Darkness, Take My Hand

by Dennis Lehane

  I’d said I’d shoot them to get information, and at the time I’d felt it. But it was real easy to say and real easy to feel standing in a hospital waiting room, for distanced from the actual human flesh and bone and blood I was threatening.

  Now, here were two bloodied human beings rendered completely helpless and at my mercy. And they weren’t vague concepts, they were breathing. And shaking.

  At my mercy.

  I left Bubba and Phil and walked down the alley toward Kevin. He watched me come and seemed to gather strength from it. Maybe he thought that I was the weak link here.

  When Grace had told me he’d approached her table, I’d said I’d kill him. And at that moment, if he’d walked into the room, I would have. That was rage.

  This was torture.

  As I neared him, he sucked air and shook his head as if to clear it and then fastened his numb eyes on my own.

  Kevin tortures, a voice in my head whispered. He kills. He enjoys it. He’d give you no mercy. So you owe him none.

  “Kevin,” I said and lowered myself until I was on one knee in front of him, “this is bad. You know this is bad. You don’t tell me what I need to know, Bubba will do the Spanish Inquisition on your head.”

  “Fuck you.” His cracked voice broke through gritted teeth. “Fuck you, Kenzie. Okay?”

  “No, Kev. No. You don’t help me out here, you’re going to be fucked up ten different ways. Fat Freddy gave me carte blanche with you. And Jack.”

  The left half of his face sagged a bit.

  “It’s true, Kev.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You think we’d be here if it wasn’t? You let Vincent Patriso’s granddaughter get shot.”

  “I didn’t—”

  I shook my head. “That’s how he sees it. Doesn’t matter what you say now.”

  His eyes were red and bulging as he shook his head and stared up at me.

  “Kevin,” I said softly, “tell me what happened between EEPA and Hardiman and Rugglestone. Who’s the third guy?”

  “Ask Jack.”

  “I will,” I said. “But I’m asking you first.”

  He nodded and the noose bit into his neck and his throat gurgled. I pulled the rope back out of the center of his Adam’s apple and he sighed, his eyes on the floor.

  He shook his head adamantly and I knew he wouldn’t talk.

  “Fore!” Bubba yelled.

  Kevin’s eyes widened and his neck jerked back in the noose and I stepped out of the way as the bowling ball rocketed down the alley and seemed to pick up speed by the second as it hurtled across the splinters in the ancient floor and made contact with Kevin Hurlihy’s groin.

  He howled and jerked forward against the noose and I yanked at his shoulders to keep his neck from snapping and tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “Only a spare,” Bubba said.

  “Hey, Bubba,” I said, “hold up.”

  But Bubba was already into his windup. He crossed one leg in front of the other at the foul line and the ball left his hand and arced out by the target arrows, hit the alley with a hint of a backward spin and then streaked across the wood and shattered Kevin’s left knee.

  “Jesus!” Kevin screamed and flipped to his right.

  “Your turn, Jack.” Bubba picked up a ball and stepped into the next lane.

  “I’ll die, Bubba.” Jack’s voice was soft and resigned and it stopped Bubba for a moment.

  “Not if you talk, Jack,” I said.

  He looked at me as if just noticing me. “You know what the diffeRenee between you and your old man is, Patrick?”

  I shook my head.

  “Your old man would be throwing those bowling balls himself. You, you’ll use what torture can get you, but you won’t do it yourself. You’re vomit.”

  I looked at him and suddenly felt the same crazed rage I’d felt in Grace’s house. This piece-of-shit Irish Mafia killer was getting self-righteous with me? While Grace and Mae were holed up in some FBI bunker in Nebraska or someplace with Grace’s career in ruins? While Kara Rider lay in the ground and Jason Warren lay in pieces and Angie lay in a hospital bed and Tim Dunn was stripped of his clothes and shoved in a barrel?

  I’d spent weeks standing by while people like Evandro and his partner and Hardiman and Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy wreaked violence on innocents for fun. Because they enjoyed the pain of others. Because they could.

