The Boss of Hampton Beach

by Jed Power

  * * *

  Lt. John O'Brien stood beside the Lincoln and took a deep breath to slow the adrenalin surge. He kept his weapon trained on the car's back seat. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Bumpers coming up slowly from the unmarked, his weapon extended.

  Christ, Bumper was hit! He was bleeding heavily from a wound on the left side of his neck.

  "How bad is it?" O'Brien reached out and started to pull his partner's collar open. Bumpers pushed him away.

  "I'm fine. I just . . . need . . . to catch my . . . breath." Bumper’s skin color turned almost Caucasian and his knees buckled.

  “Somebody call an ambulance!” O'Brien grabbed his partner and lowered him until he was sitting Indian-style on the asphalt with his back against an adjacent car.

  Someone in the growing crowd of onlookers passed O'Brien a cloth. “Ambulance is on its way.”

  Someone else shouted, "Put pressure on it."

  O'Brien tore open Bumper's collar. The wound was bad. Something serious had been hit. He glanced around, hoping to see the crowd parting to let an ambulance through. No such luck. He could hear the sirens off in the distance, but they didn't sound any closer than they had a minute ago.

  O'Brien pressed the cloth tight over the wound with his right hand, shocked to feel blood pulsing beneath the cloth. It's all right, it's all right, he told himself, adjusting his hand so he didn't cut off Bumpers' air supply. It's just a small caliber wound; no one dies from a small caliber wound.

  That was a lie and O'Brien knew it. People died from small caliber wounds all the time. But those people weren't his partner.

  Bumpers looked up, eyes glazed. He swallowed over and over, like something was caught in his throat. "You were right, John. There was something going on. And it . . . it must've been something big."

  "Yeah, sure. Something big," O'Brien answered. He cleared his throat and looked around again for the ambulance. What the hell was taking so long? "Don't try to talk."

  "If I don't talk, I'll die." Bumpers smiled, his face still pale as a white man's. "It was something big, wasn't it?"

  "Sure it was, Carl. It was something big." Warm blood ran between O'Brien's fingers. He had to press harder. Get the bleeding to stop. But all he could feel was that pulse pumping underneath his palm. If only it would stop for a minute, he thought, and then to his horror realized what that would mean.

  "You were right from the beginning." Bumpers' eyelids drooped closed.

  O'Brien's breath caught in his throat. He shook Bumpers' shoulder. "Right about what, son? Right about what?"

  Bumpers' eyes flickered open. "You said something was going on. You were right. I guess there is something . . . something to say for intuition."

  "Of course there is," O'Brien said. "I've tried to teach you that, son." Was it his imagination or was Bumpers' pulse slowing down? It just didn't feel like it was pumping as often or as strong as it had been.

  Bumpers swallowed again. "Take a look, John. Please."

  Someone stepped up beside him and took hold of the cloth pressed against Bumper's wound. O'Brien hesitated for a moment, then stood. He made the few steps to the Lincoln, reached through the car's open driver's window, and removed the keys from the ignition without giving the dead bodies inside a glance. Like a man in a trance he walked to the rear of the car, opened the trunk, and unzipped one of the duffel bags. Quickly, he inverted the bag and dumped the contents into the trunk.

  "Shit." O'Brien picked up one of the packages with his bloody hand as if it were nothing more than a loaf of bread and walked back to his partner. He knelt down beside Bumpers and held out the blood-smeared bundle.

  Bumpers reached out and gently touched the kilo of cocaine with his finger as if it might be hot. "It figures," he said.

  "Yeah, it sure does," O'Brien said.

  Bumpers' head dropped and his body went limp.

  O'Brien began to shiver and his vision darkened. He stood up slowly and walked back to the rear of the Lincoln just as an ambulance pulled into the parking lot. He hurled the bloody kilo of coke back into the trunk and slammed the trunk closed.

  "Yeah, partner. It figures. It sure fucking figures."

  ~*~*~