Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  Just Ray always said the same thing. “You can’t outrun a train.”

  And Jimmy, confused, said, “No one can, Ray.”

  Just Ray, starting to sink again, smiled. “You in particular, though.”

  Thirteen years of those dreams, thirteen years of Ray’s head bobbing on the water, and Jimmy still didn’t know what the hell he meant by that.

  27

  WHO DO YOU LOVE?

  BRENDAN’S MOTHER had gone out to Bingo by the time he got home. She left a note: “Chicken in fridge. Glad you’re okay. Don’t make a habit of it.”

  Brendan checked his and Ray’s room, but Ray was out, too, and Brendan took a chair from the kitchen and placed it down in front of the butler’s pantry. He stepped up on the chair and it sagged to the left where one of the legs was missing a bolt. He looked at the ceiling slat and saw the smudge marks of fingers in the dust, and the air directly in front of his eyes began to swim with tiny dark specks. He pressed his right palm against the slat, lifted it slightly. He brought his hand down, wiped it on his pants, and took several breaths.

  There were some things you didn’t want to know the answers to. Brendan had never wanted to run into his father once he was grown because he didn’t want to look in his father’s face and see how easy it had been to leave him. He’d never asked Katie about old boyfriends, even Bobby O’Donnell, because he didn’t want to picture her lying on top of someone else, kissing him the way she kissed Brendan.

  Brendan knew about the truth. In most cases, it was just a matter of deciding whether you wanted to look it in the face or live with the comfort of ignorance or lies. And ignorance and lies were often underrated. Most people Brendan knew couldn’t make it through the day without a saucerful of ignorance and a side of lies.

  But this, this truth had to be faced. Because he’d already faced it in the holding cell, and it had sliced through him like a bullet and lodged in his stomach. And it wasn’t coming out, which meant he couldn’t hide from it, couldn’t tell himself it wasn’t there. Ignorance was not a possibility. Lying was no longer an accessible part of the equation.

  “Shit,” Brendan said, and pushed the ceiling slat aside and reached back into the darkness, his fingers touching dust and chips of wood and more dust, but no gun. He felt around up there for another full minute, even though he knew it was gone. His father’s gun, and it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. It was out in the world, and it had killed Katie.

  He put the slat back in place. He got a dustpan and swept up the dust that had fallen to the floor. He took the chair back to the kitchen. He felt a need to be precise in his movements. He felt it was important that he remain calm. He poured himself a glass of orange juice and placed it on the table. He sat down in the chair with the sagging leg and turned so that he was looking at the door in the center of the apartment. He took a sip of his orange juice and waited for Ray.

  “LOOK AT THIS,” Sean said, pulling the latent prints file from the box and opening it in front of Whitey. “That’s the cleanest one they pulled off the door. It’s small because it’s a kid’s.”

  Whitey said, “Old Lady Prior heard two kids playing on the street just before Katie banged her car up. Playing with hockey sticks, she said.”

  “She said she heard Katie say ‘Hi.’ Maybe it wasn’t Katie. A little kid’s voice could sound like a woman’s. And no footprints? Of course not. What do they weigh—a hundred pounds?”

  “You recognize that kid’s voice?”

  “Sounded a lot like Johnny O’Shea’s.”

  Whitey nodded. “The other kid not saying anything at all.”

  “Because he can’t fucking speak,” Sean said.

  “HEY, RAY,” Brendan said as the two boys entered the apartment.

  Ray nodded. Johnny O’Shea waved. They started heading back toward the bedroom.

  “Come on in here a sec, Ray.”

  Ray looked at Johnny.

  “Just a second, Ray. I got something I want to ask you.”

  Ray turned and Johnny O’Shea dropped the gym bag he’d been carrying and sat on the edge of Mrs. Harris’s bed. Ray came down the short hall into the kitchen and held out his hands, looked at his brother like “What?”

  Brendan hooked a chair with his foot and pulled it out from under the table, nodded at it.

  Ray’s head tilted up as if he smelled something in the air, a scent he wasn’t fond of. He looked at the chair. He looked at Brendan.

  He signed, “What did I do?”

  “You tell me,” Brendan said.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “So sit down.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  Ray shrugged.

