Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  “You’re gonna catch hell for this,” Mulligan said.

  “I know,” Murphy said, “but I don’t really give a shit.”

  * * *

  It was past two A.M. when Mulligan stepped out into the storm and fetched Secretariat from the parking lot across the street. The rain was coming down hard as he turned into Felicia’s condo development in Cranston. A single downstairs light was on in her place when he drove past.

  He continued to the end of the street and drove back, unable to see much through the rain-spattered windshield. He parked at the curb, grabbed his .45, and tucked it into his pants. Then he climbed the front stoop, quietly let himself in, and found Mason sleeping on the couch, the Louisville Slugger like a lover in his arms.

  * * *

  Eight miles south, Gloria rolled up to her house in Warwick, parked in the garage, went through the connecting door to the kitchen, and dropped her camera bag on the kitchen table. She was proud of herself tonight, proud that she’d stood in the rain without panicking to shoot some first-rate fire photos. She walked through the house, checking the locks on all the doors and windows. Then she skipped up the stairs, pulled off her clothes, and tossed them on the floor. She dropped into bed and immediately fell asleep.

  * * *

  Mulligan headed for the half-bath to drain the evening’s coffee from his bladder. When he was done, he roused Mason and told him to go upstairs. Then he went out through the sliding glass doors, checked the backyard, came back inside, rechecked all the locks, and turned off the air-conditioning.

  * * *

  In Warwick, ten miles to the south, Andy Jennings’s two big dogs snored on his living room carpet. He sat on the floor beside them, cleaning their namesake, a Model 460 V Smith & Wesson. His other pistol, a nine-millimeter Walther, was already cleaned and loaded. When he was done, he loaded the Smith & Wesson with hollow-points, bade the pooches good night, picked up both pistols, and tiptoed up the stairs to the bedroom where Mary was sleeping. He put the guns on the bedside table and slipped under the covers.

  Fifteen minutes later, he bolted awake. The dogs were barking.

  * * *

  Mulligan put his .45 down on the coffee table. Exhausted, he stretched out on the couch and listened to the house. All he could hear was rain battering the windows.

  Suddenly, he was on the death plane again, but this time something was different. At first, he didn’t know what it was. Then one of the blond women’s eyelids fluttered. She opened her mouth to scream.

  * * *

  In Coventry, twelve miles to the west, Tim Zucchi poured himself another cup of black coffee and settled down in front of the TV. His pistol, a nine-millimeter Sturm, Ruger semiauto, lay beside him on an end table. For two weeks now, he’d been going to bed at six P.M., getting up at eleven P.M., and standing guard until dawn. Each night, he TiVo’d all the late night talk shows and then watched them until it was time to go to work.

  “Say something funny, asshole,” he told Conan O’Brien. “I need help keeping my eyes open.”

  * * *

  Mulligan startled awake. It wasn’t just the dream that was different. Something was different here, too. The rain sounded louder now. The air stirred as if a window had been opened. He peered into the darkness.

  He saw nothing.

  After a moment, he sensed something huge padding toward him across the living room carpet. He swung his legs off the couch, picked up his .45, and snicked off the safety.

  The gun had a will of its own. It boomed three times before Mulligan made a conscious decision to fire it. The something huge vanished in a red mist.

  78

  “If you were a better shot, you could have saved the criminal justice system a ton of money,” Chief Hernandez said.

  “He’s gonna live?”

  “The doctors working on him at Rhode Island Hospital seem to think so. I told them not to work too hard.”

  “Where’d I hit him?”

  “You put one round in his left shoulder and another in his left lung. The third shot struck a picture of Freyer’s mother on the living room wall. Got the old gal right in the liver.”

  It was early Wednesday morning, the sun just coming up. Hernandez and Mulligan were sitting in straight metal chairs on opposite sides of a scarred steel table in a Warwick PD interrogation room. Three detectives, two local and one from the Rhode Island State Police, leaned against once white walls stained yellow with cigarette smoke.

  “Diggs was carrying a military-style combat knife with a seven-inch blade,” Hernandez said. “Did you catch a glimpse of it before you fired?”

  Mulligan hesitated.

  “The smart answer would be yes,” Hernandez said.

  “Then yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “But you were afraid for your life?” Hernandez asked, nodding his head to signal the correct answer.

  “Yes, Chief. I was afraid for my life.”

  “And for the lives of the two people sleeping upstairs?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, then,” Hernandez said.

  “How long are you going to keep me here?”

  “In a hurry, are you?”

  “I am. I’ve got to get back to the paper. I don’t want to get scooped on my own story.”

  “You’re going to be here all day.”

  “Aw, shit. What about Mason?”

  “He’ll be here all day, too.”

  “Sonovabitch!”

  “Tell you what,” the chief said. “We’ll keep a twelve-hour lid on this, give the two of you enough time to break the news.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Under the circumstances, it’s the least we can do.”

