Darkness, Take My Hand Page 3

  Angie exhaled loudly behind me.

  “You’re clear, Patrick,” he said as I stepped onto a patch of floor about ten feet away from him. He narrowed his eyes at Angie. “Don’t be such a sissy, Ange.”

  Angie was standing with one knee raised looking a lot like a stork. A very put-out stork, actually. She said, “When I get there, I’m shooting you, Bubba Rogowski.”

  “Oooh,” Bubba said. “She used my full name. Just like my mom used to.”

  “You never knew your mother,” I reminded him.

  “Psychically, Patrick,” he said and touched his protruding frontal lobe. “Psychically.”

  Booby traps aside, sometimes I worry about him.

  Angie stepped onto the patch of floor I’d just vacated.

  “You’re clear,” Bubba said and she punched his shoulder.

  “Anything else we should worry about?” I said. “Spears falling from the ceiling, razor blades in the chairs?”

  “Not unless I activate them.” He walked back toward an old fridge which sat beside two worn brown sofas, an orange office chair, and a stereo system so old it had an eight-track deck. In front of the office chair was a wooden crate, and its several cousins were stacked on the other side of a mattress thrown down just beyond the couches. A couple of the crates were open and I could see the ugly butts of oiled black firearms sticking up through yellow straw. Bubba’s daily bread.

  He opened the fridge, pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer. He produced three shot glasses from the trench coat I’ve never seen him without. Dead of summer or heart of winter, it doesn’t matter. Bubba and his trench coat do not part. Like Harpo Marx with a really bad attitude and homicidal tendencies. He poured the vodka and handed us each a glass. “I hear it steadies the nerves.” He tossed his back.

  It steadied mine. By the way Angie closed her eyes for a moment, I think it steadied hers. Bubba showed no reaction, but then Bubba doesn’t have nerves or, as far as I know, most other things humans need to function.

  He plopped his two hundred and thirty-plus pounds down into one of the sofas. “So, why you need a meet with Jack Rouse?”

  We told him.

  “Doesn’t sound like him. That picture shit, I mean, maybe it’s effective, but it’s far too subtle for Jack.”

  “What about Kevin Hurlihy?” Angie said.

  “If it’s too subtle for Jack,” he said, “then it’s completely beyond Kevin.” He drank from the bottle. “Come to think of it, most things are beyond Kev. Addition and subtraction, the alphabet, shit like that. Hell, you guys must remember that from the old days.”

  “We’d wondered if he’d changed.”

  Bubba laughed. “Nope. Gotten worse.”

  “So he’s dangerous,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Bubba said. “Like a junkyard dog. Knows how to rape and fight and scare hell out of people and that’s about it, but he does those things well.” He handed me the bottle and I poured another shot.

  I said, “So two people who knowingly took a case that pitted them against him and his boss…”

  “Would be morons, yeah.” He took the bottle back.

  I glared at Angie and she stuck her tongue out at me.

  Bubba said, “Want me to kill him for you?” and stretched out on the couch.

  I blinked. “Ahm…”

  Bubba yawned. “It’s not a problem.”

  Angie touched his knee. “Not at the moment.”

  “Really,” he said, sitting up, “no sweat. I built this new thing, and what you do is clamp it around the guy’s skull, right here, and—”

  “We’ll let you know,” I said.

  “Cool.” He lay back on the couch, looked at us for a moment. “I didn’t figure a freak like Kevin for having a girlfriend, though. He seems like a guy either pays for it or takes it by force.”

  “That bothered me too,” I said.

  “Anyway,” Bubba said, “you don’t want to meet Jack Rouse and Kevin alone.”

  “We don’t?”

  He shook his head. “You go up to them, and say, ‘Back off our client,’ they’ll kill you. They’d have to. They ain’t real stable.”

  A guy who used a minefield for home protection was telling us Jack and Kevin weren’t stable. This was good news. Now that I knew just how dangerous they really were, I considered walking back into that minefield, doing a jig, getting it over with quick.

  “We’ll go through Fat Freddy,” Bubba said.

  “Are you serious?” Angie said.

