Darkness, Take My Hand

by Dennis Lehane

  “Something’s wrong in those files, Devin. I know it.”

  He sighed. “Where’s Angie?”

  “Asleep.”

  “Alone?” He chuckled.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  In the backround I could hear Oscar’s guttural guffaw.

  “Spit it out,” I said.

  Devin’s amused sigh followed the squawk of the walkie-talkie. “Me and Oscar just made a little side bet.”

  “Pertaining to?”

  “You and your partner and how long you’ll be able to stay cooped up together before one of two things happens.”

  “And those things would be?”

  “I say you’ll kill each other, but Oscar says you’ll get buck wild before the weekend.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Aren’t you guys late for your political correctness training session?”

  “Police department calls it Human Sensitivity Dialogues,” Devin said, “and me and Sergeant Lee decided we’re sensitive enough.”

  “Of course.”

  “You sound like you don’t believe us,” Oscar chimed in.

  “Oh, no. You’re posterboys for the New Sensitive Male.”

  “Yeah?” Devin said. “Think it’ll help us pick up chicks?”

  After I hung up with Devin, I called Grace.

  I’d been stalling most of the night. Grace was mature and understanding, but even so I wasn’t sure how I’d explain moving in with Angie to her. I’m not a particularly possessive person, yet I’m not sure how well I’d take it if Grace called me and said she was shacking up for a few days with a male friend.

  As it happened, the issue didn’t come up immediately.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Grace?”

  “I’m not sure I feel like talking to you, Patrick.”

  “Why?”

  “You damn well know why.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t.”

  “If you’re going to play games with me, I’ll hang up.”

  “Grace, I have no idea what you’re talking—”

  She hung up.

  I stared at the phone for a minute, considered banging it into the wall several times. Then I took a few deep breaths and called her back.

  “What?” she said.

  “Don’t hang up.”

  “That depends on how much bullshit you try to sling.”

  “Grace, I can’t respond to something if I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  “Is my life in danger?” she said.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Answer the question. Is my life in danger?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Then why are you having me followed?”

  Canyons opened in the pit of my stomach and ice melted against my spine.

  “I’m not having you followed, Grace.”

  Evandro? Kevin Hurlihy? The mystery killer? Who?

  “Bullshit,” she said. “That psychotic in the trenchcoat didn’t get this idea all on his own and just go—”

  “Bubba?” I said.

  “You know very fucking well Bubba.”

  “Grace, slow down. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  She exhaled slowly through the receiver. “I’m in the St. Botolph Restaurant with Annabeth and my daughter—my daughter, Patrick—and there’s a guy sitting at the bar checking me out. And he’s not being really subtle about it, okay, but he wasn’t threatening either. And then—”

  “What did this guy look like?”

  “What? He looked sort of like Larry Bird before Madison Avenue got a hold of him—tall, very pale, horrible hair, long jaw, and big Adam’s apple.”

  Kevin. Fucking Kevin. Sitting a few feet away from Grace and Mae and Annabeth.

  Considering various ways he could crack their spines.

  “I’ll kill him,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Go on, Grace. Please.”

  “So he finally works up his nerve and gets up from the bar and comes over to the table to try out whatever pathetic pickup line he’d use, and then, then your certifiable mutant friend comes out of nowhere and drags him out of the restaurant by his hair. In full view of thirty people, he banged the man’s face off a hydrant several times.”

  “Oh, my,” I said.

  “’Oh my’?” she said. “That’s all you can say. Oh my? Patrick, the hydrant was just on the other side of the window from our table. Mae saw the whole thing. He smashed that man’s face in, and she watched. She’s been crying all day. And that poor, poor man, he—”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know. Some friends of his pulled up in a car and that…fucking lunatic and some midget henchman of his just stood back and watched as they dragged the man into a car and drove off.”

  “That ‘poor, poor man’ Grace, is a contract killer for the Irish Mafia. His name’s Kevin Hurlihy and he told me this morning he’d hurt you to fuck up my life.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish I were.”

  A long hard silence hung over the line between us.

  “And now,” Grace said eventually, “he’s in my life? In my daughter’s life, Patrick? In my daughter’s?”

  “Grace, I—”

  “What?” she said. “What, what, what, what? Huh? That freak in the trenchcoat, he’s supposed to be my guardian angel? He’s supposed to make me feel safe?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You brought this into my life. This violence. You…Jesus!”

  “Grace, listen—”

  “I’ll call you later,” she said and her voice was distant and small.

  “I’m at Angie’s.”

  “What?”

  “I’m staying here tonight.”

  “At Angie’s,” she said.

  “It’s possible she’s the next target of the guy who killed Jason Warren and Kara Rider.”

  “At Angie’s,” she said again. “I’ll call you later maybe.”

  She hung up.

  No good-bye. No “take care.” Just a “maybe.”

  It took her twenty-two minutes to call back. I was sitting at the table, staring at photographs of Hardiman and Rugglestone and Cal Morrison until they all blurred in my head and joined as one, the same questions nagging my brain, the answers, I knew, lying in front of me, but floating simultaneously, just beyond the limits of my vision.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “How’s Angie?” she said.

