“I thought they called it an administration.” Bobby doesn’t know why he loves to fuck with Bureau guys so much, but he does.
“Whatever they call it, those little worms with guns, those little gerbils with badges, they’re up on the Butlers too, apparently, which we didn’t know until they busted one of his guys.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“He was our guy. Been working one of Marty’s chop shops for six months, and DEA went and cocked the whole thing up.”
“That’s too bad.” Bobby pats his pockets for his cigarettes, gets a bolt of panic when he realizes they’re not there. He looks around wildly, spies them right there on his desk, where he laid them about thirty seconds ago.
Across the bullpen, Vincent sticks his head out of Interview Room B and bulges his eyes at Bobby with a clear Get in here message. He scowls and closes the door again.
“Yeah, it is too bad,” Giles is saying. “Duplication of effort doesn’t help anyone. The solution is to just pick one team to run point.”
Bobby scoops up his cigarettes and matches. “Great idea,” he says, grinning from ear to ear. “We’ll take it.”
“Oh, no,” Giles says quickly, “you guys got enough on your plate. Why don’t you let us run point?”
“Why don’t we schedule a meeting over it?”
“Sure, but until then we could just have a handshake deal that—”
“I’ll have my girl reach out to your girl. We’ll get a meeting on the books.”
“Okay, but Bobby—”
“Gotta go, Giles.” Bobby hangs up.
My girl reach out to your girl. Where does he come up with this shit?
In Interview Room B, Ronald “Rum” Collins is sitting on the far side of the table looking like someone used his face for golf practice. Some of the damage is older, and Bobby recalls that Mary Pat got to the kid in a bar about a week ago. The new damage consists of a torn right eyebrow, a swollen left ear, a black, bulbous right eye socket (on top of the older yellowed bruising from a week ago), teeth blackened with blood, and cuts to his neck that look like they came from a razor blade or the flick of an extremely sharp knife.
But as Vincent warned Bobby, the worst of him is just below the waist. He smells like piss and even some shit, and his jeans are stuck to him with blood.
“What’s up, Rum?” Bobby sits across from him, trying not to smile at the absurdity of the sentence he’s just uttered. Why is everything so funny tonight? Then it hits him: Because — for the moment, anyway — I’ve got someone in my life. Makes everything a little brighter.
And the next thought: Christ, let this one last.
Rum is biting the inside of his lip like it’s his job. Bobby doesn’t even want to think what it looks like in there. “She’s gonna kill me.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say.”
“Let me take a wild guess — Mary Pat Fennessy.”
“I can’t fucking say! I won’t fucking say!”
Bobby leans over the table, gets a good look at the bloody crotch of Rum’s jeans. “What’d she do to you, kid? She cut it off?”
“No!” Rum looks away for a bit, chewing on his lower lip like a rabbit now. “Said she would, though.”
“So where’s the blood from?”
“She, like, sliced at it.”
“Your dick?”
“Under my balls.”
“This is Mary Pat Fennessy we’re talking about?”
Rum almost nods and then snaps to, and a wave of fear smell — rank and metallic — pops through all his pores. “I’m not going to fucking say, no matter how much you ask.”
“Okay.” Bobby offers him a cigarette. “Well, what will you say?”
Rum takes the cigarette and the light Bobby offers next. “I’ll tell you what happened on the platform that night.”
Behind Rum, Vincent raises his eyebrows at Bobby as if to say: See?
Bobby places an ashtray in front of him. “You mind if my partner takes notes?”
Rum shakes his head, his eyes on the table. “Sure.”
Behind Rum, Vincent beams, his eyes the size of headlights.
When the group of kids broke up at Columbia Park around midnight, Rum, George Dunbar, Brenda Morello, and Jules Fennessy started for Carson Beach. But just before they reached Day Boulevard and prepared to cross to the beach, Brenda realized she’d left her keys back in the park somewhere. They were on a ring along with a white rabbit’s foot and a bottle opener, the latter of which had come into play a few dozen times that night.
So they went back to the park to search for the keys. They were just about to give up when Jules spotted something white under one of the bleacher seats and — voilà — Brenda’s keys. Columbia Park was empty now, so they sat back down and opened four more beers, and George passed around a joint. This was the good shit, he assured them, not the Mexican colitas he sold to schmucks but real Southern Californian sinsemilla. Truth was, Rum Collins couldn’t tell the difference, but he figured all the booze was clouding his taste buds.
That was when George Dunbar, looking out at the road, said, “That’s right — don’t even fucking look at me.”
At first no one knew who he was talking to, but then they all got a look at the car passing them, its exhaust belching, nigger kid behind the wheel looking at them.
“Drop those fucking eyes, spook,” George said in a voice so low they could barely hear it. “Or I won’t be responsible for what I do.”
The black kid did drop his eyes — either by coincidence or due to some sixth sense for imminent danger — and the car belched and sputtered its way past them, going so slow it almost seemed to be floating. It passed under the expressway, where they lost it in the vast shadow cast by the overpass, and they didn’t hear it anymore.
Jules was talking to Brenda in harsh, desperate whispers. She said, “I’m calling him.”
Brenda said, “No. Wait till tomorrow. Cool off.”
“He doesn’t have to call it his own, he just has to pay for it.”
Bobby stops Rum for a second. “You’re saying Jules Fennessy was pregnant?”
“What?”
Bobby says, “She said, ‘He doesn’t have to call it his own, he just has to pay for it.’”
Rum thinks about it. “She coulda been talking about anything.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Like a pet. Or a car.”
This moron can fucking vote, Bobby despairs. And breed.
“All right,” he tells Rum, “after she says she’s gonna call him — and who’s ‘him,’ by the way?”
Rum pauses quite a while before he gives it all up: “Well, Frankie.”
It takes Bobby a few seconds, but then somehow he knows, out of all the Frankies in the world, who the kid’s referring to. “Frank Toomey?”
“Yeah.”
Holy fuck. Bobby turns in his chair, meets Vincent’s eyes. Vincent looks as flabbergasted as Bobby feels.
“Jules Fennessy was seeing Frank Toomey?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re telling us this now because...?”
“Because she said she’d fucking kill me if I didn’t.”
Bobby looks down the table at Vincent to make sure he didn’t write that last exchange into the record. Vincent is holding his pen aloft, so Bobby knows he didn’t.
No more questions to Rum about why he’s talking, Bobby reminds himself, just let him talk.