Robert B. Parker's Kickback

by Ace Atkins

  “And why on earth would I do that?”

  “Because you don’t like this any more than I do,” I said. “You don’t mind playing the game for the DeMarcos, but you want out of this.”

  She looked at me, mouth open, as if about to speak. She then shut her mouth and just stared. “You got me,” she said. “Where do I sign up to unburden myself?”

  “You are a tough nut,” I said.

  “I have a job to do, as do you,” she said. “You keep following me, and I’ll file a restraining order.”

  “Then why did you sit down with me?”

  “Why else?” Sydney said. “To find out what you know. To learn what kind of an agenda you have toward my client.”

  “The judges,” I said. “Sydney, I just want the judges. You can help.”

  “Good-bye,” she said. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “May I offer you a maple scone?”

  She stood, snatched her big bag, and turned back toward Bloomingdale’s. I paid and followed her out. Outside, the rain had indeed turned to sleet, and the wet asphalt turned slick. The sleet pinged off my hat and jacket as I walked to my car, spotting Sydney Bennett getting into her Lexus, lights blazing on, and then sitting there watching me. For a moment, I thought she might have a change of heart. But soon she drove off and I was left standing there.

  I got back into my Explorer.

  It was late. I could head back to my apartment and finally unpack. I could return to my office and shuffle through unpaid bills. Or I could go to the Harbor Health Club and see how much damage had been done to my knee.

  When I started the engine, I felt a firm forearm wrap around my throat and the familiar click of a revolver in my ear.

  “You boys take mall security seriously.”

  “Drive, fucknuts,” said a familiar voice.

  “Hello, Arty.”

  “You say another word and I’ll ruin the leather interior.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Say it again.”

  “You want to remove your arm or are you looking to go steady?”

  “I said drive,” he said, removing the arm and reaching down on my hip for the .38. He removed my gun but kept his gun screwed behind my ear.

  I drove. I nosed the car back out to Route 9. I idled at the stoplight, unsure of which way to turn. “Back to the city,” Arty said. “Back to the city.”

  “This time of day it’d be much faster to hop on the expressway.”

  “I’ll tell you where to go,” he said, settling in behind me. We drove around for a long time in complete silence. I wanted to turn on the radio but feared we would have a disagreement on the music. Arty LeBlanc struck me as an easy-listening kind of guy. Or maybe smooth jazz.

  “You like smooth jazz, Arty?”

  “What part of ‘shut the fuck up’ don’t you understand?”

  “You still sore about Tampa?”

  “Goddamn right I’m sore,” he said, just as we passed Pru Center. “That nigger sucker-punched me.”

  “I’ll pass along your complaint to Hawk.”

  “I’ll deal with him soon enough.”

  “I thought you’d been around, Arty.”

  “I been around,” he said. “So what?”

  “You sure don’t know much about Hawk.”

  Arty Leblanc stayed silent until we passed though Back Bay and drove along the Common. He told me to turn on Tremont and head into the South End, where we crossed the channel into Southie. We drove along Dot Ave and deeper into the old neighborhoods, cutting along the destruction site of the Old Colony Housing Projects, where some good people I’d known had grown up. And several crooks, including Joe Broz.

  “Turn here,” he said.

  I turned.

  “Turn there.”

  I turned there.

  We rode the long length of a chain-link fence with a lot of NO TRESPASSING and PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. He told me to drive to the gate and wait. Soon the chain-link gate slid open and I drove past a big sign reading DEMARCO TOWING.

  “I get to finally meet Jackie,” I said. “Hot damn.”

  48

  Two junkyard dogs pulled at anchor chains set near two old construction trailers. They yelped and barked, claws scratching into the broken asphalt as sleet pinged off the ground. The door of one trailer opened and a thick-bodied guy with a lot of black hair and a hook nose descended a short flight of handmade steps. He wore a slick Pats jacket and an orange watch cap and stopped halfway between us and the trailer to light up a smoke. He had thick legs and a big gut. He was built like a Bulgarian power lifter gone to seed. “This him?” he said, clicking a Zippo closed.