  Brendan said, “Who do you hate, Ray?”

  Ray looked at him like he was nuts.

  “Come on,” Brendan said. “Who do you hate?”

  Ray’s sign was brief: “Nobody.”

  Brendan nodded. “Okay. Who do you love?”

  Ray gave him that face again.

  Brendan leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “Who do you love?”

  Ray looked down at his shoes, then up at Brendan. He raised his hand and pointed at his brother.

  “You love me?”

  Ray nodded, fidgeting.

  “What about Ma?”

  Ray shook his head.

  “You don’t love Ma?”

  Ray signed, “Don’t feel one way or the other.”

  “So I’m the only person you love?”

  Ray thrust his small face out and scowled. His hands flew. “Yes. Can I go now?”

  “No,” Brendan said. “Have a seat.”

  Ray looked down at the chair, his face red and angry. He looked up at Brendan. He raised his hand and extended his middle finger, and then he turned to walk out of the kitchen.

  Brendan didn’t even realize he’d moved until he had most of Ray’s hair in his hand and was pulling him up off his feet. He pulled back with his arm as if he were pulling the cord on a rusty lawn mower, and then he opened his fingers and Ray flew backward out of his hand and over the kitchen table. He hit the wall and then dropped onto the table, brought the whole thing crashing to the floor with him.

  “You love me?” Brendan said, not even looking down at his brother. “You love me so you kill my fucking girlfriend, Ray? Huh?”

  That got Johnny O’Shea moving, as Brendan had figured it would. Johnny grabbed his gym bag and bolted for the door, but Brendan was all over him. He picked the little prick up by his throat and slammed him against the door.

  “My brother never does anything without you, O’Shea. Never.”

  He pulled back his fist and Johnny screamed, “No, Bren! Don’t!”

  Brendan punched him so hard in the face he heard the nose break. And then he punched him again. When Johnny hit the floor, he curled into a ball and spit blood on the wood and Brendan said, “I’m coming back. I’m coming back and I just might beat you to death, you piece of fucking garbage.”

  Ray was standing on wobbly feet, his sneakers sliding on broken plates when Brendan came back in the kitchen and slapped him so hard across the face he knocked him into the sink. He grabbed his brother by the shirt, Ray looking into his face with tears streaming from his hate-filled eyes and blood smearing his mouth, and Brendan threw him to the floor and spread his arms and knelt on them.

  “Speak,” Brendan said. “I know you can. Speak, you fucking freak, or I swear to God, Ray, I’ll kill you. Speak!” Brendan shouted, and brought his fists down into Ray’s ears. “Speak! Say her name! Say it! Say ‘Katie,’ Ray. Say ‘Katie’!”

  Ray’s eyes went foggy and dull and he spit some blood up onto his own face.

  “Speak!” Brendan screamed. “I’ll fucking kill you if you don’t!”

  He grabbed his brother by the hair along his temples and pulled his head off the floor, shook it from side to side until Ray’s eyes focused again and Brendan held his head still and looked deep into tho
se gray pupils, saw so much love and hate in there that he wanted to rip his brother’s head clean off and throw it out the window.

  He said it again, “Speak,” but this time it came out in a hoarse, strangled whisper. “Speak.”

  He heard a loud cough and looked behind him, saw Johnny O’Shea on his feet, spitting blood down onto the floor, Ray senior’s gun in his hand.

  SEAN AND WHITEY were coming up the stairs when they heard the racket, someone screaming in the apartment and the unmistakable snaps of flesh hitting flesh. They heard a man scream, “I’ll fucking kill you!” and Sean had his hand on his Glock as he reached for the doorknob.

  Whitey said, “Wait,” but Sean had already turned the knob, and he stepped into the apartment and saw a gun pointed at his chest from six inches away.

  “Hold it! Don’t pull that trigger, kid!”

  Sean looked into the bloody face of Johnny O’Shea and what he saw there scared the shit out of him. There was nothing there. Probably never had been. The kid wouldn’t pull the trigger because he was angry or because he was scared. He’d pull the trigger because Sean was just a six-foot-two video image, and the gun was a joystick.

