A Drink Before the War

  “Who was that someone?” Angie asked.

  Devin tapped the photocopy. “A Senator Brian Paulson,” he said. “Mean anything to you?”

  I stared back at him.

  “No cameras or tape recorders in the walls,” he said.

  I glanced at the photocopy. “I can’t reveal the names of my clients.”

  Devin nodded. Oscar smiled. They liked that. I’d just told them exactly what they wanted to know. Devin said, “This is big, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged. Another confirmation.

  Devin looked at Oscar. “You got anything else?”

  Oscar shook his head. His eyes were bright.

  Devin said, “Let’s walk them down. Sound good to you, Detective Lee?”

  When we stepped out the back door, Oscar told the young cop to go get a cup of coffee. He shook Angie’s hand, then mine. He said, “Depending how far this goes, we could lose our badges on this one.”

  I said, “I know.”

  Devin looked around the back of the building. “Bucking city hall’s one thing, the State House is something else entirely.”

  I nodded.

  Oscar said, “Vine,” and looked at Devin.

  Devin sighed. “No shit.”

  Angie said, “Vine?”

  Oscar said, “Chris Vine. Vice cop a few years back. Swore he had evidence on a senator, hinted about it going higher than that.”

  I said, “What happened?”

  Devin said, “Someone found two kilos of heroin in his locker.”

  “Box of hypodermics too,” Oscar said.

  Devin nodded. “Couple weeks later, Vine ate his gun.”

  Oscar gave Devin another look. There was something alien in both their eyes. It might have been fear. Oscar said, “You be careful, the both of you. We’ll contact you.”

  “Agreed.”

  Devin said, “If you’re still tight with Richie Colgan, I’d say now might be a good time to use him.”

  “Not quite yet.”

  Oscar and Devin looked at each other again, let out big bursts of breath. Oscar looked up at the sky. “Going to be a serious shitstorm any day now.”

  Angie said, “And the four of us without umbrellas.”

  We all got a chuckle out of that. A short one though. Laughter at a wake.

  24

  We took Boylston down to Arlington and came back around the block to the Greyhound Station. We waded through a listless sea of hookers, pimps, grifters, and assorted terminal cases before we found the dark green metal checkerboard of lockers. Number 506 was at the top of its row and I had to reach up a bit to try the key.

  It didn’t fit. One down.

  We tried a couple of smaller places. Nothing.

  We drove out to the airport. Logan Airport has five terminals, lettered A through E. A had no 506. B terminal had no lockers. C had no 506 in Arrivals. We walked down to Departures. Like the rest of the city, it was a ghost town, the waxed floor still slick and unscuffed, reflecting the bright fluorescents overhead. We found 506, took a deep breath, let it out when the key didn’t fit.

  Same thing in D and E.

  We tried some places in East Boston, Chelsea, Revere—nada.

  We stopped at a sandwich shop in Everett and took a seat by the window. The morning had died and the sky had hardened to a damp newspaper gray. It didn’t seem particularly cloudy, just resolutely sunless. A red Mustang pulled in across the street and the driver looked in the record store in front of him, probably waiting on a friend.

  Angie said, “You think he’s the only one?”

  I shook my head, swallowed a bite of roast beef. “He’s the point man.”

  We both looked across at him. He was parked a good forty yards back, a thin black head shaven till it gleamed. No sunglasses this time. Probably didn’t want anything obstructing his vision when he took a shot at me.

  “Where do you think Bubba is?” I said.

  “If we could see him, he wouldn’t be doing his job.”

  I nodded. “Still, be nice if he fired a flare every now and then, if only for my peace of mind.”

  “He is your peace of mind, Skid.”

  Hard to argue with the truth.

  We led the Mustang back with us through Somerville and up onto 93, heading into the city. We got off at South Station and parked on Summer Street. The Mustang cruised past, following the traffic past the post office. He turned right, and we got out and walked up to the main entrance.

  South Station used to look like a great location for a gangster movie. It’s huge, with enormous cathedral ceilings and parquet marble floors that seem to run on into infinity. Used to be all this space was interrupted only by a wooden newsstand, a shoeshine booth, and a few dark mahogany circular benches, expansive and double-tiered like human water fountains. It was the perfect place to wear powder-blue wool suits and matching fedoras, sit and watch people from behind a newspaper. Then came hard times, forgotten times, and the marble grew brown and scuffed, the newsstand needed a paint job or a wrecking ball, and the shoeshine stand disappeared entirely. Then, a few years ago, refurbishment. Now there’s a hot dog/pizza place with a yellow neon sign, an Au Bon Pain with Cinzano umbrellas over black wrought-iron tables, and a new newsstand that looks like a cross between a fern bar and a bookstore. The whole place looks smaller, the moody dark hues that pooled in shadows around shafts of faded sunlight have been replaced with glaring bright lights and an ambience of faked happiness. Spend all the money you want on ambience, it still won’t change the fact that a train station is a place where people wait, usually without much glee, for a train to come take them away.

  The lockers are in the back near the rest rooms. As we headed toward them, an old guy with stiff white hair and a PA system for vocal cords announced: “The Ambassador bound for Providence, Hartford, New Haven, and New York City, now boarding on track thirty-two.” If the little dink had had a megaphone I would have lost an ear.

