Among Thieves (38 page)

The refrigerator door was standing open, and there was food on the counter. Flies buzzed around a smorgasbord of hamburger
meat and ham that had been left out.

“That fuckin’ bitch,” Devon said. He moved around Kozlowski to get a better look. “Fuckin’ Shelly. She did this on purpose.”

“Probably,” Finn said.

Kozlowski opened a window. “It can be cleaned.”

“I know, but still,” Devon said.

“You left her with your mess for a couple of days,” Finn pointed out. “She probably figured turnabout was fair play.”

“Fuck,” Devon said.

“You’ve got bigger problems than this,” Kozlowski pointed out. That brought them all back to reality.

“The money,” Finn said to Devon.

Devon pulled some paper towels off a roll on the counter and swept some of the mess into a nearby garbage can. “This is fucked
up,” he said, holding his head away from the smell.

“I’m serious, Devon,” Finn said. “We don’t get paid, and we don’t move on from here.”

Devon threw the paper towel into the garbage can. “You’re a bloodless shit,” he said. “You wait here. I’ll be right back.
It’s in back.”

Finn shook his head. “Do we look stupid?”

“I swear to God, it’s in back,” Devon said. “I just don’t want you to see where.”

“That’s too bad,” Finn said. Devon hesitated. “All we want is what you owe us, but we’re not letting you out of our sight
until this is settled. I don’t give a shit whether you trust us or not. If you want to get your daughter back, we’re doing
this right now.”

“Fine,” Devon said at last. “Knock yourself out.” He walked out of the kitchen and around into the hallway. As Finn and Kozlowski
followed, Finn took a good look at the place for the first time. As bad as it looked from the outside, it got worse the deeper
into the apartment he traveled. The living room was tiny, and the furniture was fraying and stained. The back hallway had
been carpeted sometime in the 1950s, from the look of it, and there were places where it had worn through entirely. Everywhere
the walls were stained and shedding paint. Finn shuddered to think of Sally living there.

Devon walked halfway down the hallway and then turned into the bathroom. Finn and Kozlowski would have followed him in, but
there wasn’t enough space for two grown men inside. They kept an eye on him from the hallway.

Devon stood on the edge of the tub and reached up to what looked like a vent in the ceiling. He pushed the vent cover up gently,
then slid it to the side. Reaching into the opening in the ceiling, he withdrew a sack. He held the sack in front of his body,
away from Finn and Kozlowski so that they couldn’t see. After a moment, he reached up again and replaced the sack, then slid
the vent cover back into place.

He stepped down off the tub and walked back out into the hallway. Holding out his hands, he said, “There’s thirty-five thousand
there.” Finn looked at the stack of cash. It was tightly packed, wrapped in orange bands denoting five-thousand-dollar bundles.
There were seven bundles. “That’s five thousand for the bond, twenty thousand for the work you’ve done so far, and another
ten to cover the next bit. That gets you all in,” Devon said.

Finn slapped the money out of his hands. The bundles fell to the floor, and Devon reached for them instinctively. “What the
fuck!” he yelled.

“You stupid, lying motherfucker,” Finn said.

“What? Count it, it’s real!”

“I don’t give a shit about the money, you stupid asshole.” Finn reached out and grabbed Devon by the shirt and threw him up
against the hallway wall.

“What do you mean?” Devon’s voice was cracking, and he looked confused as he tried to wrestle away. Finn held his neck, though.
“What the fuck are we here for?”

“Where are the paintings, Devon?”

Devon’s confusion morphed to panic. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Still holding on to Devon’s neck, Finn leaned back and punched his client in the face. Devon crumpled to the floor. “Don’t
give me that shit, Devon. We know.”

Devon jackknifed on the hallway floor in front of Finn, his hands covering his head. “Know what?” he choked out. “I don’t
understand!”

“Cut the shit, Devon, or I’ll turn this over to Koz here. He was a cop for twenty-five years; you don’t think he’s got some
experience getting people like you to talk?” He knelt down, putting his face right up next to Devon’s. “We know you were the
one who offered to sell the paintings. You gave potential buyers photographs and paint chips to prove the offer was real.
That means you know where they are. Now you’re going to tell us.”

