The Rat on Fire

Praise for George V. Higgins

“Higgins can plot a whole book like one long chase scene. He can write dialogue so authentic it spits.”

—Life

“Higgins’ writing is utterly convincing in every line.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Higgins’s books are extremely stylized, but utterly realistic; poetic yet vernacularly down to earth. The epic struggles in them are entirely human.”

—The Boston Globe

“George V. Higgins is a master.”

—Chicago Sun Times

“The Balzac of the Boston underworld.… Higgins is almost uniquely blessed with a gift for voices, each of them … as distinctive as a fingerprint.”

—The New Yorker

“I
DO NOT NEED
this shit,” Terry Mooney said. He was a small man with a lot of red hair, wire-rimmed glasses that were tinted pink and a wardrobe of three-piece glen plaid suits.

I hate the little bastard, John Roscommon thought after their meeting. Roscommon had said that aloud on many occasions when there was nobody around but other State cops. “That little bastard,” Roscommon said, “here he is, about thirty years old, got more hair on him’n a fuckin’ buffalo but less brains, and he’s got this diploma from some half-assed law school and that gives him the right to order everybody around.
He
thinks. The little shit.

“This guy,” Roscommon told Mickey and Don and every other trooper in the Attorney General’s office, “this guy was appointed directly by God to clear up all of the problems of suffering mankind. Here I am, I have been running around the world and dealing with the Japanese when I was a kid with fuzz on my cheeks and they have got Nambu machine guns with which they have got every intention of blowing my ass off before we finally get Douglas MacArthur safely at home in Tokyo, and they didn’t make it. I went out there in the goddamned jungle like I was Wyatt fuckin’ Earp and I keep my head down and no goddamned Jap blows my ass off and I in the meantime blow the asses off of several Japs.

“I live through that,” Roscommon said. “I will not eat beef teriyaki and I will not go down to some fake Jap restaurant where the chef’s idea a good time is waving a knife around and screaming ‘Banzai’ every time somebody heaves a piece of cow in front of him, but I come out of my adventures with the Japs all in one piece and that is pretty good going, considering what I see happen to some other fellows I was somewhat acquainted with for a little while.

“I live through that,” Roscommon said. “I live through several small labor disputes that some gentlemen on this side of the Pacific had with the warden and the guards down at the various jails we maintain for the care and feeding of guys that make everybody nervous when they are out on the street. There was one night when some of my previous fellow officers went out to deliver a piece of paper to a guy that took French leave from the prison and I was ordered to join them because the word was that he had every sidearm Colt Firearms ever made and one or two extra from Remington Arms that you could put up against your shoulder for a little extra range. And he did, too, and he was using them, and I got out of that in one piece.

“I have never had an ulcer,” Roscommon said. “I am fifty-eight years old and if I do say so myself, I am in the prime of health and the pink of fucking goddamned good condition. But if I ever
get
an ulcer, if I ever
do
fall down and collapse on the floor with motherfucking apoplexy, it will be the fault of Terry Mooney.”

Roscommon got out of the wooden chair and began to pace around the conference room. His face reddened upward from the collar of his shirt to the roots of his gray hair. Mickey Sweeney and Donald Carbone, corporals in the Massachusetts State Police, looked at the floor and did not permit any expression of amusement to attract the attention of Detective Lieutenant Inspector John Roscommon.

“So,” Roscommon said, “we got no goddamned choice. That little piece of shit has got a law degree and for some reason that escapes my sawtoothed mind, the Attorney General has seen fit to make him a full-fledged prosecutor. There’re times when I think
that
guy’s playing with no more’n forty-four cards too, puttin’ a jerk of a kid like that in charge of anything bigger’n a head-on collision of two skateboards. But he did it and we’re stuck with it, the damned fools that we are.”

“John,” Mickey said, “what’s he want?”

“He wants to get reelected, naturally,” Roscommon said. “He’s got another year before he goes to bat again, and therefore naturally he is sucking every minority and majority hind tit he can find, and he is going to take over the work every District Attorney between here and Albany until he
gets
reelected. Then he will relax and maybe then we can all calm down a little and maybe even get some work done.

“In the meantime,” Roscommon said, “what he has got is a whole bunch of people that’re beating on his head and griping all the time about various things that they do not approve of. Some of them’re complaining about the oil companies and how they’re nailing everybody to the mast, and some of them’re complaining about being broads and that means they can’t get their bosses to leave them alone and can’t get free abortions after their bosses get through with them. He’s got guys that want him to sue the Red Sox because the seats in the bleachers’re too expensive, and he’s got guys that don’t approve of dogs taking a shit on Beacon Hill. He’s got women that spend the whole day at the State House so they can scream at him that we shouldn’t have nuclear power, and he’s got people there that bring kids and yell about how they should get forty grand a year on welfare and he should go sue somebody so they can. I am telling you, if his porch light is out, and I think it is, I also know the reason why. I’ll be damned if I can figure out how the hell he stands it.

“Now,” Roscommon said, “one of the things he does on some day when he’s got six shingles off the roof and all these people yelling at him, one of the things he does is hire this fucking Mooney kid. He hadda be nuts to do that. You know what Terry Mooney thinks? Terry Mooney thinks us cops’re too soft on crime. Terry Mooney thinks that until Terry Mooney came along and became a goddamned prosecutor, people got away with murder all over the place. And Terry
Mooney is going to put a stop to it, and also make the AG think that if he did one thing right in the whole time he was in office, it was hiring Terry Mooney. Terry Mooney thinks that when the AG runs again, he is gonna spend most of his time out in Belchertown and Clinton telling everybody that we got the whole crime thing under control now, on account of they elected him and he hired Terry Mooney. The AG does not believe this, but he has got Terry Mooney believing it and that is enough to give me a case of piles, I can tell you that.”

Sweeney began to laugh.

“Shut up,” Roscommon said. “You think this is funny, you wise little prick? Listen up, because you won’t when you get through.

“Mooney can read,” Roscommon said. “I know it’s hard to believe, but he can. You would’ve thought a man that reads as well as he does would’ve learned something about judgment, but he didn’t and there’s nothing we can do about that, either.

“What that little turd has done,” Roscommon said, “is somehow he persuaded the newspapers to bring him copies every morning, and he also watches the television every night and apparently takes in a lot of what is said. So he goes to the AG and he says to him, ‘There’re people that’re burning buildings down in Boston.’ ”

“No shit,” Sweeney said.

“ ‘And furthermore,’ says Mooney, ‘they are doing it for
money
.’ ”

“Goodness gracious,” Sweeney said.

“Heavens to Betsy,” Carbone said.

“Who would’ve dreamed of it?” Roscommon said. “I’m telling you guys, this kid’s as sharp as a tack. There’s no fooling him.

“ ‘Now,’ says the genius Mooney, ‘here is what you should do: you should set up a special outfit that doesn’t do a god-damned
thing in the world except run around and catch guys that play with matches. And you should put me in charge of it and give me every single cop in the world that isn’t off guarding the President or the Pope and never mind all that simple-minded shit about catching people that’re looting the banks, and then make an announcement about how you’re gonna stand up for the rights of all the poor people that live in the buildings where the fires start, and that will make you golden. How is that?’ And the Attorney General says, ‘Mooney, you are a gentleman, a scholar, a good friend and a loyal knight of the table round, and someday I will dub thee
Sir Terrence
, if everything else works out all right and I get reelected. Go plague the shit out of Roscommon.’