Serpents in the Cold

by Thomas O'Malley

  “First off, tell me why you two were looking for a meat truck over at the city dump, and in the early hours of the morning?”

  “Got a tip from a dispatcher about a missing truck, that’s all.”

  “Why a missing truck?”

  “Trucks are the only traffic down at Tenean this time of year. You see them coming and going like clockwork.

  “And then there was the state of her body postmortem, as if she’d been killed on the beach when we know she wasn’t. When I saw the tracks at the beach all I could think was that perhaps it had been a reefer. It was a hunch, but I didn’t think it would end up anywhere. You had to have thought of that too.”

  Owen nodded. “Yeah. We’d thought of it.”

  “So, who are the women?”

  Dante turned away and looked out the window. Hiding their faces from the driving snow, pedestrians labored against the wind and passed by slowly.

  “Okay, this is what we’ve got, and I’m telling you only because you found the trailer.”

  He lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and leaned back in his seat as the waitress arrived with their food. She refilled their cups with coffee and then passed down the row of booths.

  “We know one of the Jane Does as Margaret Hill, a hooker from Roxbury, pimps for a creep named Shea Mack—”

  Dante swore as he slopped coffee onto the table and his hand. Cal pushed his napkin across to him and Dante worked to pool up the liquid before it dripped onto the floor.

  “You know this Shea Mack?” Owen asked.

  Cal shook his head, but Dante nodded. “I’ve heard of him.” Shaking, he balled up the sopping napkin and put it aside.

  Owen began to carve up his meat, placed a small piece in his mouth. “That figures.”

  He chewed for a moment and then swallowed with obvious discomfort. “Okay, well then maybe you know a little of how he works. Real piece of shit. We’ve got beat cops looking for him, but no word yet.

  “The other victim we identified as Anne Montague. She’s from Weymouth. Her parents have had a Missing Persons out for her since the end of December.”

  From between bites of food he said, “We’ve been in touch with the State Police and agencies from three other states, Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. So far they’ve gotten back to us with nine missing young women from Providence to Portland, all in the last twelve months.”

  He pushed the plate away from him although he was only half-done.

  “This all seems to be the work of the Butcher—maybe this Scarletti character you told me about. Hell, he’s got the credentials for it. His record of arrest shows two burglaries and three aggravated assaults: assault with the attempt to cause bodily injury to another person by use of a deadly weapon, assault with the attempt to cause bodily injury to a police officer, assault with the attempt to cause serious bodily injury and have sexual activity with a person under the age of consent.”

  “What do you mean ‘maybe’? We know who did this—it was Blackie Foley! Why haven’t you already taken him in?”

  “Those are his salvage yards, okay? He leases part of the property out to trucking companies so that they can load and unload, switch trailers, or dump them. For years we’ve known that he’s used it as a front for black market smuggling. We’ve never been able to make anything stick on him, but we’ve known all about it.”

  “So you’re going to let him slide?”

  “Christ, Cal, why would he jeopardize his business by leaving a truckful of bodies in a place he knows we watch? The yards are his property and he has every right to check on them whenever the fuck he wants.”

  “This is all bullshit, Owen.”

  “Let me finish. A bum tipped him off about the rig, and as soon as he discovered the trailer, he called it in. He also said somebody chased him halfway across Boston.”

  “So what did you say to him?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Fuck him.”

  “No. Fuck you, Cal—fuck you both.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Owen sipped from his coffee, placed the cup on the table, and squared his hands around it. They were a boxer’s hands, much like Cal’s. Dante noticed the glimmer of Owen’s wedding band shimmering dully beneath the lights of the diner.

  Owen pursed his lips, looked at Dante. “So you knew this Margaret Hill?”

  “It was a long time ago, Owen. The faces, the names, they all blend together.”

  Owen stared, unconvinced, pushed his coffee cup to the center of the table. “That’s okay. I’ve got to get back to the station.”

  “What about Blackie?” Cal asked again.

