while taking note of the bluish tinge to his lips, damp hair, and absence of any visible wounds. He leaned forward to close the kid’s eyes just as Tommy Dillon fired from a doorway. That would have been it, should have been it, Barkley’s skull popped like one of the overripe melons sitting at the ass end of the truck bays across the street. But Barkley’s lean had saved him, the bullet burying itself in a hunk of drywall an inch or so above the detective’s head.

  Tommy fired a second and third time, except Barkley was moving now, hugging the wall, giving his partner no angle as he closed the space between them. Tommy Dillon was nothing if not tough, and tough guys could never pass up a fistfight, even when they were giving away six inches plus and over a hundred pounds. So Barkley was ready when his partner charged, roaring like the crazy fuck he was, spitting another bullet and hitting nothing. Barkley caught Tommy’s weight easily, tossing him like a sack of Vidalia onions. Tommy hit the wall, spine first, gun clattering across the floor. Barkley kicked it away and waited as Tommy climbed to his feet. He lunged again, hands curled like hooks, hunting for Barkley’s eyes. Barkley stepped to one side and loaded up with a short right, dropping his partner, who hit his head on a radiator and didn’t move.

  Barkley rubbed his knuckles and swore, picking up the gun and pocketing it. Then he stripped Tommy’s leather jacket off Sanchez, grabbed him by the heels, and dragged him into the hall. In an adjoining bathroom was a tub with a puddle of water near the drain. Barkley returned to the front and cuffed Tommy to the chair. Barkley found a second chair and sat in it, watching Tommy not breathe, wondering whether he’d killed the fuck. All things considered, that might be for the best. Just then Tommy groaned and lifted his head. Barkley pointed the throwaway piece his partner had tried to shoot him with at his partner’s nose and waited.

  “You never could punch for shit,” Tommy said.

  “How’s the head? I’m guessing you got a concussion.”

  “Like it matters.”

  Barkley shrugged. “How do you want it?”

  “Clean. Fast. Don’t wanna be no fucking vegetable, pissing on myself and drooling and all that shit.”

  “I got you.”

  “You’ll make up something for Katie?”

  Barkley nodded, breaking eye contact for the first time.

  “I know you was boning her, Bark. Fuck, I knew all along.”

  “You were broken up.”

  “Exactly. Hell, I was proud of it, you wanna know the truth.”

  Barkley didn’t wanna know the truth. At least not that kind. “Why Sanchez?”

  “Where is he?”

  Barkley rolled his eyes toward the hallway.

  “He’s no fucking saint, B. He set up Fitzsimmons. Whole thing was a setup.”

  “There was no girl grabbing Sanchez’s wallet?”

  “I sent one of ’em by to duck her head in the car. He was supposed to raise holy hell and then run down the street after her.”

  “Why?”

  “Sanchez said Fitzsimmons would follow. All-for-one, stand-up guy and all that college crap. Big fucking game.”

  “But why?”

  “They wanted Fitzsimmons in the alley.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Can’t go there, B. Might come back on Katie, the girls.”

  Barkley tried a different tack. “What did they have on Sanchez?”

  “What do you think? He liked to gamble. Owed money to the wrong people. At first they were pushing him to shave points on a couple of Harvard games, but the kid never got off the fucking bench. Then this came up. Sanchez thought they just wanted to roll Fitzsimmons, grab his wallet or something.”

  “How about you?”

  “You had it sniffed out from the jump. I never really got off nothing. Dope, booze, betting, all that shit. By the time I got halfway straight, the fuckers owned me, balls and all.”

  “Let me guess. Trunks full of blow and forever money.”

  “For Katie and the girls, B. You, too.”

  “All I gotta do is unlock the cuffs.”

  They both knew that wasn’t gonna happen. Even if there’d been no bodies, Barkley wasn’t ever gonna get rich skimming money off drug dealers. Would he have looked the other way if Tommy had broken off his piece? Maybe. But not now. Not with the bodies and all the rest.

  “You hired Walter Price,” Barkley said.

