by Howie Carr
“Exactly,” I said. Maybe she wasn’t as stupid as I’d thought she was. “But right now, Bench’s gotta deal with these guys from the Python.”
“And then Bench will hit the other guy in the head.”
She said it, not me.
* * *
Before getting out of the car, Patty gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then I was back on the road, an hour of bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to Dedham during rush hour.
I’d set up the meeting a week earlier, before I’d even stumbled into this mess. At the time I was just doing a favor for a friend of a friend, talking to an amateur who wanted to run for an obscure county office. Short money at best, assuming he even decided to run. Now I knew I’d have trouble keeping my mind on my end of the conversation. I would have canceled it but this was the kind of guy who’d keep calling and calling and calling until I finally sat down with him. Besides, what else was I going to do tonight? My services were not required for the kind of task at hand. Even if I’d wanted to get involved, Bench McCarthy would have told me again to screw.
So I was sitting down with a guy named Robert O’Mara, one of those perennial candidates who keep running for the same office over and over, in his case county register of deeds. I guess somebody has to be the register of deeds, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why, unless it was the pension. Come to think of it, that was reason enough for most guys, and then some.
I walked into the 99 in Dedham and he was immediately waving at me, trying to get my attention. About fifty-five, wearing a loud sport coat, a wide tie and double-knit pants. His gut hung over his belt; if ever a man was meant to wear suspenders, it was Robert O’Mara. He was wearing a large campaign button, green lettering on white background: “O’Mara Register of Deeds.”
I wondered what Bench McCarthy was doing at this moment. I suddenly realized that I was now providing myself with an alibi, in a different county, a long, long way from Somerville. In other words, this meeting was not going to be a total loss.
After the customary small talk, O’Mara told me why he was running for register of deeds—for the third time.
“I can’t believe we still have county government,” he said.
And I can’t believe anyone still cares.
“I need some work done on the campaign, but I don’t have a lot of money.”
Somehow they always go hand in hand, needing some work done on the campaign and not having a lot of money.
He told me a long, involved story about how the Registry had had a bindery for deeds since at least the eighteenth century, but that now it was much cheaper to just subcontract the printing, not to mention even simpler just to scan the deeds and put them online. So, with excitement in his voice, as if he had stumbled onto a major scandal, O’Mara told me how the county commissioners had done away with the bindery department and moved the single remaining hack employee out to the parking lot out in back of the courthouse, which had always been free, and now he sat outside in a little booth, charging five bucks per car.
“Isn’t that outrageous?” he said.
I nodded, trying to feign interest. His next story was about how if you wanted a copy of a deed, you had to go to a room where another ancient hack would get it for you, unless of course he wasn’t there, which was most of the time, in which case you could just wander back into the stacks and grab the book yourself.
“In other words, they don’t need this guy,” he said. “Why is he drawing a salary?”
“Maybe,” I guessed, “he lives on a corner in Quincy and puts up a yard sign for the Register every election.”
“And if you want to make a copy,” he continued breathlessly, oblivious to my little dig, “they don’t have copying machines. Well they do, see, but what you have to do is, you have to pay a buck—a buck, instead of fifty cents, like in Middlesex! And then they make out a receipt, and you have to take the receipt down the hall, and there’s three or four of these hacks just standing there, unless it’s lunch hour of course, when the entire office is closed, and you have to give them the receipt, and that’s when they make the copy for you. If they feel like it.”
I wanted to get back outside to the car and turn on the radio to find out if the shooting had started yet.
“Can I ask you something, Bob?” I said.
“Shoot,” he said, and my mind was immediately back in Somerville.
“How much does the register of deeds’ job pay?” I said.
“One hundred ten,” he said.
“How much were you planning to spend on the fight this year?” I said.
“I’m hoping to raise thirty thousand,” he said. “But to be honest, most of that will be my own money. I came into an inheritance this year. My mother passed away. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to raise money for a county race, unless you’re selling jobs of course.”
I sighed. “Can I make a suggestion?”
“Of course,” he said. “They say you’re the best at what you do.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I don’t like to see anyone throw his money away, so I’m going to make a recommendation to you, Bob, a free recommendation—can I call you Bob? If you take your thirty grand and get it out in cash, I’ll personally introduce you to the register of deeds—what’d you say his name was?”
“O’Connor, Kevin O’Connor. He’s from Quincy.”
“Of course he is,” I said. “I guarantee you, Bob, that for thirty large I can get you a job at the Registry that pays eighty grand. You want to be assistant register? Associate register? I’ll bet I can even line up a job for you as deputy register. And everything on the level, so fucking legit I’m not even checking to see if you’re wearing a wire.”
I smiled; I wanted him to think he was one of the boys. “This O’Connell—”
“O’Connor.”
“This O’Connor, he’s got a business on the side, right. Lawyer?”
“No, insurance agency.” Of course it was an insurance agency. It was Quincy. Lawyers starved in Quincy, unless they were public defenders.
“How’s that sound, eighty grand?” He seemed puzzled. It was just now occurring to him that I was more like O’Connor than I was like him.
“Once you’re inside, on the payroll,” I said, “you can start working on reform from the inside. It’s always better to be on the inside, believe me.”
