The Pariot GAme (28 page)

Riordan bent over and ran forward again. He was behind his own car when he saw a man in a brown leather scalley cap, barely visible in the area beyond the aura of the Oakleigh street lamp, pressing himself against the house at the corner next to Riordan’s car. Riordan stood up. “
Scanlan
,” he roared,
“the great hero won’t use his own name. What is your name, you coward?” Scanlan made his position a little better, fired once with a 9mm. Walther PPK, hit Riordan in the musculature of the left side of the neck, and left his feet at the impact of the first bullet from the magnum. Riordan fired again as Scanlan’s body extended with the shock, the second bullet entering the torso one inch to the right of the one that exploded Scanlan’s left lung.

Riordan could hear the sirens now, and then he could see the flashing blue lights. He stood there next to the car, using his left hand to explore the neck wound, not to see whether it was serious, but whether the bullet had passed through. He needed both hands, and he was feeling lightheaded. He holstered the gun and sat down in the yoga position in the street next to his car, under the light. He was still pawing the wound when the police came to him.

He rode sitting upright in the ambulance, pressing a compress to his neck, to Boston City Hospital. He had preserved possession of his gun with his credentials. The oxygen which the attendant had given him brought him back to life.

“Oh,” the cop said, leafing through the forms on the clipboard, “most people of course don’t know this, but it helps the medical examiner if you know what kind of bullets you were using, you know? So he can rule out whether anybody else did any of the shooting.”

“Somebody else fuckin’ damned right did a little shooting,” Riordan said. “The three of those bastards that I shot. I don’t know what they were using. Cheap shit, though.”

“Yessir,” the cop said, “but what’d you use? Standard government issue, maybe? If that’s what it was, we can find out easy enough for the report.”

“No,” Riordan said, “hundred-and-ten grain slug. Twenty-point-four
grains Hodgkin one-ten powder. Fifteen-hundred-fifty feet-per-second, muzzle velocity.”

“Jesus Christ,” the cop said, “that’s the killer load.”

“That’s one of them,” Riordan said. “That’s the one you fire from a revolver.”

S
HORTLY BEFORE
12:45 in the morning, Paul Doherty took the East Milton Square exit northbound off the Southeast Expressway. He waited in front of the fire station for the light to change, then drove up Granite Avenue toward Dorchester. He reached Gallivan Boulevard, stopped at the lights, and drove up through the business district on Dorchester Avenue until he reached the satellite parking lot for the J. J. Donlan Funeral Home one block up from the boulevard. He turned right into the dark and deserted lot and drove to the back row, under the overhanging branches of the maple trees that grew on the other side of the stockade fence. He backed the blue Aries into a space against the fence and shut off the lights and ignition. The engine ran on, shaking the car with its dieseling. “Junk,” Doherty said.

There was nothing in the parking lot between Paul Doherty and the curb of Dorchester Avenue. There was one Oldsmobile parked at the curb on the other side of the street. It was a metallic chocolate Ninety-eight luxury sedan, and it was new. It partially blocked Paul Doherty’s view of the main entrance to the Bright Red Tap and Gentlemen’s Bar. The door was flanked with plate-glass windows which were heavily tinted smoke-gray. The plastic relief picture of the Budweiser Clydesdales, hung against the window on the left, was legible,
and the Schlitz display sign against the window on the right was legible, but everything more than six inches behind the glass was indistinct. Paul Doherty could see human figures moving around in the dim light inside the bar, but he could not identify them. At one o’clock, the door opened and two men emerged into the warm, still evening. They stood and talked for a moment, and then separated and left in opposite directions, on foot. There was no observable activity in the bar for a few minutes. Then the lights that shone through the window on the left were extinguished. The light that illuminated the sign on the front went out. The door opened again and a figure emerged partway. The lights that shone through the window on the right went out. The beer advertisements remained illuminated. Paul Doherty could see one dim light over the bar as the door opened wider and the figure came out.

