The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  ‘You know who pulled the trigger?’

  ‘Officially, no. Unofficially, we believe it was Tommy Morris himself.’

  ‘Unusual. You’d think he’d palm off a job like that to his people.’

  This time, a response flickered. It was like the briefest ripple on the surface of an otherwise smooth pond where an unseen creature had flicked a fin. There was something there, something interesting.

  ‘I told you, he doesn’t have many people left,’ said Engel. ‘It could be that it was personal for him. The ones who’ve been around for a while, they learn to bury their feelings deep. They hold on to the grudges, then wait for a time when they’re justified in making a move.’

  ‘You seem very well informed. You have a wire somewhere?’

  ‘We have lots of wires. That’s why we’re the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not the Local Bureau of Supposition.’ He was settled again. That brief flash of uncertainty was gone. ‘It’s also why, if you’re concerned for the safety of your client, we can guarantee that he’ll be looked after. We can put men on him, or move him out of town for a while. It is a “he,” right?’

  I did a little cheek-puffing and imitation weighing up of potentially grave consequences, then allowed that the client was indeed male.

  ‘He doesn’t want to leave town,’ I said. ‘In fact, that’s something of a deal breaker for him. He has a nice life in Pastor’s Bay. He wants to hold on to it. And I don’t want federal agents on him. Half the people in here probably smelled you as law the minute you arrived, and the other half didn’t have to because they were lawmen themselves. If someone like Tommy Morris is going to be sniffing around this, then I want as little attention as possible drawn to our client. If it comes down to that, I’ll look after his protection myself.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  The straight line became a jagged scar: a smile, assuming you didn’t look for warmth or reassurance in a smile, or anything resembling a decent human emotion.

  ‘Go on. I’m listening.’

  ‘Tommy Morris has left the reservation, and we believe he’s heading this way.’

  ‘All the more reason to keep my own client safely off the board.’

  ‘It’s your call. When can we expect to talk with this elusive gentleman?’

  ‘I want more.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I want freedom to investigate on his behalf. In return, I’ll share any information of relevance with Walsh.’

  ‘He won’t like you being on his turf. Neither will Allan.’

  ‘They’ll just have to hold their noses.’

  ‘I’ll talk with them and see what I can do.’

  ‘I’m sure you can convince them, you silver-tongued devil, you.’

  ‘And in return we get access to your client?’

  ‘I’ll get in touch with his lawyer.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be hard, since she just walked through the door.’

  I turned and spotted Aimee. She hesitated when she saw that I was with someone. I beckoned her forward, and introduced her.

  ‘Aimee, this is Special Agent Robert Engel of the FBI’s Boston field office. Special Agent Engel, Aimee Price. Special Agent Engel likes to be called “Special Agent Engel,” Aimee. It’s a matter of some pride.’

  Aimee looked confused but said nothing. Special Agent Engel smiled in the way an executioner might smile at the condemned man’s last good gag just before he dropped the ax.

  ‘Special Agent Engel and I were just discussing client safety, but we’re all done now,’ I said.

  Engel rose, and thanked me for his drink. ‘I’ll let discussions commence,’ he said. ‘I look forward to hearing from you both very soon.’

  He left more than half of his whisky on the bar and headed for the door.

  ‘He didn’t finish his drink,’ said Aimee.

  ‘I think he only asked for it so as to seem more human.’

  ‘He certainly needs something.’

  ‘Agreed. When he looks in the mirror, his reflection probably wants to punch him in the face.’

  ‘What did you discuss?’

  ‘I let him wear me down to the point where I felt that perhaps our client should present himself for interview, and in return he told me more than I knew before, and maybe a little more than he wanted me to know, because he believed that he was getting the better part of the deal. It may be that he’ll also persuade Walsh and Allan to let me operate on Haight’s behalf, or just to give me enough room to breathe.’

  ‘So you didn’t feel obliged to let him know that Haight had already made his decision? That’s almost, but not quite, dishonest. Are you sure you didn’t train to be a lawyer?’

  ‘I’d have flunked insincerity.’