Six months at the courthouse, and he’d be a union steward. And he wouldn’t be bothering me—or anybody else, except maybe O’Connell, er O’Connor. But if O’Connor wanted to pocket O’Mara’s thirty large cash, and I knew he would, then that was the price he’d have to pay.
“Let me think about it,” O’Mara said, running his hand through his greasy, thinning brown hair.
“You do that,” I said, “and get back to me. Right now, though, I gotta run. Give me a call when you make up your mind.”
“Deputy register,” he muttered, more to himself than to me, a faraway smile in his eyes. “Deputy register of deeds…”
35
BEEZO BAFFLES ’EM
I suppose I could have called the Somerville P.D. and had them make the stop. Their guns obviously wouldn’t be registered, and probably most, if not all, of the shooters were illegals. But this was my problem. I had had it with these people. Trying to kill me was bad enough, but trying to kill me not for any particular reason other than to stop a casino bill that Sally and I had absolutely nothing to do with …
I never figured myself as “collateral damage,” just as I’d never expected to be an extra in somebody else’s movie. Sally and I had turned the other cheek for far too long. It was time for some payback. I knew just what I was going to do. I was going to shoot out the stoplights at the intersection of Broadway and the McGrath/O’Brien Highway. Back during the Charlestown gang war, I’d considered it, to the point of spending some time with the engineer from the Traffic and Parking Department at City Hall. I could have used a guy down below at the lights to turn them off, but that was one more wi
tness, and I’ve always been a believer in the old axiom, if you want something done right, you’d better do it yourself.
I knew I could knock the lights out with a couple of shots. That would stop traffic, and then the people in the cars would be sitting ducks. Back then it was going to be Charlestown gunsels, now it would be illegals from East Boston.
I’d even picked out the building I was going to shoot from, a four-story office building on the southeast side of Broadway. Hobart still had the keys to get onto the roof of the building. I parked my car behind the Alibi on Marshall Street. Hobart was waiting for me in the stolen hit car—the boiler, as we called it. He’d picked a nondescript gray Chevy that looked like a million other gray Chevys.
* * *
There wasn’t much time, but I told Hobart to keep the car running and wait while I ran upstairs. I told you I had a small freezer built into the floor in my office upstairs, but I didn’t tell you what I kept in it. A few years back, before I buried the rat bastard cocksucker who ran the Charlestown crew, Beezo Watson, it occurred to me to chop his right hand off and save it for just such a moment as this.
Talk about baffling the cops—this one would drive them crazy, if they found Beezo’s prints on the rifle I was planning to use. If the Bushmaster was good enough for the D.C. sniper, it was good enough for me. As for Beezo’s hand, I’d had a lock put on the freezer, and it had been a while since I’d shaken hands with my old rival. He was cold, very cold, and stiff. Dammit, I should have taken him out to thaw a few hours earlier.
I briefly considered taking Beezo downstairs and putting him on “defrost” in the microwave behind the bar. But I didn’t want to take any chances on “degrading” the quality of the fingerprints, as the forensic pathologists say. I slipped Beezo’s hand into a white plastic CVS bag, ran back downstairs and jumped into the boiler.
Hobart had the Bushmaster under an Army-surplus blanket in the backseat, along with a silencer and a pair of gloves. I called our guy who was trailing the Python car and in as few words as possible filled him in on what was going to happen. The shooters were driving a dark green Toyota Celica; for some reason illegals just love Toyotas. My guy said it was banged up, again just what you’d expect in a typical illegal mobile. They’d just passed the Mount Vernon Restaurant on the Charlestown line. They were about four minutes away.
Hobart dropped me off outside the four-story building, and I slipped on my gloves, unlocked the door and then started climbing to the roof. All the while I was talking to our guy trailing the green Toyota Celica. I told him to let me know when he was within a half block east of the McGrath/O’Brien intersection with Broadway. That was when I would shoot out the stoplights. Once the Python car was stopped, my guy was to flash his lights, and then pull a U turn and get the hell out of there.
He understood perfectly.
It was sunset, with just enough light left to make the first shot easy. As soon as he told me how close they were to the lights, I fired four shots at the signal box. It wasn’t a difficult shot, but I had to make sure. I reloaded as traffic halted in all directions, and then I saw my guy flash his lights, pull a u-ie and take off back toward Charlestown.
The Toyota from the Python was the second car at the lights, just where I wanted it.
I drew a bead on the Python driver’s front side window. I’d take him out first, so that the others would have to get out of the car and start running. Actually, they probably would have had a better chance of surviving if they had just stayed in the car and hit the floor. They would have known that if they’d been in the military, but I very much doubted they covered this point in Guatemalan basic training. They were going to panic and make a run for it.
I fired at the driver’s window. It exploded, and so did the driver’s head. He was dark, wearing a baseball cap. I could see the guy in the shotgun seat, snapping his own head around in wild panic, trying to decide what to do. He didn’t quite make his decision in time. I blew his head off. He must have already had the passenger door open to escape when the bullet struck him, because as the force of the shot hurled his body against the door, it flew open, and his corpse tumbled headfirst out of the car onto Broadway.
