She kissed my cheek and I could smell a lilac fragrance on her skin.
“So,” she said, “make it quick.”
“Gosh,” I said, “am I hungry. You guys have anything in the fridge?”
As I reached for the refrigerator, Richie hit me like a snowplow and carried me down the hall into the dining room.
“What?” I said.
“Just tell me it’s important.” His hand was an inch from my face. “Just tell me, Patrick.”
“Well…”
I told him about my night, about Grief Release and Manny and his Pods, about the encounter with Officer Largeant and Angie’s B and E of the corporate offices.
“And you say you saw Messengers out front?” he said.
“Yeah. At least six of them.”
“Hmm.”
“Rich?” I said.
“Give me the diskettes.”
“What?”
“That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
“I—”
“You’re a computer illiterate. Angie, too.”
“I’m sorry. Is that bad?”
He held out his hand. “The discs.”
“If you could just—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He snapped the diskettes from my hand, tapped them against his knee for a moment. “So, I’m doing you another favor?”
“Well, sorta, yeah,” I said. I shifted my feet, looked up at the ceiling.
“Oh, please, Patrick, try the aw-shucks-bawse routine on someone who gives a shit.” He tapped my chest with the diskettes. “I help you, I want what’s on these.”
“How do you mean?”
He shook his head, smiled. “Now, see, you think I’m playing, don’t you?”
“No, Rich, I—”
“Just ’cause we went to college together, all that shit, you think I’m just going to say, ‘Patrick’s in trouble. Lawsy, I’ll do whatever I can.’”
“Rich, I…”
He stepped up close to me, hissed. “You know the last time I had a good old romantic, I’m-gonna-have-sex-with-my-wife-and-take-my-time sorta night?”
I stepped back. “No.”
“Well, I don’t either,” he said loudly. He closed his eyes, tightened the belt on his robe. “I don’t either,” he repeated in his hissed whisper.
“So, I’m leaving,” I said.
He stepped in front of me. “Not until we get this straight.”
“Okay.”
“I find something on these diskettes I can use, I’m using it.”
“Right,” I said. “As always. As soon as—”
“No,” he said. “No ‘as soon as.’ I’m up to here with that ‘as soon as’ shit. As soon as you’re okay with it? No. As soon as I can, Patrick. That’s the new rule. I find something on here, I use it as soon as I can. Okay?”
I looked at him and he stared back at me.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” He held a hand to his ear. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Okay, Richie.”
He nodded. “Good. How soon you need it?”
“Tomorrow morning, the latest.”
He nodded. “Fine.”
I shook his hand. “You’re the best, Rich.”
“Yeah, yeah. Get out of my house so I can have sex with my wife.”
“Sure.”
“Now,” he said.
8
“So they know who you are,” Angie said as we entered my apartment.
“Yup.”
“Which means it’s just a matter of hours before they know who I am.”
“One would imagine.”
“Yet they didn’t want you to get arrested.”
“Something to gnaw on there, eh?”
She dropped her purse in the living room by the mattress on the floor. “What’d Richie seem to think?”
“He was pretty pissy, but he seemed to perk up when I mentioned the Messengers.”
She tossed her jacket on the living room couch, which these days doubled as a chest for her clothing. The jacket landed on a pile of freshly laundered, folded T-shirts and sweaters.
“You think Grief Release is connected to the Church of Truth and Revelation?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
She nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first time a cult or what-have-you had front organizations.”
“And this is one powerful cult,” I said.
“And we may have angered them.”
“We seem to be good at that—angering people who shouldn’t be angered by people as wee and powerless as us.”
She smiled around her cigarette as she lit it. “Everyone needs a field of expertise.”
I stepped over her bed and pressed the blinking button on my answering machine:
“Hey,” Bubba said into the machine, “don’t forget tonight. Declan’s. Nine o’clock.” He hung up.
Angie rolled her eyes. “Bubba’s going-away party. I almost forgot.”
“Me, too. Think of the trouble we’d be in then.”
She shuddered and hugged herself.
Bubba Rogowski was our friend, unfortunately it seemed at times. Other times, it was quite fortunate, because he’d saved our lives more than once. Bubba was so big he’d cast a shadow on Manny, and he was about a hundred times scarier. We’d all grown up together—Angie, Bubba, Phil, and I—but Bubba had never been what you’d call, oh, sane. And whatever minute chance he’d had to become so ended in his late teens when he joined the Marines to escape a prison term and found himself assigned to the American embassy in Beirut the day a suicide bomber drove through the gates and wiped out most of his company.
It was in Lebanon that Bubba made the connections that would create his illegal arms business in the States. Over the last decade he’d begun to branch out into often more lucrative enterprises such as fake IDs and passports, counterfeit money and name-brand appliance replicas, flawlessly bogus credit cards, permits and professional licenses. Bubba could get you a degree from Harvard in four years’ less time than it took Harvard to confer it, and he himself proudly displayed his own doctoral certificate from Cornell on the wall of his warehouse loft. In physics, no less. Not bad for a guy who’d dropped out of St. Bartholomew’s Parochial in the third grade.
