by David Hosp
Saunders watched as one of Gruden’s men stepped forward and reached for Cianna’s arm. His hand was a ham hock with chubby fingers, at the end of a stubby, short arm. She let him grab her arm and pull her toward him, a resigned look on her face. As he got closer, though, she planted her left foot and spun her body around. The momentum carried her even closer to him, and as she came out of the arc, she swung her right elbow out, putting the force of her shoulder behind it. The sudden, unexpected burst of violence caught everyone by surprise, and even Saunders had no idea how to react.
It was perfectly executed, and the sharp end of her elbow caught the heavy man just below the sternum, in the soft spot right at the solar plexus. He made a noise that was midway between a squeal and a scream, and his body seemed to collapse in on itself, his face going tight, his lips drawn into a tiny circle. He dropped to his knees, grabbing at his chest, gasping for breath, dropping his gun. Cianna rocked back on her heels and swung her leg forward, kicking the man on the ground squarely between the legs. He went blue in the face and keeled over.
Gruden’s other bodyguard rushed Cianna, but not before she had managed to kick the gun on the ground over to Nick. He bent down to pick it up, but was warned off by Gruden, who shook the barrel of his pistol at Nick and said, ‘I don’t think so, Spudge. Kick it to the corner.’
Nick looked at Saunders, who nodded. The last thing Saunders wanted was for the shooting to start before he could get a hold of his gun. Nick nodded back and kicked the gun over to the corner. In the meantime, the second bodyguard had managed to get behind Cianna, and appeared to have her in a solid hold. He wore a determined expression, and he treated her with far more caution than the first man had. With one hand, he twisted her arm behind her back, and he wrapped his other arm around her neck.
‘Let her go, Miles!’ Nick shouted.
‘Give me the dagger, and we’ll talk about it,’ Gruden said.
‘Don’t give it to him!’ Cianna yelled, breathing hard. ‘It’s Charlie’s only hope!’
Nick shot a nervous look at Saunders. ‘They’ll hurt her,’ he said. Saunders held the bundled dagger high to his chest with his left hand and reached up to it with his right hand, feigning that he was going to give the relic to Gruden. Gruden’s eyes watered at the possibility, and his attention was diverted; it was the opening he was looking for. He slipped his hand under the bundle and took hold of the gun in the holster under his jacket.
‘I said, don’t!’ Cianna yelled. She was bending forward, straining against the arm around her throat. She was strong for her size, but Gruden’s bodyguard had more than a hundred pounds on her, and he bent slightly forward to keep hold of her. If he’d bent over any further he might have lost his balance, but he was careful to keep his head up. That was his mistake.
Cianna leaned forward with all her strength and then swung her shoulders back, driving her body toward the man. As her torso gained speed, she snapped her head in a perfectly timed strike. The back of her head collided with the bridge of the man’s nose, and he screamed in shock, his face erupting in blood. His grip on her loosened, and she lifted her boot and brought it back down hard on top of the man’s foot, driving the heavy heel into the bone, drawing a fresh howl.
He’d released her completely now, and his hands were at his face, wiping away the blood that streamed into his eyes. Cianna squared herself and launched a straight shot with her fist that connected with his throat. There was an awful popping noise, and the man’s expression went from pained to panicked as his hands flew to his throat and he struggled to breathe. Cianna stepped back and kicked him in the abdomen hard enough to send him reeling back into a table against the wall. He collided with the table, his head catching the edge and splitting open as he collapsed to the floor.
The men in the room were frozen. Everyone’s attention was on Cianna as she turned and regarded Gruden and Carlos, her face twisted in rage.
‘Holy fuckin’ shit,’ Gruden said. ‘This bitch is crazy. Shoot her, Carlos.’
Saunders didn’t hesitate. His hand was already inside his jacket, gripping his gun. The world slowed as he watched the scene play out, matching his actions to the rhythm of the violence around him. He pulled the gun out and stepped toward Gruden and McSorlly. Cianna rushed Gruden, and Carlos McSorlly raised his gun, taking aim at Cianna’s chest. Cianna never hesitated, though. Carlos smiled slightly as he pulled the trigger.
