We Were Kings (2 page)

“I don't know. I'm still waiting.”

The tide slowly went out and at close to eleven the kids left the bridge. They watched them passing between the streetlights, towels draped over their shoulders, as they crossed the two lanes of traffic and headed south toward Neponset. A brief breeze came up but not even that brought relief. It was the type of heat you sat in without moving, aware of your lungs working, slowly taking air in and forcing it out. The whiskey mellowed the mind—made you forget about the heat—but it also made you aware of the fragile shell you wore, a heap of skin draped over bones containing nothing but ballast and barely functioning pumps and shunts. Cal felt his heart working, a tight ache at the center of his chest, as if he'd taken a savage blow there and days later the pain had ebbed but still persisted.

“It's Owen's birthday tomorrow. They're celebrating in Dudley Square. Anne said you and Claudia should come. It'll be fun.”

Dante continued looking toward the bay. Only a few cars moved along Morrissey Boulevard. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Why wouldn't you be there, after everything we've all gone through?”

“Owen hates my fucking guts.”

“He doesn't hate your fucking guts. All that's in the past. What we did…back then…” Cal shook his head. “Jesus, he stood by you, didn't he? He saw to it that you and your sister could adopt Maria as your own. He did all that paperwork, saw it pushed through, no questions asked. He put his ass on the line, for the both of us.”

“I know he did. I don't forget it.”

Lights flashed on the giant gas tanks. The sound of the engines of planes bound for Logan came to them long after the planes had gone by, lost somewhere up there in the murk. They passed the bottle and listened to sirens wailing in other parts of the city. The streetlights dimmed and surged and dimmed again. Window fans turned in slow metallic circles, changing speeds with the current. Cal could hear the small, electric clicks in their motors as they stopped and then engaged, whirring like summer bugs.

“Look, it'll be fun,” Cal said, “and it'll get you and Claudia out of the house for once.”

“Oh, she's been getting out of the house plenty.”

“Yeah?”

“Her boyfriend. She's barely around anymore.”

“The same guy?”

“Yeah, it's the same prick, going on four months. The way she carries on with him—” Dante shook his head angrily. “You'd think she was eighteen or something.”

“For her it probably is like being eighteen again.”

“Fucking embarrassment, that's what it is.”

“So come then, have a night where it's just the two of you. Tell the boyfriend to go fuck himself.”

“Okay, okay. I'll ask Claudia. We'll get a babysitter. We'll fucking come.”

“Yeah? Good.”

From the Hennesseys' front window a pale incandescent light spilled onto the curb. They had one of the few televisions in the neighborhood. Dante and Cal could hear
The Jack Benny Program,
which was blaring because old man Hennessey was almost deaf. They listened for a while and then the sponsor's commercials came on. Tonight it was Lucky Strike. Cal murmured the slogan aloud—“Be Happy, Go Lucky”—and Dante looked up. Assuming Cal wanted a cigarette, he pulled one from his pocket. He lit it up and passed it down, and Cal drew long and deep on the cigarette that he hadn't really wanted and the smoke seemed to coil in his lungs and got his gut writhing. It was too much in the heat and he felt sick to his stomach. He handed the cigarette back to Dante and, taking another pull from the bottle, stared out over the water. Together they watched as the city went to sleep—nothing but a lone car passing over the drawbridge every once in a while—and until their bottle was done, they listened to thunder rolling, it seemed without end, through the starless Boston night.

_________________________

Boston Harbor

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN
Owen was on a BPD patrol boat with a federal agent and two of his own men, the vessel churning across the inner harbor toward the Chelsea waterfront, where ships and boats shimmered vaguely. Seagulls swooped low across the water—white on silver—and then Owen lost them as they rose into the silver glare of the sky and the low sun. He had to squint and look away.