  “Yeah,” Arty said.

  “Don’t look like much,” he said.

  “C’mon, Jackie,” I said. “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

  Arty shrugged and walked over to one of the two dogs and rubbed the pit bull’s nub ears. On one knee, he spoke to the dog like the animal was a child. The pit bull flopped over on its back for a belly rub.

  “You Spenser?” Jackie said.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Arty just told you I was and then you said, ‘He don’t look like much.’ And then I said, ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.’”

  I was ready for it, but the punch in my gut still took a little air from me. I returned with a rabbit punch to Jackie DeMarco’s kidney and then another into his bloated gut. It felt like I was punching into a lumpy mattress. By that time, both doors to both trailers had opened and both Howdy Doody and Baldy ran from the steps and pointed guns at me. They were joined by a skinny guy in an open parka, jeans, and no shoes holding a shotgun.

  “The gang’s all here,” I said. I rubbed my stomach. Jackie DeMarco gave a good punch. I nodded my respect toward Jackie. The dogs were barking again and digging at the asphalt, trying to break their chains to get to me.

  “At your office,” Arty said, “didn’t we tell you to get lost?”

  “You did.”

  “And in Tampa?” he said. “We let you go with a warning.”

  “I don’t recall you saying much, Arty,” I said. “After Hawk knocked you out.”

  “Shut up,” Arty said.

  Jackie DeMarco lit another cigarette, clicked the lighter closed, and then eyed me with a little humor. Baldy had slipped the auto back into his belt. Howdy Doody had dropped his pistol, too. Only the new guy, Shoeless Joe, kept his gun aimed at me. He walked around in a wide circle while I talked with Jackie and Arty Leblanc. He had the jittery look of a meth head with an itchy trigger finger. I kept in close to Jackie and Arty. If he were to spray buckshot, it would be nice if we all got it. The pinging sleet gave the air an electric feel in the graying day.

  There must have been more than a hundred impounded cars parked out into the spaces behind the trailers and a fleet of a couple dozen tow trucks, DEMARCO’S proudly displayed on the doors.

  “I guess we’re at an impasse,” I said.

  “What?” DeMarco said.

  “An impasse,” I said. “You want me to quit with those two judges. And I won’t.”

  “Maybe so,” DeMarco said. “But nobody is really going to care when you disappear, Spenser. You know how many guys I know who will throw a freakin’ party when you’re gone?”

  “How many?” I said.

  “Lots.”

  “But we’ll need a head count,” I said. “Appetizers. Cocktails.”

  “Arty?” DeMarco said.

  Arty looked up. Howdy Doody and Baldy had joined him to stare at me as Jackie DeMarco shamed me so thoroughly. My face felt stiff and waxen in the cold. The sleet fell harder. The dogs pulled at the chains, reaching their limit, but still clawing, yelping. DeMarco took one last puff on the cigarette and tossed it to the ground. “Kill this son of a bitch,” he said, tossing Arty some k
eys. “Take that old Buick somewhere and burn ’em both up.”

  Arty pocketed the keys and reached into his black leather coat for his gun.

  I heard the boom of the rifle a millisecond after Arty’s head exploded. The three flunkies pulled their guns and started firing out into the wide-open space of the impound lot. I’d dropped to the ground and snatched back my gun and Arty’s stainless-steel Taurus. He’d fallen ugly and dead onto his back, his fingers just in reach of one of the dogs. The dog was in a yelping frenzy, biting and pulling Arty by the digits closer toward him. Blood spilled across the ground. Jackie DeMarco had come out of the trailer holding a shotgun. Two more blasts of the .44, one ripping into the skin of the trailer, and DeMarco was back inside.

  I ran for cover behind a tow truck, one of those big ones that can slide a Patton tank up onto the flatbed. I exchanged a few shots with Baldy. He was behind the hood of a black Jeep Wrangler, popping up every few seconds like a game of Whack-A-Mole. Jackie DeMarco had a window opened in the construction trailer and was firing out into the lot. Another rifle blast from the lot silenced him for a bit. For a good twenty seconds, gunfire ringing in my ears, all I could hear were the pin sounds of ice needles hitting the ground.

