I saw the debate dancing in Twitch’s eyes. He was never someone to back down from a challenge. And this was a big one, from a big authority. If I didn’t step in, this could erupt into something really bad, really fast.
“Dog is right, Twitch.”
“What?”
“This isn’t your conversation. You should take off. Lay low, I’ll call you tonight.”
Twitch stood slowly, picking up his bag. He walked by Underdog, the mad dog stare never leaving his eyes. For a second, I thought he might spit on the floor, maybe on Underdog’s shoes.
“It’s okay, Twitch.”
“Yeah. We’ll see,” he said.
The room remained silent but for Twitch’s footfalls down the stairs. Once they’d stopped, I said, “You here to arrest me, Dog?”
“I’m here to talk to you.”
“Tell me what you got first.”
“Did you do it?”
“I don’t know what ‘it’ is.”
“Goddammit, Boo. There’s a dead body with Junior’s phone in his pocket. We got a call from several people in JP who saw two guys—two guys with very similar descriptions to two guys I know—stuff what was possibly the body of Byron Walsh into the trunk of a brown Buick that was at least a couple decades old. Those same witnesses then saw the two men drive off, one of them in the Buick, the other in a car meeting the description of one owned by the deceased. Any of this ringing bells?”
“So far.” I pulled a fresh bottle of Jim Beam off the liquor shelf. I poured a few belts into a coffee cup that had been turning into penicillin for a week. At that point, I didn’t care. “You want any?”
“You know I’m not drinking anymore.”
I took two big gulps. “Oh yeah. You’re clean now. Little Underdog’s not a puppy any more. He’s all grown up. Not even a drop of the brown stuff.” I was feeling a hostility toward Dog that I knew was ill-focused, even in the moment. Junior and I were going back into cages. My back was against the wall, so I was tumbling into default mode: drinking and aggression, my old familiar amigos.
“This the tone you’re honestly going to take right now?” Underdog said.
“What tone would you like? You’re the one who came strolling into my office accusing me and Junior of murder.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything yet. I’m asking you what happened.”
“Gimme some of that whiskey, I’m freezing my balls off,” Junior said.
Underdog and I both jumped at the ghostly-pale and tattooed apparition that was shrouded in the doorway. What was up with everybody making like Batman?
And why the fuck was Junior only wearing boxer shorts and wrapped in a thin comforter?
Junior took the bottle from me with a frozen and shaking hand. Hard liquor wasn’t normally his thing, but under the circumstances, he seemed willing to forego preferences. “The hell is going on? Where are the boys? Hey, Dog…” His shivering turned to a shudder, making him the living embodiment of screwed, blued, and tattooed.
“You’re gonna make us ask, aren’t you?” I said.
Junior swigged the bourbon, than coughed and wiped his mouth. “What? The ensemble? I was going to bed. A ton of cops were banging at my door, so I grabbed the emergency bag and jumped out the window. I got behind my neighbors’ garage before the cops thought to check the back.”
“Why do think the cops were at your door, Junior?” Underdog said with an incredulous tone.
Junior curled his mouth down. “I dunno. Took it to be nothing good, so I figured we’d group up and figure this shit out. Was gonna call you next, Dog. See if you could give an answer to the whys of it.”
“That’s why I’m here in the first place.”
“Huh…perfect. The fuck is going on, Dog?” Junior opened the short metal file cabinet where we stored extra clothes (if you’ve ever worked in a bar, you’d understand) and some emergency blunt weaponry (if you’ve ever worked at a bar like The Cellar, you’d understand).
“You tell me. You want to explain why we got a body in Revere with his head staved in? A body that has your cell phone on it?”
“See? I told you we must have grabbed each other’s phones. Man, I shoulda put a password on that piece of shit. If that butt pirate called a sex line, I’m…wait…the fuck you say?”
I stood up. “We didn’t stave anybody’s head in, Dog.”
“Seriously,” Junior said. “And I don’t even know what ‘staved in’ means.”
