She places the muzzle of the .38 into his midsection and reaches across his body to unlock the handcuff from the seat belt latch plate. She digs the muzzle farther into his abdomen, looks in his eyes, their noses only half an inch apart. She takes his wrist and swings it across their bodies and snaps the cuff into the driver’s wheel.
She sits back and places the gun back under her shirt. “I look at you now, George, and I see a little boy who’s scared, who wants a second chance. But they don’t hand out second chances when you’re an adult. Not around here. As a mother, I want to hold you in my arms. I want to whisper ‘Shh’ in your ear and tell you everything will be all right.”
He’s looking at her wildly, like maybe she’ll do these things. “So, so, help me, Mrs. Fennessy. Please.”
“I’d love to, George. I would.” She caresses the back of his head and presses her forehead to his for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is kind and motherly. “But then? Then I remember that you sold my son the drugs that killed him, you murdered that poor black boy who just wanted to get home, and you helped bury my daughter in a basement.” She removes her forehead from his, holds his hateful gaze with her own. “So I don’t give a flying fuck, really, whether you die tonight or live a long hellish life in prison. I just know if I never look on your face again, it’ll be a blessing from God Himself.”
He repeatedly yanks the handcuff against the wheel as she exits the car.
She stops at a pay phone beside the Tea Party Museum and dials the number on the card she was given last week.
He answers on the third ring. “Detective Coyne.”
She tells him where to find George Dunbar and hangs up.
24
Though the OPEC oil embargo officially ended five months earlier, a major side effect of the gas shortages of ’73 is that no one drives around with a tank that’s any less than half full. You never know when the Arabs are going to hold the oil hostage again, and no one wants to get stuck sitting for hours on end in those fucking lines.
So the cars parked out front of the Fields of Athenry that night are all sitting on gas tanks at least two thirds full. Most, including Marty Butler’s AMC Matador, are topped up all the way. When someone tears a man’s shirt — what arson investigators will later determine was the dress uniform of a U.S. Army corporal — into strips, ties the bottom of each strip to a small stone, and drops those strips into the gas tanks of every car parked in front of the Fields, it would take only a match, a firm hand, and balls the size of fucking ostrich eggs to light one hell of a fire.
Which is what happens.
The men in the bar notice the light playing off the windows. It almost seems like Christmas lights, maybe strung in a garland between two streetlamps and lifting in the winter breeze. But it’s not winter, and those aren’t Christmas lights. By the time they all get out to the sidewalk, it’s like the end of the world or some fucking thing. Six cars in a row — half a block of them — are bonfires. Smoke and heat roil off the shells in oily waves.
They pull the hoses out from behind the bar and grab every fire extinguisher they can lay their hands on to keep the flames from hitting the bar itself, but the heat is like the heat of hell, and when the car windows start to blow out, guys get blasted with pebbles of glass. Poor Weeds catches a bunch of it in his right ear, enough to turn it into ground pork, as if his face weren’t already bad enough, and they drag him back into the bar and someone goes looking for tweezers.
By the time the firemen show up, sparks drizzle off the roof and fat blue flames dance along the exterior walls of the bar. Everyone’s evacuated. So they’re standing there on the street — Marty and Frankie and Brian Shea and about fifteen other guys in the most feared crew on the south side of the city — and they’re all sooty and bewildered, and the firemen push them back like they’re regular citizens, everyday fucking schmoes.
It’s Brian Shea who looks beyond the roof of the bar to the top of the building behind it and says, “Oh my God.”
The firemen see it too, and they start shouting and pointing and calling for backup.
They’d all thought the bar was on fire, but the bar has just a couple of sparks and flames to deal with, flames that are already dying under the weight of the water smashing into them. But the house behind the bar — the house where Marty has done his deals and run his girls and his casino nights for wiseguys all across New England — that’s got towers of flame shooting twelve feet high off the top of it.
They try to get to it, but the firemen push them back. Now the police are there and EMTs and, fuck, even reporters from 4, 5, and 7 and the Globe, the Herald, the Argus, and the Patriot Ledger.
Marty watches it all burn and says to Frankie, “If this is who I think it is, it falls on you, Tombstone. All on you.”
Bobby finds a message taped to his desk lamp the next morning:
To: Det. Sgt. M. Coyne
Fr: Some Southie Broad
Message: Sorry I burned the toast. She never got to Florida. She never left the cellar.
Bobby can tell from the handwriting that Cora Sterns took the message. He finds her coming out of the women’s locker room in street clothes. She doesn’t want to stand around work one second longer than she has to, so Bobby has to hotfoot beside her toward the parking lot.
“When did the call come in?”
“Three in the morning.”
“She called herself ‘Southie Broad’?”
“Called herself ‘Some Southie Broad.’”
“And she said she burned the toast?”
Cora pushes out through the door into the parking lot. “She insisted I put that in the message. I was like, ‘Lady, you fucking up the detective’s breakfast sounds like personal business you don’t call in on a department line.’ But she made me write it down.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t give your chippies your work number, Detective, let your sisters deal with them.”
“Yes, Cora.”
She shoots him a kinda friendly/kinda not middle finger as she walks to her car.
Twenty minutes later, Bobby hears about the fire in Southie last night, and the penny drops.
The arson investigators, tracing the point of origin, determined that the blaze started in the basement. They hand Bobby an oxygen mask and tank, tell him the basement flooring was recently done over with cement that’s still settling, so the fumes are toxic. They lead him down a blackened set of stairs and shine a light on a dark brown oval in the center of the floor. The rest of the floor is a goopy blue-gray. There’s a film of it over the brown oval, but it’s thin.
The arson investigator’s voice comes through his mask as if up from a bathtub. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
Bobby nods.
It takes them half the day to get the body up. They’re all down there, sweating their balls off in masks and hazmat whites and the firemen trying to shore up the whole basement and make sure it doesn’t collapse on their heads. To dig up the body, they have to send someone out to the special-equipment warehouse in Canton to get the right tool, which looks like a jackhammer with a putty-knife blade, but it cuts a perfect rectangle in the floor that looks, appropriately, like a coffin.
They keep taking trips upstairs to the grotto outside because, even with the masks and oxygen, it’s easy to get dizzy down there. Brian Shea and half a dozen Butler guys watch them from the little tables out back of the bar, ask them why they’re not somewhere fighting real crime, maybe busting the niggers before they can come in here and fuck up the schools and every other fucking thing by Thursday.