  “Like I said: Blackie had nothing to do with this.”

  Owen hesitated. He stared at Dante, wiped at his nose with the back of his hand. “I’ve been dreading this all day. I should have just done it back at the morgue.”

  “Dreading what?” Cal asked.

  Owen ignored him, kept his eyes locked on Dante. “Giordano has been on me these past couple of days. He’s pissing blood about how nobody questioned you before.”

  Cal stiffened in his chair. “What the fuck is this shit, Owen?”

  “Dante was the only real relative Sheila had. We got to ask him questions.” He stood, pulling his coat about him, and pushed a dollar bill across the table.

  A sickly grin pulled at Dante’s lips. “You’re not going to cuff me?”

  “No, and if it makes you feel any better, you can ride up front with me.”

  “This is bullshit, Owen, and you know it,” Cal said.

  “It’s all part of the process, you know that. I promise to make it as harmless as I can.”

  Outside, they had to lower their heads against windblown snow as traffic rumbled past. Cal and Dante huddled together for a moment against the side of the building, attempting to light a cigarette.

  “Just go with it,” Cal said in a low voice. “Giordano is a real greaseball prick, and he’ll try to heavy-hand you.”

  Dante shook the match and inhaled off the cigarette. “I’ll be fine.”

  Cal watched Dante’s fingers tremor as he reached toward his lips, took the cigarette, and passed it over.

  “I’ll be fine,” Dante repeated, as if he was saying it more to himself than to Cal.

  Owen reached casually for Dante’s shoulder, turned him in the opposite direction toward the city morgue. He gestured to Cal with his handkerchief.

  “You can follow us in your car if you like. It’s up to you.”

  “Does he need an attorney?”

  “I don’t know.” Owen looked at Dante. “Do you?”

  Dante shook his head and Owen nodded. “Good,” he said. “That’ll make it easier.”

  Owen blew his nose violently, looked down at the handkerchief, and frowned in disgust. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and glared at them. “I wish this fucking cold on you two idiots.”

  28

  _________________________

  Boston Police District D-4, South End

  A SOFT, WET snow came down and the wipers clacked back and forth across the new windshield. Cal had the heater on and sipped coffee; every so often he lit a cigarette and let down the window to blow the smoke out. He’d swung by Scollay Square before following Owen and Dante to the precinct, had shuttered and locked the Pilgrim Security offices, and although he expected the phones to remain dead, he’d had their calls put through to the answering service. He stared through the bleary glass, wiped at it with his sleeve, watched the gray of the street: police cars moving in and out of their spots and cops and pedestrians trudging sluggishly up and down the stairs to the precinct. To the north the lights of the John Hancock Building flashed red, shimmering through the sleet. He checked his watch, and when he looked up, Dante was descending the stairs: so slow and disheveled he looked like a man who’d spent the weekend in the drunk tank, a man with nothing in his pockets and nothing to lose. Dante stood at the bottom of
the steps and glanced up and down the street until Cal tapped the horn twice and got his attention. He climbed in wearily, and Cal stared at him, handed him the cigarette he’d been smoking.

  “How’d it go?” Cal asked.

  Dante sucked on the cigarette, blew smoke out from his nostrils. He looked through the glass and shrugged.

  “I would have come in but it would have just made it worse for you. That fucker Giordano hates my guts.”

  “He was okay. Someone had to ask the questions.”

  “Was Owen in the room with you?”

  “Yeah. He even told Giordano to lay off a couple of times.”

  “Good for Owen, the prick.”

  Cal put the car in gear and eased out into the street, past the old redbrick and brownstone row houses of the South End, and then onto Columbus. Dante hadn’t looked at him since he’d gotten in the car.

  “What did they want to know about you and Sheila?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  Cal focused on the traffic; they crossed one intersection and then another, idled as they waited for a light to turn green. He coughed into his hand, wishing there was a bottle in the glove compartment. He turned to Dante and noticed his eyes were red and glassy, as if he’d been crying.

