Tremblay spotted his man outside the T-stop, sitting on a bench at the south-eastern corner of Boston Common. The informant’s name was Ace; he worked as a plumber’s apprentice. Six months ago, Tremblay caught him selling an ounce of coke at the same location.
“You look like you’ve seen a cop,” Tremblay said.
“So what?”
“Maybe it’s your conscience.”
“Is that why you pay me?”
They went north on Tremont Street, across from the Masonic lodge and the radio station. At dusk, the Common had its usual crowd: tourists, Emerson students, Saint Francis House bums, a few junkies in hoodies and torn black sweatpants who were stooped at their waists.
“How much can you spare?” Ace said.
“I’m not the one who called, so it depends what you offer. Same as any hood rat selling stolen tires.”
“I’m no hood rat.”
“You’re a kid from the sticks who should’ve stayed there. As it is, you’ve got some good qualities. Making hand-to-hands outside the Boylston T-stop isn’t one of them.”
“You want Ratface Gowran, right? That’s why you got transferred to vice?”
“I have an interest.”
“If he’s alive.”
“He’s not?”
“I didn’t say that.”
A man in a blue tracksuit was asleep beneath the elms. Tremblay pinched Ace’s shoulder, pulled him left. “See that guy?” Tremblay said. “He used to visit the Fens at lunch hour. Real busy with his wrists, so bad he got arthritis. Doctor gave him a few pills and next thing you know, he’s a fiend.”
The man opened his eyes. “Fuck you, Tremblay,” he said. “I’m on duty.”
“Waiting for someone?”
“Yeah.”
“Captain McDonald and his scratch cards?”
“Tell McDonald I’m quitting.”
Tremblay and his man continued up the path. He said, “We’re everywhere—so are you guys. Hard to tell one from another, or dead from alive. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“I don’t know if Gowran’s dead. He’s been missing. The new guys are Dominican, or something else—Portuguese.”
“That’s what they speak?”
“I think so. It’s that kind of accent. Reminds me of that container at Fort Point, where the Cape Verdeans starved to death.”
“They ate each other,” Tremblay said. “Those weren’t Gowran’s guys.”
“Heard they’re setting him up tomorrow. In your neighborhood.”
“Who’s they?”
“I told you, man. The Portuguese.”
“Speaking Portuguese and being Portuguese can be different things. How’d they rate on the beige scale?”
“Pretty dark. There’s a shed in McLaughlin Park where they’re throwing guns and jackets and his personal stuff. Hair dye. Suspenders.”
“Why all the trouble?”
“They wanted to hack his computer, but Ratface doesn’t own one. So they took his stuff. Maybe a switch or two.”
“Stuff?”
“Baggies. Beer cans. Whatever you can use for a swab.”
They crossed Park Street. Past the church, Tremont narrowed and curved left toward city hall.
“What I heard,” Ace said, lowering his voice, “is that it’s Burgos. Figured Ratface was easy to make.”
Tremblay smelled rotten meat. There was a ring of addicts squatting in the alley, skin melted from their elbows. Someone in Boston was cutting the fentanyl with horse tranquilizers. When injected in a speedball, it burned out even the big veins after two or three months, usually followed by muscling and popping before the skin began to ulcerate. At first there were pimples, knots, bumps, and blisters. Then the appearance of abscesses, black patches, holes that never closed. Maggots on the sidewalk were common. Tremblay once saw the bone in a woman’s forearm; he didn’t envy his peers working narcotics. A few more were huddled by the dumpster, waiting for a mobile clinic to stop and dress their wounds.
Gowran had been messing up, with two episodes on Captain McDonald’s mind. First, one of Ratface’s men robbed a jewelry store on Winter Street. During his escape, the man fired into a crowd and injured three bystanders. He was caught a few blocks away in the Financial District, sitting in a bank lobby.