  “Johnny, you need to point that gun at the floor.”

  Sean could hear Whitey’s breathing from the other side of the threshold.

  “Johnny.”

  Johnny O’Shea said, “He fucking punched me. Twice. Broke my nose.”

  “Who?”

  “Brendan.”

  Sean looked to his left, saw Brendan standing in the kitchen doorway, hands down by his side, frozen. Johnny O’Shea, he realized, had been about to shoot Brendan when Sean came through the door. He could hear Brendan’s breath, shallow and slow.

  “We’ll arrest him for that if you want.”

  “Don’t want him fucking arrested. I want him dead.”

  “Dead’s a big thing, Johnny. Dead’s never coming back, you know?”

  “I know,” the kid said. “I fucking know all about that. You going to use that?” The kid’s face was a mess, blood pouring from that broken nose and dripping off his chin.

  Sean said, “What?”

  Johnny O’Shea nodded at Sean’s hip. “That gun. It’s a Glock, right?”

  “It’s a Glock, yeah.”

  “Glocks kick ass, man. I’d like to get me one of those. So you going to use it?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah. You going to draw on me?”

  Sean smiled. “No, Johnny.”

  Johnny said, “The fuck you smiling for? Draw on me. We’ll see what happens. It’ll be cool.” He thrust the gun out, his arm straight, the muzzle maybe an inch from Sean’s chest now.

  Sean said, “I’d say you got the drop on me, partner. Know what I mean?”

  “Got the drop, Ray,” Johnny called. “On a fucking cop, dude. Me! Check it out.”

  Sean said, “Let’s not let this get out—”

  “Saw this movie once, right? Cop’s chasing this black guy on a roof? Nigger threw his ass off. Cop’s like all ‘Aaagh’ and shit the whole way down. Nigger’s so bad-ass he don’t care the cop got the wife and little shits at home. Nigger’s that cool, man.”

  Sean had seen this before. Back when he was in uniform and sent as crowd control on a bank robbery gone bad, the guy inside gradually growing stronger for a two-hour period, feeling the power of the gun in his hand and the effect it had, Sean watching him rant and rave over the monitor hooked up to the bank cameras. At the start, the guy had been terrified, but he’d gotten over that. Fell in love with that gun.

  And for one moment, Sean saw Lauren looking over at him from the pillow, one hand pressed to the side of her head. He saw his dream daughter, smelled her, and thought what a shitty thing it would be to die without meeting her or seeing Lauren again.

  He focused on the empty face before him. He said, “You see that guy to your left, Johnny? The one in the doorway?”

  Johnny’s eyes darted fast to his left. “Yeah.”

  “He doesn’t want to shoot you. He doesn’t.”

  “Don’t care if he does,” Johnny said, but Sean could see it got to the kid, his eyes getting rabbity now, jerking up and down.

  “But if you shoot me, he has no choice.”

  “Ain’t afraid of dying.”

  “I know that. Thing is, though? He won’t shoot you in the head or nothing. We don’t kill kids, man. But if he shoots you from where he’s standing, you know where that bullet’s going to go?”

  Sean kept his eyes on Johnny, even though his head seemed to be magnetized to the gun in the kid’s hand, wanting to look down on it, see where the trigger was, if the kid was pulling on it at all, Sean thinking, I don’t want to get shot, and I definitely don’t want to get shot by a kid. He couldn’t think of a more pathetic way to go. He could feel Brendan, ten feet to his left and frozen, probably thinking the same thing.

  Johnny licked his lips.

  “It’s going to go through your armpit and into your spine, man. It’s going to paralyze you. You’ll be like those kids on those Jimmy Fund commercials. You know the ones. Sitting in the wheelchair, all frozen up on one side, head hanging off the chair. You’ll be a drooler, Johnny. People will have to hold the cup up beside your head so you can suck from the straw.”

  Johnny made up his mind. Sean could see it, as if a light had clicked off in the kid’s dark brain, and Sean felt the fear seize him now, knew this kid was going to pull the trigger if only to hear the sound.

  “My fucking nose, man,” Johnny said, and turned toward Brendan.