Digger Doherty triple-locked the front door of the Bright Red and armed the burglar alarm so that the warning light glowed red over the keyboard. He put his keys in his pocket and stepped onto the sidewalk, into the light from the street lamp. He hitched up his green chino pants around his heavy belly and stuffed his white cotton shirt more deeply into the waistband. He patted his stomach while he looked up and down the street. He nodded at nothing in particular. He walked across the sidewalk and around the back of the Oldsmobile. He stopped at the driver’s side door and took from his pocket the same key ring he had used to lock the door of the saloon. He unlocked the car, got in, and reached under the dash to disarm the automobile burglar alarm. His left leg stuck out the open door and he had considerable difficulty compressing his belly enough against the steering wheel to permit him to reach the alarm lock. He got the key into it just as the siren began to sound, and shut it off before it had reached full blast. He straightened up in the seat and glanced into the Donlan parking lot as he shut the car door. He saw the
Aries in the lot, but he could not see whether it was occupied.

He closed his car door and started the engine of the Oldsmobile, settling his hams into the deep, loose, crushed-velvet seat cushions as the engine caught and purred, running his tongue over his teeth to root out the remains of the pastrami sandwich he had only nominally chewed before swallowing it as his dinner, gazing speculatively at the blue Aries in the Donlan parking lot. He kept his left hand on the steering wheel, where it would be visible in the light. He slid his right hand off the bottom part of the steering wheel and felt under the seat. By touch he located a cigar box. He pulled it out onto the floor mat under his thighs and opened it without looking down. He reached into the box and took out a 9mm. Luger. He slid the Luger under the cushion of the passenger seat, closed the cigar box, and slid it back under the seat. He turned on the headlights, shifted his gaze from the Aries, and put the Oldsmobile in gear.

Digger Doherty headed south on Dorchester Avenue toward the Gallivan Boulevard intersection. There were no other cars on Dorchester Avenue behind him. He watched in the rear-view mirror and saw the headlights on the car that came out of the Donlan lot and turned left on Dorchester Avenue behind him. He did not have a green arrow for the right turn on Gallivan Boulevard, but there was no traffic approaching the intersection in either direction, and he made the turn without using his blinker. He shut off his headlights as he completed the turn. He did not straighten the wheels of the car, but pulled into the parking lot behind the branch of the Shawmut Bank beyond the intersection on the right, stopping just short of the chain that blocked through traffic. He put the car into reverse and backed up into the side street opposite the entrance, blocking a driveway which was shaded from the street lamp by three large maple trees. He kept the engine running.

The Digger saw the blue Aries reach the intersection as the light turned green on Dorchester Avenue. It turned right on Gallivan Boulevard, without hesitating. The Digger put the Oldsmobile in drive and pulled out of the side street. At the corner of Gallivan Boulevard he paused, the headlights still off, and peered up the boulevard. The Aries was passing under the railroad bridge and heading up the hill. The Digger waited until it disappeared. Then he turned left on Gallivan Boulevard, ran the light at Dorchester Avenue again, turning left. He repassed the Bright Red and headed north four blocks. He took a left on a side street and varied his speed on several more intersecting and parallel streets, always proceeding in a generally westerly direction, until he reached the middle of the block on Moraine Street in Saint Gregory’s parish, where he lived.

He did not pull out. He parked and shut off the lights. It was a neighborhood of cramped colonial three-bedroom homes, crowded together on small lots on a steep hill. His was three doors north of the intersection where he had stopped. He took the Luger out from under the cushion of the passenger seat and put it in his pocket. He got out of the car and shut the door. He locked it. Then he unlocked it. He reached in and set the alarm. He closed and relocked the door.