  The Bear was now almost empty, and the stragglers were being encouraged to make their way home, or at least somewhere else that wasn’t the Bear. I poured Aimee a glass of white wine, put it on my tab, and said, ‘I have a treat for you. What are we missing here?’

  ‘Good company.’

  ‘Good company. Exactly!’ I placed my hand on the small of her back and steered her toward the back of the bar. ‘But in the absence of it, I have some people I’d like you to meet instead.’

  It had been months since I had seen them. Louis’s new beard was certainly striking, I had to give him that. They both stood as we approached.

  ‘Aimee Price, I’d like you to meet Angel. And this is his close friend, Old Father Time . . .’

  22

  They checked into a suicide motel just out of Belfast, the kind of place that Dempsey always associated with estranged fathers, commission-only salesmen, and hookers who kept the lights down low so the johns couldn’t get a good look at their faces. It had probably been built in the fifties, but it was too ugly and dilapidated to merit the description ‘retro,’ and the only restoration job worth doing on it would have involved restoring the lot on which it stood to a condition of vacancy. It struck Dempsey that he was growing disturbingly used to staying in such places, to eating without looking at his food, his eyes constantly scouting for familiar faces in unfamiliar places, for the car that disgorged a passenger while the driver kept the motor running, for the gaze that lingered just a moment too long, for the approaching figure and the moving hand, for the sight of the gun that would, in time, surely take his life.

  No wonder he was plagued with stomach pains and constipated to hell and back. He could now hardly recall a time when he was not fearful, not wary. He had to force himself to remember beery afternoons in Murphy’s Law at First and Summer, in the shadow of the big generating station, and Philly-steak spring rolls in the Warren Tavern in Charlestown, or just sitting with a coffee and a newspaper in Buddy’s on Washington Street in Somerville, the old diner’s elevated position giving him a sense of inviolability, of safety. All gone now, all gone, and he would never be able to return to them. Instead, there were just anonymous rooms in dumps like this one, rooms that always smelled of smoke despite the No Smoking signs, and food eaten out of paper and plastic, and the constant grinding ache in his guts.

  Half of the cars and trucks in the motel’s parking lot were keeping Bondo in business, and the other half had problems that even Bondo couldn’t fix. He tried to figure out what these people were even doing here. Were they, like him, rootless persons, drifting men? The old woman in the office wore her glasses on a gold chain, and the fats in her body made liquid noises as she walked. She had tiny feet. Dempsey couldn’t understand how she managed to remain upright. She confirmed that she was happy to take cash for two rooms, on the grounds that ‘there weren’t never nothing worth stealing in them anyway,’ and therefore guarantees of credit were largely unnecessary. There was coffee available in the mornings from seven until nine, she told them, but Dempsey took one look at the stained pot, the dusty foam cups, the sachets of powdered creamer, and decided that he could wait until they found somewhere more appealing for a kick-start. Tommy paid for two nights, and told the woma
n that they might stay longer, ‘depending on how good the hunting is.’

  ‘We ain’t never full,’ she said. ‘We always got room.’

  Dempsey took another look at the peeling paint in the reception area, at the snow-screened portable TV playing an inexplicably popular sitcom aimed at people who thought that a grown man living with his mother was the height of humor, at the sign warning that checkout time was ten a.m. (‘AND NO EXSEPTIONS!’), at the woman’s painted expression and barrel-like form, as though she were a living matryoshka doll capable of containing infinitely smaller but no less unwelcoming versions of herself, and decided not to comment on the motel’s apparently infinite capacity to absorb new guests.

  There was music coming from a bar next door to the motel, and Dempsey asked if there was any chance of getting food there. The woman snorted.

  ‘They got pickles,’ she said, ‘but I wouldn’t go eatin’ ’em.’

  Dempsey said that he’d pass. There was a sheaf of fast-food menus at the desk, so he grabbed a couple and brought them with him to the room that he and Ryan would share on the first floor, while Tommy took the adjoining room for himself.