  Fat Freddy Constantine was the godfather of the Boston Mafia, the man who’d wrested control from the once preeminent Providence outfit and consolidated his power. Jack Rouse, Kevin Hurlihy, anyone who so much as sold a nickel bag in this city answered to Fat Freddy.

  “It’s the only way,” Bubba said. “You go through Fat Freddy, you’re showing him respect, and if I set up the meet, they know you’re friends, they won’t whack you.”

  “Bonus,” I said.

  “When you want the meet?”

  “Soon as possible,” Angie said.

  He shrugged and picked up a cordless phone off the floor. He dialed and took another swig from the bottle as he waited. “Lou,” he said, “tell the man I called.” He hung up.

  “’The man?’” I said.

  He held out his hands. “They all watch Scorsese movies and cop shows, think it’s the way they’re supposed to talk. I humor them.” He reached across his whale’s-hump chest and poured another shot into Angie’s glass. “You officially divorced yet, Gennaro?”

  She smiled and downed the shot. “Not officially.”

  “When?” He raised his eyebrows.

  She propped her feet up on an open crate of AK-47s and leaned back in her chair. “The wheels of justice turn slowly, Bubba, and divorce is complicated.”

  Bubba grimaced. “Smuggling surface-to-air missiles from Libya is complicated. But divorce?”

  Angie ran both hands through the hair along her temples, looked up at the peeling heating pipes stretched across Bubba’s ceiling. “A relationship in your hands, Bubba, lasts about as long as a six-pack. So what do you know about divorce? Really?”

  He sighed. “I know people seem to go out of their way to fuck up things usually should be snapped off clean.” He swiveled his legs off the couch, dropped the soles of his combat boots to the floor. “How about you, home-boy?”

  “Moi?” I said.

  “Si,” he said. “How was your divorce experience?”

  “Piece of cake,” I said. “Like ordering Chinese—one phone call, and everything’s taken care of.”

  He looked at Angie. “See?”

  She waved a dismissive hand in my general direction. “You’d take his word for it? Mr. Introspection?”

  “I doth protest,” I said.

  “You doth full of shit,” Angie said.

  Bubba rolled his eyes. “Would you guys just bang each other and get it over with?”

  There was one of those awkward pauses that comes up every time someone suggests there’s a lot more than friendship between me and my partner. Bubba smiled, getting a charge out of it, and then, thankfully, his phone rang.

  “Yeah.” He nodded at us. “Mr. Constantine, how you doing?” He rolled his eyes as Mr. Constantine elaborated on just how he was. “Glad to hear it,” Bubba said. “Listen, Mr. C., I got a couple friends need to speak with you. Take a couple minutes.”

  I mouthed, “Mr. C.?” and he shot me the bird.

  “Yes, sir, they’re good folks. Civilians, but they may have stumbled onto something could maybe interest you. Has to do with Jack and Kevin.” Fat Freddy began talking again and Bubba made the universal masturbatory gesture with his fist. “Yes, sir,” he said eventually. “Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.” He listened, then blinked and looked at Angie. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “You related to the Patriso Family?”

  She lit a cigarette. “’Fraid so.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bubba said into
the phone. “The very same Angela Gennaro.” He raised his left eyebrow at her. “Ten tonight. Thanks, Mr. Constantine.” He paused, looked at the wooden crate Angie was using as a footstool. “What? Oh, yeah, Lou knows where. Six cases. Tomorrow night. You bet. As a whistle, Mr. Constantine. Yes, sir. Take care.” He hung up and sighed loudly, shoved the antenna back into the phone with the heel of his hand. “Fucking wops,” he said. “Everything’s ‘Yes, sir. No, sir. How’s the wife?’ Least the Harp mobs, they’re too mean to give a fuck how the wife is.”

  Coming from Bubba, this was high praise for my ethnicity. I said, “Where do we meet him?”

  He was looking at Angie with something akin to awe on his rubbery face. “At his coffee shop on Prince Street. Ten tonight. How come you never told me you were connected?”

  She flicked her cigarette ash on his floor. It wasn’t disrespectful; it was Bubba’s ashtray. “I’m not connected.”

  “According to Freddy, you are.”

  “Well,” she said, “he’s mistaken. An accident of blood, that’s all.”

