“Bullshit,” Bubba said. “Guy was a cop.”
“So? Gerry got it in his head that it was her fault. That she’d been fucking around on him and God had punished her by killing their kid. He punched her to death, framed some spook for it. The spook got shivved to death in Dedham a week after his arraignment. Case closed.”
“How’s Gerry reach out and touch a guy locked up?”
“Gerry was a bull at Dedham. Back in the old days, when they still allowed cops to work two jobs in the same system. Some witness, a con, supposedly heard Gerry set it up. Gerry whacked the guy in Scollay Square a week after he was released.”
Jamal Cooper. Victim Number One. Jesus.
“Gerry’s one of the scariest guys on the planet, you dumb fuck, Kenzie.”
“And it never occurred to you that he could be Hardiman’s partner?” I asked.
Everyone looked at me.
“Hardiman’s…?” Jack’s mouth opened wide again and the muscles in his jaws rotated against thin skin. “No, no. I mean, Gerry’s dangerous, but he’s not…”
“He’s not what, Jack?”
“He’s, well, not serial-killer-psycho crazy.”
I shook my head. “How fucking dumb could you be?”
Jack looked at me. “Shit, Kenzie, Gerry’s from the neighborhood. We don’t breed crazies like that in the neighborhood.”
I shook my head. “You’re from the neighborhood, Jack. So was my father. Look what you two pulled off in that warehouse.”
I started to walk back down the alley and he called after me: “What about you, Kenzie? What about what you pulled off here today?”
I looked back, saw Kevin trying to stay conscious against the pain, blood painted on his mouth and chin.
“I didn’t kill anyone, Jack.”
“But if I hadn’t talked, you would have, Kenzie. You would have.”
I turned, kept walking.
“You want to think of yourself as good, Kenzie? Huh? Think about what I just said. Remember what you would have done.”
The shots came out of the darkness in front of me.
I saw the muzzle flash and actually felt the first bullet streak past my shoulder.
I dropped to the floor as a second bullet burst through the darkness and out into the light.
Behind me, I heard two deep metal-into-flesh sounds. Sucking sounds.
As Pine walked out of the darkness, he unscrewed a silencer from his pistol, his gloved hand shrouded in smoke.
I turned my head and looked back down the lanes.
Phil was on his knees, hands over his head.
Bubba tilted his head back as he poured vodka down his throat.
Kevin Hurlihy and Jack Rouse stared blankly back at me, identical bullet holes in the centers of their foreheads.
“Welcome to my world,” Pine said and offered me his gloved hand.
37
I didn’t like the way Pine stood over the elevator shaft with his eyes on Phil as we descended. Phil had his head down and his hand on the roof of the Porsche as if he needed its support to remain standing. Pine’s gaze never wavered.
As we neared the first floor Pine said something to Bubba, and Bubba stuffed his hands in his trench coat pockets and shrugged.
The elevator doors opened and we climbed in the car and pulled out the back of the building and turned up the alley that led to South Street.
“Jesus,” Phil said.
I drove slowly up the alley, my eyes on the headlights cutting through the hard dark in front of us.
“Pull the car over,” Phil said desperately.
“No, Phil.”
“Please. I’m going to be sick.”
“I know,” I said. “But you’re going to have to hold it down until we’re out of sight of the building.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
I pulled out onto South Street. “Because if Pine or Bubba sees you puke, they’ll be convinced they can’t trust you. Now hold on.”
I drove up the block, turned right and picked up speed on Summer Street. A half block past South Station, I pulled in behind the Post Office, checked each loading bay until I was sure they hadn’t started filling the trucks yet, and then pulled in behind a Dumpster.
Phil was out of the car before we came to a complete stop and I turned up the radio so I wouldn’t have to hear the sounds of his body revolting against what he’d just witnessed.
I reached down and turned the volume higher and the windows reverberated as Sponge’s “Plowed” poured through my speakers, the vicious guitar riffs carving through my skull.
Two men were dead and I may as well have pulled the trigger myself. They weren’t innocent. They weren’t clean. But they were human, nonetheless.
Phil came back to the car and I handed him Kleenex from the glove compartment and turned down the volume. He pressed the tissue to his mouth as I swung back onto Summer and headed toward Southie.
“Why’d he kill them? They told us what we wanted to know.”
“They disobeyed his boss. Don’t get caught up in the whys, Phil.”
“But Christ, he just shot them. He just pulled his gun and they were tied up and I’m standing there, looking at them, and then—shit—no sound, nothing, just those holes.”
“Phil, listen to me.”
I pulled to the side of the road on a dark stretch by the Araban Coffee Building, smelled the roasted aroma trying to override the oily stench of the docks off to my left.
He put his hands over his eyes. “Oh, my God.”
“Phil! Fucking look at me!”
He lowered his hands. “What?”
“It never happened.”
“What?”
“It never happened. You got it?” I was shouting, and Phil recoiled from me in the dark of the car, but I didn’t care. “You want to die, too? Do you? That’s what we’re talking about here, Phil.”
“Jesus. Me? Why?”
“Because you’re a witness.”
“I know, but—”
“But is not an option. This is very simple, Phil. You’re alive because Bubba would never kill anyone I care about. You’re alive because he’s convinced Pine that I’ll keep you in line. I’m alive because they know I won’t talk. And both of us, by the way, would go to jail for double homicide if we did, because we were there. But it’d never come to that, Phil, because if Pine has any reason to worry, he’ll kill you and he’ll kill me and he’ll probably kill Bubba, too.”
“But—”