  And suddenly I wasn’t just angry at Jack or Kevin or Hardiman, I was furious at every person who practiced violence willingly. People who blew up abortion clinics and bombed airliners and butchered families and gassed subway tunnels and executed hostages and killed women who looked like women who’d spurned them in the past.

  In the name of their pain. Or their principles. Or their profit.

  Well, I was sick of their violence and their hate and my own codes of decency, which may have cost people their lives in the last month. Sick to fucking death of it all.

  Jack was staring up at me defiantly and I could feel blood roaring in my ears and still hear Kevin hissing in pain through clenched teeth beside me. I met Bubba’s eyes and saw a gleam in them and it invigorated me.

  I felt omnipotent.

  I kept my eyes on Jack and pulled out my gun and rammed the butt into Kevin’s gritted teeth.

  The shriek he sent out into the atmosphere was one of complete disbelief and sudden, utter fear.

  I grabbed his hair in my hand, my eyes still on Jack, and the hair felt slick and oily between my fingers as I rammed the barrel into his temple and cocked the hammer.

  “You have any feelings for this guy, Jack, talk.”

  Jack looked at Kevin and I could see it pained him. I was once again surprised by the bonds that could exist between two people who knew so little about love.

  Jack’s mouth opened and he looked so, so old.

  “You got five seconds, Jack. One. Two. Three…”

  Kevin moaned and his broken teeth rattled against the wire in his mouth.

  “Four.”

  “Your father,” Jack said quietly, “burned Rugglestone from head to toe over the course of four hours.”

  “I know that. Who else was there?”

  His mouth opened wide again and he looked at Kevin.

  “Who else, Jack? Or I start counting again. From four.”

  “All of us. Timpson. Kev’s mother. Diedre Rider. Burns. Climstich. Me.”

  “What happened?”

  “We found Hardiman and Rugglestone hiding out in that warehouse. We’d been looking for the van all night and that morning, we found it right in our neighborhood.” Jack licked his upper lip with a tongue so pale it was almost white. “Your father came up with the idea of tying Hardiman to a chair and making him watch while we did Rugglestone. At first, we were just going to take a few shots each, then work on Hardiman, then call in the police.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Something happened to us in there. Your father found a box hidden under the floorboards. The box was inside a cooler. There were body parts in it.” He looked at me wildly. “Body parts. Of kids. Adults, too, but, Jesus, there was a child’s foot in there, Kenzie. Still in a small red sneaker with blue polka-dots. Christ. We saw that and we lost it. That’s when your father got the gasoline. That’s when we started using the ice picks and razor blades.”

  I waved my hand at him because I didn’t feel like hearing any more about the good citizens of EEPA and their systematic torture-killing of Charles Rugglestone.

  “Who’s doing Hardiman’s killing for him now?”

  Jack looked confused. “What’s-his-name. Arujo. The guy your partner killed last night. Right?”

  “Arujo had a partner. You know who it is, Jack?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. Kenzie, we made a mistake. We let Hardiman live, but—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why’d you let him live?”

  “Because it was our only way out
once G busted us. That was the deal he made with us.”

  “G? What the hell are you talking about?”

  He sighed. “We got caught, Patrick. Standing around Rugglestone watching his body go up in flames with blood all over our clothes.”

  “Who caught you?”

  “G. I told you.”

  “Who’s G, Jack?”

  He frowned. “Gerry Glynn, Kenzie.”

  I felt light-headed suddenly, as if I’d just tried to smoke another cigarette.

  “And he didn’t arrest you?” I asked Jack.

  Jack nodded slightly. “He said it was understandable. He said most people would do the same.”

  “Gerry said this?”

  “Who the fuck am I talking about? Yeah. Gerry. He made sure each one of us knew what we owed him, and then he sent us on our way and arrested Alec Hardiman.”

  “What do you mean, you owed him?”

  “We owed him. Favors, shit like that, for the rest of our lives. Your father pulled strings and got him the zoning and the liquor license for his bar. I got him some creative financing. Other people did other things. We were forbidden to talk with each other, so I have no idea who gave him what outside of me and your old man.”