  He looked at me. “You know she was related to the Patriso mob?”

  “Yup.”

  “And?”

  “And she never seemed like she cared, so I didn’t either.”

  “Bubba,” she said, “it’s not something I’m proud of.”

  He whistled. “All these years, all the scrapes you two been in, and you never called on them for backup?”

  Angie looked at him through the long bangs that had fallen in her face. “Never even considered it.”

  “Why?” He was genuinely confused.

  “’Cause you’re all the Mafia we need, handsome.”

  He blushed, something only Angie can get him to do, something that’s always worth the effort. His huge face swelled like an overripe grape and for a moment he looked almost harmless. Almost.

  “Stop,” he said, “you’re embarrassing me.”

  Back at the office, I brewed some coffee to counteract the vodka buzz and Angie played back the messages on our answering machine.

  The first was from a recent client, Bobo Gedmenson, owner of Bobo’s Yo-Yo chain of under-twenty-one dance clubs and a few strip joints out in Saugus and Peabody with names like Dripping Vanilla and The Honey Dip. Now that we’d located Bobo’s ex-partner and returned most of the money he’d embezzled from Bobo, Bobo was suddenly questioning our rates and crying poormouth.

  “People,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Suck,” Angie agreed as Bobo beeped off.

  I made a mental reminder to toss the collection job to Bubba, and then the second message played:

  “Hallo. Just thought I’d wish you jolly good luck on your new case and all that rubbish. I gather it’s a splendid one. Yes? Well, I’ll be in touch. Cheerio.”

  I looked at Angie. “Who the hell was that?”

  “I thought you knew. I don’t know anyone British.”

  “Me either.” I shrugged. “Wrong number?”

  “’Good luck on your new case’? Sounds like he knew what he was talking about.”

  “Accent sound fake to you?”

  She nodded. “Like someone who’s watched a lot of Python.”

  “Who do we know who does accents?”

  “Beats me.”

  The next voice was Grace Cole’s. In the background I could hear the assaultive human noise and babble of the emergency room where she worked.

  “I actually got ten minutes for a coffee break so I tried to catch you. I’m here till at least early tomorrow morning, but call me at my place tomorrow night. Miss you.”

  She beeped off and Angie said, “So, when’s the wedding?”

  “Tomorrow. Didn’t you know?”

  She smiled. “You’re whipped, Patrick. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “According to who?”

  “According to me and all your friends.” Her smile faded a bit. “I’ve never seen you look at a woman the way you look at Grace.”

  “And if I am?”

  She looked out her window at the avenue. “Then I say more power to you,” she said softly. She tried to get the smile back but it cracked weakly and disappeared. “I wish you both all the best.”

  4

  By ten that night, Angie and I were sitting in a small coffee shop on Prince Street, learning more than we ever wanted to know about prostates from Fat Freddy Constantine.

  Freddy Constantine’s coffee shop on Prince Street was a narrow shop on a narrow street. Prince Street cuts across the North End from Commercial to Moon Street, and like most of the streets in that neighborhood, it’s barely wide enough to squeeze a bicycle through. The temperature had dropped into the mid-fifties by the time we arrived, but up and down Prince Street, men sat in front of shops and restaurants wearing only T-shirts or tank tops under open short-sleeves, leaning back in lawn chairs and smoking cigars or playing cards and laughing suddenly and violently as people do in neighborhoods they’re sure they own.

  Freddie’s coffee shop was nothing but a dark room with two small tables out front and four inside on a white-and-black-tile floor. A ceiling fan rotated sluggishly and flipped the pages of a newspaper back and forth on the counter as Dean Martin warbled from somewhere behind a heavy black curtain drawn across the back doorway.

  We were met at the front door by two young guys with dark hair and bodies by Bally and matching pink-champagne V-necks and gold chains.

  I said, “Is there like a catalog all you guys shop from?”

  One of them found this so witty that he patted me down extra hard, the heels of his hands chopping between my rib cage and hips like they expected to meet in the middle. We’d left our guns in the car, so they took our wallets. We didn’t like it, they didn’t care, and soon they led us to a table across from Don Frederico Constantine himself.

