It was Donnelly, and any doubts I might have had about the Slob knowing of my treachery vanished with one look at the sneer on his face. He swung his pistol, already in hand, back into line.
I dove just as he pulled the trigger. A bullet spanged off the sidewalk, then another, even closer, and then I was up, gun at the ready.
Bang.
I got him high in the chest. Other than spoiling his aim, the shot barely seemed to affect him. His gun went off, missing, and he took another step toward me.
What the fuck? Him too? I had time to wonder, and then he collapsed. A wheezing sound came from the hole in his chest. He wasn’t dead, not yet, though he might end up that way. No telling.
I snatched up his service weapon from where it had fallen, a few inches from his curled fingers. He probably had more than four bullets, and I was in no situation to be picky.
For what felt like the thousandth time that night, I ran.
* * *
Whether the cop behind me lost time fucking with Donnelly or I just got lucky, I lost him in a hurry. I ran like a demon, slipped through one alley to the next, and the next after that, not daring to slow down, desperate to get anywhere else.
The problem was that there was nowhere else to go, not really. The Slob wanted me dead, and now the cops would too. They’d have roadblocks up by now, so getting out of Boston would take an act of God. I could turn myself in, I supposed, but I thought there was a good chance they’d shoot me on sight, now, and I still couldn’t rule out the knifed-in-prison scenario. The Slob had guys on the inside, biding their time.
Worst of all, Lazzaro would find me. I had little doubt of that. Wherever I went, he’d find me.
I stole another car, just to get as far from my current location as possible. It was a rusted-out Buick, twenty years old, and I could actually see the road through holes in the floorboard. That it ran at all was a stroke of amazing fortune. I drove for a while and then ditched the car in an alley that threaded through a warren of tenements. The light had taken on a grainy gray cast, and I realized that the sun was coming up.
That first faint light was all it took to drop a tanker truck of fatigue on my shoulders. How long since I’d slept? Really slept? A lifetime. Maybe two. If I could get some rest, even an hour, then maybe I could think clearly enough to puzzle my way out of this mess. I’d sleep in a trash can if I thought it was defensible, but with half the world gunning for me, I wanted walls.
I broke into the nearest apartment building. I needed a place, even an empty room—something I could barricade and at least hear if somebody broke in. I stared at the names on the mailboxes, deciphering them slowly, as if they were being shouted at me from a great distance. No help—every box had a name on it, so there was nothing obviously empty. Without any better plan in mind, I cracked open the panel that granted the mail carrier access to all the boxes. It took me a stupidly long time to find what I wanted, even with the grid laid out in front of me. In the bottom corner, one of the boxes was crammed tightly full of envelopes and glossy junk mail. I pulled a thick stack of envelopes out, with some difficulty, and shuffled through them. A couple of bills, a few credit card offers, even a letter, with postmarks ranging from a couple of days old to a week.
Good enough. Apartment 4F, here I come.
* * *
I took the stairs up to the fourth floor, hoping it was early enough that nobody would be stirring yet. 4F was easy to find, down at the end of the hall. I had a bad moment when the door across the hall opened and an exhausted-looking woman in nurse’s scrubs stepped out, but she staggered past me like a zombie, eyes focused on the dingy gray carpet ahead of her. If she even noticed me, I couldn’t tell, and I doubted she got a good enough look to match up the dirty bum in front of 4F with the pictures that would undoubtedly show up on the cover of the Globe that day.
I waited until she was gone and then put an ear to the door at 4F. Nothing. No light came through the peephole, either.
It was the work of fifteen seconds to pick the crappy lock, and then I was in. Apartment 4F—the Callahans’ place, according to the mail—was small but cozy. Beige couch, old but in good shape. Flatscreen TV with Xbox controllers on the shelf below it. Framed Jesus prints hanging on the wall. They were of that peculiar Catholic variety with Jesus wearing some kind of blue shawl-looking thing, a creepy glowing red heart visible in his chest. At least in this particular rendition he wasn’t looking at me. I’d settle for that.
