At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  Naughton did as he was told, holding up a black Apelco three-watt VHF radio.

  “Okay,” McKeach said, “and, now you do know how to use it, am I right?”

  “Sure, push-to-talk here,” Naughton said, pressing the button on the left side. “Turn it on up on the top here.” He turned the first knob on the top of the radio and it hissed loudly. “And then you got the squelch here”—Naughton turned the inner knob so that the hiss first disappeared entirely and then came up low and steady—“and that means you’re ready, someone calls. And then when you wanna answer, push here to talk.”

  “Okay, good,” McKeach said. “Channel nineteen’s what we’re goin’ to be usin’. You know how to do that, get the channel that you want?”

  Naughton pressed the selector button on the right side of the unit and the channel numbers scrolled up in the liquid crystal window.

  “Good,” McKeach said, “very good. Now don’t turn it off. Leave it on until I’m back here inna car with you. Now, after you seen the light, you mark the place where you seen it come from, so that when I call you again on the walkie-talkie an’ tell you, ‘Come back for me,’ you can come right back to that spot sure as if you’re a racin’ pigeon and it was your home loft I just showed you with my little flashlight, all right? And then what you do then is, you drive away, like you’re just passin’ through, this’s the way you go to work. Happened see the ducks ’n’ geese, they got your attention; all so calm and peaceful there, Jamaica Pond at sunup, you pulled over for a minute, take it in, but now you got to be on your way and so there, off you go.”

  “Where’m I supposed to go?” Naughton said.

  “Well,” McKeach said, “far enough away so the people that I’m meetin’ here don’t see the car. I don’t think they got a look at it the last time, we had this little meeting where I hadda do a couple things I don’t think they liked, but maybe they did, so why take any chances? Now the people sell these things claim the range’s three miles. But I dunno. I’d rather you played it safe and just follow Perkins out to the Jamaicaway, all right? On the other side the pond. And take a right there and then just follow the Jamaicaway all the way back down the Arborway rotary again, and get on Parkman Drive again. Find yourself a place to park out of sight, much as you can, and then call me. Let me know you’re there in position, and I’ll get right back to you, and if that works all right, then leave the set on and wait there for my call. Then if it doesn’t, try another spot and try the radio again. All right?”

  Naughton shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “You’re payin’ me two hundred bucks drive your car around Jamaica Pond a couple times, I think you oughta get what you want.”

  McKeach slapped him on the right shoulder. “Attaboy,” he said, “really gonna miss you, you go to cop school, you know. But it’s your life, I guess. Should do what you want with it.” He sat back. “Let’s head out.”

  Naughton heard the right rear door open as he brought the car to a stop in the sixth parallel parking space from the No PARKING sign on Perkins Street, but McKeach with the duffel bag was out of the backseat and quartering down the short grassy slope above the paved sidewalk rimming the pond so quickly and quietly that Naughton had to look into the backseat to make sure he had latched the door shut.

  About thirty feet in front and below the front of the car there was a bench made of brown wooden planks fitted into cement uprights beside the paved walkway. On the surface of the pond there was a layer of gauzy grey mist about four feet deep, and still. It lay over the land too, ground fog; a hundred yards or so ahead the mist hid the dark roots of trees exposed by the erosion of the slope between the sidewalk and the beige gravel shoreline. Many dun-colored ducks and grey Canada geese with white necks slept along the water’s edge with their heads beneath their wings.

  The Apelco hissed on the seat beside him. Watching McKeach scuttle diagonally down the incline behind the bench and cross the pavement, heading toward the water, into the treeline, Naughton yawned and settled back in the driver’s seat. He turned up the volume on the car radio slightly. “In other scores around the league,” the announcer said, “Miami Heat ninety, New Jersey Nets eighty-one; and, in what some were regarding as previews of the upcoming playoffs …”

  Yawning again Naughton looked out through the windshield again; dawn was well into the sky now, the rose-tinted light high and strong enough behind the treeline on the Jamaicaway to illuminate the ground and outline the roofs of the buildings along the boulevard. The sky was cloudless. It was going to be a fine clear morning. He looked back at the pond. McKeach had disappeared. Naughton’s jaw snapped shut.