  “Scared.”

  “I don’t blame her.” She sighed into the phone. “How are you, Patrick?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Look, I won’t apologize for being pissed earlier.”

  “I don’t expect you to.”

  “I want you in my life, Patrick…”

  “Good.”

  “—but I’m not sure I want your life in my life.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  The line hummed, empty, and I found myself eyeing Angie’s cigarette pack, wanting one very badly.

  “Your life,” Grace said. “The violence. You seek it out, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “The other day, I went into the library. I looked up those newspaper articles on you from last year. When that woman got killed.”

  “And?”

  “And I read about you,” she said. “And I saw the photos of you kneeling by that woman and the man you shot. You were covered in blood.”

  “It was hers.”

  “What?”

  “The blood,” I said. “It was Jenna’s. The woman who got killed. Maybe some from Curtis Moore, the guy I wounded. But not mine.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. But as I was looking at pictures of you and reading about you, I felt, well, ‘Who is this guy?’ I don’t know the guy in those photos. I don’t know the guy who shoots people. I don’t know this pers
on. It was so strange.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Grace.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” Her voice was sharp.

  I didn’t answer at first.

  Eventually, I said, “No.”

  So easy, the first lie I ever told her.

  “You’re capable of it though, aren’t you?”

  “We all are.”

  “Maybe so, Patrick. Maybe so. But most of us don’t choose situations that force the issue. You do.”

  “I didn’t choose this killer in my life, Grace. I didn’t choose Kevin Hurlihy in it either.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you did. Your whole life is a conscious attempt to confront violence, Patrick. You can’t beat him.”

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  I reached for the pack of cigarettes, slid them across the table until they were in front of me.

  “I’m not trying to,” I said.

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  I removed a cigarette from the pack, tapped it in the center of the fan of photos of Hardiman and Rugglestone’s burned corpse, a crucified Cal Morrison.

  “Where’s this conversation going, Grace?”

  “You hang around with people like…Bubba. And Devin and Oscar. And you live in a world of such violence and surround yourself with violent people.”

  “It’ll never touch you.”

  “It already has. Shit. And I know you’d die before you’d let anyone harm me physically. I know that.”

  “But…”

  “But at what price? What happens to you? You can’t clean sewers for a living and come home smelling like soap, Patrick. It’ll eat at you, as long as you do this work. It’ll hollow you out.”

  “Has it so far?”

  For a long dark moment, I heard only silence.

  “Not yet,” she said. “But it’s a miracle. How many miracles do you have left, Patrick?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and my voice was raw.

  “I don’t either,” she said. “But I don’t like the odds.”

  “Grace—”

  “I’ll talk to you soon,” she said and her voice stumbled around the soon.

  “Okay.”

  “G’night.”

  She hung up, and I listened to the dial tone. Then I crushed the cigarette between my fingers and pushed the pack away from me.

  “Where are you?” I asked Bubba when I finally reached him on his cell phone.

  “Outside one of Jack Rouse’s chop shops in Southie.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Jack’s in there and so’s Kevin and so’s most of their crew.”

  “You fucked up Kevin good today,” I said.

  “Christmas came early, yeah.” He chuckled. “Ol’ Kev’s sucking his boiled dinner through a straw for a while, buddy.”

  “You broke his jaw?”

  “Nose, too. Got the two-for-one special.”

  I said, “But, Bubba—in front of Grace?”

  “Why not? Lemme tell you something, Patrick, that’s one ungrateful woman you’re dating.”

  “You were expecting a tip?” I said.

  “I was expecting a smile,” he said. “A thank you or just a grateful roll of the eyes would have been acceptable.”

  “You bludgeoned a man in front of her daughter, Bubba.”

  “So? He had it coming.”

  “Grace didn’t know that and Mae’s too young to understand.”

  “What can I say, Patrick? Bad day for Kev, good day for me. Oh fucking well.”

  I sighed. Trying to talk social conventions and concepts of morality to Bubba is like trying to explain cholesterol to a Big Mac.

  “Is Nelson still watching Grace?” I said.

  “Like a hawk.”

  “Until all this is over, Bubba, he can’t take his eyes off her.”

  “Don’t think he wants to. I think he’s falling in love with the woman.”

  I almost shuddered. “So what’re Kevin and Jack doing?”

  “Packing. Looks like they’re taking a trip.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll find out.”

  I could hear a slightly deflated edge in his voice.

  “Hey, Bubba.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for looking out for Grace and Mae.”

  His tone lightened. “Anytime. You’d do the same for me.”

  Probably a bit more delicately, but…

  “Of course,” I said. “Should you maybe lay low a while?”

  “Why?”

  “Kevin might come back at you.”

  He laughed. “So fucking what?” He snorted. “Kevin.”

  “What about Jack? He’ll probably have to save face, whack you for banging up one of his men.”