The apartment had two bedrooms—the master bedroom in the corner of the building, and a bedroom with bunk beds on the other side of the apartment, the kids’ room separated from the parents’ by the width of the living room. Spiderman sheets. No thanks. The master bedroom would do.
I went back to the entry and thought about my options. It would be the height of stupidity not to trap the door. I was pretty sure I could manage one of those obnoxious blue lightning deals that Kelsen had been so fond of, but there was always the chance the family would come back from their vacation today, and I’d fricassee a couple of kids. I thought about it for a long while, but I hadn’t sunk far enough to risk that. Not yet.
I bolted the door and propped a chair in front of it. Anybody coming in now would have to break the fucking door down, and I’d hear that.
I checked to make sure the windows were locked, then went back to the master bedroom. I closed the curtains and collapsed on the bed. I think I was asleep before I hit the mattress.
* * *
I meant to sleep for an hour, maybe two, then get up and start figuring out what the hell to do next. See a guy I knew about getting a fake ID, and come up with a plan for getting out of town. Instead, weeks of fatigue threw me down and pretty much had their way with me. When I woke, disoriented and confused, the digital clock on the table said eight-forty. That wouldn’t be so bad, if it was morning, but the light coming through the gaps in the curtain and the reduced pain in my head and my joints told me I’d slept way more than two or three hours.
Once I caught up to the situation, I was surprised to be still alive. It wasn’t that Lazzaro couldn’t find me, I was sure of that. Maybe he was having trouble moving around town with all the cops swarming like I imagined they must be. Maybe he couldn’t come out in the daylight. Hell, maybe it was taking him some time to break out of a drawer in the morgue. That thought got a grim chuckle out of me.
I got out of bed and tried to straighten up the tangled mess of covers. I didn’t remember any dreams, but it sure looked like I’d thrashed around plenty. I tucked the blanket in, arranged the comforter over the top, and went to the bathroom to wash my face. Then it was time to go. It was probably too late to catch my ID guy at his shop, but he’d be at home. He wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. That was okay. I was feeling pretty persuasive.
I opened the door out into the hall, and I hadn’t made three steps before the ubiquitous stink of burned flesh slipped its nasty tendrils into my nostrils. They were in the building, then. I swore under my breath.
Going out the front way would be suicidal, so it had to be the fire escape. I turned around and opened the door to Chez Callahan—
And my brain jammed up. A man was coming out of the kids’ bedroom, but for one short eternity, my mind simply refused to process the information it was presented with. Then it caught with a shudder and a jerk, like popping a clutch.
The guy coming out of the room, gun in hand, half-crouched and head turned toward me as I stood in the doorway, was dead. A Russian guy, of all fucking things, that I’d shot six times during the successful-but-unfortunate war on Kelsen.
Shit! Lazzaro’s recruiting!
The guy started shooting, and I spun out into the hall. Bullets punched holes through the cheap drywall, spraying white dust into the air. I dropped to the floor.
The shooting stopped, but from down the hall I heard footsteps running up the stairs. I was gonna get squeezed real shortly if I didn’t do something.
I stood up, scratched a b
linding sigil on my left palm, and pulled my gun. Then I charged back into the apartment.
The door smashed into the guy, who had apparently taken it in his head to follow me, and we both bounced backward and fell. Bad luck for him—the door had knocked the gun from his hand. He dove for it, but he was too late.
Lying on my back, I emptied the last three bullets from my gun into his body. I dropped the gun and pulled Donnelly’s weapon.
I dashed into the room, ears ringing from impact with the door or from the sound of gunshots in an enclosed space, just as somebody came up the stairs and cut loose with the kind of automatic weapon big sweaty guys in movies level entire forests with. Nothing in that hall could have survived.
