Darkness, Take My Hand

by Dennis Lehane

  It was supposed to sound casual. I’m sure that’s how he intended it. But it came out sounding anything but.

  The kindness in Gerry’s eyes disappeared into a vortex of pure black cold, and he glanced at me as if I were a bug under a microscope.

  And I knew all pretense had ended.

  I reached for my gun as tires screeched to a stop outside and Gerry reached under the bar.

  Phil was still frozen when Gerry said, “lago!”

  It wasn’t just the name of a Shakespeare character, it was an attack code.

  I had my gun clear of my waistband when Patton burst out of the darkness and I saw the hard glint of the straight razor in Gerry’s hand.

  Phil said, “Oh, no. No.” And ducked.

  And Patton vaulted over his shoulder toward me.

  Gerry’s arm shot out and I leaned back as the razor cleaved through the flesh by my cheekbone and Patton hit me like a wrecking ball and knocked me off my stool.

  “No, Gerry! No!” Phil screamed, his hand stuck in his belt as he dug for his gun.

  The dog’s teeth bounced off my forehead and its head reared back and its jaws opened and plunged toward my right eye.

  Someone screamed.

  I grasped Patton’s neck with my free hand and the noise he made was a savage combination of screaming and barking. I squeezed his throat but it constricted and my hand slid up his sweaty fur and his head plunged toward my face again.

  I shoved the gun into his midsection as he kicked at my arm with his back feet and when I pulled the trigger—twice—Patton’s head snapped back as if he heard his name being called, and then he jerked and shuddered and a low hissing sound escaped his mouth. His flesh went soft in my hands as he tipped to his right and toppled into the row of bar stools.

  I sat up and fired six rounds into the mirrors and bottles behind the bar, but Gerry wasn’t there.

  Phil was on the floor by his stool, grasping his throat.

  The front door shattered off its hinges as I crawled to him and I heard Devin yell, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! He’s a good guy!” Then, “Kenzie, put your gun down!”

  I laid it on the floor beside Phil as I reached him.

  Most of the blood came from the right side of his throat, where Gerry had made his initial incision before cutting a smile toward the other side.

  “An ambulance!” I screamed. “We need an ambulance!”

  Phil looked up at me, confused, as the bright blood flowed between his fingers and over his hand.

  Devin handed me a bar towel and I pressed it to Phil’s throat, placed my hands tightly on either side.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Don’t speak, Phil.”

  “Shit,” he said again.

  Twin pearls of defeat were imprinted in his eyes as if he’d been expecting this since he was born, as if you come out of a womb with a winner’s luck or a loser’s and he’d always known he’d find himself on the floor of a bar some night, the stench of stale beer soaked in rubber tile all around him, his throat cut.

  He tried to smile and tears spilled from the corners of his eyes, slid across his temples, and were lost in his dark hair.

  “Phil,” I said, “you’re going to be okay.”

  “I know,” he said.

  And died.

  39

  Gerry had run down to the cellar and crossed into the building next door, let himself out the back door as he’d done the night he’d shot Angie. He hopped into his Grand Torino in the alley behind the bar and drove toward Crescent Avenue.

  A cruiser almost collided with him as he shot out the alley onto Crescent, and by the time he squealed onto Dorchester Avenue, four police cars were in pursuit.

  Two more cruisers and an FBI Lincoln came down the Avenue and formed a blockade by the corner with Harborview Street as Gerry’s car slid along the ice toward them.

  Gerry spun the wheel at the Ryan Playground and drove straight up entrance stairs so slick with ice they might as well have been a ramp.

  He fishtailed in the center of the playground as the cops and the Feds were getting out of their cars and aiming their weapons and then he popped the trunk and pulled his hostages out.

  One was a twenty-one-year-old woman named Danielle Rawson, who’d been missing from her parents’ house in Reading since this morning. The other hostage was her two-year-old son, Campbell.

  When Gerry pulled Danielle out of the trunk, there was a twelve-gauge attached to her head by electrical tape.