  Fat Freddy looked like a walrus without the mustache. He was immense and smoke gray and he wore several layers of dark clothing, so that his square chopping-block head on top of all that darkness looked like something that had erupted from the folds of the collar and spilled toward the shoulders. His almond eyes were warm and liquid, paternal, and he smiled a lot. Smiled at strangers on the street, at reporters as he came down courtroom steps, presumably at his victims before his men kneecapped them.

  He said, “Please, sit down.”

  Except for Freddy and ourselves, there was only one other person in the coffee shop. He sat about twenty feet back at a table beside a support beam, one hand on the table, legs crossed at the ankles. He wore light khakis and a white shirt and gray scarf under an amber canvas jacket with a leather collar. He didn’t quite look at us, but I couldn’t swear he was looking away either. His name was Pine, no first name that I ever heard, and he was a legend in his circles, the man who’d survived four different bosses, three family wars, and whose enemies had a habit of disappearing so completely people soon forgot they’d ever lived. Sitting at the table, he seemed a perfectly normal, almost bland guy: handsome, possibly, but not in any way that stuck in the memory; he was probably five eleven or six feet with dirty blond hair and green eyes and an average build.

  Just being in the same room with him made my skull tingle.

  Angie and I sat down and Fat Freddy said, “Prostates.”

  “Excuse me?” Angie said.

  “Prostates,” Freddy repeated. He poured coffee from a pewter pot into a cup, handed it to Angie. “Not something your gender has to worry about half as much as ours.” He nodded at me as he handed me my cup, then nudged the cream and sugar in our direction. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I’ve reached the height of my profession, my daughter just got accepted to Harvard, and financially, I want for little.” He shifted in his chair, grimaced enough so that his huge jowls rolled in toward the center of his face and completely obscured his lips for a moment. “But, I swear, I’d trade it all in tomorrow for a healthy prostate.” He sighed. “You?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Have a healthy
prostate?”

  “Last time I checked, Mr. Constantine.”

  He leaned forward. “Count your blessings, my young friend. Count them twice. A man without a healthy prostate is…” He spread his hands on the table. “Well, he’s a man without secrets, a man without dignity. Those doctors, Jesus, they flop you down on your stomach and they go in there with their evil little tools and they poke and they prod, they tear and they—”

  “Sounds terrible,” Angie said.

  It slowed him down, thank God.

  He nodded. “Terrible isn’t quite the word.” He looked at her suddenly as if he’d just noticed her. “And you, my dear, are far too exquisite to be subjected to such talk.” He kissed her hand and I tried not to roll my eyes. “I know your grandfather quite well, Angela. Quite well.”

  Angie smiled. “He’s proud of the association, Mr. Constantine.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell him I had the pleasure of meeting his lovely granddaughter.” He looked at me and his twinkling eyes faded a bit. “And you, Mr. Kenzie, you’re keeping a careful eye on this woman, making sure she keeps out of harm’s way?”

  “This woman does a pretty good job of that herself, Mr. Constantine,” Angie said.

  Fat Freddy’s eyes stayed on me, growing darker by the second, like he wasn’t too keen on what he saw. He said, “Our friends will join us in just a minute.”

  As Freddy leaned back to pour himself another cup of coffee, I heard one of the bodyguards out front say, “Go right on in, Mr. Rouse,” and Angie’s eyes widened slightly as Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy came through the door.

  Jack Rouse controlled Southie, Charlestown, and everything between Savin Hill and the Neponset River in Dorchester. He was thin, hard, and his eyes matched the gunmetal of his close-cropped hair. He didn’t look particularly threatening, but he didn’t have to—he had Kevin for that.

  I’ve known Kevin since we were six, and nothing that lives in his brain or his bloodstream has ever been stained by a humane impulse. He walked through the door, avoided looking at Pine or even acknowledging him, and I knew Pine was who Kevin aspired to be. But Pine was all stillness and economy, while Kevin was a walking exposed nerve, his pupils lit with a battery charge, the kind of guy who might shoot everyone in the place simply because the idea occurred to him. Pine was scary because killing was a job to him, no different than a thousand others. Kevin was scary because killing was the only job he wanted, and he’d do it for free.