Serpents in the Cold

by Thomas O'Malley

  Dante fired again even as a volley of bullets ripped chunks out of the wood around him. A sudden pain tore into his shoulder and he lost his footing, slammed sideways into the jukebox. He glanced down to where a black circle smoked in his right shoulder. A surge of blood bubbled through it, dripped from between his fingers and onto the floor. He regained his feet and fired off another round, stumbled away as bullets shattered the domed glass of the jukebox, the lights within flickering strobe-like before sizzling out. He emptied the gun into the crowd as he pushed against the door and stumbled out onto the avenue.

  He slid on a layer of ice into a gutter piled high with debris, regained his foothold, and began to run. He fumbled with more bullets from his pocket, which he fingered but couldn’t quite grasp. The gun barrel singed the skin on his hand and he fought against the pain, popped the cylinder open, and jammed in as many bullets as he could.

  He glanced back as he ran, fired four more rounds at the goons rushing out of Black Jack’s so that they had to dive into the snow and behind cars parked along the curb. Gunshots popped like firecrackers. To his right, a parked car’s windshield shattered, a snowbank erupted into plumes of ice. Pedestrians huddled in storefronts, rushed for cover in alleyways and behind trash cans. When the pain in his right shoulder became too intense, he switched the gun to his left hand and fired haphazardly. Above the door, the sign for Brubaker Beer exploded in white sparks and showered down on the cowering bodies below. He kept firing until the gun clicked empty a second time.

  He made it to an intersection, stumbled off the curb and into the street. Car headlights blinded him. Drivers laid on their horns. A blackness pulsed at the edges of his vision; he felt the ground sway and bend beneath him. A hundred yards ahead he saw a taxicab coming down the avenue. He crossed into the middle of the street, raised the gun toward the headlights that grew larger and enveloped him in their light. The driver hit his brakes, and the car spun across the icy road before coming to a sideways stop, smoke steaming from its tires.

  He winced against the blinding glare of the headlights, aimed the gun at the driver’s side of the windshield, and stumbled to the passenger’s side. Inside the cab, he held the gun at the driver. The man was old, with a frightened, impoverished face and a white beard that thinned out at his chin. He shook his head, said something in a language that Dante knew was Polish.

  “Turn the car around,” Dante said, his hand trembling and spittle flying from his lips. “Turn the fucking car around!”

  The staccato flares of gunfire came from the other side of the street, the sharp echoes popping off into the night. Bullets tore through the taxi’s back door, and the side window exploded, broken glass skittering across the hard leather seats. The driver put the car into gear and pressed the gas. The tires spun, caught traction, and the engine roared as the car straightened out and sped ahead. Dante held his free hand against his shoulder to stanch the flow of blood, but there was so much of it he could taste it. He fought against a wave of burning pain carrying through his arm. Bile filled his throat. The darkness was coming and he had to hold on; he blinked and tried to will the adrenaline through his veins, while in his head he replayed how he’d seen Blackie go down and he prayed with all the strength he had left that it was a head shot.

  58

  _________________________

  Scollay Square, Downtown

  THE PAIN FORCED Dante into a fetal position on the small cot at the back of Pilgrim Security. His shoulder felt as if it were on fire; beneath the bandages it throbbed and pulsed like some manner of animal, something no longer part of him. With clenched teeth, he grabbed Cal’s army-issue blanket off the chair next to the cot, shakily wrapped it about him, feeling the coarse wool scratch at his skin like a scouring pad.

  The room didn’t have much in it. One lamp that occasionally flickered, sometimes going off and leaving him in darkness, or beaming so brightly he’d see spots if he looked at it too long; a radiator constantly pinging with pressure and hissing out steam; and one window to remind him that a world still existed outside. From the other room came voices softly talking, and then the door opened. Cal gave a weak attempt at a smile and stepped inside the room. Behind him came Fierro, wearing a heavy wool coat with the collar turned up and eyeglasses slightly fogged over. In his right hand he gripped a leather satchel, making him appear like a small-town doctor on a house call instead of the city’s medical examiner. He labored to catch his breath.