  For a long moment he was alarmed. He took a deep breath and calmed himself and waited. “ … Los Angeles Lakers one-oh-three, Utah Jazz ninety-nine, despite twenty-eight points, ten assists and fourteen rebounds from Karl Malone.” The flashlight winked once from among a group of four gnarled trees about forty yards away. Greatly relieved, Naughton picked up the walkie-talkie. “See the light an’ mark the spot, four trees,” he said in a low voice. Then he realized he hadn’t depressed the push-to-talk button; as the light winked again he depressed the button and repeated the signal.

  “Aces,” McKeach replied. “See yah.” He watched the Brougham pass above his nest and nodded. He turned down the hissing walkie-talkie and put it on the crotch of the trees. Then he set to work. He had made himself as small as possible in the pocket the roots created, four trunks emerging from the single large gnarled ball in one of the cavities eroded from the base of the grassy incline. He had seated himself on a black vinyl air pillow and braced his back against one of the trees. Now he raised his knees and dug his heels into the gravel so the root ball enclosed all of his lower body but his left leg below the knee. Two of the trees, their crusty greyish-brown trunks about a foot around, their lower branches thick and close to the ground, framed his view of the sidewalk to the west while at the same time concealing his upper body and head. He leaned his right shoulder against the third tree, beside him. He murmured, “Solid.”

  He unzipped the duffel bag and took out of it his .30 caliber M2 selective-fire Winchester U.S. military carbine. The brown wooden stock was dull, nicked and scratched by years and use; he had deliberately dulled the exterior blued metal barrel with matte grey paint, but the lands and grooves of the bore gleamed silver and smelled of fresh Hoppe’s No.9 powder and lead solvent and the action smelled of Gunslick lubricant. He set the selector on the receiver to semiautomatic fire, one round for each trigger squeeze. “I was young, I’d use full auto—what a sensah power. Blam-blam, blam-blam, blam. But in those days could control it—now the muzzle climbs on me and I’m all over the place.” In the trees around the pond, birds unseen began to sing with sexual urgency in the chill but brightening morning.

  McKeach fitted the standard fifteen-round magazine clip into the housing ahead of the trigger guard and pulled back the handle of the operating slide on the right, chambering the first round and then pushing the handle forward to lock. When it snicked he murmured, “There.” The sun was visible now, the top edge of the orange ball coming up to the southeast of the apartment and hospital towers east of the Jamaicaway, and traffic along it was beginning to pick up; the occasional auto horn sounded.

  From the duffel bag he removed a pale green plastic two-liter Sprite bottle he had emptied and rinsed clean and a six-inch looped strip of two-inch silver duct tape. Holding the carbine upright with the stock between his knees he fitted the mouth of the Sprite bottle over the muzzle and eased it back over the ramp sight about three inches down on the barrel. Then he unstuck the ends of the duct tape and taped the neck of the bottle tightly against the barrel. “Poor man’s silencer. Could I get a real silencer? Sure, could get one easy. But get caught with a silencer and it’s the same as a machine gun—automatic life, no arguing. Get caught with a tonic bottle? They don’t arrest you for that, ’less you throw it onna street.”

  McKeach lifted the duffel bag onto the junction of the two tree
s framing his vantage and plumped it until he was satisfied it made a soft but solid rest. He rested the front of the stock on the duffel bag so that the pale green Sprite bottle hung clear of the other side of the dark green duffel bag under the dull green foliage. Peering through the rear leaf sight over where he knew the front ramp to be inside the bottle he zeroed the muzzle on a point about three feet above the level of the bench seat at the edge of the walkway thirty feet away. Then he swung the muzzle over to the left so that when he squinted down the barrel again it was pointed at about the place where the midthorax of a man a good deal taller than average and walking briskly would be as he passed the bench. His watch read 5:42.

  He picked up the walkie-talkie and made sure he had not turned it off, fiddling with the squelch control until the hiss, barely audible a foot away, reassured him. He put the walkie-talkie back on the duffel bag and with the carbine resting on his knee and the bag sat back against the tree. Then, knowing he had done well what he had to do to make arrangements for the work he’d come to do, McKeach was content, and settled down within himself to wait for the others to appear.

