“I won’t lose my job or my pension or my boy,” Bobby tells his sisters now.
“As long as you don’t fuck with Marty Butler.”
“He’s a fucking criminal,” Bobby says. “I’m a cop.”
“He’s a connected criminal,” Claire reminds him.
It isn’t just fellow cops Marty Butler has in his pocket. There are judges for sure, probably at least one congressman or state senator, and maybe, just maybe, the darkest of the dark whispers say, someone or maybe a half-dozen someones in federal law enforcement. Over the years, far too many potential witnesses against Marty or his associates — whose identities were kept under lock and key, mind you — have vanished or been killed.
“I know,” Bobby assures them all. “It was kids chased Auggie Williamson into the station. And no matter what I find out, it’s not looking like first-degree murder. Might not rise much higher than involuntary manslaughter.” He yawns into his fist, exhausted. “I’m gonna hit it, ladies.”
He puts his beer can in the trash, gives each sister a peck on the cheek, and heads up to bed.
After a shower, he sits by his window and smokes and looks out at the night. He told his sisters the truth — he doubts the kids who were instrumental in the events that led to Auggie Williamson’s death will face serious prison time. And that fact, he realizes, was what created the sudden wave of exhaustion.
He’d stood with the parents, Reginald and Calliope Williamson, as they identified their son in the morgue. They didn’t cry or wail. They took in the breadth of their son lying on the metal table and each ran their hands down one of his arms — Reginald on the left, Calliope on the right. Then they did the same to his cheeks. With their hands there — each pressed to their son’s face — Reginald said, “I love you, my son,” and Calliope said, “We are always with you.”
Bobby’s seen a lot of parents identify their dead offspring. It stopped getting to him some time ago. But the way the Williamsons beheld their son, how they’d caressed his arms and face, as if doing so might provide warmth on his journey to the other side, stuck with Bobby for most of the day.
If four black kids had chased a white kid into the path of a train, they’d be facing life. If they entered a plea, the best offer would be a minimum of twenty years hard time. But the kids who chased Auggie Williamson into the path of a train won’t, Bobby knows, face more than five years. If that.
And sometimes that disparity wears him the fuck out.
Bobby finishes his cigarette and climbs into bed.
When he closes his eyes, he can see Reginald and Calliope’s palms gliding ever so slowly along the bare arms of their dead son.
Not how you ever imagined it would end twenty years after you first burped him and changed his diapers.
Bobby’s killed two people in his life. Neither could have been older than eighteen. One may have been fifteen, sixteen. Bobby has no way of knowing for sure. He killed them both in Vietnam on the same day while he defoliated bush near his base. The VC hid in vegetation. They harvested food from vegetation. So Uncle Sam sent Bobby and his platoon out with a South Vietnamese platoon to poison the fuck out of the countryside around their base. They had hand sprayers and spray trucks. Farther south they were using helicopters. Someday soon, Bobby had heard, they planned to drop the shit out of planes.
The kids who came out of the bush did so from both sides of the road, skinny little fuckers with square heads and rifles or machetes bigger than they were, firing or swinging away like it was do or die, now or never. Which, as it turns out, it was. Bobby shot one of them in the face with his M14, was tackled right in the road by another who had a fucking machete but didn’t think to use it until Bobby was on the ground. Bobby put the muzzle of his .45 into the kid’s abdomen and fired up twice. Blew the kid’s esophagus to shreds. Was looking into the boy’s eyes as those bullets ripped through his body. Was looking into his eyes a few seconds later when the boy died, Bobby thinking, Why didn’t you use the machete before you tackled me?
That was back in the days when the VC was still figuring it out. That morning Bobby and the other guys killed fifteen of them, the whole gang. The corpses lay on the road afterward, and it was clear from their rib cages that none of them had eaten a full meal in months.
Two of them were dead because they’d tried to kill Corporal Michael “Bobby” Coyne of Dorchester, Massachusetts. But he knew they were really dead because they were in the way. Of profit. Of philosophy. Of a worldview that said rules apply only to the people who aren’t in charge of making them.
Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something — anything — that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.
Bobby lies in a soft comfortable bed nine thousand miles and twelve years removed from those dead boys on the road and decides that tomorrow he’s going to haul all four of those Southie kids in.
13
The next morning Bobby sends out four cruisers to pick the kids up. The uniforms come back with only two of the kids, though. Julie Fennessy still seems to be in the wind; no one’s seen her since the night Auggie Williamson died. The rumor on the street is that she’s down in Florida, but nobody knows where specifically. It nags at Bobby — the mother was clearly worried about her daughter’s whereabouts. But if the girl was involved in a death, taking off to Florida might make sense, particularly to a seventeen-year-old.
The other miss is George Dunbar, the drug dealer. He’s the son of Marty Butler’s main piece of ass, which might mean the patrolmen didn’t look too hard for him or maybe didn’t even look at all.
Which means when Bobby and Vincent go down to holding, the only two assholes waiting for them in the interview rooms are Ronald Collins and Brenda Morello. Ronald Collins, a Southie kid from a line of Collinses who go back to the potato famine, is as dumb as his older brothers, his father, and his three uncles, most of whom, per Bobby’s recent research, have done time. He’s a hard case not because he’s particularly hard but because he’s too fucking stupid to know there’s any other way to be.
Brenda Morello, on the other hand, with her wet eyes and her shaky chin, is the jackpot. She’s been ready to blab since the moment she was picked up walking to her summer job at Sullivan’s on Castle Island. When Bobby and Vincent enter the interview room, she looks up at them with her tear-streaked face, and the first words out of her mouth are “Can I please go home?”
Bobby takes the seat across from her.
Vincent remains standing, which, of course, makes Brenda more nervous.
Bobby gives her his friendliest smile. “Just want to ask you a couple of questions.”
“And then I can go home?”
She can walk right out the door right now — she hasn’t been charged with anything — but she doesn’t grasp that, and it’s not part of their job description to enlighten her.
“Can you tell us what you did Saturday night?”
Brenda pretends to think about it, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. “I dunno. Hung out.”
“Where?”
“You know.”
“We don’t.”
“Around.”
“Around Columbia Park?” Bobby says.
She stares back at him, her mind working furiously now that his question confirms all her fears about why she’s there.
“You were there with Ronald Collins, George Dunbar, and Jules Fennessy.”