More perplexing was a naked woman, covered in cuts and gashes, who ran through Jamaica Plain in the middle of the night. In broken English, she told the patrolman about her escape, fleeing the basement of a house she couldn’t identify. The incident happened two blocks from Gowran’s home.
“If it’s Burgos,” said Tremblay, “did you see him on the street?”
“Just his friends. One was a cop—like you. What you heard about them, you never heard from me.”
“How do you think I made detective? I’ve known Burgos since he moved to this city. He was one of my snitches, way back in the anti-gang unit.”
Ace said, “He isn’t doing anything good.”
“That isn’t his job.”
“Hey, I heard you guys are taking bets. Downtown, it’s even odds—Ratface gets blasted before they unseal his indictments.”
“It’s that close, huh?”
“Can I get in?”
“Not with me.”
“Sure,” Ace said. “What about that guy in the tracksuit?”
“His name’s Podolski. He got transferred to vice right after I did. If you ask me, he’s lazy.”
They rounded the Atheneum and stopped at the concrete slab named Government Center. “I’m headed back to Worcester,” Ace said. “Some of the bikers got into plumbing, at least out west.”
Tremblay leaned against a pillar and watched Ace vanish into the crowd on Tremont Street. The gutter stank of discarded skin, so he strolled to the old West End, glancing back at the window of Daphne’s office. Now a federal attorney, she and Tremblay met when he was a Chinatown patrolman and Daphne a clerk with the Suffolk County DA. Every few months, they sat together in the Liberty Hotel lounge, got drunk, and rented a room. Unlike Daphne, he had never been married.
He decided against calling her.
Tremblay took the train back to Brigham Circle. He thought of Ratface, a local from the Hill, who had graduated from tailgating and theft to extortion, gambling, cigarette smuggling. Burgos came to Boston from outside, and brought his people from outside. Now he was everyone’s problem.
2
The cubicle was gray and an inch longer than Tremblay’s bed. His right hand was bandaged. After turning on his back, he softly fingered the bullet wound.
Calderon sat on a white folding chair. He and Tremblay were once partners in Roxbury: as members of the old Tango unit, they’d had citywide jurisdiction and worked out of an unmarked Delta K-1 car. Now Calderon was a lieutenant in homicide.
“I’ve never solved a case by myself,” he said. “You listen to the victim. There’s a lot that dead men can tell you.”
“I’m not dead,” Tremblay said.
“Gift from forensics.”
Calderon lobbed a stick of chalk at Tremblay, who caught it with his good hand. He’d changed little—gained some weight in his neck and cheeks, maybe bought real Italian leather shoes, or a two-story house in Jamaica Plain. Tremblay’s old partner nodded at the heart monitor: “Hasn’t quit yet. I expect it never will.”
“We’ll see.”
“You got eyes? Or did you quit playing dice when they transferred you to, uh—”
“Vice,” Tremblay said. “Told my superior everything, which isn’t much. I remember static and the dispatcher asking for ID. Then the paramedics cut off my clothes.”
“One cubicle for another, huh? Not like you had anywhere to go tonight.”
“What day is it?”
“Friday,” Calderon said. “Vice pays. McDonald wants to put some cash in your pocket. Loosen your belt.”
“Careful.”
“Any trauma?”
“From getting shot in the side? Or whacked on the temple with a bat? You’ve got a better idea than I do.”
Calderon said, “Last I heard, they were watching footage. A camera near the hospital and one in McLaughlin Park. Whoever shot you had a waiting car. What were you doing there, anyway? Don’t tell me you’re still on Calumet Street…”
“I got a tip.”
“Someone we know?”
“Burgos.”
“Thought you were on the Gowran case.”
“Gowran’s looking like a victim. A frame-up, with guns and jackets and saliva on coffee lids.”
“Know what I heard?” Calderon said. “Ratface gets the federal treatment. Two quick convictions, then a RICO warrant.”
“Think he’ll live that long?”
“That’s how I’m betting.”
“If you had bet some money.”
