“He’s a…” She swallowed, snapped her eyes away from the photo and curled into herself on the couch. “He said he was an airline pilot for TWA. Hell, we met in an airport. I saw his IDs, a route schedule update or two. He was based out of Chicago. It fit. He has the trace of a midwestern accent.”
“You want to kill him,” I said.
She looked at me, eyes wide, then dropped her chin.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Is there a gun in the house?”
She kept her chin pressed to her chest.
“Is there a gun in the house?” I repeated.
“No,” she said quietly.
“But you have access to one,” I said.
She nodded. “We have a house in New Hampshire. For ski season. There are two there.”
“What kind?”
“Excuse me?”
“What kind, Mrs. Dawe?”
“A handgun and a rifle. Christopher sometimes hunts in the late autumn.”
Angie reached out, put a hand over Carrie Dawe’s. “If you kill him, he still wins.”
Carrie Dawe laughed. “How’s that?”
“You’re destroyed. Your husband is destroyed. Most of the fortune, I’ll bet, will go to your criminal defense.”
She laughed again, but this time tears had sprung out along the tops of her cheekbones. “So what?”
“So,” Angie said softly, tightening her hand on Carrie’s, “he set out years ago to destroy this family. Don’t let him succeed. Mrs. Dawe, look at me. Please.”
Carrie turned her head, swallowed a pair of tears that reached opposite corners of her mouth at the same time.
“I’ve lost a husband,” Angie said. “Just as you lost your first. Violently. You got a second chance, and yeah, you’ve fucked it up.”
Carrie Dawe’s laugh was one of shock.
“But you still have it,” Angie said. “You can still make it right. Make a third chance out of your second. Don’t let him take that.”
For a good two minutes, no one spoke. I watched the two women hold hands and stare hard into each other’s faces, heard the clock tick on the mantel above the dark fireplace.
“You’re going to hurt him?” Carrie Dawe said.
“Yes,” Angie said.
“Really hurt him,” she said.
“Bury him,” Angie said.
She nodded. She shifted on the couch and leaned forward, placed her free hand over Angie’s.
“How can I help?” she asked.
As we drove over toward Sleeper Street to relieve Nelson Ferrare on the roof, I said, “We’ve tailed his ass for a week. Where’s he vulnerable?”
“Women,” Angie said. “His hatred sounds so pathological-”
“No,” I said. “That’s deeper than I’m looking for. What makes him vulnerable right now? Where are the chinks in his armor?”
“The fact that Carrie Dawe knows he and Timothy McGoldrick are one and the same.”
I nodded. “Flaw number one.”
“What else?” she asked.
“He has no curtains on most of his windows.”
“Okay.”
“You’ve been following him during the day. Anything there?”
She thought about it. “Not really. Wait. Yeah.”
“What?”
“He leaves the engine running.”
“On the truck when he does his stops?”
She nodded, smiled. “And the keys in the ignition.”
I looked out the windshield as we approached the end of the Mass Pike, and shifted lanes from the northbound to southbound exit.
“What are you doing?” Angie asked.
“Going to drop by Bubba’s first.”
She leaned forward, peered through the wash of a yellow light strip in the tunnel above us. “You’ve got a plan, don’t you?”
“I have a plan.”
“A good one?”
“A bit crude,” I said. “Needs some polish. But effective, I think.”
“Crude’s okay,” she said. “Is it mean?”
I grinned. “Some might call it that.”
“Mean’s even better,” she said.
Bubba met us at the door wearing a towel and a face completely devoid of hospitality.
Bubba’s torso, from the waist to the hollow of his throat, is a massive slab of dark and light pink scar tissue in the shapes of lobster tails and smaller red ridges the length and width of children’s fingers that litter the pink like slugs. The lobster tails are burns; the slugs are shrapnel scars. Bubba got his chest in Beirut, when he was stationed with the marines the day a suicide bomber drove through the front gates and MPs on duty couldn’t shoot him because they’d been given blanks in their rifles. Bubba had spent eight months in a Lebanese hospital before receiving a medal and a discharge. He’d sold the medal and disappeared for another eighteen months, returning to Boston in late 1985 with contacts in the illegal arms trade a lot of other men before him had died trying to establish. He came back with the chest that looked like a mapmaker’s representation of the Urals, a refusal to ever discuss the night of the bombing, and a profound lack of fear that made people even more nervous around him than they’d been before he left.
“What?” he said.
“Good to see you, too. Let us in.”
“Why?”
“We need stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Illegal stuff.”
“No shit.”
“Bubba,” Angie said, “we already figured out you’re doing the nasty with Ms. Moore, so come on. Let us pass.”
Bubba frowned and it thrust his lower lip out. He stepped aside and we entered the warehouse to see Vanessa Moore, wearing one of Bubba’s hockey jerseys and nothing else, lying on the red couch in the center of the floor, a champagne flute propped on her washboard abdomen, watching 9½ Weeks on Bubba’s fifty-inch TV. She used the remote control to pause it as we came through the door, froze Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger going at it against an alley wall as blue-lit acid rain dripped on their bodies.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. Don’t let us disturb you.”
She scooped some peanuts from a bowl on the coffee table, popped them in her mouth. “No worries.”
“’Nessie,” Bubba said, “we got to talk a bit of business.”
Angie caught my eye and mouthed, “Nessie?”
“Illegal business?”