  He strapped Campbell to his back using the backpack Danielle had been wearing when he kidnapped them.

  Both of them had been drugged and only Danielle came to as Gerry wrapped his finger around the shotgun trigger and doused himself and Danielle in gasoline, then poured a circle of it around the three of them in the ice.

  Then Gerry asked for me.

  I was still in the bar.

  I was kneeling over Phil’s body, weeping into his chest.

  I hadn’t cried since I was sixteen years old, and my tears flooded out in waves as I knelt by my oldest friend’s body and felt sheared, in strips, of anything I’d ever known by which to define myself or my world.

  “Phil,” I said and buried my head in his chest.

  “He’s asking for you,” Devin said.

  I looked up at him and felt removed from everything and everyone.

  I noticed a fresh swath of blood on Phil’s shirt, where my head had been, and remembered that Gerry had cut me.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Glynn,” Oscar said. “He’s trapped in the playground. With hostages.”

  “You got sharpshooters?”

  “Yes,” Devin said.

  I shrugged. “So shoot him.”

  “Can’t do it.” Devin handed me a towel for my cheek.

  Then Oscar told me about the baby strapped to Glynn’s back and the shotgun taped to the mother’s head and the gasoline.

  It didn’t seem real to me, though.

  “He killed Phil,” I said.

  Devin grasped my arm roughly and pulled me to my feet.

  “Yes, Patrick, he did. And now he might kill two more people. Care to help us prevent that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and my voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded dead. “Sure.”

  They followed me out to my car as I shrugged on the bulletproof vest they gave me and put a fresh clip in my Beretta. Bolton joined us on the avenue.

  “He’s surrounded,” he said. “Boxed in.”

  I felt as numb as I’ve ever felt, as if I’d been cored clean of emotions as swiftly as you’d core an apple.

  “Be quick,” Oscar said. “You got five minutes or he maims a hostage.”

  I nodded, pulled my shirt and jacket on over the vest as we reached my car.

  “You know Bubba’s warehouse,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “The fence that runs around it also runs around the playground.”

  “I’m aware of this,” Devin said.

  I opened the car, popped the glove compartment, began pulling out its contents and spilling them on the seats.

  “What’re you doing, Patrick?”

  “The fence,” I said, “has a hole in it. You can’t see it in the dark because it’s just a cut. You push at it and it flaps forward.”

  “Okay.”

  I saw the edge of a small steel cylinder sticking up from the pile of matchbooks and warranty information and various papers and screws on my seat.

  “The hole is at the east corner of the fence where the posts meet at the beginning of Bubba’s land.”

  Devin looked at the cylinder as I shut the door and headed up the avenue toward the playground.

  “What’s that in your hand?”

  “It’s a one-shot.” I loosened my watchband, slid the cylinder between the leather strap and my wrist.

  “A one-shot.”

  “Christmas present from Bubba,” I said. “Years ago.” I flashed it at him. “One bullet. I
depress this button, it’s like a trigger. The bullet leaves the cylinder.”

  He and Oscar looked at it. “That’s a fucking suppressor with a couple of hinges and screws, a blasting cap, and a bullet. It’ll blow up in your hand, Patrick.”

  “Possibly.”

  The playground loomed in front of us, the fifteen-foot-high fence glazed in ice, the trees black and heavy with it.

  “Why do you even need that?” Oscar said.

  “Because he’ll make me give up my gun.” I turned and looked at them. “The hole in the fence, guys.”

  “I’ll send a man in,” Bolton said.

  “No.” I shook my head. I nodded at Devin and Oscar. “One of them. They’re the only ones I trust. One of you go through it and crawl up on him from behind.”

  “And do what? Patrick, he’s got—”

  “—a baby strapped to his back. Trust me. You’re going to have to break his fall.”

  “I’ll do it,” Devin said.

  Oscar snorted. “With your knees? Shit. You won’t get ten yards across that ice.”

