Boston Cream (19 page)

“These aren’t bums or businessmen,” I said. “They’re people who gave blood samples at Sinai Hospital and were specifically recruited because they matched people on a list. The better the match, the fewer drugs the person has to take after. The better the outcome. Jenn looked all of this up before she—fuck.”

“It’s all right. I mean, it’s not all right now, but it will be. Soon. We’ll get her back unharmed, I promise that, okay? So what’s our next move?”

“We go see a thin mousy chick who looks like a lab rat. Jenn and I interviewed her once already and she was jumping at her own shadow.”

“If she was scared of you,” Ryan said, “she’s going to love me.”

Back on the road to meet his gun dealer, Ryan said, “How’s your head these days?”

“Why? Did I miss an exit? You said South Boston, right?”

“No, no, you’re good. I meant in general, because …”

“Because why?”

“Last time I spoke to you—before today, I mean, you remember the last time we spoke?”

I said, “Yes,” mainly to buy time while I fired up the memory and searched backwards to think of when that might have been. It hadn’t been in the last two months. It was back in the foggy time around Christmas, when I was at my worst. Had we wished each other well for the holidays?

“You don’t remember.”

“I—”

“It was December 31, late afternoon,” Ryan said. “I know it ain’t your people’s new year but I was in the restaurant getting ready for the big night, Cara and Carlo were home alone, and I was feeling a little blue so I called to wish you a happy one and you didn’t exactly sound razor sharp.”

“That’s nice you thought of calling me.”

“But you don’t remember it?”

“It was two months ago, Ryan, I’m better now. My doctor cleared me and everything.”

“For gunplay?”

“I can watch my own back. And yours.”

“Great.”

“That wasn’t convincing.”

“Neither were you.”

“Daggett only got Jenn because he was armed and I wasn’t.”

“We’ll fix that.”

“Otherwise I would have kicked the shit out of him.”

“I know you would.”

The gun guy’s name was John Lugo. He lived in a walk-up apartment near Chinatown, where the streets smelled of sour milk and fish water. He was around Ryan’s age, late thirties, heavy enough to stretch out a black Adidas track suit to its max. His thinning black hair was wet from a shower and pulled back in a ponytail. The air was stale with cigarette smoke and fried food. Lugo had the unhealthy pallor of someone who spent too much time under artificial light.

He said, “You guys need anything? There’s coffee ain’t too old, there’s beer if it ain’t too early.”

“We’re good,” Ryan said.

“All right. So Angelo explained the deal to you, right? All sales are final, cash, and every piece comes with a box of shells. And no obscene state taxes, of course. I start around five bills for a basic nine and I can go as high as you can.”

“You have suppressors?”

“Not for every model, but I can cover most of the mainstream stuff.”

He led us into a spare bedroom that had a pine armoire against one wall. There was also a gym mat and weights in one corner. The mat had a fine layer of dust on it. Lugo unlocked the armoire and swung both doors open wide. Handguns hung on pegs on the insides of the doors. He slid out a shelf where a TV might rest and there were more guns lying flat on that.

“That’s the basic collection there. Once you choose your
weapons, I’ll match up the suppressors. If you want machine guns, rifles or shotguns, I have to take a trip to a storage unit I got out of state. Fucking Massachusetts gun laws.”

“We’ll see what’s here first,” Ryan said. “We’re hoping we can get by without heavy artillery.”

“A couple of cocky optimists,” Lugo said. “I like that.”

Ryan said, “Show me a Beretta for my friend. The 92 army model.”

“No problem. I got the ten-round version or the seventeen. Takes nine-mil rounds or the Smith and Wesson .40-calibres, which I happen to prefer. Blows a hole just that much bigger in your target. I can do these for seven apiece, six-fifty if you buy two, and no haggling please. It gets me upset.”

“And the suppressors?”

“Four apiece, which is a break, ’cause I could ask four-fifty, five each. But you’re a friend of Angelo’s so …”

“Show him the seventeen-shot model,” Ryan said. “The less he has to reload, the better.”

“I’m in the room,” I said.

“And
he
will take .40-calibre rounds.”