I made four steps into the apartment this time, and fucking Donnelly came out of the master bedroom, looking like he’d maybe spent the day at the spa sipping drinks and getting a colonic instead of facedown on an anonymous side street. I fired off two shots in his direction with his own damn gun, and he got off one at me before I slid into the living room. We were now separated by a corner and a cheap couch. If he showed his face, I’d blow it the fuck off, but I had the same problem—and guys were coming down the hall for me.
“You fucking killed me, Pecatti!” Donnelly shouted. He sounded great, for a dead guy. “Do you have any idea how much that hurts?”
I shot a couple holes through the wall, and was rewarded with a strangled curse. Got you!
I didn’t get time to exult in my victory. From the other side, the hall outside the kids’ bedroom, somebody spoke.
“Jimmy.”
Shit. Lazzaro. Again.
“They keep a special spot in Hell for betrayers,” he said, clear even over the ringing in my ears. “When we catch you, you’re gonna wish you’d died at birth. Believe me.”
“Fuck you.”
His laughter made my stomach squirm. Then he said something else, something I recognized as a fire incantation a split second before it was too late. The couch and the carpet next to me erupted in flame just as I rolled. He could burn down this whole place, I realized, with me and him and everybody else in it. Unfortunately, he’d probably walk away from that.
My mind whirled like a slot machine, trying to converge on some kind of solution and failing, when Lazzaro came around the corner, the words to another hideous spell on his lips.
Just then, the guy with the artillery kicked open the door. It was Patsy, and he came in shooting blindly. He cut Lazzaro in half before he could take his finger off the trigger, and, just about the time he figured out what he’d done and stopped firing, I shot him.
I got up, yet again, and turned toward the kids’ bedroom. The burned man stood in the hall, looking on the scene with no expression on his wrecked face. I shot him, too. I heard swearing from inside the bedroom. Big George, it sounded like. I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
I headed to the other bedroom. Donnelly was gutshot, lying in the hall, and I put one in his head on the way past. Maybe it would slow him down some. I stuck my head out the open window. Another goddamn dead Russian was coming up the fire escape! How many of these fuckers were there?
I lifted the gun again and pulled the trigger. It jammed. The dead gangster reached for his gun, but I held up my left hand and spat out the short incantation. There was a flash, and he fell over backward. I heard a wet, crunchy landing.
Then, I was out the window, racking the slide of Donnelly’s gun to try to get it unjammed. The shell casing popped loose and fell through the grating of the fire escape.
More shots. Bullets bounced off the metal of the fire escape from below. The fallen guy was down, hurt, maybe dying—but not dead yet, and with his last breaths, he was firing away like he was at the county fair trying to win a prize for his girl.
Behind me, Big George came into the master bedroom.
I saw the Dumpster squatting in the alley four floors below. Jesus, it was a long way down.
I jumped.
Chapter 28. Kit
The pavement tasted like a concrete ashtray, and something in the vicinity of my left elbow had gone horribly wrong. The spreading liquid warmth over there could only mean one of two things, and unless I’d gotten lucky and somebody was pissing on me, I was pumping blood like an open faucet.
I managed to haul my eyelids open and even roll my head to the side, coughing and spitting some of the grit out of my mouth. It was getting dark, but it wasn’t there yet. I could see the grimy brick of the alley I landed in, and a big green smear—the Dumpster that broke my fall—blocked out a third of my vision. I remembered. I was supposed to land in the damned Dumpster, but my leap had been far from graceful and I’d landed sideways on the fucking edge. The impact had snapped my arm like a pretzel. Unless I missed my guess, the jagged end of bone had torn through my flesh and was responsible for the widening pool of blood I was lying in.
I needed to get up, immediately, but that whole eyelid-lifting production seemed to have overtaxed the local chapter of the Move My Ass Union, and whole teams of muscle and nerve fibers had gone on strike. In terms of my available options, getting up was currently in the same league as throwing a bulldozer.
Footsteps from behind, and I panicked. If my pursuers were already up and around, the situation was worse than I thought. I flopped weakly, which constituted a full five-alarm freak-out as far as my trashed body was concerned.
“Jeez, Jimmy. Hold still. You’re a mess.”