  We walked down a dark corridor and stepped into yesterday. No glaring fluorescents, no ferns, just marble and dim yellow lamps that were one step removed from candles. We searched the rows of lockers in the semidarkness, trying to make out the faded, stenciled brass numbers, until Angie said, “Here.”

  I patted my pockets. “You got the key, right?”

  She looked at me. “Patrick.”

  “Where’s the last place we used it?”

  “Patrick,” she said again, only this time her teeth were gritted.

  I held it up. “God, you can’t take a joke anymore.”

  She snatched the key from my hand, slipped it into the lock, and turned it.

  I think she was more surprised than I was.

  The bag inside was blue plastic. The word “Gap” was stenciled in white letters across the middle. Angie handed it to me. Light. We looked back in, felt around. Nothing more. Angie let the door clang behind us and I carried the bag in my left hand as we walked back down the corridor. A veritable spring to our steps. Payday.

  Or Payback Day, depending on your perspective.

  The bald kid who’d been driving the Mustang was coming across the terminal toward us fast. He saw us, surprised, and started to turn away. Then he noticed the bag. Real bright fucking move on my part, not putting it under my coat. Baldie raised his right hand over his head and his left dug under his warm-up jacket.

  Two kids disengaged themselves from the corner of the Au Bon Pain counter, and another one—a guy, older than the three of them—sauntered toward us from the left, near the entrance.

  Baldie had his gun clear now, holding it down by his leg, walking casually, his eyes never leaving us. The terminal was packed, the oblivious crowd between us and Baldie scooping up their coffee cups and newspapers and luggage and heading out toward the track. Baldie was starting to smile, the crowd and twenty yards all that remained between us. My gun was in my hand now, the bag in front of it. Angie had her hand stuffed in her pocket, both of us taking tender steps forward as the crowd streamed past
us, jostling us every now and then. Baldie was moving just as slowly, but with confidence, as if all his movements had been choreographed. His smile was huge, an adrenaline junkie’s smile, sucking its fuel from the tension. Fifteen yards between us now, and Baldie starting to rock forward just a bit as he walked, getting high off it.

  Then Bubba stepped out of the crowd and blew off the back of his head with a shotgun.

  The kid vaulted up in the air, arms spread wide, chest out in a swan dive, and hit the ground on his face. The crowd erupted, scattering across the marble, crashing into one another, no real sense of direction except to get as far away from the corpse as possible, like pigeons without wings, tripping and sliding, trying to scramble back up off the marble before they got trampled. The guy on our left aimed an Uzi, one-handed, straight across the terminal at us and we dropped to our knees as it let loose, the ricochets chucking out pieces of the wall behind us. Bubba’s shotgun went off again, and the guy jerked up in the air like he’d just pulled the rip cord on a parachute. He flew back through a window but only half the glass shattered. He hung there, half in, half out, in a glass web.

  I took aim at the other two kids as Bubba jacked the shells out of the shotgun and slammed two more home. I squeezed off three shots and the kids dove into a fray of black iron tables. It was impossible to get a clear shot with the crowd in the way, so Angie and I fired at the tables, the bullets popping off the black iron legs. One of the kids rolled onto his back as Bubba turned in his direction. He fired a .357 and the round hit Bubba high in the chest. The shotgun shattered the glass six feet above their heads, and Bubba went down.

  A police unit came off Atlantic, bounced straight up onto the curb, and stopped just short of the glass doors. What remained of the crowd seemed to have all come to its senses at once; everyone lay flat on their bellies on the marble, hands protecting heads, luggage providing extra cover like leather retaining walls. The two kids stumbled over the tables and headed toward the tracks, firing in at us from the other side of the windows.

  I started toward the middle of the terminal, toward Bubba, but a second police unit jumped the curb, skidding to a stop. The first two cops were already inside, pumping rounds at the two kids near the tracks. Angie grabbed my arm and we ran toward the corridor. The window to my left shattered, dropping out of the pane in a white cascade. The cops were coming closer, firing with accuracy now as the two kids stumbled into each other, trying to get a clear shot at us. Just before we made the corridor, one of them suddenly spun around like a top and sat down. He looked confused, glass falling around him like snow.

  Angie kicked the alarm bar on the back door and the siren blast filled the terminal, bleating its call onto the street as we ran behind a row of trucks toward the corner. We cut out into traffic and went around the block, charging back up to Atlantic. We stopped on the corner, took a couple of deep breaths, held them as two more cruisers blew past us. We waited for the light, sweat pouring off our faces. When it turned red, we trotted across Atlantic, through the red dragon’s arch and down into Chinatown. We walked up Beach Street, past some men icing down their fish, past a woman tossing a barrel of fetid water off the back of a tiny loading dock, past an old Vietnamese couple, still dressed in the garb they’d worn during the French occupation. A small guy in a white shirt argued with a beefy Italian truck driver. The truck driver kept saying, “We go through this every day. Speak fucking English, goddamnit,” and the small guy said, “No speak English. You charge too fucky much, goddamnit.” As we passed, the truck driver said, “Now ‘too fucky much’ that I can understand.” The small guy looked fit to shoot him.