Lugo slipped a pistol off its peg and handed it to me. It weighed about the same as the model I’d carried in the Israeli army.

“You can dry-fire it,” Lugo said. “It ain’t loaded.”

I adopted a shooting stance and squeezed the trigger until the hammer snapped down. I looked at Ryan and shrugged. “This is fine.”

“And for me …,” he said. He looked up one side of each cupboard door and down the other. He ran his hand over every gun in the sliding shelf until he stopped at one with a flat black polymer body. “Is this the new Glock 17?”

“That’s it,” Lugo said. “The fourth-generation G17. I was at the SHOT show in Vegas when Glock unveiled it. Great piece. I also have the G22, very similar gun but takes the .40-calibres.
Only downside is it carries fifteen rounds, not seventeen. I also got the compact versions of both, the G19 and G23.”

“Nice selection.”

“Thanks. You a lefty?”

“No.”

“ ’Cause the magazine release catches on both models are reversible.”

“I’m left-handed,” I said.

“Yeah? You want one of these instead of the Beretta? Only that’s gonna run you a grand, not including the suppressor.”

“Don’t confuse him,” Ryan said. “He should have something with a safety.”

“So one Beretta and one G17?” Lugo asked.

“Make mine the one that blows bigger holes,” Ryan said.

“One Beretta and one G22.”

“I also need an ankle gun. Does that Baby Eagle there take the same .40 ammo?”

“But of course.”

“All right,” Ryan said. “Add it up.”

“Boys going off to play,” Lugo said. “Warms my heart. Can I interest you in holsters?”

“Three. A shoulder and an ankle for me. You?” Ryan asked me. “Shoulder or hip?”

I imagined drawing a gun, wondering which would be quicker. I opted for hip, since that was how I’d carried my Beretta in the army.

“You can throw in the ankle holster,” Ryan said, counting out hundreds from a half-inch stack. “And I don’t like haggling either.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Lugo said.

I
t wasn’t far to Upham’s Corner, the neighbourhood where Carol-Ann lived. The GPS map showed a straight route along Dorchester out of South Boston and into Roxbury. But not too deep into it: just a few lights past the I-93 overpass.

Jenn had been gone about five hours now. The outside world became a blur as rain began to fall and my fear for Jenn clouded my mind. Sean Daggett was a predator, not above harming her if it profited him or filled some coarse dark appetite.

Traffic slowed, then stopped as orange construction cones closed off the right lane. After a moment of silence, Ryan said, “Cara was not strictly pleased I came down here.”

“I can imagine. You picked up and left pretty fast.”

“It wasn’t that,” he said. “It’s what coming here meant.”

I looked over at him, saw the strong set of his jaw. There’s a scar that creeps along the other side that gets darker when he’s angry. I couldn’t see it now but I’d bet it was livid. “That you might have to kill someone.”

“I tried to leave it behind last summer, you know I did.”

“Yes.”

“Then I went to Chicago in the fall to help you and Jenn out. I was ready to kill if I had to but it never came up. That cop
pulled the trigger first. Now I’m here again, I’m armed, I’m gonna do what I have to do to get Jenn back and deal with the fucker who took her. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to her and I didn’t do everything to stop it. But for Cara, it’s like I’m a drunk who keeps walking into a bar. Will he or won’t he slip? Is this thing she hates so much coming back into our lives? What if I kill someone here and it leads to some kind of retribution against Carlo? That’s what it always comes down to. That’s why she left me last year.”

“I remember.” He’d been living in an airport hotel when I met him, thrown out by Cara as the Calabrian Mob family he worked for descended into a murderous fight for spoils as their patriarch lay dying.

“But she threw me another question today, one of her nasty curves in the dirt. Something I know she’s always wondered about but never asked out loud: Did I actually like killing or had it always been just business. We never talked about this shit before, never discussed my work once since we took our vows. But now she’s hammering me over the phone, this is while I’m in the cab on the way to the airport, she’s asking me if I’m looking forward to getting back in action. Was there a thrill to the hunt or something like that in it for me?”

“What’d you say?”

