Serpents in the Cold (21 page)

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Kneeland Street, Chinatown

FOR THE THIRD
night in a row Dante braved the cold and stood on a street corner talking to a group of streetwalkers. Mostly it was the same girls, but every so often a new one showed, and Jill introduced her to him. As the old whore, Jill was the one who ran the show, the one the others looked to for guidance. Tonight her eyes were so bright that for a moment Dante thought she might be high. It turned out she was as angry as he was.

“Cops don't do nothing, they just don't care. I tell the girls to be safe. Like you said, Dante, to watch out for a rig, I give them the description of this guy, but you think they listen? Everyone's out for themselves, especially in this weather. Sometimes it's worth it to give them a discount just to get in out of the cold.”

“I've known people who'd do just about anything to get in out of the cold, Jill.”

“Then why you still here?”

“He's got to show up sooner or later.”

“Does he? I've been saying that my whole life.”

Traffic pressed tight together moved slowly up and down Atlantic Avenue, faces blurred behind steamed glass. On the far corner of the street, hustling the traffic moving southbound, four girls stood, hands on hips, on display for the passing gaze.

“You already talk to those girls over there?” she asked.

“Yeah, last night. They said they hadn't seen anything, but the tall one knew the latest girl.”

“Didn't shake Shirley up any. I've never seen anyone that excited to be standing outside in ten-degree weather freezing her tits off.”

“I told them to be careful.”

“
Careful.
Not much use for that word around here.”

Dante lit up a cigarette and passed it to her. When he realized she wasn't going to be giving it back, he lit another. In an hour he'd have to move on, and he knew the girls would as well. It was too cold to stay in one spot for too long.

“Where you headed after this?”

“Maybe back to Scollay or over to Fort Point.”

“Think you'll be back out tomorrow night?”

Dante laughed, despite himself. “Not if it gets any colder, I won't.” Jill sucked on her cigarette, shifted from foot to foot, stared down the street. “Maybe,” he said. “It can't hurt, right?”

A car slowed and a girl went over to it. The driver put down his window and they spoke for a moment and then the girl climbed in. A few trucks passed, dirty snow plastered to their sides, but none stopped; an old '38 Plymouth with an even older guy peering over the wheel, his wipers beating at the glass, a milk truck, a gleaming sports car low to the ground, shining red as it passed beneath the glow of streetlamps.

Wind came in off the water and turned the moisture in the air hard and sharp. The lights shimmered and crystallized. Dante and Jill watched half a dozen girls get picked up, and then when they'd been the only ones standing there for some time, Jill pulled the collar of her coat tight and sighed. “Got to call it quits for the night, Dante, before I freeze to death or catch my death of cold. You be here tomorrow night?”

It was less a question and more a request, and Dante nodded. “I'll bring us some coffee.”

“You're all right.”

He watched Jill wave to the girls on the other side of the street and then head away from the water, toward a diner on Causeway. He waited until most of the girls were done for the night and then considered heading back to Scollay. Fort Point could wait. At the far corner the southbound girls had been luckiest. Most had gotten their johns, and the tall one remaining, the one they called Shirley, was hobbling quickly off the curb in her heels, waving toward some customer who had stopped for her. Sometimes, as Jill said, it was worth it just to get in out of the cold.

Dante watched her cross the street toward what he thought was a green flatbed or a white Ford, and then he saw the red and green Peterbilt idling before the light and Shirley passing the other vehicles and moving toward it. He watched her and then looked at the window of the rig and the vague impression of a face staring back. He saw the door of the cab open and the hulking shadow of a man beckon her inside.

“Hey!” Dante called. “Hey!” He hurtled from the curb, hands held up before a stream of cars blowing their horns, and raced toward the truck. He slipped badly, his leg giving out on him before he managed to right himself and keep running. Shirley had climbed into the truck cab and the driver was gunning the engine, grinding the gears, lurching toward the light that still shone red.

The Peterbilt's engine roared and the truck pushed at the cars before it. There was a loud grinding and squealing of metal as its front bumper crushed the rear of the car ahead; thick, acrid-smelling smoke came off the car's tires as the Peterbilt shoved it out of the way, sent it sideways into a row of parked cars, and then began doing the same to the next car in line. The truck hammered its way through the stalled traffic, cars blowing their horns and pinwheeling to the left and right before it.

Shirley screamed from within the cab, and Dante grasped for the door handle, tried to pull himself up onto the running board but slipped again and almost fell beneath the rig's moving wheels. He righted himself and banged on the metal, hollered, “Open the fucking door!” The driver cut the wheel sharply and Dante lost his footing, fell hard to the street. From inside the cab, Shirley was still screaming.