  “You were forbidden to talk with each other? By Gerry?”

  “Of course by Gerry.” He stared at me and the veins in his neck were bright blue and hard. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with when it comes to Gerry, do you? Jesus.” He laughed loudly. “Holy shit! You bought all that Officer Friendly bullshit, didn’t you? Kenzie,” he said and strained against the noose, “Gerry Glynn is a fucking monster. He makes me look like a parish priest.” He laughed again and it was a shrill, awful sound. “You think that gypsy cab he keeps out front always takes people where they want to go?”

  I remembered that night in the bar, the drunk kid who Gerry sent into that cab with ten bucks. Had he made it home? And who was the cab driver? Evandro?

  Bubba and Phil had come down the alley by this point and I looked at them as I removed the gun from Kevin’s head.

  “You guys know this?”

  Phil shook his head.

  Bubba said, “I knew Gerry was a little shady, ran some blow and some hookers out of the bar, but that’s it.”

  “He duped your whole fucking generation,” Jack said. “The whole pack of ya. Jesus.”

  “Be specific,” I said. “Very specific, Jack.”

  He smiled at us and his old eyes danced. “Gerry Glynn is one of the meanest motherfuckers who ever came out of the neighborhood. His son died. You know that?”

  I said, “He had a son?”

  “’Course he had a fucking son. Brendan. Died in ’sixty-five. Had some bizarre hemorrhage at his brain stem. No one could ever explain it. Kid was four years old, he grabs his head, drops dead in Gerry’s front yard while he’s playing with Gerry’s wife. Gerry snapped. He killed his wife.”

  “Bullshit,” Bubba said. “Guy was a cop.”

  “So? Gerry got it in his head that it was her fault. That she’d been fucking around on him and God had punished her by killing their kid. He punched her to death, framed some spook for it. The spook got shivved to death in Dedham a week after his arraignment. Case closed.”

  “How’s Gerry reach out and touch a guy locked up?”

  “Gerry was a bull at Dedham. Back in the old days, when they still allowed cops to work two jobs in the same system. Some witness, a con, supposedly heard Gerry set it up. Gerry whacked the guy in Scollay Square a week after he was released.”

  Jamal Cooper. Victim Number One. Jesus.

  “Gerry’s one of the scariest guys on the planet, you dumb fuck, Kenzie.”

  “And it never occurred to you that he could be Hardiman’s partner?” I asked.

  Everyone looked at me.

  “Hardiman’s…?” Jack’s mouth opened wide again and the muscles in his jaws rotated against thin skin. “No, no. I mean, Gerry’s dangerous, but he’s not…”

  “He’s not what, Jack?”

  “He’s, well, not serial-killer-psycho crazy.”

  I shook my head. “How fucking dumb could you be?”

  Jack looked at me. “Shit, Kenzie, Gerry’s from the neighborhood. We don’t breed crazies like that in the neighborhood.”

  I shook my head. “You’re from the neighborhood, Jack. So was my father. Look what you two pulled off in that warehouse.”

  I started to walk back down the alley and he called after me: “What about you, Kenzie? What about what you pulled off here today?”

  I looked back, saw Kevin trying to stay conscious against the pain, blood painted on his mouth and chin.

  “I didn’t kill anyone, Jack.”

  “But if I hadn’t talked, you would have, Kenzie. You would have.”

  I turned, kept walking.

  “You want to think of yourself as good, Kenzie? Huh? Think about what I just said. Remember what you would have done.”

  The shots came out of the darkness in front of me.

  I saw the muzzle flash and actually felt the first bullet streak past my shoulder.

  I dropped to the floor as a second bullet burst through the darkness and out into the light.

  Behind me, I heard two deep metal-into-flesh sounds. Sucking sounds.

  As Pine walked out of the darkness, he unscrewed a silencer from his pistol, his gloved hand shrouded in smoke.

  I turned my head and looked back down the lanes.

  Phil was on his knees, hands over his head.