“Right. How well do you know McDonald?”
“A good cop,” Tremblay said, “always knows his superior. You have it—”
“I don’t,” Calderon said. “But I know who shot you.”
Tremblay froze and felt the blood drain from his face. After he woke up, Calderon gave his cheek a light slap.
“Anyone home?” he said. “Look, sergeant, it’s great you’re alive. But when you’re in McDonald’s office, there’s a choice. Between a right and a wrong.”
Tremblay brought his eyes into focus, staring at Calderon’s cratered forehead: “Who did you wrong?”
“No one,” Calderon said, “at least not yet. Come on—you remember Burgos, right? Back in those Tango days, anti-gang shit. He sold rocks in Mattapan.”
“You telling me to sell crack?”
“I’m not telling you a damn thing.”
Trembley went quiet, then said, “He’s trying to frame Gowran, for God knows what.”
“For selling crack—which Ratface does, anyway. You hear about that chick, the one who ran screaming down the street? Bruises and welts and I bet he hit her with the belt.”
“What did you say before?”
“About Ratface?”
“You shot me. That’s what you said?”
Calderon put on his jacket. “Nope,” he told Tremblay. “A bullet can save a life, too.”
3
Tremblay left the hospital. He walked south on Francis Street. Past the sky bridge, there was a row of flat-roofed three decker homes to his right. The houses were yellow and green and wood-framed, opposite the red and gray stucco of Longwood campus. A few blocks away stood the towers of Mission Park, a brick project built after the neighborhood was bulldozed in the seventies.
He crossed the tracks to Flann O’Brien’s, a pub at the bottom of the hill. Tremblay ordered a Guinness and a Harp and sat alone in one of the snugs, opposite a stained-glass portrait of the pub’s namesake, with a circle above his head like a halo. After a few sips of lager, he closed his eyes and recalled the last moments in McLaughlin Park. Ace had been right about the place and time. At eleven o’clock, two men opened a victory garden shed. It was too dark to see what they carried; Ace said two duffel bags with guns, ammo, and grenades as well as a Dunkin Donuts cup. He’d heard two voices:
“That our guy?”
“Too early.”
Then a round tore through his side, an inch above the right hip. Tremblay was already dazed when the bat smashed the side of his skull. He fell forward, one of his teeth cracking on a slab of puddingstone.
Now the stout slid easily down his throat. Saint Flann remained in the stained-glass window. Tremblay drank two more beers, then gathered the strength to go home.
His bedroom had the dark he’d wanted at the hospital. A single lamp buzzed down on the sidewalk, two stories below his window. On game days, Tremblay could watch the big screen at Fenway from his living room; that night, he wanted to sink into the floor. Tremblay felt a little sick from the pints. Taking his medication was out of the question.
He drifted off to sleep thinking of Daphne: her hair, shoulders, the curve of her neck as she lit a cigarette. It was all in the past. Now she worked for the federal government. She no longer smoked. He was a cop, sinking…
In his dream, he turned over Daphne’s leg.
4
At Precinct C-14, cops on the four o’clock shift appeared for roll call. Captain McDonald stood before a glazed glass door and waved to Tremblay.
“Take a seat.”
“Is this an interview?”
McDonald walked back to his chair. He lived in West Roxbury and fit in with the times by looking worried and wearing spread collars.
“I got your Form Twenty-Six report,” McDonald said. “Why didn’t anyone know about this McLaughlin stake-out?”
“It’s my backyard. May as well have been walking home.”
“You could have told me,” he said. “We won’t discuss the injuries. Three weeks paid leave, or whatever the doctor says. It’s more a question of your return.”
“You’re taking me off the Gowran case?”
“It won’t be a case much longer—maybe a day, a week. The DA has all he needs for gun possession, as well as a charge for pimping that girl.”
“What was her name?”