  “Claudia,” Dante managed. “I’ve got to get Claudia.” He tried to rise, but Cal motioned him to be still.

  “She’s okay. She’s at Owen’s.”

  Dante nodded and lay back. “Thanks.”

  “You’re an idiot. You should be dead after what you did.”’

  “Did I get him?”

  “No. Word on the street is that he got you.”

  Fierro placed his satchel on the wooden footstool, took off his glasses, and rubbed the lenses with his thumb, wiping away the moisture. He put them back over his wide inquisitive eyes and attempted to appear professional before turning back to the satchel and rifling through it.

  “First, Dante, I want you to take some of these pills; they’ll help you sleep. Wash them down. And then I’ve got to check that wound and get the bullet out, that is, if you want to keep living.”

  Dante reached out for the pills, his good hand shaking so horribly that Fierro had to hold it steady as he placed them in his palm, and then as he lay back on the cot, he felt Fierro undoing the dirty wrappings about his shoulder.

  FIERRO CAME BACK into the office, sat down heavily in the chair opposite Cal’s desk.

  Cal looked at him. “So he’ll be fine?”

  Fierro, his neck stiff and tight, eyes appearing owl-like behind his glasses. “He’ll live, but he’s not fine. That wound is bad. I got the bullet out, cleaned it up best I could, and rewrapped it with clean gauze and bandages. Another day or two, gangrene would have set in. I gave him something that should help him sleep a bit, but he isn’t right. Not right at all.”

  “Just tell me he’s fine. That’s all I want to hear.”

  “Cal. He’s not fine.”

  Cal moved behind the desk, sat down in the chair, and reached for the half-empty bottle of whiskey on the glass top.

  From his desk drawer he took two shot glasses. He filled them to the rim and slid one across. Fierro tossed it back in one go. He winced briefly, suddenly warmed over.

  “Really, Cal, I have no idea what you two are up to, but whatever it is I don’t like it. The next time I see you two, I don’t want it to be because I’m performing an autopsy on you. Christ’s sake, you look almost as bad as him.”

  “Don’t lecture me. I’m not in the mood.” Cal downed his whiskey, grabbed the bottle, and refilled his glass but not Fierro’s.

  Fierro glanced down at his empty glass and back up at Cal. “You should stop with all this cops-and-robbers shit. I mean it. Go back to chasing cheating husbands, missing persons, and cats stuck in trees, whatever the fuck you do.”

  “You have no idea what’s going on.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t want to know.”

  Fierro pushed up his glasses, eased forward toward the desk. “That’s supposed to be your best friend in there. Do what’s right and bring him to a hospital. And you, you should lay off the whiskey for a while.”

  Cal shrugged indifferently; it was as if a great weariness were pulling him down. “Fuck you, Fierro,” he said, but without much feeling.

  Fierro stood, took his leather satchel and hat off the desk. “I don’t know if you’ve listened to the radio the last couple of days, but there’s a real bad storm coming up the coast. Might be the worst one this winter. You’ll want to stay put. Keep an eye on Dante, and if his fever gets worse, you’ll know what to do, right?”

  Fierro waited for Cal to speak, but he didn’t.

  “I guess that’s it. Take care of yourself.”

  Cal fought to find words to thank
him, to offer him an apology, an excuse, anything, but nothing came to him, and all he could do was pour a third whiskey and keep his eyes downcast, staring at the shot glass filled with its amber liquid and not looking up as Fierro opened the door and left the office. He listened as Fierro’s footsteps padded down the hallway and then faded in the stairwell. The curtains were drawn but he could tell it was snowing again, could hear the slow, dull thump of thick, heavy snow against the glass and windowsill. From the back room came the sudden sound of Dante heaving painfully, as if he were vomiting his guts and everything else within him onto the floor.