Their speed and the spray from the water offered only a mild relief from the heat, and the water became choppy from ships and tankers moving out in the bay, sudden swells lifting the pilot boat and dropping it so that the hull banged loudly and the engine seemed to sputter and groan, and spumes of spray lashed the deck. Owen felt the shuddering in his feet and up through his legs as the small boat took each wave like a depth charge to the keel. He could smell the greasy odor of oily gasoline, the carbon monoxide seeping from the port exhaust and up from the engine room, and when he looked at the water, everything seemed to swirl in the same sickening, myopic haze.

Somehow something had gone wrong and their tip-off had been found out. They'd laid a network of cops and patrol boats around the harbor, waiting for the shipment of contraband that the informant had told them would be arriving from New York at noon, had locked down the docklands on both sides of the harbor since midnight, but still a boat had found its way in through their snare at some point during the night and only now had they discovered it, moored in Charlestown, with no sign of its crew or its cargo. Someone had gotten word to them and if it was one of his own, there would be hell to pay. The thought of all the work they'd done that was now wasted—all for nothing—made him feel sick. He considered telling the cop at the wheel to slow it down, that the motion and the heat and the diesel fumes were bringing on one of his migraines, then thought better of it. A wave of nausea forced him to close his eyes and breathe deeply. When he opened them again, the federal agent was looking at him, and he nodded to assure him that he was okay.

The two-way sputtered from the wheelhouse and Owen called out to the pilot. “Tell them we're coming in,” he shouted, “and not to touch a thing until we're there.” The pilot looked at him, uncomprehending over the noise of the engine; a wave buffeted the boat, and the nausea forced Owen to clench his jaw. “I said to fucking tell them to maintain their perimeter and not to touch a fucking thing!” he shouted, and this time the pilot got it. He pulled back on the throttle and got on the two-way to the main units waiting on the docks, and Owen glared at the approaching wharves, wishing he could just puke and be done with it.

The trawler was empty. Owen walked from the aft to the wheelhouse and galley in the superstructure toward the bow. He had his men scour the deck and he climbed below into the crew's compartments but this too was empty. In the insulated fish hold he scanned the space with his flashlight. It was as dry as a coffin and despite the smell it was difficult to believe that it had ever transported fish. He sniffed the air for the scent of something that might tell him what had been there only hours before. He smelled diesel, oil, and brine, a foul, brackish smell that seemed to come from another part of the boat, perhaps from water in the bilge that hadn't been properly pumped out. Whoever had sailed aboard the vessel had taken great pains to remove everything from it.

He stood in a square of light provided by the open hatch over his head and looked up above the pinioned trawling arms to where two cormorants beat their black wings at the sky, listening to his men moving across the deck and in the engine room, and he imagined how slow a process it would have been to heft crates of guns and ammunition up onto the deck and then into waiting vehicles in the middle of the night. He considered the number of crew—four to five individuals—and then the driver of the waiting vehicle, and perhaps the muscle he'd have with him. The informant had told him that the boat was carrying five tons' worth. They might have used multiple vehicles to transport the shipment once they'd unloaded it. Say three trucks, with a driver and help per truck. That made a good ten bodies. With that many people, perhaps the job hadn't been that difficult after all.

His men found blood on the sheets in one of the crew's bunks; he told them to take pictures of the sheets and bag them, and he discovered more blood on deck, at the stern. There was a spatter trail across the transom. Either someone had been shot during the trip or there had been some manner of event after they'd docked. He stood at the rail and stared from the aft deck out across the water toward the stunted Boston skyline, which seemed even more stunted beneath the leaden sky. Even at a short distance, heat shimmered on the water and caused the city to blur.

“Detective!” the pilot of the patrol boat called to him from the dock and he made his way hastily off the boat and down the pier to the wooden walk, which, rising and falling on the tide beneath him, caused his nausea to return.

The pilot already had the engine running, the prop churning the water at the boat's rear and the pipe pumping exhaust into the air, and he was undoing the ropes from their moorings. The two-way squawked in the wheelhouse. Owen removed his sunglasses to wipe at his eyes.

“What is it?” he asked.