  Devin looked at him. “Yeah? How you going to drag your whale’s ass across a playground without getting seen.”

  “I’m a brother, partner. I’m one with the night.”

  “Which is it?” I said.

  Devin sighed, jerked his thumb at Oscar.

  “Whale’s ass,” Oscar said grumpily. “Huh.”

  “See you in there,” I said and walked over the sidewalk to the playground.

  I came up the steps by pulling myself, hand over hand, up the railing.

  The streets and avenues had been burned free of ice by salt and tires during the day, but the playground was a skating rink. At least two inches of blue-black ice covered the center where the pavement sloped and the water had pooled.

  The trees and basketball hoops and jungle gyms and swings were pure glass.

  Gerry stood in the center of the playground, in what was intended as a fountain spring or frog pond before the city ran out of money and it became merely a cement basin with benches surrounding it. A place to go with the kids and watch your tax dollars at work.

  Gerry’s car sat sideways; he leaned against the hood as I approached. I couldn’t see the baby on his back from my angle, but Danielle Rawson bore the hollow gaze of someone who’d already accepted her own death as she knelt on the ice by Gerry’s legs. Twelve hours in a trunk had matted her hair to the left side of her head as if a hand were pressed there, and her face was streaked with dirty fingers of ruined mascara, the corners of her eyelids burned red by gasoline.

  She reminded me of pictures of women I’ve seen in Auschwitz or Dachau or Bosnia. She seemed to know her life had passed beyond the reach of human protection.

  “Hi, Patrick,” Gerry said. “That’s far enough.”

  I stopped six feet from the car, four feet from Danielle Rawson, found myself toeing the ring of gasoline.

  “Hi, Gerry,” I said.

  “You’re awful calm.” He raised an eyebrow, and it was sodden with gasoline. His rusty hair was pasted to his head.

  “Tired,” I said.

  “Your eyes are red.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Phillip Dimassi is dead, I take it.”

  “Yup.”

  “You wept for him.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  I looked at Danielle Rawson, tried to find the energy necessary to care what happened to her.

  “Patrick?”

  He leaned back against the car and the shotgun taped to Danielle Rawson’s head pulled her back with him.

  “Yeah, Gerry?”

  “Are you in shock?”

  “I dunno.” I turned my head, looked around at the prisms of ice and the dark drizzle and the blue and white lights from the police cruisers and the cops and federal agents stretched across car hoods, splayed haphazardly on telephone poles, kneeling on the roofs surrounding the playground. All of them, to the man, with guns extended.

  Guns, guns, guns. Three hundred and sixty degrees of pure violence.

  “I think you’re in shock.” Gerry nodded to himself.

  “Well, shit, Gerry,” I said and found myself scratching my head as it was pelted with rain, “I haven’t slept in two days and you’ve killed or wounded just about everybody I care about. So, I dunno, how’m I supposed to feel?”

  “Curious,” he said.

  “Curious?”

  “Curious,” he repeated and wrenched the shotgun so that Danielle Rawson’s neck twisted in his grip and her head banged off his knee.

  I looked at her and she wasn’t terrified or angry. She was defeated. Just like me. I tried to find a bond based on that, to force emotion to rise in me, but it wouldn’t come.

  I looked back at Gerry.

  “Curious about what, Gerry?” I rested my hand against my hip, felt the butt of my gun. He hadn’t asked me for my gun, I realized. How odd.

  “About me,” he said. “I’ve killed a lot of people, Patrick.”

  “Kudos,” I said.

  He twisted the shotgun and Danielle Rawson’s knees lifted off the ice.

  “You’re amused?” he said and his finger curled tight around the shotgun trigger.

  “No, Gerry,” I said, “I’m apathetic.”

  Just over the trunk of the car I noticed a piece of the fence push forward in the darkness and a gaping space open in its place. Then the fence fell back and the space disappeared.

  “Apathetic?” Gerry said. “Tell you what, Pat—let’s see how apathetic you are.” He reached behind his head and came back with the baby, his fist gripping its clothes at the back, and held it aloft. “Weighs less than some rocks I’ve thrown,” he said.

