by Ace Atkins
“If you want to be an asshole about this,” Ziggy said, “I can walk away right now.”
“What time does Jackie DeMarco’s plane land?” Whitehead said.
“Ten in the morning,” the female agent said. “Should we meet him at the gate?”
“What do you think, Zig?” I said. “Fair offer.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Okay. Okay. What do you want me to say?”
“You said Callahan and Scali wanted to meet,” I said, looking to Whitehead as I spoke. “And you persuaded them Boston was too hot. So here we are. And here they are. All you got to do is facilitate some fascinating conversation.”
“On the fucking boat?”
“Reel Justice,” Whitehead said. “It’s gonna look great in print.”
“Not my name,” he said.
“Not now,” Whitehead said. “Not until the trial.”
“My career is over,” Ziggy said. “Hope you’re all happy about that.”
Whitehead smiled and nodded. I nodded, too. I was very happy how it all worked out.
“How’d you know about me being shaken down?” Ziggy said. “Sydney tell you?”
The rain hit the glass a little harder now. The palm fronds shook and the boats rocked out in the marina. A man and a woman darted off the long pier and ran to the parking lot. I saw the taillights click on as they U-turned out of the lot and drove away.
“I don’t believe Scali and Callahan would’ve had it any other way,” I said. “A big boat like that takes a lot of gas. They’d need gas money.”
“Someone on the inside tipped you,” he said. “Who the hell was it?”
Whitehead held up his hand in a polite gesture to tell Ziggy to shut his mouth. He leaned over the young agent who was working on the laptop and looked up to the female agent finishing with the tape. Ziggy stood there, pale and hairy, a pink silk shirt hanging across a rattan chair. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
“Get them talking straight and exact,” Whitehead said. “They start talking in vague terms, or in code, we won’t make a move. Don’t have them hemming and hawing around the point. You understand?”
“What do you mean?” Ziggy said.
“I once worked a case with some guys who called money fish,” Whitehead said. “They’d make plans for a deal and talk about all the fish they’d need. I don’t want the judges talking how much flounder they plan on netting. You got it?”
Ziggy nodded.
“Ask them straight out about this new deal they want with Bobby Talos.”
“Bobby is a good guy,” Ziggy said. “A class act. He don’t deserve this.”
“Zig, you are the true Good Housekeeping Seal,” I said. “If only Bobby Junior could be with us today. I’d love to finally meet him up close and personal.”
“Mr. Swatek here comes through and we’ll get all we need to indict Mr. Talos,” Whitehead said. “Only thing that’s not clear is who came up with the whole plan? Did Talos go to the judges or did the judges go to Talos?”
“Joe Scali reached out,” Ziggy said, reaching for his pink shirt and thankfully covering up his less-than-impressive physique. “He came to Bobby. He said he and Callahan could close down that shithole in Blackburn and they could steer business his way. It was all supposed to be a straight deal until they came back for more. And then more again.”
“And the DeMarcos?” I said.
“The who?” Ziggy said, smiling and buttoning up.
“One step at a time,” Jamal Whitehead said. “One step at a time.”
“Jackie was going to have Sydney killed,” I said. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“Yeah,” Ziggy said. “It means I’d have to look for a new partner who wouldn’t put my dork in the broiler.”
I shook my head. Ziggy tucked his pink shirt into his black pants. His face was red and sweaty. I handed the strange little man a hand towel. He just looked down at it like he didn’t know how to use it.
“Always a lovely sight to see a man saving his own ass,” Whitehead said, checking his watch.
I just watched Ziggy the way you might examine an animal at a zoo. Endlessly fascinating.
A folding table had been set up in the middle of the condo. On the table, six laptop screens showed various locations around the boat, cameras mounted on neighboring slips. Whitehead leaned in and studied the screens, the other Feds making the final prep for the meeting. In panoramic clarity, I watched Joe Scali board the fishing boat and run into the wheelhouse. He had on a polo shirt and shorts showing off his short, skinny legs. He was alone, closing an umbrella and surveying the gulf with a big smile, before opening up a cooler and pulling out a cold beer. Miller Time. He drained half the bottle while sitting up high in the captain’s chair.
“You gonna stick around?” Whitehead said. “Gonna be a hell of a show.”
I shook my head. “I better get back to Boston.”
“More with the DeMarcos?”
“Nope,” I said. “Just a promise to keep.”
53
I didn’t sleep, making two phone calls and changing clothes before driving down to the Seaport to meet Sergeant Danny Long, harbormaster for the Boston Police. One day you’re staring out into the deep green of the Gulf of Mexico and the next at the choppy gray waves of the Boston Inner Channel. Long waved me aboard and shook my hand as I set foot on deck. He was built like a heavyweight from another century, with a big Irish head, smiling green eyes, and a lot of thick black hair. He had on a heavy coat, as Long mentioned today was cold as a bastard. A blue ball cap noted he was indeed harbormaster.
“Commander Quirk says you got a wellness check?”
“Sure.”
“And you don’t want to call ahead to the facility?”
“I believe phone lines are down.”
“Oh, yeah,” Long said, chewing gum, smiling. “I heard that, too.”
