Blood in the Water

by Jack Flynn

  Dillon was her soul mate, but Ollie was the true love of her life. Her son was a precocious boy with a round face and a laugh that could wrap itself around your heart. She loved that laugh. Sometimes, when he was lying on her chest, laughing, if felt like little puffs from his soul washing over her face, and she would breathe in every giggle. It was the greatest nourishment she’d ever experienced.

  She went out for a few drinks after the exams let out that afternoon. It was more of an obligation than a celebration on her part. Most of her fellow students were a few years younger than her, and single. Almost none of them had children, so they were free, and the last day of law school exams was a time to let loose. She understood that, and she wanted to participate with those with whom she’d bonded over three years. But the real celebration would be saved for Dillon and Ollie later that evening. Dillon was making them dinner, and after Ollie had nodded off to sleep, the two of them would split a bottle of wine and make love until they had no energy left. Sometimes that could be hours.

  Dillon had picked up Ollie at daycare after school. He was looking forward to the end of the school year with even more enthusiasm than she was. He taught at the high school, and by the time June rolled around, everyone was worn down. Nerves were frayed for both the kids and the teachers, and sometimes he said it was like they were just hanging on, trying to get everyone to the last day of classes. Just the week before, the tension had boiled over, and Dillon had had to step in to break up a fight between some of the students. He was ready for the summer to come.

  Kit finished her second drink and headed home. It was a subway ride with a switch, followed by a bus. She usually drove, but she’d known that she would be having some drinks, so she’d left the car at home that day. It was fine with her. She was feeling free and relaxed, and looking forward to the evening.

  She got off the bus and walked the four blocks to her perfect little house.

  When she was a block away, though, she saw the lights. The police were there, and the ambulances. At first she thought they were in front of a different house, but as she drew closer she knew she was wrong. It was at that moment, as her perfect future stretched out before her, that everything changed.

  She played the events of that day over in her head now as she stood in the central command center at FMC Devens, watching the monitor that displayed the constant video feed of Vincente Carpio in his cell. It was four in the morning. He sat motionless on his cot, eyes ahead, back straight, as though in meditation. Steele had visited the facility multiple times since her first meeting with the warden, learning everything she could about the security protocols that were being used to keep Carpio safely in custody. So far, she had been impressed, but not enough for her to give up on her quest to find the gap in the armor. She knew that Carpio’s people would never stop searching for it, and that meant she had to find it first.

  There was always one corrections officer in the command center, monitoring everything. Usually it was one of the junior officers, as it was at the moment. The warden had given them all instructions to cooperate with her.

  ‘FBI, huh?’ the screw on duty said to her. She could hear in his tone of voice a hint of admiration. Or was it flirtation?

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. She didn’t look at him.

  ‘Pretty cool. I’m taking the test to get into the Staties,’ he replied. ‘It’s not the Feds or nothing, but it’s still pretty hardcore.’

  ‘That right?’

  ‘Fuckin’ A.’ It was clear that he was trying to keep the conversation going. It was equally clear, though, that his conversational skills were limited. He stared at Carpio’s image on the screen for a moment, then said with bravado, ‘He doesn’t look so hardcore to me.’

  Steele finally looked at the young corrections officer. He sat to her left, at the center of the control panel, an array of forty-odd video monitors in front of him. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and he had a buzzcut and gym-fed muscles. He wore the gun off his hip like a second penis. Or maybe a first. She looked at the name tag on his chest.

  ‘Officer Teadic, is it?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  She hated being called ma’am. ‘What do you see when you look at him?’ she asked.

  The young man shrugged. He clearly hadn’t expected to be challenged. ‘I don’t know. I see an asshole. I see a coward.’

  ‘Look closer at the screen. Look at him. What do you see?’

  Teadic leaned in toward the screen, squinting, almost as though he was looking for a hidden picture or taking a test. ‘I don’t get it. What am I looking for? He’s just sitting there.’