  Baldy fired at me again and then ran for a long line of impounded cars. I could hear the thud of his boots and his heavy breathing as another rifle shot sounded and he was cut down at the legs. He screamed and yelled obscenities and rolled around on the ground. I looked up over the edge of the flatbed and saw and heard nothing else but the guy’s pain. The automatic spent, I laid it on the ground and held my .38. I moved toward the cab of the tow truck, trying to keep quiet, trying to listen. In the big oversized sideview mirror, I saw the flash of red hair and turned to see Howdy Doody pointing his shotgun at me.

  I shot him three times. His body jerked and spasmed like he was being jolted by an electric wire.

  The ringing silence broke with the sound of a big engine starting and the squealing of tires. A big black Ford F-250 raced by the tow truck, slamming on brakes before it came to the closed gates, the gates slowly clanging open. One of the doors opened and the skinny guy with no shoes jumped in the passenger side as the truck raced off into Southie.

  I stepped over Howdy Doody’s body, which now looked like a broken marionette. I felt an acid rising up in the back of my throat. I spit into the lot and kept walking forward, trying not to look over at the two dogs fighting over different pieces of Arty Leblanc. Baldy was screaming in pain. Everything was dirty and messy, but I preferred this to being burned up in the back of a Buick as Jackie DeMarco had instructed.

  Hawk wandered out of the maze of impounded cars, propping a .380 hunting rifle over his shoulders like old stills I’d seen of Woody Strode.

  “You want to call Quirk?” he said. “Or split.”

  “Call Quirk.”

  “Then I split.”

  I nodded at Hawk. He nodded slightly to me and disappeared out the gate and into Southie. It was another ten minutes before I heard the police sirens.

  49

  You know, I saw this movie once,” Frank Belson said. “The private eye kills a bunch of hoodlums before the police show up. And you know what the detective does?”

  “What’s that, Frank?”

  “The guy gives the shamus his weapon back,” he said. “No questions asked. He tells the boys on patrol, ‘He’s okay, guys. No problem.’ Our hero rides off into the sunset or drives his fucking sportscar, or whatever.”

  “And that’s what you’re going to do for me, Frank?” I said.

  “Ha,” Belson said, plugging an old cigar into his mouth. “Ha, ha.”

  There were a lot of BPD cars and a lot of cops scouring the impound lot. I spotted an ambulance, two hearses, and a lot of unmarked units parked inside or near the chain-link fence. It was night now and the sleet had stopped. I wanted to go home very badly. Belson kept laughing.

  “Something funny?”

  “I don’t give a crap if this is Jackie DeMarco’s impound lot or Lucky Luciano’s,” he said. “You got a lot of explaining to do, hotshot.”

  “I had just run in to get some takeout,” I said. “I didn’t even see the meter.”

  “And so you got pissed about them towing your ride and killed two guys and sent another guy to the hospital?”

  “How’s he doing anyway?” I said.

  “Do you care?” Belson said.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not really. They had just offered to snuff out my candle and burn me up in the trunk of an old Buick.”

  “The indignity,” Belson said. “I would’ve figured you for a Cadillac.” He looked over my shoulder to a couple uniformed cops walking the impound lot. One of them held up a thumb, finding the place where DeMarco’s crew had returned shots with Hawk. They set little tags on the hood and windshield for the bullet holes.

  “Who was with you?” Belson said. “Hawk, Vinnie Morris? Or was it that Indian kid you’re training these days?”

  “I ride alone.”

  “Bullshit,” Belson said. “I don’t need some tech people to tell me they’re pulling rifle slugs out of that one on the ground. The other one, Jesus Christ. I saw he’d been shot, but son of a bitch. What that dog did to him. They had to tranq the fucking dogs and send ’em to the pound.”

  “His name is Arty Leblanc,” I said. “He used to work with Broz. Back in the day.”