  ‘I talk to you for a minute, Tommy?’ said Dempsey, as he allowed Ryan to enter the room ahead of him. Tommy nodded. He lit a cigarette and Dempsey indicated that they should walk a little farther into the lot, away from the main building. There were no stars in the sky, and Dempsey could feel the weight of the clouds, the sky itself pressing down on them. He had never felt more constricted, more hemmed in by forces both human and elemental.

  Tommy had not informed them of what he planned to do before they picked him up in Newburyport, but Dempsey had guessed as soon as he told them to head north. They had passed most of the trip in silence, with not even the radio to distract them from their thoughts, Ryan in the passenger seat, Tommy stretched out in the back, sometimes dozing but mostly just staring into space. Now they were here, within striking distance of Pastor’s Bay.

  ‘You didn’t want to talk in front of Francis?’ said Tommy. Dempsey could smell stale sweat on Tommy, and there were stains on his pants. Tommy had always been an elegant man. Even at the worst of times, he kept himself neat and clean. The stale odor of him, his wrinkled clothes and unshaved face, troubled Dempsey more than what Tommy had done to Joey, and the aborted action he had ordered against Oweny’s crew.

  ‘No,’ said Dempsey. ‘I thought it should just be us two.’

  ‘You let him sit in on the meet with Joey Tuna?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone would think you didn’t trust him. Is there something you’d like to share with me?’

  Again, Dempsey wished that he still smoked. It was becoming a kind of mantra. He felt that he had nothing to do with his hands, nothing to occupy them. He pushed them hard into his pockets for fear they would betray him, their movements revealing his barely restrained fear.

  ‘I got a lot of things on my mind,’ said Dempsey. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Take your time. We got all night. I haven’t been sleeping so good, and I’m afraid to start popping pills.’

  Tommy took a long drag on the cigarette and examined the glowing tip. It seemed to hypnotize him. He stared at it, unblinking, the other man forgotten, his face gray with stress and exhaustion. Dempsey wondered just how long it had been since Tommy Morris enjoyed an undisturbed night’s sleep. Uneasy lies the head, and all that. The only head that rested less easily was the one that would soon be detached from its body.

  ‘How did it come to this, Tommy?’ he said.

  ‘Huh?’ Tommy emerged from his daze. ‘Come to what?’

  ‘Us, here, living out of money taken from a shoebox. You ever thought about how it all fell apart so fast?’

  ‘Yeah, I thought about it.’

  ‘You come up with any answers?’

  ‘More questions. No answers. You?’

  Dempsey chose his words carefully.

  ‘After the meet with Joey, I started thinking that maybe all of them had it in for you from the start, and not just Oweny. I mean, how long had Joey been stringing us along, claiming to be the middleman when he was secretly on Oweny’s side? And if Joey was whispering in Oweny’s ear he was doing it because it had been sanctioned from above, and he hadn’t just started last week, or last month. People had agreed on it. We started figuring we were unlucky, but the more I look at it the more I think that someone was talking out of turn.’

  ‘To the cops? The feds?’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be them. All this person needed to do was pass the word to Joey. We trusted him. We thought he was neutral. But he wasn’t. He never had been, not really. Joey could have used the information as he saw fit: an anonymous tip-off to the cops, a word to Oweny. Look at it: horses that were supposed to fall didn’t fall like they should have, and Joey laughed it off and told us that these things happen, that everybody took a hit on that one. Our couriers and dealers get picked up, and Joey tells us that the feds had a snitch in Florida, and he was looking to figure out who it was, and we weren’t the only ones who were concerned. We get a tip on a bond warehouse, and when we hit it there’s only a tenth of what we were told was there, and the cops are crawling all over us before we even get the truck out the gate. Joey told us that it was lousy information, that the Contadinos nearly lost a crew the same way, but I ask around and there’s no talk about the Contadinos pulling a warehouse job that went south. And we get cut out of deals that should have been shared: pads on construction, on concessions. Jobs are pulled, and we only find out about them after the fact. I look back on it now and it was an accumulation of small details, like we were being picked at, like we were slowly being eaten alive. Everyone else was making money, but not us.’

