Snake Eater (25 page)

“That one,” I said. “Not exactly hots. More like luke-warms.”

“This for when you get offed.”

“This for
if
I get offed.”

“You want me to keep it for you, man?”

“Keep it secure, Zerk. Tell no one you’ve got it. Tell no one you met with me today. You, either,” I said to Pops.

They both shrugged.

“Well, thanks.” I stood up. “Drinks for both of you. Next week sometime.” I shook hands with each of them and turned to leave.

“Wait,” said Zerk. “I’ll go down with you.”

“No. I’ll go down alone.”

Zerk turned to Pops. “Heavy paperwork,” he said, weighing the envelope in his two hands and nodding solemnly.

Phil Varney was perched on a barstool just inside the entrance to Locke’s. I climbed onto the empty one beside him and placed my briefcase on the bar. Varney glanced at it, then at his watch. “You’re right on time, Mr. Coyne,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” I said. I caught the bartender’s eye. “Daniel’s, rocks,” I told him.

We didn’t say anything until my drink was delivered. Then Varney held his glass at me. “To the satisfactory completion of our business,” he said.

I clicked his glass and sipped my drink.

“Well,” he said, “let’s have it, then.”

I removed the manila envelope from my briefcase and handed it to him. He opened it and removed all the papers. He glanced through them, frowned up at me, shuffled through the papers again. Then he carefully put his glass down on the bar and said softly, “What the fuck is this, Coyne?”

“Pretty self-evident, isn’t it?”

“Photocopies? All photocopies? And this… this fucking document?” He waved the copies of the three pages I had typed and signed and Pops had witnessed and Zerk had notarized. The copies, of course, had no signatures on them. “What the Christ is this?”

“You can read it at your leisure,” I said. “I think I got it all down. Not, of course, in the same detail as Daniel McCloud’s manuscript. But enough, I think. I signed the originals, and my signatures have been witnessed and notarized. The photographs—you see I’ve photocopied them for you, just to verify for you that I have them—they’re with the document, as is an assortment of corroborating stuff, copies of which you have there. The originals of everything are in a safe place, where they will remain.”

I took another sip of my drink, then lit a cigarette.

“Unless something happens to you,” said Varney in a low voice.

“Oh, right,” I said. “In that case, the newspapers get everything.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Coyne.”

“The way I see it, this is less dangerous than all the alternatives I could think of Look at it this way. It protects both of us. It’s in your interest to make sure nothing happens to me. And it’s in my interest to make sure nobody hears a word about any of this.” I tapped my fingers on the papers on the bar. “Tit for tat. Good deal all around, huh?”

Varney stared at me for a long moment. Then he smiled. “I guess we understand each other.”

“I hope so.”

“We’re not that different, you and I,” he said.

“I’m not flattered.”

He shrugged and smiled again. “We think the same way.” He gathered up the papers and slid them into the envelope. “One thing still puzzles me,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Sweeney couldn’t come up with any copies of McCloud’s book.”

“Not for lack of trying,” I said, remembering how the little office in back of Daniel’s shop had been tossed.

“Now that we’ve got this—this stalemate between us, I was wondering…”

“I don’t think there is a copy,” I said. “Sweeney got the original for you. There’s nothing among Daniel’s things. I don’t have one. Al Coleman’s wife doesn’t have one.”

“Let us both hope nobody has one,” he said.

“Which reminds me,” I said. “If anything should happen to Cammie Russell or Bonnie Coleman, the deal changes.”

“And if a copy of that manuscript turns up in the wrong hands, Mr. Coyne, the deal’s emphatically off.”

“I think we both understand the deal, then,” I said.

He nodded. “We do. And it’s a good deal all around. You want another drink?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

O
N THE LAST SUNDAY
in January I drove out to Wilson Falls. Cammie and I held hands and walked along the shoreline of the Connecticut. The muddy banks were frozen solid. The bays and edges of the river were iced over, but out in the middle open water marked the main channel.

Snow had fallen, melted, and fallen again through the halting progression of the New England winter. The landscape was all white, daubed here and there in ocher, sepia, burnt sienna. Tree skeletons poked up through the snow, stark black, and splashes of dark green marked groves of evergreens. Chickadees and nuthatches flitted among the leafless bushes.

It was one of those transparent winter days when the sun shines so bright and ricochets so hard off the ice and water and snow that it seems to slice through the air, and even wearing sunglasses I had to squint the pain out of my eyes. The sun carried no warmth. Just light. Cammie and I wore ski parkas and wool hats and gloves. We walked slowly, picking our way over the logjams and boulders along the rim of the river. Cammie talked about Daniel. She missed him, but she was healing. She didn’t ask me any difficult questions, for which I was grateful. It saved me the trouble of lying to her.

I pointed out the place where Daniel first took me fishing. It seemed like a very long time ago. A little farther along, we stopped for a moment at the spot where Sergeant Richard Oakley shot Brian Sweeney.

Both places looked different under the ice.

We walked until the shadows grew long and the sun began to settle behind the low hills across the river. Then we turned back.

Cammie made hot chocolate. We played our favorite Jimmy Reed tape. Outside, darkness fell fast. We sat in rocking chairs by the woodstove, sipping our cocoa and staring at our stockinged feet.

“Have you talked with Terri?” said Cammie.

“Not for a long time. I think as soon as we decide we can be friends without being lovers, we will talk.”

“It’s good to be friends.”

“Yes.”

“Better, sometimes.”

“Yes.” I reached my hand to her.

She grasped it and squeezed it and held on. We continued to study our feet. “I’ve decided to leave, Brady.”

I sipped my cocoa and said nothing.