“Selma something. Rodriguez. The name is unimportant. We all know Gowran’s had it coming, ever since he flew to Rotterdam and got dosed on ketamine. Blackouts, shootings. Walking the avenue with loose laces. Walking a Maserati into a tree.”
“Gowran smuggled cigarettes. No drugs, no pimping.”
“He was more involved than we knew. As for cigarettes, he bought so many from the Indians that he flooded the market on Route One. Other guys got mouths to feed.”
“And Burgos is our new guy?”
“Who mentioned Burgos?”
“My informant.”
“Burgos… gets the same deal as anyone, so long as he keeps a hole from opening in the street. That’s when feuds erupt, when people get murdered. Our concern is public safety—not Ratface.”
“No one’s safe with Burgos,” Tremblay said. “When me and Calderon were partners, he sold dope in Mattapan. Owned a diner on Blue Hill Ave. They trafficked Haitians out of the basement.”
“So what?”
“Not all of the dishes were chicken.”
McDonald looked out through the glass door. “I’m not asking you to make friends, sergeant. I’m not asking you to be anything, or do anything. I’m asking you not to do anything.”
“I don’t trust Calderon.”
“Calderon can look after himself, can’t he? Made lieutenant. Made his own connections.”
A patrolman entered the room and handed McDonald a hot coffee. “They teach you to knock at the academy?” the captain said. “What if we were discussing your wife’s pussy?”
“Then I’d want to hear it.”
“You would?”
“I’m not married, sir.”
“At ease, private.”
The patrolman left McDonald’s office. He was a fair captain, however hard that may have been at C-14. Everyone knew Calderon wanted his job; in the canteen, he’d been careless enough to joke about it.
“Heard about the betting pool.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“Do the Dominicans have their own? What about the Irish?”
“You’d know better,” McDonald said. “Now, back to your fitness—as an officer… I mean, your snitch. No witness is completely honest, not in our line. Did he set you up?”
“It’s possible.”
“Make a decision, sergeant.”
“About what?”
“Still want to be a cop?”
“Less and less.”
“Glad to hear it,” McDonald said. “For you, it’s three weeks’ leave. As a civilian.”
“I’m in the middle of the Gowran case. That girl—”
“Investigation is closed. Affaire classée, as they say in Montreal, or would if their men were still worth a damn.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Right now, your badge and gun. See you next month.”
He descended the gray brick steps to the lobby. Some of Calderon’s detectives were loitering by the door, giggling like cadets. One of them blocked the entrance.
“Heard you work for Ratface,” said the man. “That mick gets split one way or another.”
“I was trailing him,” Tremblay said. “Then he vanished—just like you.”
“I’m right here.”
“And you know I turned in my gun.”
“Watch it, Tremblay.”
5
He would not be a police officer for three weeks. The next morning Tremblay shaved, showered, and rang Daphne.
“You working or what?” he said.
“I’m a federal employee.”
“When’s a good time? I’ll bring a bouquet to Bowdoin. Catch a power nap.”
He entered her office at noon. By twelve-fifteen, they were done.
Daphne buttoned her blouse. “You said there was a reason?”
“What do you know about Burgos?”
Her office was wide and lined with tarnished metal bookshelves. On the fifth floor, they were high enough to see Faneuil Hall, as well as part of the Greenway. She stood and glanced at herself in one of the windows. “I remember him from Roxbury. You and Calderon lived out of each other’s uniforms.”
“It was a plainclothes gig.”
“At least you didn’t get a tattoo. My boss wants us focused on Gowran—tomorrow, he’s reading out the indictments.”
“I bet,” Tremblay said, now dressed. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand: Selma Rodriguez. Gowran had cigarettes, other rackets, but not women. Not even on ketamine. What, he decided to start pimping?”
“That woman isn’t my problem. Anything else?”
“Yeah, I got fucking shot. I change these dressings three times a day. When I get home, it’s another fifth of Jack.”
“Want a medal?”
“Thanks, sweetheart.”
