by Chuck Hogan
53
Home
DOUG WALKED OFF THE T at the Community College stop and crossed over Rutherford Avenue on the elevated walkway, seeing the soaked Town before him, the shoulders of its twin hills shrugged against the rain.
He walked along Austin Street between the rink and the Foodmaster plaza toward Main Street, umbrella people nodding at this drenched beat cop passing them on the sidewalk, kids in slickers and rubber boots staring up at the man in blue. Doug didn't see any of it. The only thing he noticed other than the bricks at his feet was the State Police helicopter cutting through the rain over the city across the river, looking for him.
The bell over the front door giggled as he entered the flower shop. He heard harp and fiddle music, "A Little Bit of Heaven" serenading the thirsty plants and squatting stone gargoyles. Doug stood alone among the pale blooms for a few airless moments, until Rusty, the Florist's guy, pushed through the black curtain hanging over the door behind the back counter.
He wore a green tracksuit and was eating a lettuce sandwich out of tinfoil. He looked at the sodden blue cop in the store as just another customer, until he recognized the face.
For a moment it seemed that Doug wouldn't have to shoot the ex-IRA man. Rusty had nothing but a cold sandwich to defend himself with, and Doug thought the guy might just bend to the will of force and time and step aside.
But a glance at Doug's empty hands showed him that Rusty had too much pride. The Florist's guy dropped his sandwich and lunged for something under the counter.
Doug cleared his holster and fired twice, the white-haired Irishman falling back against the wall to the floor. Doug passed the counter on the way to the back, Rusty facedown and gasping for air.
Doug pushed through the black curtain gun-first. The Irish music was louder there, warbling out of an old turntable. The glass-doored walk-in cooler was empty, Fergie's workbench standing across the room.
Doug heard a toilet flush. He turned toward the latch door as it opened.
Fergie wandered out carrying a newspaper, wearing his tight, hooded sweatshirt, long work pants, and maroon suede slippers. He saw the cop there with the gun in his hand and at first just looked annoyed. Then he pulled off his reading glasses for a clear look at the cop's face. The half-glasses fell against his chest.
He said Doug's name and Doug filled the air between them with smoke. Doug did not stop firing until Fergus Coln lay beneath the workbench, barefoot among the stem clippings, condolence ribbons unspooling over him.
It was a while before the Irish music returned to Doug's ears. He never heard the bell over the front door.
Two gunshots punched him high in the back of his vest. Another round bit into his left rear thigh, a fourth skipping off his shoulder to slice into his neck.
Doug twisted and dropped to the floor, firing from there, aiming back through the curtain into the store. He heard something fall, then the giggle of the doorbell.
He pushed himself to his feet. The lead in his leg burned and blood was spilling down the front of his shirt over his fake silver-and-blue badge. He felt a warm, pulsing hole in his neck and closed it with his palm, pressing hard and hobbling to the doorway, tearing down the black curtain.
Rusty hadn't moved, dead where he had fallen. Among the floor pots in front lay a body on its side, a young guy quaking, his black boots thumping the tile. A tear in the back of his T-shirt was blooming red, just over the belt of his fatigues. Doug limped over, his left hand holding the blood into his neck, his right hand holding his gun.
One of Jem's camo kids. The giggling bell had been the other one getting away.
Doug stood over him, waiting, but the kid refused to look up, lying there shaking in the scummy pot water he had overturned.
Doug holstered his gun and started away, leaving the kid twitching on the floor.
* * *
FRAWLEY SAT INSIDE THE McDonald's, still trying to count all the shots he'd fired. There was going to be an FBI investigation as well as civil liability hearings, and he would be held accountable for each and every round. He had already surrendered his Remington for ballistics.
"I'm going to be fired," he said.
Dino was drinking a strawberry shake next to him. "Easy, now."
"Look out there." The street was filled with umbrella-toting city, state, and federal lawmen, Suffolk County coroners, city hall lawyers, and news crews pressing against BPD sawhorses. "Shots fired in Fenway Park. A goddamn grenade blowing up a car." Frawley sat up. "I killed a man in the street."
"You shot him pretty good, but technically I think it was that crazy mofo's hand grenades that cashed out his tab."
Frawley's wrinkled FBI vest lay before him. "They can't clip me right away. Wouldn't look good. Got to wait for the inquest to run its course. Transfer me somewhere cold in the meantime."
"You at all curious about that other one down the street?"
Frawley grimaced. "Okay."
"It was Elden. The one in the Suburban, that was Magloan-- with what looks like the entire take in the trunk, minus whatever got blown up out there with Coughlin."
Frawley waited. "And MacRay?"
"We'll find him. Bringing in the Canine Unit to search the ballpark."
Frawley looked at the half-eaten breakfasts left on the tables by the windows, empty high chairs, open newspapers.