A shot rang out, deafening in the small bar. ‘No!’ Nick yelled in anguish.
Cianna heard the shot, and waited for the impact to carry her off her feet. It didn’t happen, though, and in her rage, she kept moving forward, rushing Gruden.
‘Shoot her again!’ she heard Gruden shout to Carlos. There was no answer, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw Carlos lying with his arm at an impossible angle, his shoulder looked as though it had been torn apart, and blood was pooling underneath him.
‘What the fuck?’ Gruden said.
Glancing to her left, Cianna saw Saunders with his gun standing over McSorlly’s prostrate figure. As Gruden raised his gun toward Saunders, Cianna lowered her shoulder, and drove it hard into Gruden’s chest, throwing him back. She heard his gun hit the floor as the two of them tumbled to the ground.
He landed on his back, and she was on top of him. She saw him struggling to find his weapon, and she raised her fist and drove it hard into him. It caught him just under the ribs, hard and sharp, taking his breath away. Before he could turn and focus she unleashed a second punch, this one just under his eye, tearing the skin open. She could see the blood as it flowed, close enough for her to smell the iron in it. His face was inches away, and she could see the terror in his eyes. She lost track as she continued to swing at him, each blow with the power of a jackhammer. She felt his collarbone snap at one point, and he curled into the fetal position to try to protect himself. Rational thought had deserted her, and she was driven now by forces more primal than anything she could recall in the past two years.
The screaming in the background continued, and through her fog she realized that it was not just she who was yelling.
‘Cianna! Stop!’ Saunders shouted, pulling at her arms. ‘Cianna! You’ll kill him! Get her off him!’ She fought to keep throwing punches.
Then she heard Nick’s voice. ‘Cianna, it’s me! It’s Nick! Stop! You’ve got to get out of here!’
Slowly the fog lifted. She looked around at Nick and Saunders, and saw the worry in their faces. Looking down at Gruden, she could see the blood pouring from his head. She thought he was still breathing, but couldn’t be sure.
She surveyed the bar, and saw Carlos lying in a dark puddle of his own blood, unconscious. At the far end of the room, one of Gruden’s bodyguards was in a ball under a table. The only one of the four who seemed conscious was the first bodyguard who had grabbed her, but he was curled into a fetal position, gasping for breath, and Nick had a gun loosely pointed at him.
Cianna looked down at Gruden and spat in what was left of his face. She saw Nick and Saunders exchange a glance.
‘You need to get her out of here,’ Nick said to Saunders.
Saunders nodded. ‘You’ll be all right dealing with these people?’
‘I’ll call the cops,’ he said. ‘It’s a little much for a Wednesday night, but it’s nothing they haven’t seen before in this neighborhood. Gruden and his boys will keep their mouths shut. It’s our way. Besides, you think they want to admit that a girl did this to them?’
‘I shot that guy,’ Saunders pointed out. He reached down and picked up the gun that had fallen from Carlos McSorlly’s hand, slipped it into his jacket pocket.
‘Fair enough. The point still stands. I’ll be fine. You get moving before anyone shows up.’
Cianna stood up, but her legs felt weak as the massive rush of adrenaline deserted her. Nick held her by the shoulders. ‘You take care of yourself, got it?’ he ordered her. ‘And get your brother out of this.’
She nodded weakly. Nick kiss
ed her on the forehead, then let go of her.
‘Off with you now.’
Saunders put an arm around her shoulder and started leading her toward the door. At the threshold, she gave one last look at the destruction wrought behind her and shuddered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Saunders said nothing for a while as they drove back toward Cianna’s apartment. South Boston rolled by, its clapboard houses flush to the street, its residents shuffling along the narrow sidewalks. Halfway up the hill from the water, they passed The L Street Pub, and they could hear the subdued revelry from inside. Saunders marveled at the way the world continued to march on for most of those in it, even as events that could alter the course of nations unfolded within earshot.