Underdog shook his head in wonder. “It means that somebody bashed in Byron Walsh’s head.”
Junior frowned. “Sucks to be Byron.” Junior took another long swig, then made a sound in his throat like he’d downed a shot filled with thumbtacks. “Don’t know how you enjoy this shit, Malone.” Then, to Underdog, “Yeah. Anyway, we didn’t stove in shit. We beat his ass, but we didn’t do no stoving. No way, no how. So what’s the problem?”
“To the cops, it sure looks like we did,” I said.
“There’s more,” Underdog said, a sick expression on his face.
Shit… “What?”
“The neighbors reported that you were yelling homophobic slurs as you guys were…doing whatever you did in the first place.”
“Yeah,” Junior said. “But I didn’t know that the guy was a faggot when I called him a faggot.”
Underdog threw his hands up. “Well, I hope you say exactly that to the jury.”
“Say what to what jury? We didn’t do shit. Well, we did shit, but we didn’t stove. How many times we gotta tell you that?” Junior fluffed out his T-shirt and Pogue Mahone sweatshirt, then, to my relief, began dressing himself.
“You know that there’s a change of clothes in the run-pack, right?” I said. “You could’ve dressed yourself on the way, rather than freezing your ass off and subjecting us to your nudity.”
“Shit,” Junior said, pulling the sweatshirt over his head. “I wore those in August when I forgot to pick up my laundry.”
“You ate the protein bars too, didn’t you?”
“You didn’t?”
Underdog loudly cleared his throat. “Can we get back to the much bigger problem at hand than Junior’s lack of self-control?”
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to hear any more. But I supposed if we were sinking in shit, we might as well know how deep the septic tank was.
“The DA wants to prosecute this as a hate crime.”
That was a deep septic tank.
“You guys understand how grim this is looking, right?” Dog said, a pleading note in his voice.
“That was an accident,” I said.
Underdog’s face dropped when he thought that I was breaking open the confession.
“No, no, no,” I said. “We…uh…accidentally called him those names. Still didn’t kill him.”
“You accidentally beat on a homosexual man while calling him a faggot?”
“I think I might have called him a cocksucker too,” Junior said, pulling on a pair of black Dickies. “But like I said, I had no idea the guy was a weenie enthusiast at the time, so bingo bango bongo—no hate crime. Am I right?”
“That’s not going to help, Junior!” Dog said, his voice squeaking. A tiny, tiny bit of our friend was peeking out from under the face of Officer Brendan Miller. Underdog was honestly concerned at the level of trouble we were looking at.
“Hey, just coming clean.”
“The hate crime part was an accident,” I said. “That was an accident. We didn’t know that we were actually committing one when we said the things we said.”
“But you meant the beating part.”
“Hells yeah,” Junior said. “The douchebag was stalking Ginny and his ex-boyfriend.”
“Wait, wait, wait…” Underdog cut in. “You knew he had a boyfriend, but didn’t know he was gay?”
“That was all after-the-fact information. We didn’t know it at the time,” I said.
“Yeah,” Junior said. “We were there to provide motivation for him to cut th
e shit with Ginny.”
Underdog slumped against the wall and rubbed his face vigorously, trying to wipe off the stupid that Junior and I had verbally smeared him with. When his hands came down, the cop was gone. All that was left was our buddy Underdog. He glanced at the bottle of booze with a hunger that I was uncomfortable seeing in him after his months of sobriety.
“Hey,” I said, sliding myself between his gaze and the bottle. “My first question is this, Dog. Do you believe us?”
Underdog took a deep breath. “Yeah. I do. Is there anyone who can back your side?”
I thought about Ginny, about her terror at Junior’s second anti-gay outburst of the day. I didn’t think her testimony would be in our favor at that moment. “Maybe.”
“Well, try to make that a definitely. What else?”
“Anybody looking into Byron?” I asked. “Seeing who else maybe wanted the guy dead?”