  We caught a cab at the corner of Beach and Harrison, told the Iranian driver where we wanted to go. He looked at us in the rearview. “Tough day?”

  No matter where you are, “tough day” and “too fucky much” seem to be part of the universal language. I looked at him and nodded. “Tough day,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Me too,” he said and pulled onto the expressway.

  Angie leaned her head against my shoulder. “What about Bubba?” Her voice was hoarse and thick.

  “I don’t know,” I said and looked at the Gap bag in my lap.

  She took my hand and I held on tight.

  25

  I sat in the front pew of St. Bart’s and watched Angie light a candle for Bubba. She stood over it for a moment, her hand cupped around it until the yellow flame grew fat with oxygen. Then she knelt and bowed her head.

  I started to bow mine, then stopped halfway, caught in the middle as always.

  I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or a she or an it, but as something that defies my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.

  I stopped praying—or bowing, for that matter—a long time ago, around the time my prayers became whispered chants pleading for the Hero’s demise and the courage necessary to have a hand in it. I never did get the courage, and the demise happened slowly, witnessed by my impotent stew of leftover emotions. Afterward, the world went on and any contract between God and myself had severed, interred in the hole with my father.

  Angie stood up, blessed herself, and walked down off the carpeted altar to the pew. She stood there, looking down at the Gap bag beside me, and waited.

  Bubba was dead, dying, or severely wounded because of this innocuous-looking bag. Jenna was dead too. So were Curtis Moore and two or three guys in the Amtrak station and twelve anonymous street kids who’d probably felt dead for a long time. By the time this was all over, Socia or I would join those statistics too. Maybe both of us. Maybe Angie. Maybe Roland.

  A lot of pain in such a simple plastic bag.

  “They’ll get here soon,” Angie said. “Open it.”

  “They” were the police. It wouldn’t take Devin and Oscar long to identify the Unidentified White Male and the Unidentified White Female who shot it out at the train station with gang members, aided by a known gunrunner named Bubba Rogowski.

  I loosened the string at the top of the bag, reached in, and my hand closed around a file folder, maybe a quarter-inch thick. I pulled it out and opened it. More photographs.

  I stood and laid them out on the pew. There were twenty-one in all, their surfaces splintered by the triangles of shadow and light cast by the stained-glass windows. Not one of them contained anything I’d want to look at; all of them contained things I had to.

  They were from the same camera and location that produced the photograph Jenna had given me. Paulson was in most of these, Socia in a few. The same scuzzy motel room, the same grainy texture to the film, the same high camera angle, leading me to assume they were stills from a videotape, the camera probably positioned eight or ten feet up, possibly behind a double mirror.

  In most of the photos, Paulson had removed his underwear but retained his black socks. He seemed to be enjoying himself on the small twin bed with torn, stained sheets.

  The same couldn’t be said for the other person on the bed. The object of Paulson’s affection—if you could call it that—was a child. A young, extremely skinny black boy who couldn’t have been any older than ten or eleven. He wasn’t wearing any socks. He wasn’t wearing anything at all. He didn’t seem to be having as much fun as Paulson.

  He did seem to be in a lot of pain.

  Sixteen of the twenty-one photographs captured the sex act itself. In some of these, Socia appeared, leaning into the frame to give Paulson what appeared to be directions. In one, Socia’s hand gripped the back of the child’s head, yanking it back toward Paulson’s chest, like a rider reining in a horse. Paulson didn’t seem to mind or even notice, his eyes glazed, his lips pursed in pleasure.

  The child seeme
d to mind.

  Of the five remaining photographs, four were of Paulson and Socia as they drank dark liquid from bathroom glasses, chatting it up, leaning against the dresser, having a swell old time. In one of those, the boy’s slim leg was apparent, just out of focus, tangled in the filthy bedsheets.

  Angie said, “Oh, my God,” in a cracked, high-pitched voice that sounded like it came from someone else. The knuckles of her right hand were in her mouth, and her whitening skin rippled. Tears welled in her sockets. The warm, stilted air in the church closed in on me for a moment, a weight against my chest that left me slightly lightheaded. I looked down at the photographs again, and nausea eddied against the walls of my stomach.

  I forced myself to look down at the photos, to hold my eyes there, and soon, my eyes were drawn to the twenty-first the way they would drift toward and fasten onto a single flame in the corner of a dark screen. This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it. It was not taken during the act, but afterward. The boy sat on the bed, uncovered and oblivious, his eyes taking on the ghostly image of what he’d already ceased being. In those eyes was the shriveled cast of dead hope and a closed door. They were the eyes of a brain and a soul that had collapsed under the weight of sensory overload. The eyes of the walking dead, their owner oblivious to his loss, his nakedness.

  I shuffled the photographs back into a pile and closed the file. Numbness was already settling in, clotting the flow of horror and bewilderment. I looked at Angie, saw the same process taking place in her. The shakes had stopped and she stood very still. It wasn’t a sweet feeling, possibly it was harmful in the long run, but at the moment, it was absolutely necessary.