“It was just the one time, that spring,” he said to Desmond. “The two of you had broken it off. She called me, hysterical, already a little drunk, to tell me she was leaving Boston forever. She came over to my apartment. And I swear on your own son’s head that it was my intent to console. But then more drink was taken, by both of us.” He ran out of words then.
“And you betrayed me,” Desmond said, finishing the thought for his brother. “The both of you.”
“I loved her first,” Felix said.
I wondered what Desmond would have done in the moment if his hands were not bound behind him.
“She called me a few months later, without telling me where she was,” Felix said. “She told me she was pregnant, and that it had to be my child, and that her father was making arrangements. I didn’t ask what the arrangements were, and she didn’t tell me. What she did tell me was that she never wanted to see me, or you, ever again.”
“You’re all lying!” Bobby Toms shouted now.
“I’m not,” Felix said.
In a much quieter voice, Bobby Toms, talking only to himself now, said, “Fuck it. Time to end this.”
“Yeah,” Joseph Marchetti said, and turned away from Richie and me and shot Bobby Toms in the forehead.
Marchetti took a step back then, slightly away from the window, so he could see us all at once and said, “The old man told me to tie up as many loose ends as I had to.” He grinned. “Starting with the loose cannon.”
He looked at Desmond and Felix and said, “Now who wants it first?”
Then everything seemed to happen at once, Joseph Marchetti pointing his gun at Desmond and Felix throwing himself and his chair sideways to put himself in the line of fire, in the instant before Marchetti pulled the trigger. Then I was clearing my own gun and rolling off the couch as the window behind Marchetti and behind Richie and me shattered, and a bullet from outside hit Marchetti in the back of his head and he went down next to Bobby Toms.
Richie was already across the room, kneeling next to his uncle Felix, the one who’d raised him more than his own father had, the one who’d just taken a bullet intended for Desmond Burke in the back.
Then Vinnie Morris was kicking in what was left of the shattered side window and stepping through it, saying, “I didn’t have a clear shot because the two of you were in the way, but I figured I couldn’t wait no longer. Then the guy moved just enough.”
Richie was holding his uncle Felix in his arms. I went and got a kitchen knife and cut loose the rope tying Desmond’s hands, and then Desmond was lying next to his brother on the floor, saying something that I could not hear and feared Felix could not hear.
Blood was blood.
I called 911, and then Pete Colapietro.
Sixty-Nine
Richie and Desmond rode in the ambulance with Felix on the way to Rhode Island Hospital, the same one in which Maria Cataldo had died.
Then it was just Vinnie Morris and me. Before Richie and I had left Jake’s, I had told Vinnie that if he didn’t hear from us within an hour after we left him and Spike at the diner that he needed to come after us.
Spike had asked why I didn’t want him to be the one to come after us.
“Because Vinnie is a better shot than you,” I’d said.
“Better than anybody,” Vinnie had said.
Before he left, Vinnie had apologized again for not getting a clear enough shot before Marchetti shot Bobby. I told him that it had finally become a moment, as embarrassed as I was to say it, when he needed to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Yeah,” he said. Then he said, “That expression you always use about the balloon going up? That fucker had gone up.”
“There was more I wanted to know,” I said.
“It was them or you,” he said. “And Richie.”
I knew it hadn’t been an ethical choice for Vinnie, even though I knew he operated by a code he had constructed for himself, one where he wasn’t a criminal, just the people who hired him. And Vinnie knew when I had enlisted him to help tonight that I wanted Bobby Toms arrested, not shot. But what had ended in this room, Bobby is the one who had started it all. Until it had been him or us.
Then Vinnie was gone, almost as if he hadn’t been there at all, on his way back to Jake’s to pick up the men from his crew with whom he had originally driven down from Boston. Somewhere between Jake’s and his bowling alley, I knew his long gun would disappear forever.
Pete Colapietro lived close enough to Black Point that he managed to beat what seemed half of the Providence Police Department to the scene. When he arrived I told him that Bobby Toms, likely with the assistance of Joseph Marchetti, had kidnapped Desmond Burke and brought him here. That Marchetti had walked Richie and me into this room. That shortly thereafter, shooting had commenced.
Colapietro listened. By now I knew he was the kind of cop Belson was. And my father had been. He would be able to pretty much remember what I was telling him, word for word.
“So Marchetti shot Bobby Toms first,” Pete said.
“Yes.”
“Pretty much at the same time that another shot came from outside and put down Marchetti,” he said.
I could hear the first sirens in the distance.
“Must have been a sniper,” I said.
He gave me a long look. “You know I like you, Sunny,” he said. “I’ve been pulling some strings for you. I kept the Taunton cops away from that diner tonight. I rode around with you the other day on my own time. But I’m a cop. And a goddamn good one. And even both of us knowing that a couple of no-good guys came off the books tonight, I know there’s a lot of shit you’re not telling me here. Starting with who the outside shooter was who shot Antonioni’s shooter.”
The sirens were getting louder.
Pete nodded at the window.
“Guy who could make that kind of shot in the night, from a distance,” he said.
“Maybe Albert thought these guys were making too much trouble for him,” I said. “Maybe he hired somebody. Who can know these things?”
He gave me another long look. “You know anybody who can make a shot like that?” he said.
“Only heard of them,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”
“I just got caught up in the middle of a Mob war,” I said. “All the way to the end.”
“That’s your story,” Pete Colapietro said.
“And I’m sticking to it,” I said.
Pete said, “I’m gonna need you to come to the station and make a statement. And answer some questions that I might not be the only one asking.”
I told him Richie and I had left the car up the road a bit.
“We’ll go now,” Pete said.
“Understood,” I said.
By now the cavalry had arrived, lights flashing, cars making plenty of noise on the gravel driveway. Pete badged everyone in sight, telling them that I was with him. We got into his car. He drove me to my car.
On the way to downtown Providence Richie called and told me that Felix Burke had died not long after they’d gotten him inside the hospital.
Sins of the father, I thought.
Felix being the father.
Seventy
We had sat up long into the night after Felix Burke’s funeral, Desmond, Richie, me. We had been drinking whiskey for some time. Irish, appropriately enough. Midleton Very Rare. Desmond was finally ready to tell some of the things Bobby Toms had told him after Bobby had taken him from this house in the night, things about his mother and the life they had shared in Arizona, in a house in the name of one of Vincent Cataldo’s shell companies, about how when the money she had inherited from her father had finally run out, she had decided to call Albert Antonioni.