Daphne said, “Why make things harder? You know it won’t pay the mortgage.”
“I need honest work.”
“So why’d you become a cop?”
“Dishonesty works, then it doesn’t. Then you’re fucked forever.”
“You’ll never be fucked forever?” Daphne said. “If you’re looking for Selma, she’s back in the hospital. Say you’re her husband.”
6
Dressed in khakis and a light blue raincoat, Tremblay went to the second floor of Beth Israel Hospital. At the end of the corridor, he found the ward empty. A woman in scrubs approached him: “Looking for someone?”
“My cousin—Selma Rodriguez. Has she been moved?”
“The woman with the hematoma?”
“Yeah.”
“What is your name?”
“Rodriguez. Edwin.”
She spoke into her walkie-talkie: “We have an Edwin Rodriguez…”
Tremblay turned back to the stairs. The nurse kept speaking: “Yes, about six feet, brown hair, blue raincoat… Rodriguez, he said. Edwin…”
No one followed him to the road. Dizzy from pills and lack of sleep, he left Kilmarnock as it started to rain. By the time he reached Brigham Circle, Tremblay was drenched. Was Selma in Framingham, where Burgos owned a diner near the train station? Get on, get off—he needed a drink.
Calderon was leaning against the door of Flann’s. He dropped a cigarette butt in the gutter and chuckled, “Knew this Irish shit was haunted. I just saw a ghost.”
“The answer is no.”
“One way this thing ends—a promotion.”
“Tenth circle of Hell, maybe.”
“Keep walking, sergeant.”
He went up the hill, past the pizzeria and the library and took a right on Calumet Street. His house stood at the top. As Tremblay climbed, he heard a pebble skid across the sidewalk behind him.
“Is that our guy?” someone said.
“Keep walking, buddy.”
The first voice laughed and its laughter died at the park gate.
An image from the stake-out suddenly came to Tremblay: yellow teeth. He didn’t know if they were naturally yellow, or a reflection of the lamps, or a hallucination. It was followed by the outline of a round, tapered skull.
Instead of going beyond the laundromat, he went left and circled back. Tremblay stopped at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. He sat in one of the swings facing Tremont Street, rocking back and forth, his finger curled around the Beretta’s trigger guard.
Tremblay woke from a kick to the shin. Before him stood Father Lemieux, wearing a green parka over his cassock.
“If you didn’t read the forecast,” he said, “it’s going to rain.”
“I knew that.”
“Stand up.”
Tremblay felt a burn in his hip. The stitches were broken; blood soaked the right side of his shirt. He wrapped the tail of his raincoat over his stomach.
“Go back to Longwood,” Lemieux said, “if there’s a leak.”
“If you say so.”
“I do,” he said, and left the gate open.
7
In a cabin near the Quabbin Reservoir, Ratface Gowran was found dead with his feet blown off by a shotgun.
Tremblay drove to Selma’s apartment in Hyde Park. After he waited a few minutes, a woman with a baby stroller came through the doors. Tremblay held them open for her and entered the lobby.
He pounded on Selma’s door. He called her name. He was about to slide a steel ruler over the latch when another opened down the hall. A woman with graying dark hair and a torn camisole said, “She’s not here.”
“Selma?” said Tremblay. “Where is she?”
“Last night… one of your guys took her? I told them to keep down the noise. For the baby.”
“Who was here?”
“Everyone knows,” she said, “you work for Burgos.”
He went to Framingham and left his car at the corner of Henry and Franklin. It was a Brazilian complex, cluttered with toys, bikes, beach balls, rusted barbecue grills. The backroads were quiet and green. On Waverly Street, there was a Chinese restaurant with a red roof and signs with pictures of fish. Block by block, he passed bakeries, nail salons, revival churches, liquor stores, cash-for-gold exchanges, and the pale brick cathedral of Saint Tarcisius.