  “How about a medal?”

  “No.”

  “A commendation I can hang on my wall?”

  “Don’t press your luck.”

  79

  A week later, Mulligan stepped into the elevator at the Dispatch with five men wearing identical black suits, white dress shirts, and purple ties. Three of them were carrying laptops. One of them got off with Mulligan on the third floor and headed for Lomax’s office. The other four continued on to the upper floors, which housed the treasurer’s and publisher’s offices.

  Mulligan walked to his cubicle, checked his messages, and found one from Lomax assigning him to write six obituaries for the next day’s paper. Ninety minutes later, he was banging out the last one:

  Herbert “Party Boy” Walker, 57, of 22 Colfax Street, Providence, a patrolman in the Providence Police Department, died yesterday at Miriam Hospital after a long illness.

  Walker’s dying wish, according to friends and family, was to make it known that his enthusiastic consumption of cheap whiskey and oxycodone, along with his stubborn refusal to take the advice of his physician, had contributed to his early …

  The man in the black suit was leaving the managing editor’s office now. Mason watched him head for the elevator and then wandered over to ask Lomax what was up.

  “Strangers are rummaging through the Dispatch looking for loose change,” Lomax said.

  “Who are they?”

  “A pack of greedy corporate raiders negotiating to buy the paper.”

  “From General Communications Holdings International?”

  “How the hell did you know?”

  “I’m an investigative reporter. I know all kinds of stuff.”

  80

  On Saturday night, Roomful of Blues, the legendary eight–man Rhode Island band, was on stage at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel on Washington Street. Chris Vachon, the lead guitar player, was tearing it up behind a new frontman named Phil Pemberton. A veteran of the Boston blues scene, Phil injected soul into the band’s familiar sound, his textured voice alternately aching with tenderness and threatening to wreck the walls.

  Mulligan, Gloria, Mason, and Felicia were sharing a table, but not the check. Mason was springing for their night
on the town. Felicia, who’d shed her lawyerly garb for party duds, wiggled to the band’s insistent groove.

  “Don’t you hear that?” she squealed, clutching at Mason’s hand. “How can you sit still?”

  Under the table, Mulligan’s right Reebok was keeping time. Gloria stared at him, surprised by his rhythm, and tried to remember the last time she’d danced. Mason, looking somewhat distracted, held on to Felicia’s hand and smiled in her direction as Phil launched into “Ain’t Nothin’ Happenin’.” How wrong he was, Mason thought.

  After Doug Woolverton’s trumpet finished the tune with a sizzling flourish, Phil acknowledged the screams for more, then hushed the crowd.

  “Got a triple threat for ya here tonight,” he said. “Newport’s own Edward Mason is in the house. He writes the news. He writes music. And if he hasn’t lost his nerve, tonight he’s gonna sing. This ragtime number he just wrote is something different for the band, but we ran through it a couple of times this afternoon, and we dig it. I think you will too.”

  Mason grinned at his shocked colleagues, winked at Felicia, and made his way to the stage. Travis Colby, the keyboard player, got up so the kid could take his place. Mason bent toward the mike and said rather jauntily, “Ladies and gentlemen, ‘Providence Rag.’”

  His fingers hit the keys, setting down a rollicking beat that made the audience hoot with surprise. When he began to sing, his voice wavered, hunting for a key. Once the rhythm kicked in, he found it and started to have fun.

  Come on and hear the presses rising roar

  Inking tales of sins and war

  Oh ma honey, what we do

  Provide you with a point of view

  Oh ma baby, there’s just no match

  For the roar we roar at the ol’ Dispatch

  That mighty rumble that you hear

  Rhode Island’s favorite ragtime rag

  The truth we tell will persevere

  Rhode Island’s favorite ragtime rag

  Work up a cheer, and hoist your beer

  For Rhode Island’s favorite ragtime rag!

  After Mason’s debut, and a raucous ovation from the crowd, the band took a break. The newly minted performer walked back to the table through backslaps, toasts, and high fives. When he reached his seat, Felicia jumped up and planted a long kiss on his lips. Mulligan leaned in as if he were going to do the same, then laughed and gave his friend a brotherly clap on the shoulder.

  “Two questions,” Mulligan said. “Is this what you’re gonna do when the paper is sold? And do you need a roadie?”

  * * *

  Mulligan drove home alone beneath a big yellow moon, Phil Pemberton’s tender rendition of Sam Cooke’s masterpiece “A Change Is Gonna Come” still singing in his ears. He left Secretariat at the curb, trudged up the stairs, and shouldered through his apartment door. He was grateful that Larry Bird was history, but he still longed for a big dog, one that would greet him with moist kisses and a thumping tail.