Wait a minute. That’s not Lazzaro, or any of the others. That sounds like . . .
“Kit?” I stopped flopping and picked my head up an inch or so off the ground, trying to get a better look. Everything went gray, so I let my head fall back to the ground. It bounced.
“Shhh,” she said. Then strong hands rolled me over, even taking care not to whack my arm too hard on anything. I could have cried, I was so grateful. Kit tore the sleeve of my shirt open and winced. There was some fumbling, and then she tied off my arm and bandaged the wound with pieces shredded from my shirt. The bleeding slowed to a trickle. I was still exploring vast new realms of pain and weariness, but I thought I might live to see midnight if we got out of there fast enough. Dawn was probably too much to ask.
“You’re a goddess, Kit.”
“Get up.” She pulled me to a seated position. From there I could see two bodies—the guy I’d tricked into looking at a blinding sigil then shot while he was coming up the fire escape, and Big George. George had tried to jump down after me, and he probably would have punched my ticket if I hadn’t shot him in the leg just as he jumped. My expert forensic opinion, garnered from the flat spot on his head and the unchristian angle of his neck, was that he landed headfirst.
His hand balled into a tight fist, then relaxed.
“Get up,” Kit said again. “We’ve gotta go.”
That was no joke. Big George had been the last of the seven, and he was starting to move. Even God couldn’t help me if the first one down was already up and walking around.
I grayed out a few times while Kit half-dragged me to the car. I was trying to help, honest, but there’s only so much a body can take. The next time I was fully conscious, I was folded up accordion-style in the back seat of an ancient rustbucket that grumbled down the road, its tiny engine sounding like a giant chewing slabs of rock.
“Ow,” I said. In my current condition, I regarded it as a deeply profound statement. We rumbled over a pothole and the world went hazy again.
“Where are we going?” I asked after a while. And shouldn’t we be going there faster? I wanted to add.
“You need to see a doctor,” somebody said. Not Kit. I tried to pick up my head, apparently having failed to learn my lesson from the previous attempt. Before the dizziness and pain forced my head back to the seat, I saw Benedict’s angular profile. He was in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. Even damaged, my body could muster enough fear to squirt acid into my stomach, and my depleted adrenal glands managed a little spurt.
�
�Kit?”
“Yeah?” Oh, good. She’s still here. Driving. For a moment, I was gripped with a terror that she had sold out to the mob, but then reason returned. She’d no sooner do that than the president would get caught with an underage hooker.
“Kit, what the hell is going on? What’s he doing here?”
“A little gratitude might be in order,” Benedict said. He still didn’t look at me.
“You gonna kill me?”
An exasperated noise escaped Benedict’s mouth. “If I wanted to kill you, I’d have left you in the damn alley.”
At that point, I decided it was best to forget about understanding and simply accept. I’d get the story later, if I lived long enough. There was one more question, though, that I had to ask. I had to be sure.
“How’d you find me?”
Benedict flicked something over his shoulder. A piece of paper fluttered to the floor of the car. I slid my head over to the edge of the seat and peered over.
A card, with a picture of a saint on it. And a smear of my blood.
I smiled and slipped into unconsciousness.
* * *
Next time I was fully with it, the car had stopped. Cheesy yellow moonlight fell through the windows and onto my face, and I felt a weird urge to get out from under it, like the rays would give me cancer or curse my offspring.
Kit and Benedict got out of the car, came around the side, and helped me out. Benedict wasn’t a lot of help, actually. He’d seemed sober enough before, but he wasn’t walking any too steadily now, and he pulled me in a direction that was only sort of similar to the direction Kit was trying to pull. They got me up, though, and supported me like I was the drunk.
I stopped long enough to grin at Benedict. He hadn’t sold me out. Maybe he knew the whole story and maybe not, but he’d come for me—and he’d brought the card. That meant Lazzaro didn’t have it, and neither did anybody else. He’d given me a ticket to freedom, and I thought he knew it.
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