  ‘He’s just sitting there,’ Steele agreed. ‘He hasn’t moved in more than an hour. Not a muscle. I don’t even know if he’s blinked since I’ve been here. Do you see that? Do you see how still he is?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, that’s what patience looks like, Officer Teadic. That is what hatred looks like. That is what determination looks like. As he sits there, he’s not spacing out or sleeping. His mind is formulating a plan. It’s honing it, finding all the flaws in it, and fixing those flaws. It’s fine to call him an asshole and a coward. It makes it easy to dismiss him, and it’s safe to do that in here with the cameras and the steel doors and a dozen armed men just a phone call away. But don’t ever underestimate him. He isn’t some street thug. And, no matter what you see on that camera, he is very dangerous. Understood?’

  It looked like he’d swallowed a bug. ‘OK, yeah, I understand.’

  She went back to watching the screen.

  Teadic cleared his throat several times, clearly trying to recapture the false confidence he’d displayed previously. ‘Speaking of street thugs, that’s some story about the Mariner down in Charlestown, isn’t it?’

  He was back to making conversation, and it annoyed her. ‘What story?’

  ‘Apparently there was some sort of gang war down at the old Mariner – that bar at the edge of the Charlestown piers. They burned the whole thing down. Heard it on my police scanner on the way in.’

  She didn’t care about any gang war at the moment. Her mind had been too consumed with how to keep Carpio in prison. And yet, for some reason, perhaps habit, she asked the question. ‘Who burned it down?’

  Teadic shrugged. ‘I don’t think they know. Gangs, I guess. They found a bunch of them dead inside. Spics mainly, I guess. And some Mick union guy they fished out of the harbor.’

  Her intuition tingled. ‘What union guy?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just some guy who ran one of the unions. “Mick” something or “Mack” something. It’s Boston, who can keep that shit straight?’

  ‘Cormack? Cormack O’Connell?’

  ‘Yeah, that could be it.’

  ‘Was he alive or dead when they fished him out?’

  ‘Dead. No fuckin’ wonder. Cold as it’s been out there? You go into the harbor in this kind of cold, you come out stiff. Literally.’

  Kit Steele stared at the monitor for a few seconds, her mind racing, her heart pounding. ‘I have to go,’ she said at last, struggling to keep her composure. ‘Keep an eye on him. Anything changes – he moves or talks or has any visitors, or anything – I want to know about it, got it?’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Teadic replied, confusion in his voice.

  As she walked to the door at the far end of the room she wondered whether Teadic had seen it on her face, sensed it from her demeanor. In the end it mattered little. Cormack O’Connell was dead, and the implications of his demise were too complicated for her to even comprehend.

  Fourteen

  Massachusetts General Hospital rose from landfill along the Charles River at the northwest edge of Beacon Hill – the ‘bad’ side of the Hill, as it was known in the past, before every side of Beacon Hill teemed with luxury townhouses and condo complexes where one-bedrooms sold for more than a million dollars. Its location put Mass General a short trip across the river from the Charlestown Shipyard and Pier Six,
which still smoldered in the wan early morning light.

  Cicero Andolini walked up the Causeway from the waterfront at ten in the morning, keeping his head down against the biting wind. It was snowing again, and the flakes stung his cheeks. He moved nimbly, his short, narrow frame cutting through the elements like a schooner through rough water. He wore a dark suit and narrow tie, covered by a cashmere-blend charcoal overcoat. A sharp-brimmed fedora clung improbably to his widow’s-peaked forehead even as the gale tried to pry it loose. The elements were no match for Cicero’s unyielding commitment to style.

  He turned right onto Cambridge Street and slid down the hill toward the hospital. With his pale skin, sharp features, and dark clothes, the terminal patients might be forgiven for assuming he was an angel of death come to take them away. Truth be told, there were dozens of men over the years for whom Cicero had facilitated the transition from this life to the next. None of them had been ill, though.