He’d been downsizing his weapons operation for years, but it was that (as well as the disappearance of a few wise guys over the years) for which he was best known. Late last year, he’d been rousted, and the cops found an unregistered Tokarev 9mm taped to his wheel well. There are very few certainties in this life, but in Massachusetts, if you’re found with an unregistered fire-arm on your person, it is certain that you’re going to spend a mandatory year in jail.
Bubba’s attorney had kept him out of jail as long as he could, but the waiting was over now. Tomorrow night, by nine, Bubba had to report to Plymouth Correctional to serve out his sentence.
He didn’t mind particularly; most of his friends were there. The few left on the outside were joining him tonight at Declan’s.
Declan’s in Upham’s Corner sits amid a block of boarded-up storefronts and condemned houses on Stoughton Street directly across from a cemetery. It’s a five-minute walk from my house, but it’s a walk through the epitome of slow but certain urban decay and rot. The streets around Declan’s rise steeply toward Meeting House Hill, but the homes there always seem ready to slide in the other direction, crumble into themselves, and cascade down the hilly streets into the cemetery below, as if death is the only promise with any currency around here anymore.
We found Bubba in the back, shooting pool with Nelson Ferrare and the Twoomey brothers, Danny and Iggy. Not exactly a brain trust, and they seemed to be burning through whatever cells were left by trading shots of grain alcohol.
Nelson was Bubba’s sometime partner and knockabout pal. He was a small guy, dark and wiry, with a face that seemed set in a perpetual angry question mark. He rarely spoke, and when he did, he did so softly, as if afraid the wrong ears wo
uld hear, and there was something endearing about his shyness around women. But it wasn’t always easy feeling endearment toward a guy who’d once bitten off another guy’s nose in a barfight. And took it home as a souvenier.
The Twoomey brothers were small-time button men for the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville, supposedly good with guns and driving getaway cars, but if a thought ever entered either of their heads it died from malnourishment. Bubba looked up from the pool table as we came into the back, bounded over to us.
“Hot shit!” he said. “I knew you two wouldn’t let me down.”
Angie kissed him and slid a pint of vodka into his hand. “Perish the thought, you knucklehead.”
Bubba, far more effusive than usual, hugged me so hard I was sure I felt one of my ribs cave in.
“Come on,” he said. “Do a shot with me. Hell, do two.”
So it was going to be that kind of night.
My recollection of that evening remains a bit hazy. Grain alcohol and vodka and beer will do that to you. But I remember betting on Angie as she ran the table against every guy stupid enough to put his quarters on it. And I remember sitting for a while with Nelson, apologizing profusely for getting his ribs broken four months ago during the height of hysteria in the Gerry Glynn case.
“’S okay,” he said. “Really. I met a nurse in the hospital. I think I love her.”
“And how does she feel about you?”
“I’m not sure. Something’s wrong with her phone, and I think she mighta moved and forgot to tell me.”
Later, as Nelson and the Twoomey brothers ate really questionable-looking pizza at the bar, Angie and I sat with Bubba, our three pairs of heels up on the pool table, backs against the wall.
“I’m going to miss all my shows,” Bubba said bitterly.
“They have TV in prison,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but they’re monopolized by either the brothers or the Aryans. So you’re either watching sitcoms on Fox or Chuck Norris movies. Either way, it sucks.”
“We can tape your shows for you,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Sure,” Angie said.
“It’s not a problem? I don’t want to put you out.”
“No problem,” I said.
“Good,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “Here’s my list.”
Angie and I looked at it.
“Tiny Toons?” I said. “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman?”
He leaned in to me, his huge face an inch from mine. “There’s a problem?”
“Nope,” I said. “No problem.”
“Entertainment Tonight,” Angie said. “You want a full year’s worth of Entertainment Tonight?”
“I like to keep up with the stars,” Bubba said and belched loudly.
“You never know when you could run into Michelle Pfeiffer,” I said. “If you’ve been watching ET, you might just know the right thing to say.”
Bubba nudged Angie, jerked his thumb at me. “See Patrick knows. Patrick understands.”
“Men,” she said, shaking her head. Then, “No, wait, that doesn’t apply to you two.”
Bubba belched again, looked at me. “What’s her point?”
When the tab finally came, I ripped it out of Bubba’s hand. “On us,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You two haven’t worked in four months.”
“Until today,” Angie said. “Today we got a big job. Big money. So let us pay for you, big boy.”
I gave the waitress my credit card (after making sure they knew what one was in this place) and she came back a few minutes later to tell me it had been declined.
Bubba loved that. “Big job,” he crowed. “Big money.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
The waitress was wide and old with skin as hard and beaten as a Hell’s Angel’s leather jacket. She said, “You’re right. Maybe the first six times I punched your number in, I did it wrong. Lemmee try again.”
I took the card from her as Nelson and the Twoomey brothers joined in Bubba’s snickering.