  Bubba sighed. “Jack is all bullshit, Patrick. That’s something you never got. He’s made his bones, he’s dangerous, sure, but only to people who’re vulnerable. Not to someone like me. He knows to take me out he’d have to use fucking humungous amounts of manpower and be ready for an all-out war if he misses me. He’s like…when I served in Beirut, they gave us rifles with no bullets. That’s Jack. He’s a rifle with no bullets. And I’m this deranged Shiite Muslim motherfucker driving a truck full of bombs around his embassy. I’m death. And Jack’s too pussy to fuck with death. I mean, this is the guy who got his first taste of power running EEPA.”

  “Eepa?” I said.

  “E-E-P-A. The Edward Everett Protection Association. The neighborhood vigilante group. ’Member? Back in the seventies?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Shit, yeah. They were all good citizens, all geared up to protect their neighborhood from niggers and spics and people who looked at ’em funny. Hell, they rousted me twice. Your old man gave me an ass-whupping, boy, that—”

  “My old man?”

  “Yeah. Seems funny now, looking back on it. Hell, the whole group only lasted maybe six months, but they made punks like me pay when we got caught, I’ll give ’em that.”

  “When was this?” I said as some of it came back to me a bit—the meetings in my father’s living room, the sound of loud, self-righteous voices and ice clinking in glasses and hollow threats delivered in refeRenee to the car thieves and B&E operators and graffiti artists of the neighborhood.

  “I don’t know.” Bubba yawned. “I was stealing hubcaps back then, so I was probably just out of the crib. We were maybe, like, eleven or twelve. Probably seventy-four or-five. Right around busing, yeah.”

  “And my father and Jack Rouse…”

  “Were the leaders. And then there was, like, lemme see—Paul Burns and Terry Climstich and some small guy always wore a tie, didn’t live in the neighborhood long, and like, oh yeah, two women. I’ll never forget it—they bust me clipping caps off Paul Burns’s car and they’re putting the boots to me, no big deal, but I look up and I see two chicks doing it. I mean, Christ.”

  “Who were the women?” I said. “Bubba?”

  “Emma Hurlihy and Diedre Rider. You believe that? A couple of chicks kicking my ass. Crazy world. Huh?”

  “Gotta go, Bubba. Call you soon. Okay?”

  I hung up and dialed Bolton.

  28

  “What did these people do?” Angie said.

  We were standing over her coffee table with Bolton, Devin, Oscar, Erdham, and Fields, all of us staring down at copies of a photo Fields had acquired by waking the editor of The Dorchester Community Sun, a local weekly that had been covering the neighborhoods since 1962.

  The photo was from a puff piece done on neighborhood watch groups the week of June 12, 1974. Under the headline NEIGHBORS WHO CARE, the article gushed about the daring exploits of the EEPA, as well as the Adams Corner Neighborhood Watch in Neponset, the Savin Hill Community League, the Field’s Corner Citizens Against Crime, and the Ashmont Civic Pride Protectors.

  My father was quoted in the third column: “I’m a fireman, and one thing firemen know is that you have to sto
p a fire in the low floors, before it gets out of control.”

  “Your old man had a feel for the sound bite,” Oscar said. “Even back then.”

  “It was one of his favorite sayings. He’d had years of practice with it.”

  Fields had blown up the photo of the EEPA members and there they stood on the basketball court of the Ryan Playground, trying to look mean and friendly at the same time.

  My father and Jack Rouse were kneeling at the center of the group, on either side of an EEPA sign with shamrocks in the upper corners. They both looked like they were posing for football cards, as if emulating the stance of defensive linemen, fists dug into the ground, opposite hands holding up the sign.

  Behind them stood a very young Stan Timpson, the only person wearing a tie, followed from left to right by Diedre Rider, Emma Hurlihy, Paul Burns, and Terry Climstich.

  “What’s this?” I said and pointed at a tiny bar of black to the right of the photo.

  “The photographer’s name,” Fields said.

  “Can we magnify it somehow, get a look at it?”

  “I’m ahead of you, Mr. Kenzie.”

  We turned and looked at him.

  “Diandra Warren took that photograph.”

  She looked like death.

  Her skin was the color of white formica and the clothes hanging to her skeletal frame were beseiged by wrinkles.

  “Tell me about the Edward Everett Protection Association, Diandra. Please,” I said.

  “The what?” She stared at me with bleary eyes. As she stood before me, I felt I was looking at someone I’d known in youth but hadn’t seen in several decades, only to discover that time had not only worn her down, but had laid waste to her without mercy.

  I placed the photograph on the bar in front of her.

  “Your husband, my father, Jack Rouse, Emma Hurlihy, Diedre Rider.”

  “That was fifteen or twenty years ago,” she said.

  “Twenty,” Bolton said.

  “Why didn’t you recognize my name?” I said. “You knew my father.”

  She cocked her head, looked at me as if I’d just claimed she was a long-lost sister.

  “I never knew your father, Mr. Kenzie.”

  I pointed at the photo. “There he is, Doctor Warren. Standing a foot away from your husband.”

  “That’s your father?” She stared at the photo.

  “Yes. And that’s Jack Rouse beside him. And just over his left shoulder, that’s Kevin Hurlihy’s mother.”