Burgos would be sitting in his diner, set back in a strip mall between a laundromat and a dollar store. Tremblay stumbled through the entrance. He felt fine, if a little weak from the Oxytocin he’d taken in the car.
Tremblay found an empty counter. He walked past the white plastic tables and jukebox to the basement stairs.
After opening the door, he saw a man with the grinning skull he’d seen in McLaughlin Park. His forehead was long, his eyes red, his gums lined with yellow stumps. Next to him was a long mahogany desk, where Burgos sat with his boots on the edge. He looked bored.
“It’s been a few years,” Burgos said. “Usually the guest brings a gift, but I’ll give you what you didn’t give me.” He filled a snifter with brandy and placed it on the far side of the desk. “Salut.”
“Remember the diner on Blue Hill Ave? Never did eat there. Did you?”
“Don’t have the islander in me,” Burgos said. “Hear about Ratface?”
“Heard they threw his feet in the water supply.” Tremblay adjusted his watch strap, then said, “You’re going to turn yourself in. Precinct C-14.”
“On whose advice?”
“Mine.”
Tremblay smelled the top of his glass and drank it. As he leaned forward, Selma entered the room. Both of her arms had ulcers and patches of black skin. Already they reeked. She looked at him before walking behind the desk, then yawned as she dropped in Burgos’s lap.
“Many come through this door,” he told Tremblay. “Mouths to feed. Holes to poke. Some so big, you could stick your fist through them.”
“I’m here to arrest you, Burgos.”
“Is this a citizen’s arrest?”
“I’ve got a gun. And my badge…”
Tremblay thumped his chest twice, coughed into the snifter.
“Another drink. Calvados on the house.” Burgos poured the brandy and slid the glass over to Tremblay. “I’m not the man I was ten years ago. Are you, sergeant? We’ve changed, and the city, too. Ratface got careless on the Hill.”
“Was he pimping?”
Burgos laughed. “Pay no attention to my lap or this girl. Right, Selma? Pourquoi? Oh, that’s the Calvados talking…”
Tremblay swiped at his glass, knocking it back across the desk. The liquor splashed on Burgos’s knee, as well as a pile of scratch tickets. The grinning skull let out a hiccup. After gasping, he slapped himself in the throat.
“I won’t be threatened,” Tremblay said, “by some two-bit coke mule with friends at the precinct. You, McDonald, Calderon—the Holy Family. Don’t doubt you’re the virgin.”
Burgos rang Calderon on speed dial: “Lieutenant…You won’t believe who came to the office. Five minutes?”
He poured another three glasses from the bottle of Calvados. The room stank of stale cologne and brandy, as well as Selma’s arm.
Burgos held his snifter under her nose; as she squinted her wet eyes, two men wearing black tactical vests entered the office. They seemed to take up half the floor, which was concrete stained with flecks of blood and chewing tobacco. Their boss said something in Portuguese; the men left as quickly as they arrived.
“McDonald,” said Burgos, “gave you the Ratface case. Now he’s dead. Maybe they made a stew from his bones… You hungry?”
“For what?”
“Slop.”
Tremblay licked his lips, felt his brow. “No.”
“Oscar—throw some dirt on his belly.”
From behind the desk, the skull raised a carbine with a threaded barrel. He aimed at Tremblay’s head, but when he pulled the trigger, his entire body shook. The bullets scattered across the ceiling and pierced through the half-open door. Tremblay took cover beside the desk. The two men in tactical vests ran in the office, guns in hand, and stood there as Burgos screamed at everyone. One man replied; the carbine went off again, hitting him and his partner with round after round until they dropped to the floor.
Now the room smelled of oil and smoke. Selma lay limp, her head and torso flat across the mahogany. Burgos bellowed at the grinning skull. Both men ignored Tremblay. After Burgos slapped him across the face, the skull with yellow teeth raised his gun and pointed it at his boss’s chest. Tremblay stepped over the men’s bodies. He heard sirens half a mile down the road. Standing outside on the gravel, the sun almost blinding him, he watched as the patrol car raced past the diner, heading up Waverly Street to the foothills.