The truck pushed aside the last car and was now picking up speed, the cab jolting as the driver went through the gears, and Dante raced after it. For a moment he and the truck were parallel, Dante running down the center lane beside it, eyes locked with the driver's, whose face appeared and then disappeared in the stuttering light from the streetlamps above. He saw the orange-red hair, the disfiguring harelip, and then the driver smiled and the rig pulled ahead, and though Dante tried to keep up, eventually his legs faltered. Breath steaming from his mouth, he stood in the middle of the street as cars continued to move about him, and stared down Atlantic to see the Peterbilt's taillights blink red once, twice, and then disappear.

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Dublin House, Uphams Corner

LATE THE NEXT
morning Cal insisted that he and Dante drive over to the Dublin House in Uphams Corner and get a drink. The bar was done up in a fake Tudor-Irish style: white-painted walls now turned a greasy shade of vanilla crisscrossed by interlaid wood beams painted to look as if they'd been covered with pitch. The ceiling was low, and beams in the same style split the nicotine-stained ceiling above their heads. Smoke spiraled from cigarettes slouching in ashtrays on the bar as men, engrossed in their orations, spoke softly to one another, boots and heels banging the wood, scraping at the metal rungs of the stools as they straddled their seats and the day wound down through the slow hours before dusk.

It was their fifth or sixth pint, and Dante tilted his glass from side to side, stared blearily into its almost empty bottom. “I could have stopped him,” he said. “And now we have no idea where he's got to. He won't be coming back to the same spots again.”

“You couldn't have done anything more than you did,” Cal said, and scanned the room from their corner booth. “And you got his plates. He'll have to dump the truck now and find another, and that might take him some time. We'll see what Owen does with them, but I was hoping we'd get to him first.”

A waitress came in for the late-afternoon shift, when working stiffs stopped in for food, and she did a good job of keeping the drinks coming. Dante was speaking when Cal next looked up and twilight had fallen on the Avenue and another bartender stood behind the bar. Cal knew him, too; he was one of Blackie's boys, a wiry guy named O'Leary from some backwater bog in Cork. Originally a former world-class welterweight who had turned to knife blades one night after a fight didn't go his way. His opponent had damaged O'Leary's right retina, and since he could never box professionally again, he took the Old Testament adage “an eye for an eye” seriously: he stepped out of a crowd at Dorchester's Sons of Erin Hall after his opponent's next match six months later, came up behind him and knocked him to the ground, kicked in his face until the man wasn't moving anymore, and then went down on his knees and sliced the man's right eye cleanly out of its socket. Everyone knew it was O'Leary, and there had been at least a dozen witnesses to the stabbing, but no one ever tagged him for the crime. Since then, and that was ten years ago, he'd become even better with knives. The stories ran rampant through the old neighborhood of what O'Leary had done with a knife and to whom, and of his alliances and betrayals with half a dozen Irish families still wreaking vengeance upon one another, retribution and revenge for a hundred wrongs done in the old country when Boston was still rising out of a swampy spit of land in the harbor populated by sheep and cows.

A familiar loud voice sounded at the bar and Cal's shifting gaze slowed. A slim youth in a leather jacket and black watch cap was talking to another man and, between sips of his drink, looking about the bar. His shock of black hair made Cal pause with his drink to his mouth. The door to the bar opened and the man turned to see who had entered, and in that moment Cal could see his face clearly and knew he must have come in from the alley entrance at the back of the bar. The youthfulness was still there but in a face hardened by violence and cruelty. Blue eyes flickered lazily across the room, taking in the newcomer, and then went back to his drink.

From where he sat, Dante had the better view of him and was looking at him now. Perhaps he'd noticed him all this time and hadn't said anything about it. The laughter at the bar grew louder as more men congregated around Blackie. Cal recognized the Kinneally brothers—the fat bastards—and four from the O'Shea and Walsh clans from the D Street and L Street projects. They stood on either side of Foley, listening intently as he spoke between sips of beer and laughter, and nodding as if taking orders.

Dante noticed the joyless smile on Cal's face. “You knew he'd be here,” he said.

“Sure.”

“You're an idiot. We should drink up and move on.”

Cal put his glass down. “I'm not forgetting.”

“Forgetting what?”

“Him following Lynne.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake.”

Cal bit down on his bottom lip and grimaced. “Just seeing that short bastard makes my teeth ache.”

The whiskey was giving Cal a bad drunk, and he thought about Blackie watching Lynne, following her along the Avenue. There was a part of him that wanted to grab a glass, walk up to Foley, and smash it across his face, to tear into him as if he had been the one who'd murdered Sheila and the other girls, but even drunk he realized how foolish that would be.

“Time to go,” Dante said. “I don't like the look of this.”

“Yeah,” Cal said, but remained sitting, and when the waitress came he ordered them more drinks. An odd languorousness settled upon them, as if the scene had slowed to match the cigarette smoke swirling in the tea-colored light.

Blackie glanced back at their booth and paused. “Dante Cooper! Cal O'Brien!” he called out, and the men around him turned their eyes in their direction, and Cal knew that Blackie had no idea who had chased him through Boston the week before. “Will you look at this! The war hero and his Polack sidekick.” Foley grinned humorlessly and moved down the bar toward them while the rest of his men watched.