  He had read the news about Cormack O’Connell first thing that morning. It took him several minutes to digest the concept of a world without his old boss. Cicero hadn’t seen Cormack in over a year, but for close to a decade he hadn’t made a move without the Irishman’s say-so. Boston’s hardscrabble underworld was full of micks and spics and Russians. The FBI and Whitey Bulger’s crew had run the Anguilo family and most of the other Italian gangsters out of the city in the eighties, and Boston could now be a difficult place for someone as Italian as Cicero, but Cormack had never discriminated. He recognized Cicero’s abilities, and gave him a chance to thrive in the rackets, passing on information and opportunities that only someone in Cormack’s position could provide. More than anyone else, Cicero owed Cormack O’Connell for his place in the world.

  He turned into the drive that led to Mass General’s entrance. The place was shielded from the wind by the horseshoe of buildings that ensured traffic flowed only one way to and from the front doors. It was desolate. There was no one on the street this early in the morning, and Cicero had an eerie feeling about the hospital. He’d left his gun at home, but he fished into his pocket and felt the stiletto that he had carried with him since he was nine. There was no reason that he would need it, he knew, and yet just feeling the shape of the handle gave him comfort.

  He hated hospitals. They were weigh stations for the infirm. Cicero believed in his heart that men were not supposed to live forever, and odds being what they were, he was unlikely to live as long as most. He was fine with that. Immortality was never his aspiration. He had vowed, though, that he would never die in a hospital. When the angel of death came for him, he wanted to be on his feet with a weapon in his hand.

  He paused only slightly at the front door, and took a deep breath as though if he held it for long enough he could keep all the disease and death and despair that seeped out of the building from invading his lungs.

  The automatic doors slid open with a pneumatic whir, and slowly, reluctantly, he stepped inside.

  Fifteen

  Kit had arrived at Mass General by five in the morning, long before Cicero showed up. On the drive in from FMC Devens, she had made several calls to confirm the report. No one she knew was on duty at the Charlestown precinct, but they were able to confirm the basic facts. Cormack O’Connell had been pulled from the harbor, unresponsive, and was DOA at the hospital.

  DOA.

  Dead on arrival.

  It didn’t seem possible. Steele’s mind spun. She took deep breaths as she drove, trying to sort through all it meant. She had to compartmentalize and deal with the practical issues first. Her personal feelings would have to wait.

  She would have to tell her superiors. Maybe not all of it, but most of it. Enough to cover the people who could be most harmed. Enough to make sure that everything that had been put in place could be maintained.

  She parked illegally in front of the hospital. The police license plate on the car would ensure that it was not towed, and she couldn’t be bothered to find a spot in the garage.

  The emergency room was a madhouse. Several firefighters had been injured battling the blaze, and there were two Latinos being treated for gunshot wounds. Cops crawled all over the area.

  Steele caught the attention of a young detective and flashed her badge. ‘Where did they take O’Connell’s body?’ she asked, working to keep her voice even.

  The detective motioned over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘Two doors down.’

  She went out into the hall and headed down the corridor. A small group of cops stood outside the door, talking quietly. They looked at her quizzically as she approached, but nodded when she showed her credentials.

  ‘He’s in there?’ she asked.

  One of them nodded but said nothing.

  She pushed the door open and stepped in.

  His body was on a cot, flat on its back, eyes closed. His skin was pale, his lips were pulled tight. There were cuts and abrasions on his face, and it looked as though he’d been through an ordeal before he died.

  She walked over and looked down at him, trying to remember his face the last time she’d seen him. It was only two nights before, and yet now it seemed an eternity. The last time she’d felt something like this was years ago. Confronted once again with the reality of death, she felt wholly inadequate to the task.

  Steele reached down and took his hand. It was cold.

  She held it for a moment, trying to think of something to say. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. She could feel a single tear run down her cheek. ‘I’ll miss you.’