Preferring the shadows, the Digger stayed close to the low retaining walls that kept the tiny front lawns in place when the rains and the melting snows of winter threatened to erode them down the hill into Dorchester Lower Mills. Two doors from his house, on the other side of the street, he spotted the blue Aries, parked with its lights out. He could see one occupant, the driver. He crouched as much as he could and walked quietly across Moraine Street, approaching the Aries diagonally from the right rear, so that he would be in the blind spot of the rear-view mirror. When he got to the car he
moved very quickly to the front passenger window and pointed the Luger at the driver as he grabbed with his left hand for the door handle. The door was unlocked. He snapped it open, keeping the pistol leveled at the driver, and said, “Aw right, you cocksucker, open that door and get out real slow and keep your fuckin’ hands where I can see them.”

Paul Doherty grinned in the illumination from the dome light. “ ’Evening, baby brother,” he said. “Small case of the jitters tonight? Is our conscience bothering us? Do we feel the need of absolution, or is the handgun the only thing that will make us feel secure?”

“What the fuck’re you doing here?” Jerry Doherty said. “Whose car is this?”

“Make a deal with you, Jerry,” Paul said. “You put the gun away and get in and sit down and shut the door, I will answer your questions. I assure you that I have no intention of shooting you. From what I hear, you’ve got some reason to be apprehensive about such a thing happening, but it won’t be at my hands, honest.”

The Digger got into the Aries and shut the door, turning off the dome light. “All right,” he said, “what’re you doing driving this shitbox, and why’re you tailing me? You should be home in bed.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Paul said. “My car’s being repainted, and it wasn’t ready today. Yesterday. I’m not used to your hours, Jerry. So I came out to see you in this. You wouldn’t want me tossing and turning out there by myself in Weston, would you, when the Lord is telling me to go and see my little brother? Ye gods, but you’re fat. You get fatter every time I see you. I’m going to have the devil’s own time explaining to Mister Avis what happened to the passenger seat to squash it all down as you’re doing. He’ll think I had an anvil in here.”

“You oughta drink warm milk and crumble up some bread in it, you cant sleep,” Jerry said. “Lots safer’n driving around
in the dark scaring the shit out of people that might shoot you because they figure you’re getting set to shoot them. Besides, I may be fat, but I haven’t had no heart attack yet, and if that’s the way the Dohertys get thin, I’m gonna be fat a hell of a long time, is what I’m gonna be.

“Now,” the Digger said, “whaddaya want to see me about, you got to come hiding around like you was some guy, had it a mind to knock me off? You ever hear the telephone, you call a guy up and tell him, you would like to see him and have a meeting with him and talk to him, that kind of thing? And would he meet you someplace so you can sit down and have this talk you want to have? You ever hear of guys doing that? I have heard of guys doing that. I know lots of guys, do that. Sometimes one of those guys will call me up and he will say, ‘Digger, I would like to have a talk with you about this thing and the other thing there, and how’s about you and me, we sort of get together down the Saratoga there or someplace, and we will have a couple drinks and maybe a pizza and we will see what each other has got to say for himself.’ I do that. I do that all the time.”

“Jerry,” Paul said, “after all, I am, we are brothers, you know. Do I have to ask for an appointment?”

“Well, actually, yeah,” Jerry said. “Yeah, the same as I would think it would be the right thing to do, if I was the one that wanted to see you, that I would call you up first and tell you that I had something I wanted to talk about with you and when would be a good time to sit down. Yeah, I think you should call me up first and tell me, so I wouldn’t come out of work in the middle of the night which is when I work and there you are in this car that you know I will not recognize and so forth. Lemme ask you this, all right? You wanted to see the Cardinal there about something, would you just show up some night and make him think you were setting him up? Or would you call him first?”

“Jerry,” Paul said, “let’s face facts here. If I called you up and told you I wanted to see you, you would either refuse to take the call, if you found out who wanted to talk to you, or if you took it without knowing, you would hang up on me the minute you found out who it was. The best I can hope for, calling you up, is that you just made a lot of money doing something that has probably captured the attention of every cop, state, federal and local, in New England, and you are feeling so pleased with yourself that you will take the time to be courteous enough to take the phone and tell me that you don’t want to talk to me, and say goodbye before you hang up. Now, let’s be practical, shall we, Jerry? If I want to get some information to you, the only way I can do it is to sneak up on you.”