by Mike Lupica
I had no real destination in mind. I thought I might walk all the way to Joe’s on Newbury Street for a drink, and screw what my hair looked like when I got there. I knew the bartender, and was not intimidated by being a single woman alone at a bar. Sometimes I went to places like Joe’s for the sheer sport of it, just waiting to see and hear what the pick-up lines might be, if there were any. Pick-up lines? Was I dating myself even thinking about pick-up lines? Or should I think about it as hooking up, the way the kids did?
The last man I’d hooked up with seriously, other than Richie, was Jesse Stone, up in Paradise. We had finally drifted apart, mostly because of the force of his lingering feelings for his ex-wife and mine for Richie, even after both his ex-wife and Richie had remarried.
But it had been serious while it lasted, for both of us.
I took a right on Beacon and then a left on Arlington, and walked to Newbury and took a right. The rain started to come as I crossed Berkeley, and was coming much harder by the time I was passing Joe’s. I revised my thinking about looking like a drowned rat at the bar. Kept going.
The rain came even harder.
This was usually a busy time of the night on Newbury, stores closed but bars and restaurants fully coming to life. Or nightlife. I’d stopped briefly in front of the long window at Joe’s, noticed a pretty sizable bar crowd. For a moment, I thought I saw Richie looking over at me from across the street, but when I turned there was no one there. It wasn’t the first time I thought I saw Richie, on the street or across a crowded room, and had been wrong.
Richie on the brain, I thought.
Along with all the other Burkes.
It was raining too hard now for me to continue walking away from home. I took a right on Exeter to head back, the sudden storm at full pitch and roar. If I’d had Rosie with me, the scene would have started to feel like something out of The Wizard of Oz. I was now wetter than Jacques Cousteau, and wondering if I should head back to Joe’s and call an Uber to take me home.
I never heard him behind me, or sensed his presence.
Just felt the first hard blow to the side of my head, an openhanded slap that made me feel as if I’d been hit with a board. The punch didn’t knock me out but would have been enough to put me down if he wasn’t dragging me down the alley, halfway between Exeter and Dartmouth, and into a small, sheltered construction site, the concrete walls blocking us from anyone’s view.
I had enough presence to try to reach down and clear my gun from the belt, but he had his arms around me and his lips close to my ear.
“Don’t even fucking think about it,” he said.
We were sheltered now from the rain, but it was still at full howl. I wondered if anyone would even hear me if I were able to scream, which I was not, with his hand clamped over my mouth. As I tried to break free, he hit me again, this one a blow to my kidneys that would have made me cry out in pain if it hadn’t knocked all the air out of me.
He had me up against one of the walls now, just inside the wire fencing to the makeshift entrance to whatever this room was someday going to be. Even if someone were walking down the Public Alley, it was unlikely they’d be able to see us. Now he grabbed the ponytail coming out of the back of my cap and gave it a good yank. I could now feel the gun in my back.
“Try to turn around again,” he said, “and I will shoot you.”
There was nothing for me to say, his hand still over my mouth. I feebly tried to reach down again for my gun. As I did, he shoved me harder into the wall.
“You need to leave this alone,” he said.
I felt my knees start to go, felt myself start to fall, but then he jerked me up.
He turned around then, perhaps to see if there might be someone in the alley, and his hand was briefly away from my mouth and I was able to say “Why didn’t you kill Richie?”
To my great surprise in the moment, he answered me.
He said, “Because we’re alike.”
What the hell? I wanted to ask him what that meant, but then his hand was back over my mouth.
“I will kill him next time if you don’t leave this the fuck alone,” he said. “Now go tell them all how easy this was. Tell Desmond we keep fucking with him because we can.”
Then I felt one last blow, this one to the top of my head. I went down but was still not out as I lay on the ground, feeling the intense pain in my head and in my side, thinking that the asshole had been right about one thing.
It had been easy.
When I finally managed to get into a sitting position, waiting for the wave of nausea that would mean I had been concussed, I got out my cell phone. I thought about calling Frank Belson or Lee Farrell, probably my best friend in the department. But I didn’t want to talk to cops right now. Or even Richie. I didn’t want to go to the hospital.
I called Spike and told him what had happened and where I was.
“Shit,” he said.
I said, “My thoughts exactly.”
“You don’t want to call an ambulance?”
“No,” I said. “But you know what a cockeyed optimist I am.”
“Cockeyed, anyway.”
He said he’d be there in five minutes if he had to drive straight across the Public Fucking Garden.
“Don’t hit the little ducklings,” I said.
“Fuck the ducks,” Spike said.
TWENTY-FIVE
HE PICKED ME up in the Town Car that he sometimes had on call for special patrons who lived nearby. I didn’t recognize the driver. I was happy I could recognize Spike.
On the way to Melanie Joan’s he said a doctor would meet us there.
“You know a doctor who makes house calls at this time of night?”
“Friend of the family.”
“Whose family.”
“Somebody’s,” he said.