“Fuck you!” Devon yelled. “You don’t know shit!”

“I know that you live in a shithole roaches wouldn’t set foot in for all the fuckin’ mess. I know you haven’t been doing any
steady work for Murphy or Ballick or anyone else for years. I know that you just reached into your ceiling and pulled out
thirty-five thousand dollars without batting an eye, and if you’d had that kind of money for any amount of time, you wouldn’t
be living here. And I know that the IRA paid someone one hundred thousand dollars for confirmation on the paintings. It doesn’t
take a fuckin’ rocket scientist to put all this together, Devon. Are you really this stupid?”

Devon was still lying on the floor. It seemed as though the physical pain had subsided, but he looked utterly defeated.

“I also know that this Kilbranish out there has got your daughter, and he’s going to kill her if he doesn’t get these paintings.
Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It means everything to me!” Devon yelled. “It’s the only goddamned thing I care about. I’m giving myself up. I’ll trade myself
for her, and I’ll take the pain! Even death!”

Finn shook his head in confusion. “But don’t you understand? You don’t have to. He doesn’t want you, he wants the paintings.
If we give those to him, he’s not gonna give a shit about you anymore.”

“Fuck you,” Devon said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Finn looked at Kozlowski. He was staring at Devon, his eyes narrowed. It was clear that he had no better insight than Finn
about what was going on.

“Where are the paintings, Devon?” Finn asked again at last.

Devon looked up at him. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said.

The last time Devon saw Whitey Bulger was in December of 1994. It was a dangerous time in Southie; a dangerous time for everyone
with connections. The tension in the projects and down along the water crackled as the crisp New England winter set in. There
had been a crackdown in recent months on bookmakers across Boston, and people—connected people—had been slipping out of sight.
There were whispers everywhere that something was coming. No one knew what or when or how, but that didn’t stop people from
believing. They talked about it as if it were an impending apocalypse; a nameless threat hovered everywhere, making everyone
jumpy. There’s nothing more dangerous than a community of nervous gangsters.

Devon was at home in his apartment three days before Christmas. Despite the success at the Gardner Museum years earlier, the
promise of advancement and opportunity had never materialized. It was as if the whole thing had never happened. The fallout
from the robbery in the law-enforcement community was so heavy that the Gardner job wasn’t something he could use; if anything
the attention paid to the investigation made him radioactive. Those who knew of his involvement had stayed away from him for
years. Worse, he had spent the entire time looking over his shoulder, sure that he would be eliminated at any moment by Bulger
or one of his men, just to clean up the loose ends.

When the phone rang and he heard Bulger’s voice on the other end of the line, his heart stopped. “I got a job for you,” Bulger
said.

“Okay,” Devon said, the perspiration spreading over his body like the winter fog. “What is it?”

“Not over the phone,” Bulger said. “Tonight. Meet me at the liquor store. One o’clock.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Bulger,” Devon said.

When he hung up the phone, Devon’s first instinct was to run. He went to his bedroom and opened his drawers, wondering what
he would need to take. After a moment, though, his knees gave out and he slumped to the bed. The truth was that nothing he
could take would make a difference. A change of clothes and fifty bucks; that was the sum total of his existence. The only
thing that kept him alive was the odd job Murphy threw him occasionally. If he left, he’d have nothing. Less than nothing,
even.

As he sat there, he thought hard about his situation. If Whitey had wanted him dead, he’d have had it done before now, he
figured. It was a rationalization, but he had nothing else. He even convinced himself that maybe this was the start of good
things for him—the fulfillment of a promise made years before.

He arrived a few minutes early at the liquor store out of which Whitey ran his business. The lights were off. He went to the
front door and pushed. It was locked. He looked around and walked to the back of the building. As he approached he could see
that the back door was cracked open ever so slightly. He pulled it open half a foot.

“Mr. Bulger?” he called out softly.

“In here,” came a voice.