  Naughton slowly insinuated the right front wheel of the Pontiac over the sloping curb of Parkman Drive, steering under the overhanging tree limbs so that when he was finished the car lay all but hidden on the blind side of the curve where the drive northbound straightens out along the southwesterly side of Jamaica Pond. The limbs of the trees that had lifted over the hood and windshield and then dragged across the roof and trunk now drooped behind the bumper and the registration plate. He shifted into Park and picked up the walkie-talkie. He depressed the push-to-talk button. “Checking position,” he said.

  McKeach picked up the walkie-talkie and depressed push-to-talk. “Aces,” he said, “sit tight now.”

  At 5:54 McKeach heard the shuffling-scraping sounds of at least two heavy individuals walking fast on asphalt pavement in deep-treaded footgear, and the chuffing sounds they made as they breathed rapidly and deeply for maximum aerobic effort. Somewhere far off behind the trees at McKeach’s right shoulder an ambulance sirened its approach to one of the hospitals on Brookline Avenue and he ignored it absolutely, concentrating on the sounds of his work approaching.

  Now he was seeing the forms of the walkers large and black-clothed indistinctly, hooded there-and-then-not-there-and-then-there-again among the overhanging branches, maybe twenty yards away, and with his left forefinger he pushed the safety button at the front of the trigger guard on the M2 all the way through to the right. Another siren picked up to the northwest on Route 9, commuters were getting hurt. He ignored that one as well; he focused on the walkers huffing, breath so heavy with vapor that he could see it now and then in little white puffs before he could see their faces clearly, now coming up around the walkway curve and walking fast up to the bench and when the eyepatched outside one was in mid-stride, left HeavyHanded hand and foot down, right HeavyHanded hand and right foot coming forward, McKeach having taken a deep breath released part of it and squeezed the trigger once and then again. The first explosion muffled down into the soft semblance of a chest cough before the bullet tore through the base of the Sprite bottle and the second round followed right after it, somewhat louder, both of them drilling the eyepatched man outside very nicely at mid-chest, close in to the sternum, lifting him off his feet in mid-stride up into the air backward, McKeach muttering, “knock him right flat on his ass,” and then short-arcing the Sprite-bottled muzzle over as the man on the inside floundered to stop, gaping at his flailing partner, puffing “unh unh unh, wha’,” stunned, knowing-and-yet-not-knowing what was taking place; shot him twice too, each round now louder than the one before it, the same places, “just right of the heart,” taking him back off his feet, and then swung the muzzle back again and zeroed in again on the eyepatched outside man slapped down twisted on the pavement at an angle that displayed the right side of his hooded head to McKeach at good advantage. Shot him twice more right there, in that head, the bottom of the Sprite bottle now blown out wide open and the report of each shot now as loud and shocking as the motorcycle backfires Boston each spring learns again to disregard; “That should do it, shouldn’t it, two more inna fuckin’ head.” And then the last step: he swung the muzzle back again as the second hooded man struggled idiotically against the bullets in him to sit up, regain his balance and attend, and shot him twice more in the face, turning it at once to meat—“You be wantin’ fries with thet?”

  Then without looking further at the men he had shot down, McKeach, sniffling, annoyed, his nose running a little, “time for this shit,” sleeved it: reset the carbine on safety; tore the blown-out bottle off the barrel—“got to remember to resight it”—stuffed it in the duffel; gathered up six spent cartridges—two had popped out into the tree roots but without panicking he found them, “nothing like experience”; dumped them all into the bag; then picked up the walkie-talkie, hitting push-to-talk and saying into it, “Time for coffee, babycakes.”

  Back came Naughton’s reply fast: “Gotcha, Aces. On the way.”

  18

  SOME FIVE HOURS LATER, shortly after 11:00 A.M. on the fourth Thursday in April, Hinchey at the rented grey metal desk in front of Farrier’s put down his ballpoint pen and shut off his black Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder. He took a swallow of coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts travel mug on his desk. Then he removed his black earphones and turned the onionskin transcript he had been verifying face down on his desk. He revolved his castered swivel chair so that he faced Jack Farrier at the identical desk behind him.