  It wasn’t enough, she knew, but it was all she could manage. Her emotions had been closed off for more than a half of a decade. She shut her eyes for a moment, taking a final deep breath to clear her head.

  When she opened them again, something had changed. It took a moment for her to realize what it was, but then she noticed that his eyes were open. Not fully, but enough that it appeared as though he was looking at her. She knew it was impossible, but it still made her gasp.

  Then he spoke.

  ‘You’ll miss me, darlin’?’ he said. ‘Are you going somewhere?’

  Sixteen

  Diamond walked along Congress at the northern end of Southie, her collar up against the relentless wind coming off the harbor. It was ten o’clock in the morning and the sun was bright and low in the winter sky, casting a flat light against the brick exteriors of the converted warehouses that were home to tech startups and fledgling advertising agencies and small law firms. The area was changing rapidly. When Diamond was growing up, it had been a wasteland of parking lots and abandoned buildings pocked with a few basement taverns stretching between the glass and steel towers of downtown Boston, and the bustling blue-collar enclave of South Boston. Back then, it had been a no-man’s-land, where people might hide from the interest of the police; a rabbit’s warren bubbling with the promise of what might be if you were brazen enough and had the right connections. The commercial development vultures, though, had swept in over the past decade and picked the bones of what was there, cleaning and subdividing the warehouses and clearing the parking lots for dozens of modern towers to be filled with luxury apartments and high-end business tenants.

  Diamond missed the wasteland.

  Her father had been out all night, which wasn’t unusual. She understood. It would take him a little while to come to grips with the reality she had dropped in his lap. She could wait, and they would figure it out. Her father was nothing if not a practical man.

  She headed south, away from the downtown area. It was so cold out that she had to get moving or freeze. The city seemed to have lost the ability to retain heat. Even the sunlight had a cold edge to it.

  She had the day to herself. That was the blessing and curse of free time, she was beginning to realize. Her father was after her to go to college. She’d done well in high school, and she would have no problem getting into a good school, but she wanted time to herself before making that decision. She just wasn’t sure yet that college was for her.

&nbs
p; Now, though, after six months of working bars and tables, she was having internal doubts. She had thought she would enjoy her freedom more. Truth be told, she was finding more boredom than anything else in it, and she missed the structure of school and the challenges it provided. Perhaps she would consider applying for next year, but she couldn’t yet. It would be an admission of error that she wasn’t able to stomach.

  She moved quickly, down into the heart of Southie, toward the projects and the public parks where the cold had chased away even the dealers and the junkies who normally stalked the place, preying on everyone and everything they could suck into their world. She walked with her head down, drawn more than driven, to the place where she’d spent so much of her youth. She’d given no thought to her intentions, but she knew where she was headed and why. Up ahead, on a dingy, narrow, time-darkened alley off Old Colony, next to a window front filled with roasted, skinless ducks twisting from their necks, the sign hung with all the subtlety of a Vegas streetwalker.

  She didn’t even look up, just passed under it as the neon threw rainbows off her jet-black hair, pulled open the heavy black door, and was greeted by the bass-laden dance rhythm pounding off the darkened stairway. The door sealed behind her with a pneumatic pucker that signaled a removal from the real world. She placed her foot firmly on the first step, paused for only a split second, and continued to the second floor of the building.

  Seventeen

  ‘You’re alive?’

  Cormack turned his head. He looked weak and tired. ‘You don’t sound relieved.’ It was a fair observation, but he had a wan smile as he said it. He pressed a button on the side of the bed and it raised him into a sitting position.

  ‘No, I am,’ Steele stammered. ‘It’s just … I’m surprised. They had you listed as DOA.’

  ‘And so I was, apparently. At least nearly so. The cold slowed down my body so much they couldn’t find a pulse at first. The first ER doctor was an intern, just out of school. He called an official time of death and moved on to one of the wounded firemen. I was lucky, though. One of the other doctors took another look and realized I wasn’t actually gone. By then, word of my demise was already out on the street.’