Devon thought he would throw up. He could see nothing but darkness inside, and he assumed his life was over. He hesitated.

“Get the fuck in here,” the voice said.

Devon took a deep breath and stepped into the building. He’d passed up whatever chance he’d had to run. “Where are you?” he
asked into the darkness.

“Back here. Storage room.”

Devon moved slowly, his hands feeling for danger out in front of him. After a moment he caught the dim shadow cast by a small
light toward the back of the storage area. He walked toward the light, feeling slightly more sure-footed as he got closer
and the light gave him a better sense of the room. When he got to the door, he pushed it open.

Bulger was there. There was a table in the center of the room, and on the table was a large wooden packing crate. “I need
your help movin’ this,” Bulger said.

Devon looked around, expecting to see someone else from Bulger’s crew. It was just the two of them, though. “Sure thing, Mr.
Bulger,” Devon said. “Where to? The other room?”

Bulger shook his head. “I got a truck outside,” he said.

“Oh,” Devon said. “Sure. No problem.”

The crate was lighter than Devon had expected. It was a two-man job, but not a strenuous one. The truck outside was a custom
van. It had thick brown shag carpeting on the inside and little round bubble windows on the back end. It was the kind of a
van Devon had always wanted growing up—the kind guys from the neighborhood got laid in.

He and Bulger loaded the crate into the back and closed the rear doors. “Get in,” Bulger said. He tossed Devon the keys. “You
drive.”

Devon climbed into the driver’s seat; Whitey sat next to him. He started the engine and let it idle for a moment. “Where’re
we goin’?”

“Charlestown.” Whitey wasn’t looking at him; he was looking out the window, scanning the parking lot from every angle, looking
in the rearview mirror to see if anything was moving. Devon had never seen him nervous before. It didn’t do anything to put
Devon at ease. He put the van in gear and pulled out.

Under other circumstances, the drive might have been pleasant. The temperature hovered in the high twenties, and light flurries
drifted weightless through the beams cast by the headlights. A thin layer of snow had cleansed the city earlier in the day,
and it had remained cold enough for the snow to stick. As Devon crossed through Southie and into Boston, he hesitated. “Which
way you wanna go?”

“Charlestown Bridge,” Bulger replied.

Devon nodded and took the right onto Atlantic, then followed it around, peeling off onto Surface Road, which followed the
shadow of the raised highway that separated downtown Boston from the North End, onto North Washington to the four-lane bridge
that crossed into the southeastern part of Charlestown. At the far end of the bridge there was a light. “Take Chelsea Street,”
Bulger ordered.

Devon turned and headed north, through Charlestown on the eastern part of town. The place glowed with the holiday season,
colored lights warming the street scene through brownstone windows. To the right was the Navy Yard, with its virgin luxury
condos; to the left was the flat below Monument Square, with its redeveloped brownstones, their roof decks proclaiming the
city’s recent gentrification. With the snow, it looked as though they might have traveled through time to be cruising through
the place fifty years earlier.

Chelsea Street quickly fell into the night shadows of the Mystic River Bridge, which towered over the water, headed to Chelsea,
where LNG stations and industrial smokestacks dominated the landscape. To the right, the Navy Yard withered away to shoreline,
and to the left, the refurbished town houses gave way to battered housing projects. The contrast as they headed north was
striking.

Chelsea Street crossed the Little Mystic Channel and turned into Terminal Street at the water’s edge out on Mystic Wharf,
a twenty-acre chunk of landfill where Boston’s Public Works Department stored its vehicles. The place was covered in concrete
and jutted out from the mainland into the Mystic River. Thousands upon thousands of ghostly vehicles lined up in an endless
parking lot. It was a wasteland, with only a few buildings squatting fat and ugly at the edge of the river.

“I’ll tell you when to stop,” Bulger said as they approached the western end of the mammoth wharf. “Turn in here, to the right.”

Devon turned through a gate. There were two visible buildings, low and long, running perpendicular to the river. A faded sign
on one read “Charlestown Self-Storage.” “Around back,” Bulger said.