  “Laid it out for him, chapter and fucking verse. Gave him the knife, for Chrissakes. Then he doesn’t finish the job.”

  “So you did?”

  Tommy smiled weakly. “I know what you’re thinking. We weren’t together that night, so I could have been down in the alley and done Fitzsimmons. Didn’t happen that way.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Already told you, B. Not going there.”

  Barkley nodded in the general direction of the bathroom. “Why kill Sanchez?”

  “Fucking guy went off the grid. When he finally surfaced, he wanted to meet. So I had him hole up here.”

  “He wanted to get paid.”

  “Worse. Conscience. He’s torn up, talking about coming clean. I brought him some dinner. A burger and some fries.”

  “You put something in the food.”

  “He went night-night. Woke up at the bottom of the tub.”

  “And Price?”

  “He was a dead man once he took the job.”

  A truck rumbled past, grinding its gears before accelerating and fading to nothing. Their time was coming to its end now and the air felt sodden and heavy.

  “You gonna look after Katie? The girls?”

  “You know I will.”

  Tommy pointed with his chin at his handcuffed wrists. “Take off the watch.”

  Barkley unclasped the silver-and-turquoise timepiece, weighing it in his hand.

  “Pulled that off Juan Doe right after I popped him. Don’t look at me like that. Guy was moving product like the rest of ’em. Got his hand caught in the cookie jar and paid the price.” Tommy gave a half shrug. “Another one you can pull out of the cold pile.”

  “That it?”

  “I got a file.”

  “What kind of file?”

  “Bunch of stuff on the guy you shot over at Columbia Point.”

  “Were you gonna blackmail me, Tommy?”

  “Insurance, B, that’s all. It’s in my locker at the bottom, under a pile of shit. Take it, keep it, burn it. Whatever.”

  “What else?”

  “It’s not about the Harvard kid. Not anymore.”

  “I know. It’s about Daniel Fitzsimmons.”

  “You were always too smart for this job. Look after my family, B. And don’t fuck this up.”

  Barkley raised the gun. “Open your mouth. I’ll roof it and count to three. You won’t feel a thing.”

  Tommy nodded and closed his eyes, mumbling soft crumbles of long-lost prayers and rocking lightly in the chair. Slowly his mouth yawned open, a string of saliva connecting an upper molar to a lower, all of it soon to be so much rubble. Barkley jammed the gun in deep. There w
as no shake in Tommy. Barkley gave the prick full marks for that.

  “You ready?”

  A nod.

  “One, two . . .” Barkley pulled on the trigger and the back half of Tommy Dillon’s head exploded, whatever was left of his consciousness sliding down the far wall in a slick mess of tissue and bone. Barkley uncuffed his partner’s wrists and got up carefully, checking his shoes and clothes for splatter, then standing over the body and taking note of the details. Not that it mattered. The report was already written in his head. Cat wouldn’t buy a word, but she’d go along because she was part of it now and that’s what people did.

  He walked to the door and stopped, taking a final look at Tommy, slumped back in the chair, not a fucking care in the world. Barkley felt a sudden softening inside, old soil being turned over, something new pushing up from underneath. It scared him and shook him and he turned away, shielding himself with the curve of his shoulder as he reached for the doorknob. Outside the hallway was empty; a cruel breeze blew up the stairs.

  45

  NO ONE said a word on the drive in. Grace sat in front next to Ben. Daniel sat in the back. There was separation between them now, a parting that was as real as it was inevitable. Ben turned on the radio. Grace’s gaze found Daniel’s as Aerosmith hammered a couple of lines from “Last Child.” They pulled into a gas station just off Neponset Avenue. The station had a steady stream of morning traffic at the pumps and a small convenience store next door where folks could get their coffee and the paper. Grace got out almost before the car stopped, swinging a small green pack across her shoulders. Daniel touched Ben’s sleeve and caught his eyes before climbing out.

  “In another life,” Ben said. Daniel nodded and picked up a gym bag. Grace was already walking.