“They've found a body,” the pilot said and gestured for Owen to pull in the last rope before he climbed aboard. “Near the immigration holding center on Armitage, at the other end of the docks.” And before he even thought of arguing, Owen had climbed in, tossing the mooring rope to the floor, and the pilot backed the boat into the channel.

The body had been dumped just above the waterline on a stony promontory—a breakwater of sorts—marking the end of the docklands, where the harbor opened up into the outer harbor and the bay. As Owen's boat approached he could make out six cops assembled on the piers, creating a police line. Three stood on the promontory below. He jumped from the patrol boat just as it bumped the stone and strode toward the officers. When they saw him coming they stepped back and out of his way, but they continued watching and he could tell they were waiting to see how he'd react.

The body had been tarred and feathered, but it wasn't like anything Owen had ever read about in history books. It was streaked with black pitch and here and there feathers poked up from the blood and gore. The skin had been burned off the victim because they'd used boiling pitch and not warm pine tar, which, Owen knew, had been used once upon a time mostly to shame and humiliate, not to torture or kill. The man's face, black with flies, looked as if it were moving; caught and struggling in the tar, flies crawled slowly upon his cheeks and open mouth, across the glazed surface of his eyes, and in the shattered front of his skull; a large section of the bone at the glabella—the center of his forehead—was gone. He'd been shot through the back of the head.

Owen held a handkerchief to his mouth and swatted at the flies buzzing around him. Another wave of nausea assailed him, but, breathing deep and slow, he held it off. He knew that this was the worst of it and if he could get through it, he'd be all right. But the heat wasn't helping. The sun had risen higher since they'd come across the harbor and now it beat down on his head like a ball-peen hammer. One of the cops, a veteran named Caputo, walked to the water's edge and puked loudly.

The pitch tar was a bad touch; it had been spread on the man at an extreme temperature, so it was almost a liquid, torching the epidermis and making the skin blister and pull away from the muscle and tendon below—he would have been in agony before they shot him. Although they'd rushed the unloading, they had taken their time with this particularly gruesome act and hadn't feared they'd be caught. The act, its audacity and its brutality, worried at him. He had the sense that with the boat emptied of its cargo and its crew gone underground and into hiding, this was just the beginning of something much larger; his interception of the trawler had set events in motion and this death was only the start. He realized that he'd broken out into a sweat and that it was sour with adrenaline.

“We found the buckets of tar they used up on the dock along with a barrel of industrial pitch,” one of the cops said. “There's the charred remains of a fire, but nothing else.”

“Never seen anything like it,” said the cop standing to his right.

“Nope, me neither,” said Owen, “except in history books, and then nothing like this.”

He resisted touching the body for it looked as if the clothes and skin had melded in the heat of the pitch; he feared that if he checked the man's pockets, his skin might come away with the tugging. He'd wait for the medical examiner to arrive before having his men attempt to move the body. “Did you check for ID?” he asked one of the cops.

“You told us not to touch anything,” said Wolinski.

Owen looked at him; he had a long nose shiny with sweat and had taken off his hat. His eyes were shielded by aviator sunglasses.

“I know I did. Well?”

The cop sighed and nodded. “He's got nothing on him.”

Boat horns sounded out in the channel. The water glistened with an oily sheen. Small waves lapped at the stones. Owen looked at his watch. It was now eleven o'clock. They had a good chance of catching all the workers along the docks before they left for the day. He glanced up. A couple dozen were already beyond the police line, trying to get a look at the drama. A white sedan with the Massachusetts Office of the Chief Medical Examiner's seal on it pulled up, and Fierro got out. Owen watched him step through the police line; he was already pulling out a pack of cigarettes.

“Take eight officers,” Owen said to the cop, “pair them off and get them talking to everyone they can along the docks. Have half begin at the south entrance and half at the north.” He gestured to the fishermen, dockhands, and longshoremen peering down from the wharf. “And you can start with that group up there. I want to know who this guy was. I want to know why he was killed this way.”