  Tommy listened to all that he had to say, punctuating it with pulls on the cigarette. His right middle and index fingers were the burnt orange of a polluted sunset.

  ‘So who was the snitch?’

  Dempsey shrugged. ‘I’m just saying. I could be wrong.’

  ‘You think it was Francis?’

  Dempsey shook his head forcefully. ‘No, he’s a good kid. He’s just young, that’s all. And, you know, so many guys have drifted away. It could have been any of them or, you know, it could have been Joey himself, working to undermine you so that Oweny could take your place.’

  ‘If there even was a snitch.’

  ‘If there was,’ agreed Dempsey.

  ‘So, what else?’

  ‘Joey. I have to tell you, Tommy, I wasn’t expecting it. I never thought you’d go after him.’

  ‘It had to be done.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘I had to know for sure. I had to know that they didn’t have her.’

  But that wasn’t why you killed him, thought Dempsey. That was why you went to see him, but not why you put him down. I always suspected that you hated him. I just never knew how much. Tommy had told him once that it was Joey who wanted Ronald Doheny dead. Tommy had argued for sparing him, because even if he was a braggart and a fool and a promiscuous little bastard who should have kept his hands to himself, he was still the father of his sister’s child. Joey wouldn’t hear of it, though. He wanted Doheny gone, and he wasn’t the only one. If Tommy wasn’t prepared to do it, then someone else would, but it would look bad for Tommy, and maybe people, important people, would start doubting his commitment to the cause. They might even wonder if Tommy, like Whitey before him, was snitching to the feds, selling out his associates to secure his own position. They might decide that Tommy wasn’t sound. Joey had put all of this to Tommy at the fish market after hours. He had shown Tommy the new backlit table in the butchering room, the sharp knives hanging clean in preparation for the next morning’s work. Fillets of fish could be placed on the backlight, Joey explained, revealing the presence of parasites in the flesh that could then be removed.

  ‘That’s what we’re doing now,’ said Joey. ‘We’re picking out the parasites. We’re taking the blade to them, and
afterward the flesh, our flesh, will be clean. If in doubt, Tommy, you take it out. That’s the new rule. Don’t give anyone cause to doubt you, that’s my advice.’

  So Tommy had killed Ronald Doheny, strangling him in a basement in Revere, and his sister had hated him for it, and Tommy had waited for the chance to avenge himself on Joey Tuna.

  ‘Look, I never trusted him, Tommy,’ said Dempsey. ‘Him, and his stink, and the way he talked at you, not with you, like he always knew more than you did. If a truck had hit him, I’d have sent the driver a fruit basket. If he’d been electrocuted, I’d have written a thank-you note to the power company. But I didn’t think that you’d kill him, Tommy, because they can’t let that go. Now they’ll keep coming after us until we’re done. Because of it, we got no cards left to play.’

  Tommy finished the cigarette and flicked it toward the road, watching it flare briefly before it exploded on the ground and faded to nothing.

  ‘If you want to walk away, I understand,’ he said. ‘I won’t blame you for it.’

  ‘I don’t want to walk away,’ said Dempsey. ‘But I don’t want to die either.’

  ‘So what’s left?’

  ‘You don’t owe them, Tommy. You don’t owe any of them.’

  They looked at each other, and Dempsey was aware that, for the second time in recent days, he was discussing the possibility of a monumental act of betrayal, the very act that he had intimated might have led to Tommy’s downfall. He tensed his abdomen, waiting to absorb the punch that might come, or the hand to the throat, or the gun beneath the chin and the oblivion that would follow. There had been times in the past weeks and months when he thought he might even have welcomed the peace that a bullet would bring. But Tommy didn’t make a move, and he didn’t look angry or even surprised. He even appeared to consider the possibility for a moment, then swat it away. For the first time, Dempsey truly understood that Tommy had resigned himself to what was to come. This garbage-strewn, weed-scarred parking lot was his Gethsemane. Only the thought of his niece was keeping him from facing his enemies directly and embracing their final judgment on him.