“I said I can’t discuss it right now, I’m in a taxi with a driver has ears like a spaniel. We’ll have to talk about it when I got back. So all the way down here, I really thought about it. About every life I took. I didn’t count things I did in self-defence, or defence of you, for that matter, just the contract hits. And it wasn’t easy. As you can imagine, I’ve never exactly been given to reflection.”

“What do you think now?”

“That I did enjoy the hunt. When I was given a contract, I spent a lot of time following the target around, learning his routine. And it was always a him, right? Never killed a woman.
Following another man allowed me to become someone else. As I walked behind him, I’d find myself falling into his walk, and the more I assumed it, the more I knew about him. Did he slouch or stand tall, stride or shuffle? Was he heading somewhere or wandering? Driven or aimless? I could sense his mood, how he felt about himself. How his shoes struck the street, which way his heels would shave down over time. I was on the road a lot, on my own, answering to no one, free of all other responsibility other than to prepare, for however long I needed.”

“Ryan unbound.”

“Exactly. But the actual killing? Ending someone else’s life? No. I had nothing personal against any of these people. All I knew was they had fucked up beyond repair. It was over for them, no matter what. I was always grateful when I could use a gun. But there were times when I couldn’t and I had to use a knife or a wire or my hands. And it disgusted me. Whatever a serial killer is, getting a weird kick out of it and doing all these rituals and collecting shit, I’m the opposite. I hated getting close to them, smelling their breath or their BO. Sometimes their piss or their shit if they freaked. A couple of times I used my hands and had to look in their eyes the whole time. Saw them bulge, and then saw the lights go out. I wanted it over as fast as I could and got out of there. The only person I wanted to be close to physically was Cara, and then Carlo when he came along. My mother when I see her. Not these other people. Not these losers.”

“So you have your answer.”

“Except the minute I got it, bam, I fell into an immediate contradiction.”

“How so?”

“If I have to kill someone to get Jenn back, I won’t hesitate. And if I get a chance to kill the cunt that took her, this Daggett fucker, I’ll enjoy it.”

“Talk like that around Carol-Ann,” I said. “She’ll sing like a bird.”

Upham’s Corner was a pocket in east Roxbury, a decent neighbourhood a few streets wide bordering a larger territory that was hostile and predatory. Gianelli had told me that every other kid fourteen and up in parts of Roxbury was armed. “Boston has a miserable record of juvenile deaths by gunshot,” he said, “and an even worse solution rate. It’s one of the reasons their homicide cops get touchy. All they get is grief over the unsolveds. Some kid gets killed, everyone’s out there laying down wreaths and teddy bears and lighting candles and screaming, ‘Where were the cops?’ But not one of them picks up the phone and calls ’cause that’d be snitching.”

You’d never know any of this on Carol-Ann’s street. It was just off Dorchester, two blocks in length. She lived on the second block in a tidy two-storey house with a small garden fenced off with black wrought iron. The rest of the front had been given over to two parking spots, one for Carol-Ann, I assumed, and one for her upstairs tenant. All the neighbouring houses looked well-kept, free of litter, with gardens being prepped for spring planting.

There was only one car in the parking area, a small blue hatchback. Carol-Ann’s car was a white Camry, Jenn had told me.

“Not home,” I said.

“What do you want to do?” Ryan asked.

“We could sit awhile, see if she comes back.”

“Or break in. Be there when she walks in. Watch her wet herself.”

“That does sound better than sitting around.”

We drove down to the end of the block and left the car there. Ryan walked down a narrow concrete path between Carol-Ann’s house and her neighbour’s to see about a way in the back. I walked up to the front door and knocked. There was a decal on the front door saying the house was alarmed and
monitored by SecuriGuard. It figured a single woman living in a pocket on the edge of despair would have an alarm. Suddenly sitting and waiting seemed like the better scenario. We weren’t smash-and-grab artists willing to take the risk that we would get in and out with a laptop before the police arrived. At the least, I wanted to search the house; at best, wait for Carol-Ann to get home. Now it seemed neither was a good idea. I followed the concrete path to the rear to warn Ryan off busting his way in. Turned out I didn’t have to. There was a decal on the back door too. He was peering in through the glass, hands cupped on either side of his face.