  He was bone tired and a little drunk, but when he threw himself on his mattress, sleep wouldn’t come. He’d never shot anyone before, but he was fine with that. He wished he’d shot straighter, that he’d blasted a hole straight through the place where Kwame Diggs’s heart should have been.

  Mulligan’s mind raced, a slide show of death. He’d never been inside the murder houses, but he imagined the five long-ago victims lying in glistening pools of blood. He struggled to remember his best friend, Rosie, as she once was and not as a bundle of bones entombed beneath a marble slab. The pumping heart of the newspaper he loved was failing, too, sluggish rivers of printer’s ink barely trickling through its veins.

  Mulligan had always said that being a newspaperman was the only thing he was any good at—that if he couldn’t be a reporter, he’d probably end up selling pencils from a tin cup. He figured begging would pay as well as the Dispatch, but it didn’t sound like much of a plan.

  September 2012

  The pain in his chest is returning. He presses the red call button for the nurse. Ten minutes later, she still has not come.

  He looks at the wall clock and realizes it has been only an hour since his last shot of Demerol. It will be another sixty minutes before the bitch will give him another one.

  He picks up the remote and flips through the channels. Celebrity Apprentice. The Golden Girls. Battlestar Galactica. Hillbilly Handfishin’. Jesus, what a bunch of crap.

  The cop stationed outside his door steps in, glares at him for a moment, then ducks back into the hallway. The cop, or others like him, will remain there, the man knows, until he’s well enough to appear in court for his extradition hearing.

  More channel flipping. Finally, he hits on something worth watching. Jason X, a slasher movie about Jason Voorhees, one of his favorite characters. He’s never seen this one; it was made while he was in prison.

  He slides his right hand, the one that doesn’t have an IV stuck in it, under the coarse hospital sheet and gives himself a tug. His erection rises, then deflates. What the hell?

  The drugs, maybe. Yeah. That must be it.

  By the time the movie ends, his chest is on fire. He presses the call button maybe fifty times. Finally, the bitch comes in with his silver needle. The pain recedes.

  He drifts off.…

  He is behind the condo again, peering through the windows. The kitchen is empty. He sits in the wet grass and removes his sneakers. Then he pulls a glass cutter from his little black valise and carves a hole in the window. He reaches through it, unlocks the latch, raises the sash, and crawls inside.

  He tiptoes out of the kitchen and pads across the living room rug. Someone is sleeping on the sofa. He slips the combat knife from the sheath on his belt and swings it in an arc, tearing out the sleeper’s throat. There is a gun on the coffee table. A big, heavy pistol. He picks it up, sticks it in his waistband, and wipes his knife blade clean on the leather couch.

  Then he turns and stealthily climbs the stairs. Somewhere up there, the girl of his dreams is waiting. He feels himself getting hard.

  At long last, he will hear Felicia scream.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In September 2011, Thomas H. Cook, one of the finest writers of my generation, accepted my invitation to lunch at a pub in St. Louis. He welcomed the chance to catch up with an old pal. I had something more in mind. For two hours, the Jedi prose master listened patiently as I droned on about my muddled idea for a third crime novel, prodding me with questions and offering priceless suggestions. A year later, when I completed the first draft, I was pleased with each chapter but not with the way they fit together. Something wasn’t right, but darned if I could figure out what it was. I sheepishly sent the manuscript to Susanna Einstein, who is not only a great agent but the best story doctor I’ve ever known. She promptly identified the problem and offered a solution. As always, my wife, Patricia Smith, one of our finest living poets, edited every line of every page, adding music to my occasionally toneless prose. If not for their brilliance and generosity, this novel might never have been written. Every writer should have such friends.

  Forge Books by Bruce DeSilva

  Rogue Island

  Cliff Walk

  Providence Rag

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bruce DeSilva’s crime fiction has won the Edgar and Macavity awards, has been listed as a finalist for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry awards, and has been published in ten foreign languages. His short stories have appeared in Akashic Books’s award-winning noir anthologies, and his book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and scores of other publications.

  DeSilva was a journalist for forty years, most recently as worldwide writing coach for the Associated Press, editing stories that won nearly every major journalism prize, including the Pulitzer. He has worked as a consultant for fifty newspapers, taught at the University of Michigan and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and lectured at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation. He and
his wife, the poet Patricia Smith, live in New Jersey with two enormous dogs named Brady and Rondo. Find him online at www.brucedesilva.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  PROVIDENCE RAG

  Copyright © 2014 Bruce DeSilva

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph by Getty Images

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  DeSilva, Bruce.

  Providence Rag: a Liam Mulligan novel / Bruce DeSilva.

  p. cm.—(A Liam Mulligan novel; 3)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-7429-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-4142-0 (e-book)

  1. Journalists—Fiction. 2. Providence (R.I.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.E7575P78 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2013025786

  e-ISBN 9781466841420

  First Edition: March 2014