  Bubba tilted his head back as he poured vodka down his throat.

  Kevin Hurlihy and Jack Rouse stared blankly back at me, identical bullet holes in the centers of their foreheads.

  “Welcome to my world,” Pine said and offered me his gloved hand.

  37

  I didn’t like the way Pine stood over the elevator shaft with his eyes on Phil as we descended. Phil had his head down and his hand on the roof of the Porsche as if he needed its support to remain standing. Pine’s gaze never wavered.

  As we neared the first floor Pine said something to Bubba, and Bubba stuffed his hands in his trench coat pockets and shrugged.

  The elevator doors opened and we climbed in the car and pulled out the back of the building and turned up the alley that led to South Street.

  “Jesus,” Phil said.

  I drove slowly up the alley, my eyes on the headlights cutting through the hard dark in front of us.

  “Pull the car over,” Phil said desperately.

  “No, Phil.”

  “Please. I’m going to be sick.”

  “I know,” I said. “But you’re going to have to hold it down until we’re out of sight of the building.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  I pulled out onto South Street. “Because if Pine or Bubba sees you puke, they’ll be convinced they can’t trust you. Now hold on.”

  I drove up the block, turned right and picked up speed on Summer Street. A half block past South Station, I pulled in behind the Post Office, checked each loading bay until I was sure they hadn’t started filling the trucks yet, and then pulled in behind a Dumpster.

  Phil was out of the car before we came to a complete stop and I turned up the radio so I wouldn’t have to hear the sounds of his body revolting against what he’d just witnessed.

  I reached down and turned the volume higher and the windows reverberated as Sponge’s “Plowed” poured through my speakers, the vicious guitar riffs carving through my skull.

  Two men were dead and I may as well have pulled the trigger myself. They weren’t innocent. They weren’t clean. But they were human, nonetheless.

  Phil came back to the car and I handed him Kleenex from the glove compartment and turned down the volume. He pressed the tissue to his mouth as I swung back onto Summer and headed toward Southie.

  “Why’d he kill them? They told us what we wanted to know.”

  “They disobeyed his boss. Don’t get caught up in the whys, Ph
il.”

  “But Christ, he just shot them. He just pulled his gun and they were tied up and I’m standing there, looking at them, and then—shit—no sound, nothing, just those holes.”

  “Phil, listen to me.”

  I pulled to the side of the road on a dark stretch by the Araban Coffee Building, smelled the roasted aroma trying to overide the oily stench of the docks off to my left.

  He put his hands over his eyes. “Oh, my God.”

  “Phil! Fucking look at me!”

  He lowered his hands. “What?”

  “It never happened.”

  “What?”

  “It never happened. You got it?” I was shouting, and Phil recoiled from me in the dark of the car, but I didn’t care. “You want to die, too? Do you? That’s what we’re talking about here, Phil.”

  “Jesus. Me? Why?”

  “Because you’re a witness.”

  “I know, but—”

  “But is not an option. This is very simple, Phil. You’re alive because Bubba would never kill anyone I care about. You’re alive because he’s convinced Pine that I’ll keep you in line. I’m alive because they know I won’t talk. And both of us, by the way, would go to jail for double homicide if we did, because we were there. But it’d never come to that, Phil, because if Pine has any reason to worry, he’ll kill you and he’ll kill me and he’ll probably kill Bubba, too.”

  “But—”

  “Stop with the fucking buts, Phil. I swear to God. You convince yourself that this never happened. It was all a bad dream. Kevin and Jack are on vacation somewhere. Because if you don’t get clear on that concept, you’ll talk.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will. You’ll tell your wife or your girlfriend or someone in a bar, and then we’re all dead. And the person you told is dead, too. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be watched.”

  “What?”

  I nodded. “Face it and find a way to live with it. For quite a while, you’ll be watched.”

  He swallowed hard and his eyes bulged, and I thought he might get sick again.

  Instead he jerked his head around and stared out the window and curled into himself on the seat.

  “How do you do this?” he whispered. “Day in and day out?”