Darkness, Take My Hand (30 page)

“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.

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, Phil.”

“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?”

I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes and listened to the German engine rumble.

“How do you live with yourself, Patrick?”

I slid the shift into first and didn’t speak again as we drove through Southie and down into the neighborhood.

I left the Porsche in front of my house and headed for the Crown Victoria, parked a few cars back, because a ’63 Porsche is just about the last thing you want to be driving in my neighborhood if you want to remain anonymous.

Phil stood by the passenger door, and I shook my head.

“What?” he said.

“You’re staying behind, Phil. I’m alone on this one.”

He shook his head. “No. I was married to her, Patrick, and this prick shot her.”

“Want him to shoot you, too, Phil?”

He shrugged. “You think I’m not up to this?”

I nodded. “I think you’re not up to this, Phil.”

“Why? Because of the bowling alley? Kevin—he was someone we grew up with. A friend once. So okay, I didn’t handle him getting shot real well. But Gerry?” He held his gun up on the car top, worked the slide, and jacked a round into the chamber. “Gerry’s dogshit. Gerry dies.”

I stared at him, waited for him to see how silly he looked working the slide like a character in a movie, spitting out his bravado.

He stared back, and the muzzle of his gun slowly turned until it was facing me over the roof.

“You going to shoot me, Phil? Huh?”

His hand was firm. The gun never wavered.

“Answer me, Phil. You going to shoot me?”

“You don’t open this door, Patrick, I’ll blow the window out, climb in anyway.”

I looked steadily at the gun in his hand.

“I love her, too, Patrick.” He lowered the gun.

I got in the car. He rapped on the window with the gun and I took a deep breath, knowing he’d follow me on foot if it came down to it or shoot out the window of my Porsche and hot-wire it.

I reached across the seat and unlocked the door.

The rain started around midnight, not even a drizzle at first, just a few spits that mingled with the dirt on my windows and bled down to my wipers.

We parked in front of a senior citizens home on Dorchester Avenue, a half block up from The Black Emerald. Then the clouds broke and the rain clattered the roof and swept down the avenue in great dark sheets. It was a freezing rain, identical to yesterday’s, and the only effect it had on the ice still clinging to sidewalks and buildings was to make it seem simultaneously cleaner and more lethal.

Initially, we were grateful for it, because our windows steamed up, and unless someone was standing right beside the car, he wouldn’t be able to see the two of us inside.

But this worked against us, too, because pretty soon we couldn’t see the bar very well or the door to Gerry’s apartment. The defrost in the car was broken, and so was the heater, and damp cold bit into my bones. I cracked my window, and Phil cracked his, and I used my elbow to wipe at the condensation on the inside until Gerry’s doorway and the doorway to the Emerald reappeared, diluted and rubbery.

“How’re you so sure it’s Gerry who’s been working with Hardiman?” Phil said.

“I’m not,” I said. “But it feels right.”

“So why aren’t we calling the cops?”

“To tell them what? Two guys with fresh bullet holes in their heads told us Gerry was a bad guy?”

“What about the FBI then?”

“Same problem. We don’t have any proof. If it is Gerry, and we tip him too early, maybe he slips away again, goes into hibernation or whatever, only kills runaways nobody’s looking for.”

“So why are we here?”

“Because if he makes a move, any kind of move, I want to see it, Phil.”

Phil wiped at his side of the windshield, peered out at the bar. “Maybe we should just go in there, ask him some questions.”

I looked at him. “Are you nuts?”

“Why not?”

“Because if it is him, he’ll kill us, Phil.”

“There’s two of us, Patrick. We’re both armed.”

I could see he was trying to talk himself into it, to suck up the courage necessary to go through that door. But he was still a long way from doing it.

“It’s the tension,” I said. “The waiting.”

“What about it?”

“Sometimes it seems a lot worse than any confrontation could be, like if you could just do something, you’d stop feeling like you need to climb out of your skin.”

He nodded. “That’s the feeling, yeah.”

“Problem is, Phil, if Gerry’s the guy we think he is, the confrontation will be a lot worse than the wait. He’ll kill us, guns or no guns.”

He swallowed once, then nodded.

For a full minute I stared hard at the door to the Emerald. In the time we’d been here, I’d seen no one enter or exit, and that was more than a little odd just after midnight at a bar in this neighborhood. A solid sheet of water the size of a building swept along the avenue, its edges curling, and the wind howled distantly.

“How many people?” Phil said.

“What?”

Phil tilted his head in the direction of the Emerald. “If he is the guy, how many people you think he’s killed? Over his entire lifetime? I mean, taking into consideration that maybe he killed all those runaways over the years, and maybe a shitload of people no one even knows about and—”

“Phil.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m nervous enough. There are some things I don’t want to think about just now.”

“Oh.” He rubbed the stubble under his chin. “Right.”

I stared at the bar, counted off another full minute. Still no one went in or out.

My cell phone rang and both Phil and I jerked so hard our heads hit the roof.

“Jesus,” Phil said. “Jesus Christ.”

I flipped it open. “Hello.”

“Patrick, it’s Devin. Where are you?”

“In my car. What’s up?”

“I just talked to Erdham with the FBI. He pulled a partial print from under the floorboard in your house where one of the bugs was placed.”

“And?” The oxygen circulating through my body slowed to a crawl.

“It’s Glynn, Patrick. Gerry Glynn.”

I looked through my steamed windows and could just
make out the shape of the bar, and I felt unequivocal terror like I’d never felt in my life.

“Patrick? You there?”

“Yeah. Look, Devin, I’m outside Gerry’s place now.”

“You’re what?”

“You heard me. I came to the same conclusion an hour ago.”

“Jesus, Patrick. Get out of there. Now. Don’t fuck around. Go. Go.”

I wanted to. Christ, I wanted to.

But if he was in there now, packing a bag with ice picks and straight razors, preparing to head out to pick up another victim…

“I can’t, Dev. If he’s here and he moves, I’m following him wherever he goes.”

“No, no, no. No, Patrick. You hear me? Get the fuck out of there.”

“Can’t do it, Dev.”

“Fuck!” I heard him bang something hard. “All right. I’m on my way over there now with an army. You got it? You sit tight, and we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. He moves, you call this number.”

He gave it to me and I scribbled it on the pad velcroed to my dash.

“Hurry,” I said.

“I’m hurrying.” He hung up.

I looked at Phil. “It’s confirmed. Gerry’s our guy.”

Phil looked at the phone in my hand and his face was a mixture of nausea and desperation.

“Help’s on the way?” he said.

“Help’s on the way.”

The windows had fogged over completely and I wiped at mine again, saw something dark and heavy move out of the corner of my eye, near the back door.

Then the door opened and Gerry Glynn hopped inside and put his wet arms around me.