  “Was there something that happened between you and Sheila that you’re not telling me?”

  “I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.” He was staring through the windshield, eyes glistening.

  Cal kept his mouth shut, considering. After a moment: “Fine, then. We won’t talk about it.”

  On the road before them a green Ford swerved into their lane. Cal slammed down on the horn, cursed under his breath. The Ford straightened out and moved ahead.

  “No matter what Owen says, I know Blackie had a hand in this. And if we get to Scarletti first, maybe we’ll find out just what that is.”

  At the intersection Cal gunned the car as the traffic light went from green to red. “So, this Shea Mack, how well do you know him?”

  Dante turned and rolled down the window. Wind rushed through the car, and he sucked in the cold air.

  “Shea Mack works Fort Point and the West End,” he said matter-of-factly, and turned an odd and strangely disquieting smile at Cal, as if he were opening doors to his past that he would rather have left closed. “And I know where we can find him.”

  29

  _________________________

  Somerset Street, West End

  A VOICE CALLED from the room beyond the heavy curtains. Local and yet with a fake drawl, sickly sweet as it might come from a man mimicking a child while impersonating someone from the South. “Is that Dante, Honeydew?”

  “It’s Dante, Shea.”

  “Well, show him on in. We’s just taking care of some business here, ain’t nothing old Dante can’t see.”

  The big man called Honeydew nodded, and Cal followed Dante’s lead through the curtains.

  The back room was dimly lit and full of shadows. At the center a young man with large, pleading eyes sat bound to a wooden chair. His pants and underwear were down around his ankles and his legs were held apart by rope. Half kneeling before him with a straight razor was a grinning Shea Mack. He eyed Cal and Dante as they stepped into the room and pressed the razor against the young man’s bruised-looking testicles and then with the flat end of the blade playfully tapped the penis, which lay like a limp, withered worm against the testicles.

  Cal glanced at Dante. “What the fuck is this shit?”

  Behind the boy stood two young black men, one of them wearing leather gloves that glistened as if wet. Almost lost in the darkness, a large white man slouched on a sofa, his extraordinary belly pushing out of his gray T-shirt. He wore green khakis of the type truck drivers and city workers wore.

  Shea pressed the blade between the boy’s testicles and drew it back. The boy whimpered and strained against his ropes, the muscles in his thighs tautened, and a stream of urine spat from his penis, splattering the floor.

  “Jesus,” Shea cried, grinning, “I haven’t even started yet.” He shook his arm, the shirtsleeve now darkened and wet. “Now I’m gonna smell like piss.”

  In the corner two other young men lay trussed and naked, kneeling, gags in their mouths, and eyes wide with horror. Another was sitting naked with his back to the wall. By the looks of him, he appeared to have been the first one tied to the chair and tortured. Both eyes were misshapen mounds of black bruise, a barely recognizable slit of an eyeball glistened from his right eye socket. His cheeks and lips were so horribly contorted it looked as if the swelling would soon split the skin. The kid couldn’t move the bloodied pulp of his mouth, yet they could hear his moaning.

  “You know what these here boys did, Dante?”

  This was a mannerism with Shea Mack, a playful and manipulative banter in which the other person was always to assume the inferior role, responding to Shea’s rhetorical questions, and so that he always held center court. Cal caught on right away—in the war he’d seen enough megalomaniacs with bars on their shoulders act in much the same way—and he resisted the game, but Dante knew better, and he knew it was dangerous not to play.

  “What he’d do, Shea?”

  “This boy, and his buddies—fucking frat boys from Tufts—decide they want to get some action in so they come over the bridge and take my Kitty here for a little joyride.”

  On a stool sat Kitty, legs pressed tightly together, wringing her hands and squirming almost as much as the boy. She wore a floor-length ratty fake fur coat and a bright pink wool hat streaked with grime.