  Sean heard his own breath pop out of his mouth in surprise, and he looked down to see that gun sweeping away from his body, as if revolving on top of a tripod. He reached out so fast it was as if someone else was controlling his arms, and closed his hand over the gun as Whitey stepped into the room, Glock pointed at the kid’s chest. A sound came out of the kid’s mouth—a gasp of defeated surprise as if he’d opened a Christmas present to find a soiled gym sock inside—and Sean pushed the kid’s forehead back against the wall and stripped the gun from him.

  Sean said, “Motherfucker,” and blinked at Whitey through the sweat in his eyes.

  Johnny started to cry the way only a thirteen-year-old could, as if the whole world was sitting on his face.

  Sean turned him to the wall and pulled his hands behind his back, saw Brendan finally take a deep breath, his lips and arms trembling, Ray Harris standing behind him in a kitchen that looked like it had been hit by a cyclone.

  Whitey stepped up behind Sean, put a hand on his shoulder. “How you doing?”

  “Kid was going to do it,” Sean said, feeling the sweat that drenched every inch of his clothes, even his socks.

  “No, I wasn’t,” Johnny wailed. “I was just kidding.”

  “Fuck you,” Whitey said, and leaned his face into the kid’s. “Nobody cares about your tears but your mommy, little bitch. Get used to it.”

  Sean snapped the cuffs on Johnny O’Shea and took him by the shirt, led him into the kitchen, and dropped him in a chair.

  Whitey said, “Ray, you look like someone threw you from the back of a truck.”

  Ray looked at his brother.

  Brendan leaned against the oven and his body was sagging so bad, Sean figured he’d fall over in a light breeze.

  “We know,” Sean said.

  “What do you know?” Brendan whispered.

  Sean looked at the kid sniffling in the chair and the other kid, mute, looking up at them like he hoped they’d leave soon so he could get back to playing Doom in the back bedroom. Sean was pretty sure once he got a sign language interpreter and a social worker and questioned them that they’d say they did it “because.” Because they had the gun. Because they were there on the street when she drove up it. Maybe because Ray had never really liked her. Because it seemed like a cool idea. Because they’d never killed anyone before. Because when you had your finger curled around a trigger, you just had to pull it or otherwise that finge
r would itch for weeks.

  “What do you know?” Brendan repeated, his voice gone hoarse and wet.

  Sean shrugged. He wished he had an answer for Brendan, but looking at these two kids, nothing came to mind. Nothing at all.

  JIMMY TOOK A BOTTLE with him to Gannon Street. There was an assisted-living home for the elderly at the end of the street, a chunk of 1960s limestone and granite that was two stories tall and ran half a block down Heller Court, the street that began where Gannon ended. Jimmy sat on the white front steps and looked back down Gannon. He’d heard they were kicking the old people out of here, actually, the Point having grown so popular that the owner of the building was going to sell to a guy who specialized in starter condos for young couples. The Point was gone, really. It had always been the snobby sister of the Flats, but now it was like it wasn’t even in the same family. Pretty soon, they’d probably draw up a charter, get the name changed, carve it off the Buckingham map.

  Jimmy took the pint from his jacket and sipped some bourbon, looked at the spot where they’d last seen Dave Boyle that day the men had taken him, his head looking back through the rear window, covered in shadow, gone soft with distance.

  I wish it hadn’t been you, Dave. I really do.

  He raised the pint to Katie. Daddy got him, honey. Daddy put him down.

  “Talking to yourself?”

  Jimmy looked over and saw Sean climbing out of his car. Sean had a roadie beer in his hand and he smiled at Jimmy’s pint. “What’s your excuse?”

  “Tough night,” Jimmy said.

  Sean nodded. “Me, too. Saw a bullet with my name on it.”

  Jimmy slid to the side, and Sean sat down beside him. “How’d you know to look for me here?”

  “Your wife said you might be here.”

  “My wife?” Jimmy had never told her about his trips here. Christ, she was a real piece of work.

  “Yeah. Jimmy, we made a bust today.”

  Jimmy took a long pull from the bottle, his chest fluttering. “A bust.”

  “Yeah. We got your daughter’s killers. Got ’em cold.”

  “Killers?” Jimmy said. “Plural?”