“You know the island?”
“Of course,” he said. “It’s part of our patrol. A little past Thompson Island. Not much to it. Used to be a trash dump before the city leased it to the jail.”
“You know anything about it?”
“I’ve seen some kids picking up garbage on the beach,” Long said. “We had a kid last year went missing. They said he was trying to escape. You know, like it was fucking Alcatraz.”
“Alcatraz may have been more fun.”
“No shit?” Long said.
“None at all.”
“Most of the kids aren’t even from Boston,” he said. “It’s part of some program to extract them from problem areas and get them back to fucking nature.”
“That’s what they say.”
“What’s the boy’s name?”
I told him. He nodded, chewing his gum, and asked if I’d untie the two lines attached to the dock. I saluted him and untied the boat, coiling the ropes as I’d learned from my uncle Patrick, who’d settled in Mattapoisett to build boats. He revved the engine in reverse, chugging slow out into the channel, and then once we were all clear, throttled us forward and out into the harbor.
Sergeant Long had lied. It was colder than a bastard. I had on a pair of thermal underwear, jeans, a flannel shirt, and a peacoat with a watch cap. But I still kept in the wheelhouse, turning back to see Boston fading from view. The pilot boat skipped over the small waves and over hard chunks of ice. As he kicked the engine into high gear, hitting about thirty knots, he’d turn to stare at me when I wasn’t watching.
“You’re the guy.”
“What guy?”
“When Quirk said your name, it didn’t click,” he said. “But now. You’re the guy from the papers.”
“Boston’s Most Handsome Professional?”
“No,” he said, kind of yelling over the whine of the motors. “The guy in the shootout with those shitbags who worked for Jackie
DeMarco.”
“Just a simple misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding, my ass,” Sergeant Long said, destroying his chewing gum. “What? Were they trying to whack you?”
“They got a little agitated.”
Long nodded. He steered with one hand. He had his ball cap down in his eyes so the wind didn’t kick it up and out to sea. “DeMarco mixed up in this kids’ prison?”
I nodded.
He stared straight ahead, the shapes of a couple harbor islands coming into view, shrouded by a thick fog. “When I was a kid, I used to see his old man hand out candy in the North End,” he said. “He had a big coin laundry there.”
“Lovely man.”
“Yeah,” Sergeant Long said. “Lovely if you’re his pal. If you’re not, you’re toast.”
“And the kid?”
“Ha,” he said. “What do you think?”
“He’s a real charmer,” I said. “He’ll go far in this town.”
“Jesus Christ.”
It didn’t take long to pass the other Harbor Islands: Thompson, Spectacle, Long, Gallops, and Lovells. I didn’t know each one; Sergeant Long pointed them out along the way. I’d spent some time out this way fishing with Henry Cimoli after he moved to Revere and bought a boat. But we’d fished more for beers than we had actually searched for haddock. Fortune was situated a little outside Green Island and Outer Brewster. By the time we got there, I felt a little like Jim Hawkins.
Long slowed the boat when we spotted the docks. There was a narrow slice of a rocky beach and an industrial-looking building situated up a little hill. He pointed it out as we slid into the dock. The wind would’ve taken less hardy men out to sea. But even without breakfast, I stood firmly rooted on deck and hopped out onto the dock. I tied the lines. The motor settled into a putter, the exhaust chugging into the cold air.
Once the boat was tied up, we walked together up a narrow pebble path to signs pointing out the direction to the MCC office. Since the building took up a third of the island, the signs were a bit superfluous.
“Downed phone lines?” Long said.
“Yep.”
“You know, cell phones work out here,” he said, checking his phone. Grinning.
“You don’t say.”
Long shrugged in a noncommittal cop way and followed the path around the large building surrounded by chain link topped with razor wire. I couldn’t imagine a homier environment for troubled teens except for maybe a classic British workhouse. There were three large brick buildings and a smaller one serving as the entrance. A sign read OFFICIAL MCC PERSONNEL ONLY. NO VISITORS.
Sergeant Long opened the front door wide and held it for me. Three men and a fat lady were lounging in office chairs and watching the morning news. There was an empty box of donuts on a table. They all wore blue uniforms with patches on their shoulders. No one stood up or said anything. They all just kind of looked at one another. A wiry guy with a thin face and a purplish mouse under one eye stood up. “Yeah.”
Sergeant Long nodded and gave his name, rank, and why we were there.
“Yeah?” the guy said.
“Boy,” I said. “This guy is sharp.”
“Who the hell are you,” he said. “You a cop, too?”
“No,” I said. “And neither are you. You couldn’t even play one on TV. We’re here for a wellness check.”
The fat lady stood up. She was about to sing. “All visitation requests, even from law enforcement, have to go through our main office in Newton.”
“What if I told you I was a close and personal pal of Bobby Talos’s,” I said. “I’m into yachting.”
“No one said anything,” the fat lady said.
Long looked slightly amused. He gave the boy’s name and said we wanted to see him.
“You got a warrant?” the man with the shiner said.
“No,” Long said. “And don’t need one. This property is leased from the city. That means I got every right. Go get the fucking kid.”