  59

  _________________________

  Cedar Grove Cemetery, Dorchester

  THEY HELD A Mass and funeral service in the Cedar Grove chapel with Lynne’s coffin positioned before the altar with flowers and wreaths set upon it. The ground was too frozen to dig, and so the body would rest in the graveyard’s charnel house until the ground thawed and she could be buried. Father Nolan, who divided his time between Mission Hill and Saint Brendan’s on Gallivan Boulevard, said the Mass and spoke a brief but tender eulogy. He’d asked Cal the night before if he wanted to speak, but Cal declined. Words wouldn’t have come to him if he’d tried; all he felt was a dull numbness, as when the nerve endings of one’s body have gone into shock and no longer scream with the pain of some terrible wound. He was thankful that the funeral home, Father Nolan, and Owen had done most of the funeral plans. It if it had been up to him, he wouldn’t be sitting here now, but Owen had arranged the car service—one black Lincoln for Cal, Owen, and his wife, and another for Lynne’s parents—that had picked them up in Southie that morning, and so he’d had no choice. He tried to think about how important it would have been for Lynne, how she would have wanted this, but even that wasn’t enough, for nothing seemed to matter anymore, and when he stared at the coffin he saw only the burned and charred remains, a skeleton that could not be his Lynne and yet he knew it was.

  In the pews sat mostly Lynne’s friends, co-workers from the Carney, others from the old neighborhood whom she hadn’t seen in some time or from Savin Hill and to whom she had always been kind. There were also cousins and aunts and uncles of his, the ones who attended every wake and funeral in the city as if it were a special dispensation that their Irish souls demanded of them. Her mother and father were sitting at the front across the aisle from Cal, Owen and his wife, Anne, Claudia, and Dante, pale and disheveled in a tie and black suit, one shoulder raised and crumpled from the thick gauze that wrapped his wound; but they refused to look his way, and when he’d tried to approach them before the Mass, Lynne’s mother had shook her head fiercely and begun to sob, and Matty, her husband, jaw-clenched and pale, put up a hand warning him to keep his distance. When he glanced toward the back of the church, he caught sight of Fierro along with half a dozen cops he knew from his days as a detective.

  Outside, the air felt cold and hard despite the sun. As if, without the cloud cover that they’d been under the last month, what little heat there had been was now gone. The sky was blue, but the only bird was a seagull shrieking forlornly over the Neponset River and the flats winding out to the bay and the sea. There was the soft peal of a bell, and Cal watched a trolley car bound for Mattapan Square trundle along the tracks that bisected the cemetery. Lynne had often joked that when the time came for them to be buried here, they could still take the trolley into town at midnight and go dancing together at Storyville.

  He didn’t realize he was crying until he felt Owen’s wife hugging him, and then, awkwardly, Claudia did the same thing. Lynne’s parents had already climbed into their Lincoln, and he watched as the driver eased the large car between the granite gateposts and out onto Adams Street. And he let them take him to the car, even though it felt as if their combined weight, one on either side of him, were weighing him down.

  IN THE DINING room Owen and his wife had laid out a platter of cold cuts, bread, and cheeses; in the kitchen a large pot of stew simmered over a low flame. Mourners stood in various corners of the room talking quietly. Anne went about turning on the standing lamps while Owen refilled whiskey glasses or passed out bottles of beer.

  After he’d shaken hands and listened to condolences, to which he vacantly nodded and said thank you, Cal stood to one side of the bay window in the dining room and looked across the boulevard at Carson Beach. He spooned stew from a bowl and chewed slowly; he couldn’t taste a thing, but knew he needed to eat.

  There were a few stuttering notes on the upright piano, and then Dante began to play “Carrickfergus.” The piano was out of tune and many of the keys dead, notes that sounded out wooden and dull, but Dante’s gnarled fingers did their best, slowly letting the notes hold their pitch. His head was bent to the keys and cocked sideways, and Cal couldn’t tell whether this was from the pain of his shoulder wound or if he was listening for the absences and tremors in the range his damaged hands would allow. And there was something about the sound of the ruined piano and its player that lent a melancholy quality to the song.

  Cal glanced over from the window. Lynne would have appreciated the song—even with all of its flaws, it was beautiful. More, he thought, she would have been happy that Dante was playing again.

  After a moment, Owen placed his beer on the mantel and joined him, singing. Owen was a natural tenor with a fine falsetto and his version of the song brought most people in the room to tears. Together they played “The Galway Shawl” and then “Blackbird” and “She Moved through the Fair,” and the haunting treble of Owen’s voice filled the room.

