“Doesn’t mean an old guy didn’t send him,” Spike said. “Which gives you a leg up.”
“In what way?”
“Old guys are like your thing these days,” he said.
He said he was sleeping on the couch, and there wasn’t going to be any debate or smart talk about that. I told him I was too tired for either, and that he had Rosie, the two of them could battle it out for space.
I finished my Jameson, decided against taking more Advil, and went to bed, where I finally managed to sleep, dreaming about drowning because a hand kept holding my head underneath the water and not letting it up.
Twenty-Six
The pain, in both my side and my head, wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be when I awakened.
There was bruising in the rib-cage area, I noticed when I took another hot shower. No bruising on the side of my face, though it felt tender near my right ear. It was official that I’d lost the fight. But the bastard hadn’t knocked me out. Spike left after I came out of the shower. He told me that if I didn’t check in with him every couple hours, he planned to call a cop. Preferably a cute one.
The guy had said what he’d said to me last night. In the text message to Felix, the guy had told him to ask Desmond how it felt when it was someone he loved. He had not mentioned a gun deal. It didn’t mean that the deal wasn’t a part of this.
What if it wasn’t just about one thing?
What if it was somehow about love, in some way I still couldn’t begin to understand, and money?
I considered that as I walked Rosie up Charles Street, gun in one pocket of my hoodie, a taser in the other pocket. As ever: Not being paranoid. Just alert.
“What if it really is about both?” I said to Rosie on Charles Street. “What if, as they used to say in the old movies, it’s heaters and a broad?”
Rosie looked up at me, always optimistic herself, as if a treat might be forthcoming. Which it was. When we got home I called Frank Belson and told him what had happened to me, and asked if anybody in the department could tell me more about a possible gun deal with the Burkes than Albert Antonioni had.
“First off, you’re all right?” he said.
“Is that concern I hear from you, you big lug?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.
“I’ll live,” I said.
“Shit,” he said. “I was afraid of that.”
“I’m trying to assemble the pieces to a puzzle here,” I said, “but I’m starting to think it might be more than one puzzle.”
“I’ll call Quirk,” Belson said. “He still knows everybody. Including guys from ATF.”
“I would be most grateful,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “Our relationship continues to be give and take. I give. You take.”
Said he would get back to me and hung up.
I made myself coffee and sat there at the kitchen table drinking it, still nagged by the feeling that I had missed something the night before.
It only made my head start to hurt all over again.
I reviewed everything he’d said to me one more time, including the part about telling Desmond he was fucking with him because he could. And made a promise, to myself, that I would do the same to him, first chance I got, the sonofabitch.
Twenty-Seven
I met Charlie Whitaker, retired ATF, at George Lane Beach in Weymouth, on Boston’s South Shore, once known as the Irish Riviera. Charlie said he’d rather meet me at the beach, a short walk from his home.
“Mrs. Whitaker,” he’d said on the phone, “prefers I no longer discuss firearms in the house.”
We sat on a bench, two coffee cups he’d brought with him from Panera between us. He was a tall, thin man who still had a lot of wavy white hair and still looked fit enough to be on the job.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.
“Belson called Quirk,” he said. “Quirk called me. Felt like the old days.”
“I assume Frank told you what I’ve been hearing about the Burkes,” I said.
“Wasn’t surprised,” he said.
“Why so?”
“Because there’s something going on lately, up and down the coast, even if we haven’t yet been able to get our arms around it, or our hands on the bad guys,” Whitaker said. “You probably know this, but used to be there wasn’t enough volume, no matter how steady the flow of guns was from down south, to make big enough money to get the big guys fully engaged. But over the last few months, we’ve heard about shipments disappearing. One here, one there. At first our guys thought it might be random. Couple trucks that simply went missing. Not front-page stuff, just noteworthy if you’re in the game. It’s as if someone is stockpiling. But the guys on my crew don’t believe those guns simply vanished. They’re somewhere.”
I grinned and said, “Stop, Charlie. You’re going too fast for me.”
“My old crew is on this, believe me,” he said. “But so far they’ve come up with nothing.”
I thought about my conversation with Albert Antonioni, who’d acted about as interested in the gun business as he was in lawn bowling.
Whitaker gave me a brief tutorial then about the Iron Pipeline, the name given to I-95 by various bad guys, from biker gangs to gun-runners. The people in charge, Whitaker said, send straw buyers with clean records to states like Virginia, where restrictions on gun sales are generally softer than soft ice cream. Then they bring the guns back, in whatever bulk they can manage, and sell them on the street in places like Providence, and before long the guns are on their way to Boston and various gang members.
“Any particular ethnicity?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “The country of mutts.”
He sipped some coffee and stared at the boats on the water.
“What they’re basically doing is trafficking in legal illegal guns that were originally purchased legally in fucking Gun Show America,” he said. “Then they start passing through one pair of hands and another — and another — until somebody’s using one of them to shoot somebody in the head.”
He smiled. “You can see why Mrs. Whitaker doesn’t want such talk in her kitchen?”
“Discretion,” I said.
“Better part of all that valor shit.”
“So it really could be worth it to Desmond and Felix Burke to get big into the gun business this late in their lives?”
“Especially if they’ve figured out a way to become one-stop shopping for all of New England,” he said. “Listen, guys like them have taken a big hit because of online gambling the way everybody else has, something that was always their bread and butter. Now, that hasn’t dried up completely, mind you. But the online stuff has created a drag. And they were never into girls the way Albert always has been, though I keep hearing that Tony Marcus might want to expand his interests down here. You know him, right?”
“Far better than I would prefer.”
“On top of everything else we’re talking about, it’s even been a while since the Burkes had the loansharking business to themselves in Boston,” Charlie Whitaker said, still staring out at the water. “So in a world where the fucking NRA becomes like an unindicted coconspirator if you want to buy and move guns, maybe switching lanes is just a practical matter for Desmond.”
“How much volume would there have to be?” I said.
“Most people just do it twenty to thirty guns at a time,” he said. “Most popular item, even after all this time, is still a nine-millimeter. But if Desmond has a way to expand that to bigger guns, like that AR-15, and trade in really big numbers, the old man could do very well for himself.”
“Albert Antonioni wanted me to think he himself isn’t particularly interested in the gun business,” I said.