Underdog shook his head. “No need to right now. Everything points at you two.”
“To be fair,” Junior said, “the guy was a cocksucker.”
“Really?” I said.
“What? That was a…what d’ya call it? A metaphor.” Junior beamed, pleased that he’d not only used a metaphor but managed to correctly name it.
“Stop using metaphors. Please,” I said.
Underdog looked at the two of us, no small amount of bewilderment in his expression. He shook his head. “I really don’t know, guys. This all looks really, really bad.”
That much was becoming clearer by the moment. “So now what?” I asked.
“You gotta come in with me, Junior,” Underdog said.
Junior zipped up his Dickies, then stopped. “What?”
Dog held his hands up. “For questioning. It’s going to happen one way or the other, but it’s going to look better from the onset if you come in with me willingly. Right now, every trail points to you guys and you guys only.”
The idea of Junior being questioned terrified me. “But those trails stop short of killing the guy, Dog,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. They follow a timeline. Motive. Opportunity. You guys have both. And Homicide already thinks they have enough to call the case. They’re not going to look any further into this when there’s already enough to bury you both deep. And, honestly, you’re next, Boo.”
“Bring me in, then,” I said. I didn’t want that, but after talking to my not-so-eloquent partner, the cops would throw away the key on both of us, maybe even find reason to charge us with the Brinks heist as well.
“They’re not looking at you specifically, Boo,” Dog said. “Yet. All they have points at Junior, what with the cell phone. It’s not going to take too much to make you as the second, but right now, they don’t have any reason to sweat you.”
“So what do we do, Dog? You haven’t said a word on that end,” Junior said, his face bunched up into the bulldog mug that only accompanied his most acute angers and stresses.
Dog looked to me. “You need to find another direction for us to look in, Boo.”
“Me? Isn’t that your fucking job?”
Dog’s face went red in anger. “I’m already risking my fucking job even talking to you two. And, frankly, you did put a beating on the victim. You did drive him out to Revere in the trunk of your fucking car, and you did run from the police.”
He had us there.
“And I’m going to be working double time to keep them off your ass so you can do this in the meantime. You know details that I don’t, and, frankly, I’m better off not knowing until either you bring me some new information or you get your own ass thrown in a cell next to Junior.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. But we’d spent our entire adult lives trying to not repeat that particular era in our history.
Junior pulled Byron’s cell phone out of his bag. “So…should I bring this?”
Underdog and I gaped at him.
“What is that?” Underdog asked.
Junior shrugged. “Byron’s phone.”
“Why are you still carrying that?” I asked.
“Forgot it wasn’t mine. In my hasty escape, I just grabbed it off my nightstand.”
“Oh…my God...” Dog said, covering his face. “Leave it here. That makes it look much worse.”
“Hey!” I said. “Maybe there’s something on the phone that might hint at who caved in Byron’s skull.”
“Did you look in it?”
“It’s got a passcode,” Junior said.
“One thing at a time,” Underdog said. “Like I said, there’s no interest at all in secondary suspects. When the time comes, you need to give that to a defense lawyer, let them try to figure something out.”
“Defense—this is really that bad?”
The authoritative voice that boomed up the stairwell answered that question for us. “Darrell McCullough?” We all looked to each other. Though it was Junior’s given name, I didn’t know if he’d heard it spoken aloud in twenty years.
Junior’s entire body tensed up. His eyes flicked to the bolted door next to the vodka shelf that connected to the karate studio that had closed its doors three years ago. The studio that led to another stairwell. Another way out.
Dog couldn’t read Junior’s mind as easily as I could, but Brendan Miller the cop could recognize a runner when he saw one. “Don’t. Don’t make this worse, Junior. If you didn’t do anything, don’t give us more reason to think you did.”
“Us?” I said.
“Fuck yourself, Boo.” Brendan Miller fired a look at me that Underdog wouldn’t have been capable of a year ago. If I hadn’t been the target, I might have been proud of my probably now-former buddy.