He heard the carbine sputtering inside.
“Know your superior,” a voice said.
Tremblay shuffled around. Facing a crumbling white wall, he saw Calderon.
8
The police band started with drums and bagpipes at eight in the morning. All along Tremont Street, black cars parked for the funeral at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The procession had taken thirty minutes longer than expected, with traffic rerouted several times up the hill.
Flanking the cathedral, two cranes raised a thirty-foot Stars and Stripes flag. On the other side of the street, a row of state police officers saluted the arrival of Tremblay’s hearse. Eight men carried his casket up the stairs. The bagpipes died out. McDonald tasted the wetness in the air; he knew it would not rain.
Among the cops at C-14, it was a public secret that Tremblay had been on Gowran’s payroll. He’d visited Burgos to offer his services, seek revenge, or both.
Calderon gave one of the eulogies. Afterward, McDonald noticed Daphne standing behind the playground gates. He hadn’t seen her in years, not since she’d left special prosecutions and moved out of Government Center. She wore a black pencil skirt and gold jewelry, as well as large Givenchy sunglasses despite the clouds.
“He died doing what he loved,” McDonald told her.
“What was that?” she said.
“Being a cop.”
“He loved nothing that exists in this world,” she told McDonald. “What he was doing in Framingham, I have no idea. He never listened.”
“He was a good cop.”
“That makes one of you.”
Mourners filed out of the nave to the portico. “Cute speech,” McDonald said to Calderon.
“This shit doesn’t end with Burgos,” Calderon said. “Got a new guy in Springfield—twice the weight, half the hassle.”
“Springfield? You need better material, lieutenant. Think the rest of these Brazilians will self-deport?”
“Fuck them.”
Calderon went off with the rest of the precinct as they marched down to Flann’s. It was five minutes to noon. Ace arrived late at the playground, now empty except for McDonald and his wallet.
“Track Calderon’s car?” the captain said.
“Nothing for two days but yeah.”
“What odds he survives the week?”
“Depends who’s betting. Downtown, it’s two-to-one. Irish have it even. Dominicans, I don’t know. Haitians…”
“That’s enough. Tell your friends downtown that he’ll live.”
“So they’ll kill me later?”
“With that kind of cash, you can move to Singapore,” McDonald said. “Look, we got Ratface before they unsealed his indictments. So he was never indicted… Tremblay trusted you, and that’s enough. Just enough to cut you loose.”
Ace could barely say, “What’s the angle?”
“For me? Flip the scab, peel it off. You figure out the rest later.”
“And my money?”
“While you’re out,” McDonald said, slipping him a thick roll of twenties, “buy me some scratch cards and a nip of Fireball.”
“You sure?”
“Go.”
“Sad to see the man go.”
“Me, too.”
“He brought it on himself.”
McDonald smiled. “Me, too.”
He hadn’t meant for Tremblay to get hurt, much less killed, but it worked all the same in evidence rooms, warehouses, lounges, bars, basements, cathedrals. And from the city, the whole world.
With no one around, he lit a cigarette. Podolski came to the gate wearing his blue tracksuit.
“Tremblay’s really dead?”
“You saw him on the Common,” McDonald said. “He look depressed?”
“He was being a smartass.”
“What’s the suicide rate for smartasses?”
“Low, if you look at this precinct.”
“Has Ace been tracking the car like we asked?”
“Nope.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you want. He’s a bullshitter, Cap.”
“After Calderon, he’s the last one. Then we’ll introduce ourselves to some fine Brazilian businessmen.”
Podolski left. A yellow breeze blew down the street. McDonald stubbed out the cigarette and brushed the ash off his leg.
-- Max Thrax is managing editor of APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL and author of God Is a Killer. His novel Loose Blood, the first part of a Boston crime trilogy, will be published in 2027.