He walked me into the house. I asked him to walk Rosie while I took a shower. He asked me again if I were feeling dizzy or nauseated. I told him I was not, that I was just sore as hell.
“Not as sore as I am,” he said.
I went and undressed. Every movement was a rousing number from the Pops. But I dragged myself into the shower and made the water as hot as I could, happy that I was able to stand.
The guy, whoever the guy was, had said that he and Richie were alike.
He had said that it had been easy.
But what did it mean?
I got out and dried my hair with a towel, got into a Maroon 5 T-shirt and sweats. When I emerged, there was a man sitting next to Spike on the couch, petting Rosie. Close-cropped gray hair, stylishly cut. A bright red Ralph Lauren polo shirt and faded jeans and sneakers.
“This is Dr. Greg,” Spike said.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
Dr. Greg grinned. “Spike,” he said, as if that explained everything except quantum theory.
Then he told me to stand where I was in the middle of the room, asking me to show him exactly where the guy had hit me. I told him side of the head, top of the head, ribs. He gently probed my head, asking where it hurt.
“Everywhere,” I said.
Then he asked me what Spike had asked, about dizziness or blurred vision or nausea or loss of consciousness. I told him, none of the above. It was then that I noticed a small machine standing at the end of the couch.
“Mind if I ask what that is?” I said.
“It’s a little thing we call the TRX Dragon,” he said. “Portable X-ray machine.”
“You just happened to have one handy?” I said.
Spike said, “Is knowing where he got it going to make you feel any better?”
“Not so much,” I said.
Dr. Greg plugged it in, used it to take pictures of my ribs, then asked if I had a laptop handy. I showed him where mine was on the desk. He attached a cord from the X-ray machine into the
laptop, hit some keys, nodded.
“Contusion,” he said. “No fracture, no breaks. You’re actually in pretty good shape considering the beating you say you took.”
“I feel like I’m being graded against the curve,” I said.
“This really happened in one of those Public Alleys?” he said.
“It did.”
“No shit,” he said.
“No shit,” I said.
“Ice for the ribs,” he said. “What do you take for headaches?”
Advil, I told him.
“Take three or four now,” he said, “and three or four more in a few hours.”
“Isn’t that a lot?”
He grinned again. “What is this, a Senate hearing?”
As he wheeled the TRX Dragon toward the door he said, “Ice pack to the top of the head wouldn’t be so bad, either. You can alternate.”
“I have two.”
“No shit,” he said again.
“Be prepared,” I said. “I would have made a great Boy Scout if they were taking girls back then.”
As soon as he was gone, Spike went and got the Jameson from where he knew I kept it. Came back with the bottle and two glasses. Poured what we liked to call a Spike pour at his restaurant.
I drank some Jameson. It felt much better than it tasted as it ran through me like warm water.
“Just what the doctor ordered,” I said.
“Dr. Spike knows you way better than Dr. Greg,” he said.
Then he looked at me over his glass and said, “Why didn’t you call Richie?”
“Because it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere tonight,” I said. “And he would have had no viable outlet for the rage he would have felt.”
Spike grinned. “You really have been shrinked, haven’t you?”
I said, “He said that he didn’t shoot to kill with Richie because they were, quote, alike.”
“Alike?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“The only person Richie’s going to want to kill is him,” Spike said.
“Tell you something else,” I said. “He seemed to enjoy the power he had over me.”
“This asshat seems to be enjoying himself, period,” Spike said. “But maybe getting a little more reckless as he goes in light of tonight’s festivities.”
“Makes him more likely to make a mistake.”
I took a healthy pull on the Jameson. My head no longer throbbed as badly as it had. I wasn’t sure if it was the Advil or the whiskey or both.
“Pretty bold move on Exeter Street,” Spike said. “All in all.”
“I think the conditions might have emboldened him somewhat,” I said.
“At least he didn’t shoot you.”
“There’s that.”
“Small blessings,” Spike said. “Painful as they may be.”
“I think we’ve established that this guy, whomever he is, wants to make Desmond Burke suffer,” I said.
“And he obviously knows enough about you, missy, to be threatened by you.”
“You think he plans to kill him if he can?” I said.
“Is that a rhetorical question?” Spike said.
“But he’s gonna want Desmond to know why.”
“What happened tonight doesn’t sound as if it’s about some gun deal gone sideways,” Spike said.
I shook my head.
“This wasn’t an old guy,” I said.
“Doesn’t mean an old guy didn’t send him,” Spike said. “Which gives you a leg up.”
“In what way?”
“Old guys are like your thing these days,” he said.
He said he was sleeping on the couch, and there wasn’t going to be any debate or smart talk about that. I told him I was too tired for either, and that he had Rosie, the two of them could battle it out for space.
I finished my Jameson, decided against taking more Advil, and went to bed, where I finally managed to sleep, dreaming about drowning because a hand kept holding my head underneath the water and not letting it up.
TWENTY-SIX
THE PAIN, IN both my side and my head, wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be when I awakened.