  Farrier, wearing black earphones, sat head bowed over the mid-section of a volume of transcript assembled with gold cotter pins and covered with clear plastic, using a retracted Parker Jotter ballpoint to follow rapidly down the wide right margin of the triple-spaced pages the text of the taped conversation he was playing on his Ampex recorder. A white mug of tawny coffee steamed between the recorder and the stack of eleven boxed tapes on its left.

  That morning eight other middle-aged men in dress shirts and ties occupied other Officemaster Rentals desks—two chairs were vacant—in the rented office on the third floor of the McClatchy Medical and Professional Building on Route 1 in Norwood. Each of the men had a pair of black earphones connected to a black Ampex recorder on his desk, along with a stack of transcripts and a stack of boxed audiotapes, and was dealing with them in more or less the same fashion as Hinchey and Farrier.

  Spring with a second consecutive warm day was becoming serious around Boston and the sunlight through the window beside Farrier’s desk in the southeast corner of the office caused him to yawn and fight off dozing. It reflected at the same time blindingly off the clear plastic cover of the top volume of the eleven transcripts stacked on the desk to his right, and glared on the white paper in front of him. He squinted and blinked behind his black-framed glasses. During those few moments Hinchey looked on, delaying interruption; Farrier, trying not to fall asleep, without lifting his gaze from the page irritably shook his head twice and rubbed his forehead with his right hand once, each time as the reels continued to turn, then having to catch himself hurriedly and turn a page, unaware of Hinchey’s scrutiny.

  Outside, traffic on both sides of Route I was light but the driver of a southbound American Medical Response ambulance traveling unimpeded in the passing lane at about the normal speed of 45 miles an hour used his emergency lights and blipped his whooping French-police, horn-and-siren combination to freeze crossing traffic at the intersection just north of the McClatchy Building so that he could run the red light showing in his direction. The noise was abrupt and shrill enough to penetrate Farrier’s concentration. Without looking up he poised his left hand over the switch panel on the recorder; when the pen in his right hand reached the foot of the page he was reading he pushed the pause button on the recorder. Then he flipped the transcript face down and picked up the coffee mug, bringing it to his mouth for a deep draft. Dropping the pen he pushed back with his feet from the desk, using
his right hand to lift off the earphones and put them on the desk. He shook his head, blinking several times, and said “Ahhhhh,” before focusing on Hinchey. “You, ah, rang?” he said, yawning and putting the mug down down before stretching both arms straight up above his head.

  “Got something I think you’d better hear,” Hinchey said, concern showing on his face.

  “Ahh-awp,” Farrier said, closing his mouth quickly and jerking his thumb toward the stacks of boxed audiotapes next to the Ampex on his desk, then making a sweeping gesture to comprehend the stacked transcripts as well. “Already goin’ deaf ’n’ blind, stuff on my own desk I got in front of me to get through, and you want me to listen to yours? Gimme a fuckin’ break, willya? Don’t make me do everything for you.”

  “It’s not that … I already done this once,” Hinchey said. “I just ——”

  “Look,” Farrier said, “if you’re now findin’ you really can’t understand what the hell they’re sayin’, I know I said ‘deadline, unbreakable deadline, no exceptions for no one’; that anything that you wanted enhancement on, it hadda go in by a certain date. And I also know that date’s gone by. Went by two weeks ago, almost three. But I already bent that rule, three tapes for Taylor and four for MacIntyre, decided they now didn’t think the tapes they had matched the transcripts, and as much of a pain in the ass as it is gettin’ those prima donna ‘oh-we’re-so-overworked’ technicians down in Maryland, wherever the hell they are, ramped up again, I’d a damn sight rather get them pissed off now ’n have a jury down the line a year from now, these cases ever do get tried, sayin’ to the judge and prosecutor, ‘Hey, these tapes aren’t sayin’ what these transcripts say they say—these guys aren’t guilty.’

  “No, that we definitely do not want. So if you got one you now find you’re not sure you know what’s on it, I’ll bend the rule again to help you out. But you should’ve—”