He looked over at Cianna, leaning back in the passenger seat. Her shoulders were square, thrown back into the seat. Her head was up, and though her eyes focused straight ahead, her face had a look of defiance.
‘You want to tell me what happened back there?’ Saunders probed.
She didn’t look at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. You did a lot of damage.’
‘You’d rather it turned out differently?’
‘No,’ Saunders said. ‘But I’m still wondering where that came from. You incapacitated three armed men. Some would consider that impressive.’
She looked at him. He was sure it was the first time she had met his eyes without evasion, and he saw a fire in them that was magnetic. After a moment, she turned back toward the front windshield and closed her eyes again. ‘That’s just training,’ she said.
‘What exactly did you do when you were in the service?’
She didn’t open her eyes. ‘It’s classified.’
‘I have clearance,’ he said.
‘If you had clearance, you would have been told more about me before they sent you out to find my brother.’
She was right about that, though he was loath to admit it to her. ‘I didn’t ask the questions,’ he lied. ‘Maybe I should have.’
‘Maybe.’ It was clear she was saying nothing more on the subject.
After a moment, he said, ‘I have one more question.’
‘Feel free to ask,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether I can answer it.’
‘There was something more than training working for you at the bar.’
‘Yeah? Like what?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Rage,’ he said.
She looked at him again. ‘This is my brother’s life,’ she said. She gestured toward the dagger wrapped in Nick’s shirt. ‘That dagger may be the only thing keeping him alive, and Gruden didn’t give a shit about what would happen to Charlie if he took it. That pissed me off.’
‘Remind me not to piss you off,’ Saunders said.
‘Just don’t mess with anyone I care about,’ she said. She looked away from him, out her window, as the new buildings along the waterfront rolled by.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Boston Police Detective Harvey Morrell was exhausted and annoyed. At fifty-nine years old, he wondered for how much longer he could put up with his job. It probably would have been for longer if he wasn’t carrying more than 250 pounds on his five-foot, ten inch frame. He should have taken early retirement as soon as he hit his twenty years back in his forties, lived off his pension. More to the point, he should have stayed married to his first wife. Or his second. Without alimony and child support, he could have gotten by on a bartender’s salary. That ship had sailed, though, and there was little that he could do to escape the daily grind now.
Few days recently had ground as painfully as this one. He’d spent the first half of it chasing down leads on a case involving the disappearance of Sal Decanta, a wise guy in Boston’s North End. ‘Sal the Fish’, as he was known, had gone missing a week earlier. Well, most of him had gone missing. An ear had been found in his apartment by his landlady, and DNA testing had identified it as Decanta’s. Morrell’s best guess was that, wherever Decanta’s remaining body parts were, they weren’t breathing.
By all accounts, Decanta had been high up in Boston’s La Cosa Nostra, which meant that no one would ever admit to knowing anything about his whereabouts. So many doors had been slammed in Morrell’s face throughout the day that he was beginning to think Vaffanculo was Italian for ‘watch your toes’. The investigation had gone nowhere, which would surprise no one. And yet his name was the one that would be on the report, so when the press and public and politicians came with their outcry, his would be the phone line they would call, and his would be the name mentioned in the newspapers.
As if that was not injustice enough for one day, he was now stuck on a call in Southie after dark, chasing down a phantom shooting. He had two uniforms with him, going door to door, rousting people to see whether they had any information. Information about what, exactly, Morrell wasn’t sure. The emergency lines had received three calls late that afternoon, jabbering away unintelligibly about a shooting. As usual, no one was willing to give their names, or even their exact locations, lest they be identified. All three calls left the impression, though, that the area near the Old Colony projects was under siege. Uniforms had been dispatched to the block in question, but when they arrived all was quiet. No bodies lay in the streets, and no shop windows had been smashed. The officers had been unable to locate the people who had called in. In more rational times, the matter would have been closed. But it was an election year, and those whose employment depended on the electoral whims of the public insisted that the BPD feign concern for the special interests within the underprivileged communities. As a result, here he was in the middle of the evening, knocking on doors. The absurdity of it all soured the phlegm in the back of Morrell’s throat.