“Vinnie and Roscoe are taking over Daniel’s shop. With Brian gone, it’s theirs free and clear. They want to buy all this from me.” She waved her free hand around. “We’re working out the details.”

“What will you do?”

She gave my hand a squeeze and then let go. “I’m going home,” she said. “I’ve got some money now. I’ll buy my mother a proper house, build myself a little studio. I want to paint the mountains. In the mornings, with that wonderful early light, there’s a mist that comes off them. I think I can capture that.”

“It sounds good, Cammie.”

“Now, without Daniel, that’s where I should be. It’s where I belong.”

I found myself nodding. I turned to look at Cammie. She was smiling softly at me, and I could see the question in her eyes.

Where do
you
belong? they were asking.

But Cammie did not ask me that question.

I was glad she didn’t, because I couldn’t have answered it.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Brady Coyne Mysteries

O
N MAY 5, 1994,
Congressman Douglas Applegate (D-Ohio) voted aye, and by the margin of that single vote the United States House of Representatives passed a bill banning the manufacture and sale of nineteen specified semiautomatic assault guns.

The battle to control paramilitary weapons such as the Uzi and the AK-47 had been waged for years in American governments at all levels. Before Congressman Applegate voted “aye,” the gun lobby had won every skirmish.

My own education in the politics of gun control came two years before the passage of the House bill. It began on a quiet Sunday evening in May when my boyhood chum Wally Kinnick called me from Logan Airport, and I have to believe that the events that ensued in Massachusetts in 1992 helped to inform the debate in the United States Congress in 1994 and contributed to Douglas Applegate’s historic “aye” vote.

Brady L. Coyne

Boston, Massachusetts

December 1994

H
ARLOW—THE SILENCE OF
the public library in this little central Massachusetts community was shattered by gunshots on Wednesday afternoon. Maureen Burton, 32, a part-time librarian, was pronounced dead at the scene. Two others are in intensive care at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

According to eyewitnesses, David Burton, 37, an unemployed electrician and the estranged husband of the librarian, entered the building at approximately 3:45 in the afternoon carrying an AK-47, commonly known as a “paramilitary assault weapon.” Witnesses report that Burton approached the desk where Mrs. Burton was seated, shouted, “I’ve had it!” and opened fire.

At least three bullets struck Mrs. Burton in the chest, killing her instantly. Police estimate that twelve to fifteen shots were fired altogether, some of which struck two bystanders.

Burton’s body was later found in his pickup truck on the outskirts of town, dead of a single gunshot wound to the head, apparently self-inflicted.

According to state police records, the incident in Harlow marks the fourteenth death in Massachusetts this year directly attributable to semiautomatic assault weapons such as the AK-47, which are characterized by their capacity to fire a large number of shots as rapidly as the trigger is pulled.

Six of those victims have been police officers.

Massachusetts has no restrictions on the purchase or ownership of assault weapons beyond those that apply to target or sporting weapons. “If you have an FID [Firearms Identification Card] you can walk into a gun shop and buy an Uzi,” says State Police Lieutenant Victor McClelland. “It’s as easy as that.”

Neighbors of the Burtons report that the couple were often heard arguing and had not been living together for over a year. Mr. Burton, they say, had recently been despondent over losing his job.

“Maureen had no children of her own,” Geri Hatcher, sister of the victim, told the Globe, “which was one of the reasons she loved to work at the library after school. David refused to have children, and they argued about it a lot. That’s why she left him. She planned to get divorced. I guess he couldn’t stand it.”

The names of the other two victims have not been released.

I
WAS SITTING OUT
on the steel balcony that clings to the side of my apartment building and savoring the evening air, which was warm for early May. It was an excellent evening for balcony sitting, and I had left thoughts of newspaper reading and television watching inside. A skyful of stars overhead and a harborful of ship lights six stories below me mirrored each other. At Logan across the Inner Harbor a steady stream of airplane lights landed and took off, and I could see the streetlights from East Boston and, way off to my left, headlights moving across the Mystic River Bridge. Harbor smells wafted up, seaweed and dead fish and salt air and gasoline fumes diluted and mingled by the easterly breeze—not at all unpleasant.

I had tilted my aluminum lawn chair back on its hind legs. My heels rested on the railing of the balcony and a glass of Jack Daniel’s rested on my belly, and when the phone began to ring I contemplated letting the machine get it.

I knew it wasn’t Terri. It had been six months. Since Terri, I often found myself watching the harbor lights with a glass of Daniel’s.

But it could have been one of my boys. They often call on Sunday evenings, Billy from U Mass needing money or Joey from his mother’s home in Wellesley just wanting to chat with his dad.

So I unfolded myself and padded stocking-footed into the kitchen.

“Brady Coyne,” I said into the phone.

“Hey guy.”

“Wally,” I said, “What hostile wilderness outpost are you calling me from this time?”

“About as hostile as you can get. Logan Airport.”

“Just passing through?”

“Actually I could use a lift,” he said. “I’ve been waiting here for an hour. The guy who was supposed to meet me didn’t show up.”

“Need a place to crash for the night?”

“If you don’t mind, it looks like I do.”

“Hey,” I said, “that’s what lawyers are for. Cab service. Emergency accommodations. Sharing their booze. What terminal are you at?”

“Northwest. I’ll wait at the curb.”

“I can practically see you from here,” I said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

There’s always somebody from our childhood who becomes famous, about whom we say, “I knew him—or her—when we were kids. You’d never have predicted it.” It’s the skinny girl in seventh-grade geography class who always kept her lips clamped tight over her mouthful of braces, and who ten years later smiles dazzlingly from the cover of
Cosmopolitan.
Or the stumbling overweight grammar school boy who goes on to play linebacker for Notre Dame, or the computer nerd who gets elected to Congress.