  “Not many of you guys left,” he said. “Maybe I should salute or something.”

  I shrugged. Despite my history with Frank Belson and the guys in homicide, they took my .38 and the Taurus I’d pulled from Arty Leblanc. They would test the weapons, conduct autopsies, draw maps and diagrams, and ultimately pull me into an inquest. The inquests were seldom interesting or helpful to me. I’d sat through many before. I’d be cleared but not without a lot of questions from the Suffolk County DA.

  In the darkness, the impound lot and the triple-deckers and remnants of Old Colony that surrounded it seemed as welcoming and homey as a foreign planet. Despite my protests, Belson fired up his old cigar. The smoke looked and smelled like a piece of old rope. He made an effort to exhale in my direction. The lights over the lot shone down on the iced hoods and windshields in colorful bright patterns.

  “Where’s Quirk?”

  “He’s coming.”

  “Goody.”

  “He was off this week,” he said. “Spending time with grandkids.”

  “It’s been a while,” I said.

  “Not long enough.”

  “And you think he’ll be upset?”

  “He’ll be more than upset,” Belson said. “He’ll be fucking pissed.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Who was the other shooter, Spenser?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “Rough neighborhood.”

  “Do you know how much you make my ass hurt?”

  I walked over to the steps to the trailer and sat down. They’d been made inexpertly with some two-by-fours and penny nails. Belson pulled out a notebook and asked me to go back to the beginning. “At the mall,” he said. “When exactly did this guy Leblanc pull his weapon?”

  50

  I was lucky to get to Susan’s a little after ten that night. I had called and she was waiting up. Pearl was very happy to see me, her nubbed tail moving as fast as hummingbird wings. Susan set out a bottle of Eagle Rare bourbon on the kitchen counter. I added some ice to a glass and poured out three fingers of whiskey.

  “Bad?”

  “Worse,” I said.

  “How many?”

  “Three dead,” I said. “Two got away.”

  “Same men from Florida?”

  “Same men.”

  “And now?” Susan said.

  I removed my jacket and my ball cap. I wandered over to her leather couch and set down my drink. Pearl hopped up beside me and nuzz
led her head into my lap. Dogs had a sixth sense for knowing when their pals were down. I rubbed her head and patted her lean, muscular flank. She sniffed at my shirt and my hands. I wondered how much the smell had told her.

  “You don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “I’ve been talking about it for the last four hours with Frank Belson and Quirk,” I said. “Quirk was about as mad as I’ve ever seen him. He said I put him in an irregular position with the commissioner.”

  “Irregular?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Well, actually he said ‘fucking irregular’ because that’s the way Quirk talks.”

  I leaned forward, Pearl still huddled close to me, and picked up the glass. I drained a lot of the whiskey. I could feel the alcohol hitting the bloodstream and dilating the capillaries. The tension in my trapezius muscles started to unclench. Susan sat on the other end of the couch and watched me as I stared and drank. She had on silk pajama bottoms and one of my old BU T-shirts.

  The television was on, but she’d turned down the sound. She’d been watching some kind of cable drama show where people were throwing things and crying. A vintage movie poster for The Gay Caballero hung close by. Lee Farrell had given it to Susan as an inside joke. Caesar Romero as the Cisco Kid. I wondered if the Cisco Kid or Gordito ever had problems with shooting outlaws. Or was his sidekick Pancho? I couldn’t recall. I mainly remembered Gilbert Roland as The Kid. He had a hell of a fancy suit.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Nope.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I almost had a chocolate croissant at the Chestnut Hill Mall.”

  “And before that?”

  “A nice corned-beef sandwich from Michael’s.”

  “You know you don’t have to eat kosher just for me.”

  “I do it for the pickles,” I said. “Jews make wonderful pickles.”

  Susan stood up and gently pushed Pearl aside. She sat in my lap and wrapped her long legs around my torso. “Can I do anything to make you feel better?”

  “This may be the first time I’ve said this,” I said. “But I want to take a shower and go to sleep. I feel lousy as hell.”