There was bruising in the rib-cage area, I noticed when I took another hot shower. No bruising on the side of my face, though it felt tender near my right ear. It was official that I’d lost the fight. But the bastard hadn’t knocked me out. Spike left after I came out of the shower. He told me that if I didn’t check in with him every couple hours, he planned to call a cop. Preferably a cute one.
The guy had said what he’d said to me last night. In the text message to Felix, the guy had told him to ask Desmond how it felt when it was someone he loved. He had not mentioned a gun deal. It didn’t mean that the deal wasn’t a part of this.
What if it wasn’t just about one thing?
What if it was somehow about love, in some way I still couldn’t begin to understand, and money?
I considered that as I walked Rosie up Charles Street, gun in one pocket of my hoodie, a taser in the other pocket. As ever: Not being paranoid. Just alert.
“What if it really is about both?” I said to Rosie on Charles Street. “What if, as they used to say in the old movies, it’s heaters and a broad?”
Rosie looked up at me, always optimistic herself, as if a treat might be forthcoming. Which it was. When we got home I called Frank Belson and told him what had happened to me, and asked if anybody in the department could tell me more about a possible gun deal with the Burkes than Albert Antonioni had.
“First off, you’re all right?” he said.
“Is that concern I hear from you, you big lug?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.
“I’ll live,” I said.
“Shit,” he said. “I was afraid of that.”
“I’m trying to assemble the pieces to a puzzle here,” I said, “but I’m starting to think it might be more than one puzzle.”
“I’ll call Quirk,” Belson said. “He still knows everybody. Including guys from ATF.”
“I would be most grateful,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “Our relationship continues to be give and take. I give. You take.”
Said he would get back to me and hung up.
I made myself coffee and sat there at the kitchen table drinking it, still nagged by the feeling that I had missed something the night before.
It only made my head start to hurt all over again.
I reviewed everything he’d said to me one more time, including the part about telling Desmond he was fucking with him because he could. And made a promise, to myself, that I would do the same to him, first chance I got, the sonofabitch.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I MET CHARLIE WHITAKER, retired ATF, at George Lane Beach in Weymouth, on Boston’s South Shore, once known as the Irish Riviera. Charlie said he’d rather meet me at the beach, a short walk from his home.
“Mrs. Whitaker,” he’d said on the phone, “prefers I no longer discuss firearms in the house.”
We sat on a bench, two coffee cups he’d brought with him from Panera between us. He was a tall, thin man who still had a lot of wavy white hair and still looked fit enough to be on the job.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.
“Belson called Quirk,” he said. “Quirk called me. Felt like the old days.”
“I assume Frank told you what I’ve been hearing about the Burkes,” I said.
“Wasn’t surprised,” he said.
“Why so?”
“Because there’s something going on lately, up and down the coast, even if we haven’t yet been able to get our arms around it, or our hands on the bad guys,” Whitaker said. “You probably know this, but used to be there wasn’t enough volume, no matter how steady the
flow of guns was from down south, to make big enough money to get the big guys fully engaged. But over the last few months, we’ve heard about shipments disappearing. One here, one there. At first our guys thought it might be random. Couple trucks that simply went missing. Not front-page stuff, just noteworthy if you’re in the game. It’s as if someone is stockpiling. But the guys on my crew don’t believe those guns simply vanished. They’re somewhere.”
I grinned and said, “Stop, Charlie. You’re going too fast for me.”
“My old crew is on this, believe me,” he said. “But so far they’ve come up with nothing.”
I thought about my conversation with Albert Antonioni, who’d acted about as interested in the gun business as he was in lawn bowling.
Whitaker gave me a brief tutorial then about the Iron Pipeline, the name given to I-95 by various bad guys, from biker gangs to gun-runners. The people in charge, Whitaker said, send straw buyers with clean records to states like Virginia, where restrictions on gun sales are generally softer than soft ice cream. Then they bring the guns back, in whatever bulk they can manage, and sell them on the street in places like Providence, and before long the guns are on their way to Boston and various gang members.
“Any particular ethnicity?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “The country of mutts.”
He sipped some coffee and stared at the boats on the water.
“What they’re basically doing is trafficking in legal illegal guns that were originally purchased legally in fucking Gun Show America,” he said. “Then they start passing through one pair of hands and another—and another—until somebody’s using one of them to shoot somebody in the head.”
He smiled. “You can see why Mrs. Whitaker doesn’t want such talk in her kitchen?”
“Discretion,” I said.
“Better part of all that valor shit.”
“So it really could be worth it to Desmond and Felix Burke to get big into the gun business this late in their lives?”
“Especially if they’ve figured out a way to become one-stop shopping for all of New England,” he said. “Listen, guys like them have taken a big hit because of online gambling the way everybody else has, something that was always their bread and butter. Now, that hasn’t dried up completely, mind you. But the online stuff has created a drag. And they were never into girls the way Albert always has been, though I keep hearing that Tony Marcus might want to expand his interests down here. You know him, right?”