  The baby was still drugged. Maybe dead, I didn’t know. His eyelids were clenched shut, as if from pain, and his small head was feathered with blond whiskers. He seemed softer than a pillow.

  Danielle Rawson looked up and then she banged her head into Gerry’s knees, her screams muffled by the tape over her mouth.

  “You going to chuck the baby, Gerry?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “Why not. He ain’t mine.”

  Danielle’s eyes bulged and their pupils damned me.

  “You’re burned out, Pat.”

  I nodded. “I got nothing left, Gerry.”

  “Take your gun out, Pat.”

  I did. I went to toss it into the frozen snow.

  “No, no,” Gerry said. “Hold on to it.”

  “Hold on to it?”

  “Absolutely. In fact, jack a round into the chamber and point at me. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  I did as he asked, raised my arm and centered it on Gerry’s forehead.

  “Much better,” he said. “I’m kind of sorry you’re all burned out on me, Patrick.”

  “No, you’re not. That was one of the alleged points of this. Wasn’t it?”

  He smiled. “How do you mean?”

  “You wanted to practice your bullshit theory of dehumanization. Right?”

  He shrugged. “Some people would say it’s not bullshit.”

  “Some people would buy sunblock in the Arctic, Gerry.”

  He laughed. “Worked on Evandro pretty well.”

  “Is that why it took you twenty years to come back?”

  “I never went away, Patrick. But, in terms of my experiment with the human condition in general, and a certain belief I have in the charm of threes, yeah, Alec and I had to wait until you had all grown a bit and until Alec had found a worthy candidate in Evandro. And then there were all my years of planning and all Alec’s efforts with Evandro until we could be sure he was one of us. I’d say it was all a great success, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sure, Gerry. Whatever.”

  He cocked his arm so that the baby’s head was pointed directly at the ice and stared at the ground as if looking for the perfect impact point.

  “What’re you going to do, Patrick?”

  “Don�
��t know there’s much I can do, Ger.”

  He smiled. “You shoot me now, the mother definitely dies and the baby probably does.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You don’t shoot me now, I might just hurl this baby’s head against the ice.”

  Danielle bucked against the gun.

  “I do that,” Gerry said, “you lose them both. So here we have choice. Your choice, Patrick.”

  The ice under Gerry’s car was darkened by Oscar’s shadow as he inched along the other side of it.

  “Gerry,” I said, “you won. Right?”

  “How do you see it?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong. I was supposed to pay for what my father did to Charles Rugglestone. Right?”

  “Partially,” he said and looked up at the baby’s head, tilted it so he could see the clenched eyes.

  “Okay. You got me. Shoot me, if you want. It’s cool.”

  “I never wanted to kill you, Patrick,” he said, his eyes still on the baby. He pursed his lips and made cooing sounds. “Last night at your partner’s place? Evandro was supposed to kill her and leave you alive with the guilt, with the pain.”

  “Why?”

  Oscar’s shadow was preceding him across the ice. It leaked out in front of the car and spread raggedly across the stone animals and hobby horses directly behind Gerry. The shadow was thrown by the streetlight in the rear of the playground and I found myself wondering which genius hadn’t thought of shutting it off before Oscar went through the fence.

  All Gerry had to do was turn his head, and this whole mess would reach boiling point.

  Gerry turned his hand, pivoted the baby back and forth.

  “Used to hold my own son like this,” he said.

  “Over ice?” I said.

  He grinned. “Mmmm. No, Patrick. Just hold him in my arms and smell him and kiss the top of his head occasionally.”

  “And he died.”

  “Yes.” Gerry peered up at the child’s face, scrunched his own in imitation.

  “So—what, Gerry—because of that everything makes some sort of sense?”

  It was in my voice, I’m not sure why or how, but there it was—the barest hint of emotion.

  Gerry heard it. “Toss your gun to your right.”