"Dean," he said, unable to look the older man in the eye. "I did some stupid things with this. I did some things I probably should have run by you first."
Dino looked at him, quiet, maybe counting slowly to ten.
"Nothing illegal," Frawley stressed. "But I pushed it. I put myself inside this. I got involved."
Dino took a long draw on his shake, then set the cup aside. He stood. "You're in shock, Frawl. Couple of hours, we'll talk. Rather-- you'll talk."
Dino walked away, leaving Frawley staring out the window, thinking about cold weather. He still had his law degree. Maybe this McDonald's was hiring.
Outside, he watched two detectives jump into an unmarked Grand Marquis, driving fast out of the parking lot.
Frawley read excitement on the faces of the remaining patrolmen. He pulled himself together and went outside. He asked the youngest-looking uniform what was going on.
"The Florist's shop in Charlestown," said the cop. "A bloodbath, gangland style. Looks like somebody got Fergie."
Frawley's mind seized up like a fist. All that time he'd been sitting there on his ass in a McDonald's, feeling sorry for himself--
Claire Keesey.
He took off running across the street, back up Yawkey toward his car.
* * *
DOUG PRESSED THE BELL again and hung his head low so that the badge on his hat was in the spyglass.
Claire opened the door to the cop. She saw Doug's face and his bloody hand at his neck and her hand went to her mouth, eyes widening.
Doug's first step over her threshold was okay. He faltered on the second step and went down hard on the third.
Claire screamed.
He could not move his hand from his neck. Pressure was the only thing keeping him alive. This slow throb against his palm was his clock running down.
He got himself into a sitting position and used his free hand and the heels of his shoes to push back from the open door. Making it to her place was all he'd thought about in the rain. Now he just wanted to push in deeper. He got to the small table outside her kitchen and slumped back against the legs of a chair.
He went away for a little while. Then he came back.
"Made it," he said. He needed a yawn in the worst way, but couldn't get one.
Claire came toward him. Impossibly tall, her hands covering her mouth, eyes screaming tears.
Doug fought down a swallow. "Why?"
She started to kneel, hesitated, remained standing.
"In your garden." He spoke in hoarse bursts. "That last time. I wanted you... to tell me not to do it. I wanted you... to stop me."
She shook her head
in horror.
"I wanted you... to give me a reason..."
"But nothing I could have said..."
She still didn't get him. "I would have done... anything for you. Even save myself."
She slipped to her knees, sitting on her heels at his outstretched feet, mystified. "Why? Why leave that to me?"
And there, in her bewilderment, he recognized his grave mistake. He had surrendered himself to Claire, just as Krista had to him. When you give someone the power to save you, you give them the power to destroy you as well. That was what Frank G. had been all about-- not relinquishing that grip on yourself.
A man coming at him down the front hall, gun out. The sleuth, Frawley. Doug tightened his grip on the side of his neck.
* * *
FRAWLEY WENT IN THE open door, seeing the trail of blood and rain, his SIG-Sauer out of his armpit. MacRay was in a cop uniform, slumped against a chair on the floor, Claire kneeling before him.
MacRay's gun was in his holster. One hand was wet red and clamped over a neck wound, blood dripping from his bent elbow to the lemon yellow carpet. No grenades on his belt.
MacRay, dying, frowned at Frawley's gun, then at Frawley himself.
Frawley came up behind his SIG to MacRay's side, smelling blood, reaching across and tugging the Beretta from MacRay's cop holster while MacRay sat there and watched him take it. Frawley backed away past Claire, easing up on his aim, putting the Beretta in his back pocket. He saw a telephone on the table and circled to it, picked it up.
"Don't."
MacRay's voice was as bloodless as his face. Frawley put down the phone, moving back into MacRay's line of sight.
Claire turned her head to look up at Frawley through tears. "Did you do this?"
Her words cut him. She was asking, Did you do this because of me?
MacRay worked hard to breathe, harder still to speak. "She dimed me?"
He seemed to know the truth already. Frawley said, "That's right."
MacRay swallowed with difficulty. He looked at Claire until his eyes fell, then blinked back to Frawley. "Why let it go so far? Why not take us... at the hotel?"
"What hotel?" said Frawley. "I didn't find out anything until an hour beforehand."
MacRay looked hard at Claire again. Something was going on there.
Frawley said, "We're talking about Coughlin's sister, right?"
MacRay's eyes came back to Frawley, so still and staring that Frawley thought MacRay was gone. Then MacRay nodded. He seemed to relax.
Frawley's heart was pumping hard enough for both of them. "You got the Florist."
MacRay blinked. "Tell Dez I did it for him. For the Town."
Frawley wanted to feel nothing for the crook, but to be in a room with a dying man is to die a little yourself. "You'll have to tell him."
The only reaction was a flicker in MacRay's eyes.