  “Well, Kitty tells them how much it’s going to be for each one of them and they agree, but when they get her to the room they change their minds and decide they’re not going to pay. Not only that but what they want is no longer consensual—you see, these boys want to make her hurt—so they take what they want by force. Y’know, treat her like a dog. A bitch, a piece-of-shit whore they’ve found on the street. So they rape my Kitty, all four of them.

  “They rape my Kitty, sodomize her, and beat her black and blue in the process…and that’s not all they do…you’d think they’d never had mothers and sisters, what they did to her…animals…fucking animals.” Shea screwed his face up as if something foul-tasting had just come into his mouth, and spat in the direction of the bound-and-gagged students.

  He stared over at them now. “Think they got more love for each other, don’t you? More love for the little things between their legs. You know, I always figured men who hate women this much must have a love for cock. Bet deep, deep down, they missing their daddy’s cock.”

  Shea shrugged, still smiling. “So, what do you think we’re doing about it, Dante?”

  He moved the flat of the straight blade back and forth across the boy’s scrotum. The ropes strained and the boy began gagging.

  “You’re making it right, Shea. Teaching them a lesson. They have to know they can’t fuck with Shea Mack.”

  “Yes. They have to know they can’t fuck with Shea Mack. They have to understand the consequences.” He turned the blade slightly and the boy howled again; a trickle of blood slid down the metal.

  “Enough,” Cal said, and Shea’s eyes moved slowly toward him. Shea smiled coldly. The blade paused against the boy’s scrotum. “Tell him why we’re here, Dante.”

  Dante took off his hat and raked a hand through his hair. “We’re here about Blackie Foley.”

  “Blackie Foley,” Shea murmured, and his eyes glazed. He seemed to have momentarily forgotten the boy in the chair. Shea ran the flat of the blade over his cheek. “That’s one pretty man. Always has been. Ever since I first met him, I thought he was too pretty to be doing the things he did, hanging out with the people he did. Beautiful eyes has Blackie—you ever look into his eyes?”

  Cal hacked, spat on the floor. Shea continued to eye him lazily and as if with a strange curiosity. “We think he killed one of your girls.”

  “Who?”

&
nbsp; “Margaret Hill.”

  “Dear sweet Maggie,” and he sighed. “If it’s Blackie, poor troubled boy—what are you going to do, Dante? No one in this town’s going to step out against Blackie.”

  Shea tapped the blade against the palm of his hand, stared as its edge caught the light and gleamed. “How’d he do it? How’d he kill her?”

  “Strung her up on a meat hook, tortured her, and then sliced her open.”

  Shea shook his head. “Shame. Even though she’d gotten old far too quick, she was a good girl. She really was. Always listened to what I told her. Always did right by me.

  “Strange, though, it doesn’t sound like Blackie, the way you describe it, not like Blackie at all. Why’d he do it? What reason would he have to kill Maggie like that?”

  It was Cal’s turn to smile. “Don’t know. Figure he was just getting his kicks, a sick fuck, like you.”

  Shea cocked his head to one side, and the light reflected off his black hair parted and slicked with grease, his clean-shaven face which had the pallor of a wax figure suddenly come to life. “Oh boy. If you think Blackie and me are alike, you need help, my man. Dante, your friend here needs to open his eyes. He’s walking blind.”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Dante responded, but Shea disregarded him and kept his eyes locked on Cal.

  “I would have expected more from you, war hero. Yeah, that’s right. I know you.”

  “Can’t say the same, Shea. But you’re almost exactly what I expected.”

  “You’re a funny guy, real funny, but if you’re headed to collide with Blackie Foley, you’re more of a fool. He’ll tear you up into little pieces and send you to the grinders. You’re not going to be so pretty when he’s done. Shame, really.”

  Shea tapped the razor absently against his lips, considered Cal with something almost like desire. Blood ran down the blade and onto his knuckles. He looked at it for a moment and then shook his head, glanced back at the boy strapped to the chair, watched the feeble movements of his chest, his legs as the muscles spasmed, the rapid convulsions of his Adam’s apple.