“Cheers, Finn,” Cal said, knowing that nobody called him by that name anymore, and raised his glass. “The other day we bump into your big brother, and now you. You must be proud. Michael's come a long way from his old stomping grounds, a long way from Adams Street.”

Foley thumped the bar with his glass. “The next fucking senator for Massachusetts.” The men behind him raised their glasses and cheered.

Cal laughed, nodding. “As long as he doesn't stick that little prick of his in the wrong hole. Or mess around with any more girls who end up dead like Sheila Anderson. You know Sheila Anderson, Blackie? Know anything about a truckful of dead women out on the Calf Pasture?”

Foley's grin faltered.

Cal glanced at Dante, who kept his eyes on his drink, and forced a smile. “Growing up, we always knew you were fucked up, but this fucked up? Doesn't sound like the type to be the next boss of the town. Shit, I heard you couldn't even get a straight cut from the Brink's job. You ever find the guys who did it?”

He raised his glass toward Blackie in mock celebration. “Let's just hope Sully has somebody else in mind when he hands over his crown.”

Blackie's goons crossed the barroom and had Cal and Dante up by their collars faster than Cal could have thought. He realized the drink had got to him when he tried to shake them off and helplessly flailed under their grip. One moment he was laughing and the next his legs were dragging against the wooden floor and chairs were being overturned. Two goons kept a manacle-like pressure on his shoulders until the sockets burned and he could no longer feel his arms. The sounds of the bar seemed very far away, a steel door opened before them, and then they were out in the alley and he was thrust up against the brick wall. The first punch to his gut doubled him over, had him gasping for air, and the second and third, a right roundhouse followed by a left, rocked his head upon his neck and sent his mind reeling. If the hands let him go, he'd be on the ground. He spat and tasted blood.

Dante hollered and struggled against the men who held him. “I don't think that's so wise, do you, Blackie?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Me and Cal are investigating a murder, helping the police, talking with your brother, the would-be senator, two nights ago, and now this. We end up in trouble and who you think they're going to link it back to?”

“Fuck you.” Blackie reared back and struck Cal successive blows to his mouth and nose. Cal could feel the blood filling up over his tongue. His head was becoming unmoored; his vision wavered with spots of light, fading and simmering and then flashing again. He managed to raise his head. Blackie undid his jacket and handed it to one of the Walsh brothers. The Kinneallys held Dante immobile against the far alley wall. When he struggled, the bigger one bent him double with a punch to his gut.

“You two,” Dante said breathlessly, trying to raise his voice. “You two make him see sense. Anything happens to us and everything leads back to Michael. You let this happen and if he's lucky he'll be a fucking councilman for Southie the rest of his life.”

A punch shut his mouth, snapped his head back, and sent a razor-like charge down his spine. Then they held him and he watched Blackie unleash a flurry of punches to Cal's face and head. Cal fell forward and then strong hands were pulling him upright again. Blackie went into working his body and Cal knew he would soon lose consciousness. He couldn't breathe, his nose felt shattered, and blood was dripping from his mouth and dampening the front of his shirt.

There was a sudden squeal of car tires. Headlight beams cut through the darkness, swept across the brick walls, and moved toward them. The car bounced up over the curb, entered the alley, and its front end smashed into a garbage can, sent it crashing against the wall. The driver hit the brakes, a door opened and slammed shut, footsteps crunched on snow, and a voice hollered, “We found him! Blackie! We fucking found him!”

The Kinneally brothers had come forward and were trying to pull Blackie off Cal. “He's done, Blackie, he's done. You heard the prick. We go too far and it could come down on Mikey. We've got to go.”

The driver in the car honked the horn. In the narrow alleyway the sound of it was deafening.

The other Kinneally pulled at Blackie's arm and shouted, “You heard Sean. They fucking found him.”

But Foley relented only slowly. Breathing hard into Cal's ear, he whispered, “You're a fucking dead man, O'Brien.” The hands that were holding Cal let go and he slipped forward to the ground, hard, face-first into the snow. His eyelids fluttered and he turned on his back, coughing and gasping for air. His nose sprayed the snow around him with blood.

Up between the buildings, above the alley where the sky showed itself, he could see the stars. White smoke rose from rooftop chimney stacks. From somewhere came the clanging of a church bell. He imagined he heard Mel Tormé's “Christmas Song.”

“Cal? Cal? You all right?” Dante was on one knee, leaning over him, and Cal reached up to touch his face. He could feel his ribs contracting sharp and jagged against his diaphragm and he feared they were broken.

“I'm okay,” he managed.

“You're a fucking idiot.” Dante grabbed under his shoulder to help him up, but Cal shook him off.

“Give me a moment, would you?”

He lifted himself up on his elbows and lay there for a moment, his ragged breaths steaming white in the darkness of the alleyway. He turned and hacked out a mouthful of blood that in the moonlight looked like oil, and then he rolled onto his side.

“Christ, Dante. I think I need a doctor.”