  They played together for a while longer, moving from the traditional Irish ballads to World War II standards, and then the sound of them drifted slowly into the swell of talk and lament and the giving of blessings and leave-takings, and it wasn’t until Dante stood at his side with a bologna and cheese sandwich and a beer that he knew the whole thing was finally and mercifully over.

  “How you holding up?” Dante asked.

  Cal nodded. “I’m okay.”

  He flexed his bandaged hand then looked back to the window. Dante watched him staring blankly beyond the glass. He finished his sandwich and sipped his beer.

  “What do you want us to do?”

  “Do? Do about what?”

  In the living room someone turned on the radio and a surge of static filled the room, followed by the loud, jubilant sounds of a swing number, and they quickly turned it off. Dante followed Cal’s eyes; the street looked gray and deserted. Not even a car moved. It was as if the world had been stilled and was waiting to move forward again.

  Voices from the living room came to them, louder now thanks to the whiskey and the beer, everyone more comfortable with their grief and letting go the decorum of mourning. Dante touched Cal’s arm lightly and Cal looked at him. “What do you want us to do?” he said again.

  Cal rolled his shoulders and it hurt; he realized that his body had been rigid for the last half hour, and that he’d been standing in the same spot without moving. He still felt the tightness and pain in his muscles, the ache of nerve and tendon after the surge of adrenaline from three nights before. He exhaled slowly, trying to let the tension go. Felt the holsters beneath his jacket. Since the fire he’d kept them close and hadn’t left the house without them. It was time to let them go, too. All of it needed to end, and there was only one way.

  “I want to burn the fucker down,” he said softly. “All of it. I want to light him up.”

  “Good,” Dante said. “That’s good.”

  60

  _________________________

  Blue Hill Avenue, Mattapan

  FROM THE FRONT seat of the battered DeSoto Dante had jacked in Jamaica Plain, they watched the lights beyond the plate glass windows of McGuire’s Package Store on Blue Hill Avenue and the clerk bent, slope-shouldered at the cash register, closing out, taking the cash, adding up the receipts, and then walking through the narrow building, extinguishing the lights one by one. They watched as a beer truck made a
late-night delivery, the driver carting kegs and crates of booze on a two-wheeler dolly through the side entrance. After the truck was gone, they watched as the clerk wiped the snow from his car and then as he drove out of the lot, turning left onto Blue Hill Avenue toward Franklin Park and the city.

  Cal hunched low in his seat, knees against the dashboard, thumbing bullets into the clip of his automatic. Dante sucked his cigarette slowly, let a thin stream of smoke escape from between his lips and drift out the partly open window. A truck bearing the placard RUBENSTEIN’S KOSHER MEATS growled down the deserted avenue, big band music drifting from its cab. With the heel of his hand, Cal pushed the clip into the chamber.

  On the darkened street Dante opened the trunk of the car. Six five-gallon metal gas cans stood upright, side by side, a seventh lay turned on its side. With his good arm he reached into a nook beside the upright cans and pulled out a pint bottle. “For your miseries,” he said, lifting the bottle in mock toast, and they both took swigs from it.

  Cal looked up and down the street to see if anybody was watching. The wooden triple-deckers and brick-and-clapboard houses, the poorly shoveled sidewalks, mounds of plowed snow and parked cars squeezed between them; the whole neighborhood encased in a bone-white moonlight that made it all appear frozen, as silent and still as a photograph in a rarely opened photo album. He ran his fingers through his hair, hacked, and spat phlegm into the snow. He heaved out one of the five-gallon canisters and then slammed the trunk shut. “All right, then,” he said, and in the moonlight Dante could see Cal’s face, rigid and hard as stone.

  In the back lot a line of low pine trees silhouetted the mottled sky, charcoal clouds covering the moon. The back door of the building was encrusted with ice. A drift of frozen snow covered the bottom steps in a sweeping arch. Cal kicked at the door once. Three more times and the door snapped open, the dead bolt tearing through the weathered wood.