A tentative footfall squeaked on the old wooden stairs. “Shit,” a voice echoed softly from the same spot halfway up the stairs.
Junior’s shoulders relaxed. His face took on a beaten expression I’d never seen before. Underdog saw it too.
Underdog reached into his back pocket and pulled out his ID. He stuck the badge out the door. “This is Officer Brendan Miller. I am up here with the suspect. He is cooperating and complying. He will be coming in with me. Stand down.”
A long silence.
“Your call, Officer Miller. We’ll be outside.”
Junior held out his wrists. “Put ’em on, Officer.”
“Don’t have to, Junior. This is just for questioning. You cooperating is going to help.”
Junior threw his thick keychain onto the desk. He looked at me. “You take care of my girl, Boo.” He was talking about Miss Kitty. “And don’t you fucking leave me in there.”
I stood to follow them both out the door, but Underdog placed a gentle hand on my chest, whispering, “Stay here. Stay off their radar as long as you can.”
They walked out, and I sat at the desk in silence. Audrey would have enough questions when I headed back downstairs. I poured another drink and sat in the quiet for a while after my two friends left for the station. I dropped the white cap off the bottle and it rolled under the desk. I reached under to grab it…
That was when I saw The Boy huddled under the desk. I stared at him. He stared back sadly. A tiny hand touched his nose, then his lip. My own hand followed suit, touching my sore lip and my recently bleeding nose.
Junior’s alert had nothing to do with what I thought it did. He was alerting us to the police possibly crashing down our doors. Those sure as hell weren’t cops that came to my doorstep looking to bleed me.
Who were they, then?
Were they somehow tied into said staving of Byron’s skull? They certainly seemed capable of staving. They sure tried to do some staving on me.
No. They had to be sent by Summerfield.
And I needed to stop using the word “staving.”
“What the hell?” I muttered to The Boy under the desk.
Oh yeah. Did I mention that at times of extreme mental stress, I have hallucinations of my eight-year-old self? The eight-year-old self that’s locked in time inside the moment when t
he man who killed my mother shot me in the chest?
The Boy never talks, but he’s there. I see him.
Yeah. I’m pretty fucked in the head.
Chapter Twelve
I went down the stairs to find a visibly shaken Audrey pouring herself another glass of Tennessee nerve tonic with trembling hands. I couldn’t help but notice that several of the bar’s shadier element had made themselves scarce once Boston’s Finest arrived in force. “Willy!” she said when I came out the back. “What happened? Why were those detectives here? Why did Junior leave with Brendan?”
She wasn’t being nosy. She was being the bar mama. Seeing Junior walk out with Underdog after the cops showed up looking for him had set off her alarms. Audrey had a daughter around our age that we’d never met, but there were dropped defenses, loose phrases over the years that led me to believe she’d been a world of trouble for our Big Mama growing up. She’d married well and lived in Arizona now, but Audrey still chose to wrap her thick arms around all of The Cellar’s orphans.
I could hear heartbreak in her questions, a heartbreak I was sure her daughter had walked her through over the years.
“I can’t really talk about it right now, darlin’.”
“Willie, you have to tell me something. What happened?”
I took her rough hand in mine. “Teensy misunderstanding.”
“I’m not stupid. The cops don’t show up like that over teensy misunderstandings.”
“Okay, really, really big misunderstanding. We’re gonna clear it up.”
She took in a big shuddering breath and blew it out. “Okay…okay.”
Clearly, she only sorta believed me, but I could see her finding comfort in my lies. I wasn’t even at the halfway mark believing my own words. We were fucked, as far as I was concerned. I just didn’t want Audrey to see it.
I felt all eyes on me, every ear straining for the story. I looked around at the remaining customers and saw a few heads turn quickly. Then I saw, exiting the kitchen, one of the nameless and interchangeable waitresses who came in and out of the staff during the winters when all the colleges were in session. Guess Ginny had decided to call in.
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