Next I aimed the rifle at the back window and started firing. The guy on the passenger side was quick enough to get out and take off running. He got away. The one nearer to me slumped over, so I kept firing through the door, just to make sure. The silencer had cost me a grand, but it was really coming in handy. Nobody else stuck at the lights was panicking because they were too busy honking their horns, as if that would make the traffic signals flicker back on more quickly.
I reached into the CVS bag and took out Beezo’s hand. It had thawed just enough. I pressed his dead fingers around the trigger, then made a couple of palm prints on the stock of the Bushmaster. Maybe I was overdoing it, but I had to make sure there were enough prints to get the cops’ attention. I figured that once the cops saw whose prints were on the trigger, they’d be too busy running around like chickens with their heads chopped off to worry about any other clues. I left the rifle on the roof but kept my gloves on. I dropped Beezo’s hand back in the plastic bag. He had one more job to finish tonight. Then I ran down the four flights, taking the stairs two steps at a time, and jumped into Hobart’s boiler.
“We got time to get to Roxbury?” I asked.
“Wow, you’re on fire tonight,” he said.
“Why should Salt ’n’ Peppa have all the fun?” I said, turning around to see what else was in the backseat—an AR-15. I called the trail car on the second vehicle out of the Python. There’d been an accident in the Sumner Tunnel and it was total gridlock—beautiful, I’d have plenty of time to beat them to Roxbury.
Then I called Peppa, who was a better shot than Salt. He was already in position on top of the abandoned old factory building across the street from our garage.
“They’re in a minivan, black,” I said. “If they pull up in front of the garage, don’t start nothing. A gray Chevy is gonna roll past.”
“I’m just backup?” He sounded disappointed.
“Anybody makes it out of there onto the sidewalk, they’re all yours.”
He laughed. “I know how you work, boss. Looks like a slow night for me.”
“They also serve who only sit and wait.”
“Thanks, Mr. McCarthy.” He only called me Mr. McCarthy when he was trying to give me the needle.
“Just let me know,” I said, “when they pull up in front of the garage.”
By the time we got to the garage the sun had set. It was perfect hunting weather. Nobody was out. Nobody is ever out after dark in Roxbury, unless they’re in the mood to commit suicide or homicide. It had cost a lot, having to put up new barbed-wire fencing around the garage, but otherwise the place would have been looted within days, maybe hours. Still, I liked having a place over here. I needed a garage somewhere, and the police couldn’t ever stake it out, that’s for sure.
“Cops gonna be confused tonight,” Hobart said. “Two shootouts, one on the Hill, one in Roxbury.”
I smiled. “Do you think they’ll be ‘baffled’?”
“Not for long,” he said. He didn’t know about Beezo. Hobart wouldn’t have thought of asking why I was carrying around that little plastic bag. “The reporters, they’ll be baffled for sure, but the cops’ll fill them in.” He tapped on the steering wheel. “Will this be the end of it?”
“I hope so, but I got a feeling not quite. I think this is just what those bastards are looking for, a gang war, quote-unquote.”
“So why are we giving them ammunition?” He smiled. “Bad choice of words.”
“They keep trying to kill us,” I explained patiently. “You know my policy. Do unto others before they do unto you. No exceptions. They were going to machine-gun the Alibi tonight. That would make twice in four days, three times in a week if you count the other time. What am I, a fucking clay pigeon?”
We had pulled over outside an abandoned Catholic school a
couple of blocks from the garage. Hobart’s cell phone rang. He said “okay” a couple of times and then hung up.
“They’re just sitting there, in front of the garage. Our guys broke off and are heading back to Somerville.”
“Anybody left in the garage?”
“No,” said Hobart. “Rocco was the last to leave. Salt ’n’ Peppa turned on all the lights, then locked the doors and went up on the roof. There’s two guys in the car, they’re just sitting out front, like they’re waiting for somebody to come out.”
I shook my head and reached into the backseat for the AR-15. I released the safety and told Hobart to pull up alongside them, without lights.
“Simple fucks, just sitting there,” I said. “Let’s take a look.” Without lights, Hobart crept up to the corner. The van was there in front of the garage. Its lights were off too.
I took my phone and called Peppa. “Be prepared,” I said, and hung up.
Then I looked over at Hobart: “Go for it,” I said, and he floored the boiler, bringing it to a stop just in front of the minivan so I could fire through its front windshield. All I could see were shadows in the front seat. When the windshield disappeared in the hail of bullets, so did the shadows. I racked the entire vehicle with fire until I was out of ammo and then we sped off toward Warren Street. As we put some distance between ourselves and the garage, I heard more shots. Rifle shots. Peppa was getting in a little target practice too.
I took out Beezo’s hand and wrapped it around the trigger of the machine gun. Hobart looked over.
“Is that whose hand I think it is?” he said, his eyes wide with awe.
“You was there when I chopped it off, weren’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I just thought it was some kind of sick demented Whitey Bulger shit.”
“I’ll bet you were too freaked out to say anything, right?”
“You ain’t kidding.”
“Well, what do you think now?”
He smiled. “I think this is gonna baffle ’em to no end.”