He was contemplating his misery when he saw Ayden McMurphy walking towards him, shaking his head. In almost all respects, it was hard to imagine a police officer better cut for the job than McMurphy. He was tall and well-built, with a mellow way about him that put people on the streets at ease, even in difficult situations. He was ethically straight enough to avoid trouble, but flexible enough to be trusted in a department that still had the old way of doing things in its DNA. And then there was the name. Few names belonged so readily on a force that traced more of its roots to County Kerry than to any borough in Massachusetts; a nominal fit made ironic only by the fact that Ayden McMurphy was black and had grown up in Roxbury. Who knows, Morrell thought, maybe that just makes him the perfect police officer for the modern force.
He didn’t mind. For all his old-school ways, Morrell’s view was that a good cop was a good cop. And Ayden McMurphy was that if nothing else.
‘We learn anything?’ Morrell asked him as the officer approached.
‘Yeah,’ McMurphy responded. ‘We learned the Irish are deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to anything that reeks of local crime.’
‘I thought you were Irish.’
‘I kept trying to point that out to the townies,’ McMurphy said in an exaggerated brogue. ‘I even showed them my name tag, but they seem to think I’m taking black-Irish too far. It’s not hard to see why bussing never really caught on here.’
‘You can’t expect everyone to be as enlightened as me,’ Morrell said.
‘I can’t?’ McMurphy shook his head. ‘Fuck me then, I guess.’
‘Got that right.’ Morrell chuckled in spite of himself. ‘You find out anything useful?’
‘Depends on your definition. Three people were willing to talk to me for long enough to say they heard gunshots. All of them agreed it came from the other side of the street. Two of them thought they came from that building.’ McMurphy pointed toward a rundown three-story building with a narrow front, set off from the two rows of townhouses on either side of it. ‘The third thought they came from farther up the street. None of them saw anything, and no one is sure what actually happened. A couple of them thought maybe it was fireworks.’
‘That falls short of my definition of useful,’ Morrell said.<
br />
McMurphy pointed to the large stain on the front of the shirt struggling to contain Morrell’s prodigious gut. ‘Yeah, but you’re a perfectionist, Detective.’
‘Only in the ways that matter.’ Morrell took a deep breath, and caught a whiff of the hardscrabble mixture of soot and salt and fish that linger in Southie like the hint of open revolt. ‘Probably nothing more than fireworks,’ he said with a sigh. After another deep breath, he said, ‘Okay, we’ll do a quick door-to-door in that building and call it a day.’
As he spoke the words, a car pulled up ten yards in front of the building and parked on the street. Morrell watched it without particular interest, noticing it only in the way that cops who have been around for long enough tend to notice everything. It wasn’t until the driver and passenger exited the car that his instincts truly perked up.
He would have zeroed in on the girl under any circumstances. Her appearance commanded male attention. She was fit and attractive, and had the look of a wild animal in her eyes.
The man looked in all respects her opposite. He was of average height and build, and he wore the nondescript suit of an accountant. His hair was short enough that it didn’t need a brush. Notwithstanding the rigidity of his appearance, though, he moved fluidly as he and the girl headed through the door of the clapboard building across the street.
Morrell and McMurphy shared a look.
‘Make sure we talk to them,’ Morrell said.
‘You got a feeling?’ McMurphy asked.
Morrell nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I got a feeling.’
Ahmad Fasil was on his knees in the little house in Cambridge. He brought his hands to his cheeks and raised his face in supplication, then bent forward, letting his forehead touch the prayer mat. He stayed in that position for several moments, beseeching Allah; begging for the patience to carry through with what he had started, and for the strength to suffer the incompetence that surrounded him.
When he felt that he had conveyed his supplication sufficiently, he rose and went to his black bag. Reaching in, he pulled out a satellite phone. He had been told that the line was secure, and that the transmissions were untraceable. He didn’t fully believe it, but then again, he wasn’t really the one at risk.