“Hey,” the fat lady said. She still had powder from the donut on her face.
“Now,” Sergeant Long said.
“He’s out in the yard,” she said. “Go get him yourself.”
I nodded at Long and we both brushed past the woman and the wiry guard with the military cut. The door had an electronic lock and by the time we reached it, the lock was buzzing. Long pushed it open hard and we were outside in a common rec area. The wiry guard followed us.
Out by an empty basketball court, I saw a kid sitting on a bench. He didn’t look up as we approached. The empty recreation yard had other benches, ringed by a dirty snowbank pushed up off walkways leading from bunkhouses to a cafeteria and the offices. The wind seemed even stronger in that open place than it had in the harbor. It didn’t whistle, it roared.
The kid was muscly and compact, with a shaved head. As I got closer, it appeared the boy had just gone twelve rounds with Mike Tyson. He had a lot of bruises on his face, neck, and arms. He had on a thin uniform that resembled hospital scrubs and was shaking. Someone had cuffed him to the bench.
I dropped down to a knee and said, “I’m a friend of Dillon Yates’s.”
The kid nodded. He was as pale as a bleached sheet, shaking, with dark circles under his eyes, his lips a bright shade of blue. He hugged his arms around his body, shivering without control.
“Give me the key,” I said to the guard.
The wiry guard stood next to me now, looking down at the kid. He had a smile on his face.
“He tried to escape,” the man said. “He hid out and tried to kill me yesterday with my own weapon. You know how it goes. These kids. You can’t give ’em an inch.”
“So this is punishment?” I said. “Beating up a kid and then giving him hypothermia?”
“One less,” he said. “Who gives a shit?”
I got to my feet, dusted off my knee, and punched the guard very hard in the stomach. He crumpled like a paper tiger. I reached down and felt into his pockets, pulling out a small ring of keys. I found three handcuff keys. The second worked.
I helped the kid to his feet. “You took a weapon off this guy?” I said.
The boy nodded. We looked down at the man and the boy summoned enough energy to spit on him.
Long already had out his cell phone, punching up numbers and talking to someone in Boston. “Gee,” Long said. “What do you know? The reception is excellent.”
“What do you think?” I said.
“I think I’ve seen all I need to,” Long said. “Kid gonna be okay?”
“He needs medical attention,” I said. “And this place needs to be fumigated.”
Sergeant Long nodded at me. I took off my peacoat and helped the boy inside it. I put my arm around him and walked him toward the front office. The fat woman at the desk had seen everything that happened outside. She would not look me in the eye. Everyone in the front office tried in vain to look busy until the cops arrived and many reports were written.
54
By mid-May, the weather in Boston had improved greatly. Winter was all but a bad memory, and I’d switched out the flannel for a cotton button-down. I did wear a light sport coat, as I’d agreed to drive Dillon Yates to the federal courthouse that morning. Good to her word, Sheila had moved out of Blackburn to Framingham. She’d taken a job with a small law firm and Dillon had enrolled in the local high school. The Yateses didn’t need Blackburn anymore. Blackburn had come to them.
Dozens of angry parents had amassed on the brick plaza, holding hand-painted signs with some not-so-nice things to say about Joe Scali. Thanks to stories in The Star, they knew almost eighty percent of the kids in Scali’s courtroom appeared without a lawyer. A juvenile justice group investigated further, finding parents had signed waivers outside courtroom doors. Never realizing they’d given away their kids’ right to an attorney.
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Scali was in the third day of his federal trial, the venue moving north to Massachusetts, where most of the crimes were committed. Gavin Callahan had already cut a deal and pled guilty to corruption and bribery. I was pretty sure that Jamal Whitehead was waiting for the right moment to connect Callahan to the DeMarcos. I wondered what would ever become of their boat.
The new digs of U.S. District Court were in a shiny new mirrored building just south over the Channel on Seaport Boulevard. As expected, there were news crews, onlookers, and weirdoes mixed in with the families. Making our way into the plaza, I spotted Jake Cotner and Ryan Bell. They walked over to Dillon and began to talk. Dillon was wearing a navy blazer and tie. He was expected to testify that morning.
My old friend Beth Golnick was nowhere to be seen. Jake and Ryan said she’d moved out of state.
“What do you think?” Sheila Yates said.
“I think Scali better watch out for flying tomatoes.”
“The prick.”
“And to think,” I said. “This all started with a sandwich.”
“It was worth it.”
“It was a terrific sandwich.”
“I’ll make good,” Sheila said. “I’ll pay you every last nickel for what you did. You and Miss Mullen.”
“Miss Mullen and I have agreed this one is on the house.”
“Are you kidding?”
“I would’ve paid you to take this on.”
Sheila Yates pulled me in and hugged me. She could squeeze very tight, and by now I’d grown accustomed to her perfume. As she held on, I spotted Iris Milford walking through the crowd and giving me a devilish smile. “Am I interrupting something?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We plan on doing this all day.”
Sheila Yates wiped her eyes and stepped away. She then turned to Iris and started hugging her. Iris was caught off guard. And then caught on to the spirit and patted Sheila’s back a few times before Sheila joined Dillon and the two boys.