“Moneybags,” one of the Twoomey nitwits cackled. “Musta maxed out the card buying that jet last week.”
“Funny,” I said. “Ha,” I said.
Angie paid the tab with some of the cash we’d gotten from Trevor Stone that morning and we all stumbled out of the place.
On Stoughton Street, Bubba and Nelson argued over which strip club best fit their refined aesthetic tastes, and the Twoomey brothers tackled each other in a pile of frozen snow, started rabbit-punching each other.
“Which creditor did you piss off this time?” Angie said.
“That’s the thing,” I said, “I’m sure this is paid off.”
“Patrick,” she said in a tone my mother used to use. She even wore the same frown.
“You’re not going to shake your finger at me and call me by my first, middle, and last name, are you, Ange?”
“Obviously they didn’t get the check,” she said.
“Hmm,” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“So you guys coming with us?” Bubba said.
“Where?” I asked, just to be polite.
“Mons Honey. In Saugus.”
“Yeah,” Angie said. “Sure, Bubba. Let me just go break a fifty so I have something to shove in their G-strings.”
“Okay.” Bubba leaned back on his heels.
“Bubba,” I said.
He looked at me, then at Angie, then back at me. “Oh,” he said suddenly, throwing back his head, “you were kidding.”
“Was I?” Angie said, touching her hand to her chest.
Bubba grabbed her by the waist and scooped her off the ground, hugged her to him one-handed, her heels up by his knees. “I’m going to miss you.”
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. “Now put me down.”
“Tomorrow?”
“We agreed to drive you to jail,” I reminded him.
“Oh, yeah. Cool.”
He dropped Angie and she said, “Maybe you need some time away.”
“I do.” Bubba sighed. “It’s hard being the guy who does all the thinking for everybody.”
I followed his gaze, watched as Nelson dove on top of the Twoomey brothers and they all slid down the side of the frozen snow pile, punching each other, giggling.
I looked at Bubba. “We all have our crosses to bear,” I told him.
Nelson tossed Iggy Twoomey off the snow pile into a parked car and set off the alarm. It screamed into the night air and Nelson said, “Uh-oh,” and then he and the brothers burst out in fresh peals of laughter.
“See what I mean?” Bubba said.
I wouldn’t find out what had happened with my credit card until the next morning. The automated operator I contacted when we got back to the apartment would only tell me that my credit had been placed on hiatus. When I asked her to explain “hiatus,” she ignored me and told me in her computer drone that I could press “one” for more options.
“I don’t see that I have many options in hiatus,” I told her. Then I reminded myself that “she” was a computer. Then I remembered that I was drunk.
When I got back to the living room, Angie was already asleep. She was on her back. A copy of The Handmaid’s Tale had slipped down her rib cage and rested in the crook of her arm. I bent over her and removed it and she groaned and turned onto her side, clutched a pillow, and tucked her chin into it.
That’s the position I usually found her in when I came out into the living room every morning. She didn’t drift to sleep so much as burrow into it, her body curling up so tight and fetal that it barely took up a fourth of the bed. I reached down again and removed a strand of hair from underneath her nose, and she smiled for a moment before burrowing further into the pillow.
When we were sixteen, we made love. Once. The first time for the both of us. At the time, neither of us probably suspected that in the sixteen years that would follow we’d never make love again, but we didn’t. She went her way,
as they say, and I went mine.
Her way was twelve years of a doomed and abusive marriage to Phil Dimassi. Mine was a five-minute marriage of my own to her sister, Renee, and a succession of one-nighters and quick affairs and a pathology so predictable and male that I would have laughed at it if I hadn’t been so busy practicing it.
Four months ago, we’d begun to come back together in her bedroom on Howes Street, and it had been beautiful, achingly so, as if the sole purpose of my life had been to reach that bed, that woman, that moment in time. And then Evandro Arujo and Gerry Glynn had slaughtered a twenty-four-year-old cop on their way through Angie’s front door and put a bullet in her abdomen.
She got Evandro back, though, fired three big fuck-yous into his body, left him kneeling on her kitchen floor, trying to touch a piece of his head that wasn’t there any longer.
And Phil and I and a cop named Oscar took down Gerry Glynn as Angie lay in ICU. Oscar and I walked away. But not Phil. Not Gerry Glynn, either, but I’m not sure that was much of a consolation prize for Angie.
Human psyches, I knew as I watched her brow furrow and her lips part slightly against the pillow, are so much harder to bandage than human flesh. And thousands of years of study and experience have made it easier to heal the body, but no one has gotten much past square one on the human mind.
When Phil died, his dying swam deep into Angie’s mind, happened over and over and over again without stop. Loss and grief and everything that tortured Desiree Stone tortured Angie, too.
And just as Trevor had discovered with his daughter, I looked at Angie and knew there was very little I could do about it until the cycle of pain ran itself down, and melted like the snow.
9
Richie Colgan claims his ancestors are from Nigeria, but I’m not sure I believe him. Given his sense of revenge, I’d be willing to swear he’s half Sicilian.
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