"The money." said Frawley. "Where's the rest of your stash?"
MacRay was falling into himself.
"Where's the money?" pressed Frawley.
Claire said, "Leave him alone."
MacRay was going. Frawley backed away, heavy-legged. He picked up the phone and dialed 911.
* * *
SHE CAME FORWARD AND took his empty hand, holding it tenderly in her own, as though the hand itself was the thing that was dying.
Doug said, "You were never going away. With me. Were you."
She held his gaze. Her wet-eyed expression said no.
He felt love streaming out of his hand into hers like electricity.
She would find it in the spring. The money he had buried like doomed hope in her garden. Like a note he'd left for her. Maybe she could use it to fund her work at the Boys and Girls Club. Maybe in time she'd think of him differently.
His left hand fell away from his neck as he focused on her face. He wanted her to be the last earthly thing he would see.
Even if a thing is doomed-- there is that moment of absurd hope that is worth the fall, that is worth everything.
* * *
CLAIRE FELT THE SHOCK of lifelessness in his limp hand. She dropped it out of fright and would only later wilt at the shame of letting him go. Right now a dead man was lying on her floor and her mind was choking on this.
Why had he come to her to die? Dragging himself into her kitchen, just as he had dragged himself into her life. She despised him for the mess he had made, the blood on her floor like the stain on her soul. And yet. And yet as she looked at him now, she could not help but feel for the motherless boy inside. For Adam Frawley too, the vengeful one whispering into the telephone-- these two lovesick sons she had gotten caught between. But for the men they had become, she had only scorn.
She recalled a news story about a woman who was accidentally knocked overboard a moored cruise ship. She came up to the surface unhurt, treading water, but trapped by the tide pushing the massive ship back against the dock. She would have been crushed to death if she hadn't wriggled out of her evening dress and kicked off her heels, swimming straight down into the blackness, feeling her way blindly along the hull to the deep bottom keel, then pulling herself past it and kicking free, lungs bursting as she surfaced on the other side, naked and alive.
Had Claire made it to the other side? Was she coming up for air now?
The police were already in her foyer, and she reached for Doug's hand one last time before they were separated forever. His body had settled against the chair, his hand impossibly heavy now and wanting to fall. She noticed dirt under his fingernails and darkening his cuticles, and thought immediately of her garden. She couldn't imagine any reason why he would have gone there-- nor why she felt so certain that he had.
Walk to the water until you can feel it on your toes. Then take off the blindfold.
She felt the same sensation of passing as she had watching her young brother die: of something coming to nothing, yes, but at the same time, a conferring of responsibility, a covenant passed from the dead to the living.
Claire was taking off the blindfold now. She looked deep into Doug's dimming eyes, reminded of hearth fires and how, even after the flames died, the glowing cinders were slow to cool. She wondered what it was that Doug MacRay saw as the glow of his life faded. She wondered what died last in the heart of a thief.
54
End Beginning
"CAN'T DO IT," SAID Jem. "I can't fucking do it. He's turning my fucking stomach with this. We ordered these sandwiches what, twelve hours ago? You couldn't get cold cuts like the rest of us, Magloan? Sitting here with your soggy-ass steak sub, these fucking limp peppers."
Dez said, "Never mind that he's been eating the thing for like, three hours."
"This isn't eating anymore," said Jem, "this is lovemaking. He's getting it on with a steak sub. Somebody cover my young, impressionable eyes."
Dez said, "Joanie does usually go around with a smile on her face."
"Oh-- no question Gloansy gives primo head," Jem said. "I can vouch for that."
Doug shushed their groaning laughter, not very concerned about the audio sensors inside the vault's antitamper package, but careful just the same. The four of them sitting on the floor behind the teller counter in dusty blue jumpsuits, the bank brightening with morning light, trucks and cars rumbling outside through Kenmore Square.
"Know what we need?" said Gloansy, still munching. "Those headsets with ear wires, like in the movies. So we can talk while we're in different rooms."
"Headsets are gay," said Jem. "You'd look like a girl folding pants at the Gap. Walkie-talkies-- that's a man's radio."
"I'm talking hands-free," said Gloansy. "Gun in one hand, bag of cash in the other, capeesh?"
"Do not say capeesh. You sound like a douche." Jem got to his feet, stretched. "See, this is too fucking relaxed here. This isn't robbing. This, we could do back at my place. Why going in on the prowl sucks. All night, cutting a hole in the fucking ceiling. Like working for a living."
"Prowl is smart," said Doug.
&nbs
p; "Prowl is pussy," said Jem.
Doug checked the wall clock. "You want strong, kid, we go strong in about ten minutes. Let's pack this shit up."
Gloansy said, "But I haven't finished my snack."
Jem snatched it out of his hands and mashed it, threw it into their trash bag. "You finished now? 'Cause I got a fucking bank to rob."
