Devon was still lying on the floor. It seemed as though the physical pain had subsided, but he looked utterly defeated.
“I also know that this Kilbranish out there has got your daughter, and he’s going to kill her if he doesn’t get these paintings. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“It means everything to me!” Devon yelled. “It’s the only goddamned thing I care about. I’m giving myself up. I’ll trade myself for her, and I’ll take the pain! Even death!”
Finn shook his head in confusion. “But don’t you understand? You don’t have to. He doesn’t want you, he wants the paintings. If we give those to him, he’s not gonna give a shit about you anymore.”
“Fuck you,” Devon said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Finn looked at Kozlowski. He was staring at Devon, his eyes narrowed. It was clear that he had no better insight than Finn about what was going on.
“Where are the paintings, Devon?” Finn asked again at last.
Devon looked up at him. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The last time Devon saw Whitey Bulger was in December of 1994. It was a dangerous time in Southie; a dangerous time for everyone with connections. The tension in the projects and down along the water crackled as the crisp New England winter set in. There had been a crackdown in recent months on bookmakers across Boston, and people-connected people-had been slipping out of sight. There were whispers everywhere that something was coming. No one knew what or when or how, but that didn’t stop people from believing. They talked about it as if it were an impending apocalypse; a nameless threat hovered everywhere, making everyone jumpy. There’s nothing more dangerous than a community of nervous gangsters.
Devon was at home in his apartment three days before Christmas. Despite the success at the Gardner Museum years earlier, the promise of advancement and opportunity had never materialized. It was as if the whole thing had never happened. The fallout from the robbery in the law-enforcement community was so heavy that the Gardner job wasn’t something he could use; if anything the attention paid to the investigation made him radioactive. Those who knew of his involvement had stayed away from him for years. Worse, he had spent the entire time looking over his shoulder, sure that he would be eliminated at any moment by Bulger or one of his men, just to clean up the loose ends.
When the phone rang and he heard Bulger’s voice on the other end of the line, his heart stopped. “I got a job for you,” Bulger said.
“Okay,” Devon said, the perspiration spreading over his body like the winter fog. “What is it?”
“Not over the phone,” Bulger said. “Tonight. Meet me at the liquor store. One o’clock.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Bulger,” Devon said.
When he hung up the phone, Devon ’s first instinct was to run. He went to his bedroom and opened his drawers, wondering what he would need to take. After a moment, though, his knees gave out and he slumped to the bed. The truth was that nothing he could take would make a difference. A change of clothes and fifty bucks; that was the sum total of his existence. The only thing that kept him alive was the odd job Murphy threw him occasionally. If he left, he’d have nothing. Less than nothing, even.
As he sat there, he thought hard about his situation. If Whitey had wanted him dead, he’d have had it done before now, he figured. It was a rationalization, but he had nothing else. He even convinced himself that maybe this was the start of good things for him-the fulfillment of a promise made years before.
He arrived a few minutes early at the liquor store out of which Whitey ran his business. The lights were off. He went to the front door and pushed. It was locked. He looked around and walked to the back of the building. As he approached he could see that the back door was cracked open ever so slightly. He pulled it open half a foot.
“Mr. Bulger?” he called out softly.
“In here,” came a voice.
Devon thought he would throw up. He could see nothing but darkness inside, and he assumed his life was over. He hesitated.
“Get the fuck in here,” the voice said.
Devon took a deep breath and stepped into the building. He’d passed up whatever chance he’d had to run. “Where are you?” he asked into the darkness.
“Back here. Storage room.”
Devon moved slowly, his hands feeling for danger out in front of him. After a moment he caught the dim shadow cast by a small light toward the back of the storage area. He walked toward the light, feeling slightly more sure-footed as he got closer and the light gave him a better sense of the room. When he got to the door, he pushed it open.
Bulger was there. There was a table in the center of the room, and on the table was a large wooden packing crate. “I need your help movin’ this,” Bulger said.
Devon looked around, expecting to see someone else from Bulger’s crew. It was just the two of them, though. “Sure thing, Mr. Bulger,” Devon said. “Where to? The other room?”
Bulger shook his head. “I got a truck outside,” he said.
“Oh,” Devon said. “Sure. No problem.”
The crate was lighter than Devon had expected. It was a two-man job, but not a strenuous one. The truck outside was a custom van. It had thick brown shag carpeting on the inside and little round bubble windows on the back end. It was the kind of a van Devon had always wanted growing up-the kind guys from the neighborhood got laid in.
He and Bulger loaded the crate into the back and closed the rear doors. “Get in,” Bulger said. He tossed Devon the keys. “You drive.”
Devon climbed into the driver’s seat; Whitey sat next to him. He started the engine and let it idle for a moment. “Where’re we goin’?”
“ Charlestown.” Whitey wasn’t looking at him; he was looking out the window, scanning the parking lot from every angle, looking in the rearview mirror to see if anything was moving. Devon had never seen him nervous before. It didn’t do anything to put Devon at ease. He put the van in gear and pulled out.
Under other circumstances, the drive might have been pleasant. The temperature hovered in the high twenties, and light flurries drifted weightless through the beams cast by the headlights. A thin layer of snow had cleansed the city earlier in the day, and it had remained cold enough for the snow to stick. As Devon crossed through Southie and into Boston, he hesitated. “Which way you wanna go?”
“ Charlestown Bridge,” Bulger replied.
Devon nodded and took the right onto Atlantic, then followed it around, peeling off onto Surface Road, which followed the shadow of the raised highway that separated downtown Boston from the North End, onto North Washington to the four-lane bridge that crossed into the southeastern part of Charlestown. At the far end of the bridge there was a light. “ Take Chelsea Street,” Bulger ordered.
Devon turned and headed north, through Charlestown on the eastern part of town. The place glowed with the holiday season, colored lights warming the street scene through brownstone windows. To the right was the Navy Yard, with its virgin luxury condos; to the left was the flat below Monument Square, with its redeveloped brownstones, their roof decks proclaiming the city’s recent gentrification. With the snow, it looked as though they might have traveled through time to be cruising through the place fifty years earlier.
Chelsea Street quickly fell into the night shadows of the Mystic River Bridge, which towered over the water, headed to Chelsea, where LNG stations and industrial smokestacks dominated the landscape. To the right, the Navy Yard withered away to shoreline, and to the left, the refurbished town houses gave way to battered housing projects. The contrast as they headed north was striking.
Chelsea Street crossed the Little Mystic Channel and turned into Terminal Street at the water’s edge out on Mystic Wharf, a twenty-acre chunk of landfill where Boston ’s Public Works Department stored its vehicles. The place was covered in concrete and jutted out from the mainland into the Mystic River. Thousands upon thousands of ghostly vehicles lined up in an endless parking lot. It was a wasteland, with only a few buildings squatting fat and ugly at the edge of the river.