“What about the recipe?”
Ingredients weren’t that hard to come by, he explained.
“Basic pharmaceutical supplies, ephedrine, phenylacetone, hydrochloric acid. Thing to look out for, it’s dangerous, cooking meth. You’re working with volatile materials, you can blow yourself up. And then there’s the fumes. That’s a giveaway, the smell of acetone and ammonia, like nail polish or cat urine, plus you got your toxic slurry, four or five pounds of waste for each pound of product. Two ways to go. You stake out an industrial area with a lot of smudge and smut, or you go out in the boonies where the neighbors don’t complain.”
“So it’s messy, and it stinks, and it’s an explosive mix,” I said. “Which makes it sound perfect for a crew of sociopathic losers like these outlaw bikers.”
I could hear Dugan sucking on his teeth. “Far be it from me to step on your toes, Jack, but the Disciples are a seriously mean outfit. How’d you fasten onto this?”
“Guy name of Chip McGill, over in Charlestown,” I told him. “I heard they were his new source for product.”
There was an even longer silence this time around.
I waited him out.
“You sure know how to pick ’em,” he said at last. “You’re headed for a long walk off a short pier, you fish that water.”
“Care to give me a little more detail?”
“Okay. Chip McGill’s the type, he’s burning the candle at both ends. He’s a loose cannon, and sooner or later the Bunker Hill boys are going to take him out. I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t already turned up in the trunk of a parked car out in the long-term lot at Logan.”
Long-term parking at the airport was a favored method of putting a dead body on ice. It did double duty. First, the crime scene was stale by the time Homicide got to it, but there was a secondary benefit. A corpse left unattended swells with fluids and eventually bursts and putrefies. Nobody wants his family to see him like that. So it was an object lesson.
“Anyway, your little pal there, this McGill, he’s a bad apple, take my word for it,” Dugan went on. “He’s got a sheet going back to juvie, he’s done time for distribution, he’s been pulled in on assault, conspiracy, murder. Whether it stuck to him or not, we’re talking mainline hood here. He’s been on the radar a while. Major Crimes wants him bad.”
“I don’t know as that’s really my lookout, Frank,” I said. “I just don’t want to accidentally stumble into a rat’s nest.”
“You will be, you try to put the arm on this chump.”
“Far as I know, McGill is in the background,” I said, “part of the scenery.”
“I think you’re horsing me around, but I guess it’s not for me to say,” he remarked. “My advice would be to walk away.”
“I’m not out to bust the guy’s chops. All I want is a quiet word.”
“Chip McGill is a nut job, and a speed freak on top of it,” Dugan said. “Give him an excuse, he’ll whack you out.”
“Well, that’s not very encouraging,” I said.
“It’s not supposed to be. The point is, all you have to do is wait about six months, and he won’t be a problem.”
“Yeah, I understood you the first time. Somebody with a bone to pick is likely to put the guy in the ground. Trouble is that I don’t have six months to wait.”
“Do what you gotta do,” Dugan said.
“What about habits and habitat?” I asked him.
“He holds court at a joint called the Blue Mirror, by the Navy Yard. You know it?”
I was afraid I did.
“Most every afternoon between four and six. Happy hour.”
“That’s pretty deep in Indian Country,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to tell you,” Dugan said cheerfully and hung up.
Boston is a town known for its tough, parochial neighborhoods, Southie, Charlestown, the North End, Fields Corner and Savin Hill in Dorchester, and the neighborhood bars that cater to the locals are often like ethnic social clubs, friendly and familiar to initiates but suspicious of outsiders.
The Blue Mirror was in Charlestown, right outside the main gates of the Navy Yard, where the USS Constitution is berthed.
The yard’s fallen on hard times since the seventies, deactivated with defense cutbacks, new keels being laid at Bath Iron Works in Maine and down at Norfolk and out on the West Coast in Puget Sound. Developers have had their eye on it over the years and now it’s a National Historic Site, but as a shipbuilding facility and a port of call for bluewater sailors, it’s been mothballed. Even when the yard was an active military installation, though, the Blue Mirror was off-limits to enlisted personnel.
There were rougher places, I’m sure, but you probably had to go to Belfast or Kingston, Jamaica, to find them. All the same, at four-thirty in the afternoon it looked pretty tame. A couple dozen vehicles were parked outside, vans, pickups, muscle cars, along with some choppers, low-slung panhead Harleys sporting ape-hangers and chromed valve covers. I went on in.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The room was long and low, opening up like a keyhole at the far end, where there was a small hardwood dance floor and a band was doing a sound check, testing levels. The bar itself ran along the near wall, probably thirty-five or forty feet, with two guys working behind the stick. The only lighting was a set of pinpoint spots down the back bar, the narrow focus putting the bottles on the shelves in high relief and making the liquor seem lit from within, like coals. Having the light behind them, the bartenders were in silhouette, so their faces were unreadable. The effect was a little sinister, but I guessed it might even be intentional, giving them the edge on a rowdy crowd when the clock edged last call.
They had Sam Adams on tap. I ordered a draft. Glancing down at the bar, I saw there seemed to be loose change scattered all over it, but when I tried to nudge a dime with my finger, I realized the coins were polyurethaned into the surface. It made me feel like a dope for falling for it, and it marked me as a stranger in a place where I wanted to be taken for furniture. I nursed my beer and looked around.
Given that it was a little shy of quitting time for a day job, the Mirror was pretty busy, and most of the people in there were guys. Not many of them were dressed like they’d come from work, either. Nobody in coveralls wearing a hammer holster or spattered with paint, anyway. Everyone seemed to be wearing aggressive casual, double-knits or Dockers depending on the age bracket.
I picked up my beer and wandered down the bar toward the bandstand. Tucked around the corner was a pool table, a quarter a game. The guy leaning over the table to break was wearing colors, biker leathers with an elaborate design on the back like an old Grateful Dead album. He broke open the rack but didn’t make any balls, and when he straightened up, I could make out the gang insignia better. It looked like a representation of Leonardo’s Last Supper but with Satan at the head of the table. Hitler, Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah were among his guests. Underneath, in Gothic script, was a legend that read THE DISCIPLES. I turned back to the bar, ordered a second beer, and asked for my change in quarters.
The girl the biker was playing pool with looked underage, strung-out sixteen, no more than a hundred pounds wringing wet, tie-dyed tank top and jeans she kept tugging up because she didn’t have any hips for them to hang on to. But she had tattoos across her shoulder blades and enough piercings to set off a metal detector — ear clips and a stud in her lower lip and one at the outer edge of each eyelid, the extreme outer edge where it wouldn’t scratch the sclera of her eyes if she looked sideways. She made five solids without breaking a sweat and then scratched with a cross-corner shot on the seven.