Mortal Sin (26 page)

It took some fancy footwork to keep the kid out of juvie.

He went into a huddle with the arresting officer, O’Brien, and the manager of the record store, a fresh-faced young guy named Jerry Laughlin. After considerable negotiation, he convinced Laughlin to drop the charges as long as Jamal agreed not to darken his door again.

That was the first hurdle. The second was a little harder.

When he finally squeezed the grandmother’s name and telephone number out of Jamal, the woman’s response was pretty much what he’d expected. She wasn’t getting any younger, and the boy was incorrigible. She already had her hands full with his younger brothers and sisters, and she simply could not take care of him any longer.

That left few options. He couldn’t very well take the boy home with him, and allowing Jamal to disappear into the Massachusetts foster care system wasn’t an option, The kid had potential, but a few years of being shuffled from foster home to foster home would snuff out any light shining beneath that pseudo-tough exterior.

So he did the only thing he could think of. He called Fiona.

The woman who’d been more of a mother to him than his own flesh and blood didn’t even hesitate. “Bring him over,” she said. “I could use somebody to fuss over. My grandkids are too busy to visit me, and I’ve just about given up on Conor ever giving me any new babies to spoil. I’ll straighten the boy out.”

He didn’t doubt for an instant that she would.

The cops gave him the expected hassle. “This woman is not a licensed foster parent,” McDougal said. “There’s rules—”

“Bend the rules,” he said. “We’re talking about the boy’s future.”

“Look, Father, I could get my ass chewed from here to Providence if I released him to you.”

“Then you’ll have to put us both up for the night in your little five-star hotel, because I’m not leaving without him.”

“My hands are tied. I don’t have the authority to release him to you, and if you think I’m calling my lieutenant at home over something like this—”

“Wait,” he said. “I have an idea. Do you know Conor Rafferty?”

“Homicide lieutenant?”

“That’s right. Fiona Rafferty is his mother. He lives right upstairs over her. What if he agreed to take responsibility for the boy while he’s staying with Fiona and Hugh?”

They both glanced at Jamal, who had sat silently throughout the exchange, looking young and frightened and nowhere near as tough as he pretended. McDougal sighed. “You get Rafferty on the phone,” he said, “and we’ll talk.”

Whatever Conor said to them, it worked. Five minutes after his best friend told him, via the precinct telephone, “Anything happens, Donovan, your life won’t be worth living,” he and Jamal walked out the door of the police station and into a breezy spring night. Above their heads, a thousand stars spilled across the sky. Tight-lipped, Clancy unlocked the car and reached across the seat to open the passenger door. Jama! slid in beside him, unnaturally silent, and Clancy shoved the key into the ignition.

“I won’t even ask what you were thinking,” he said, his voice deadly quiet. “I don’t have to ask, because I know. I’ve been there. I know every sneaky, slimy thought in your head, because I was just like you once.”

“No way, dude.”

“Shut up. You think you’re bad? Hah! You’re not a tenth as bad as I was at your age. You don’t even have the imagination to think up some of the things I was doing at sixteen. But you know what? I learned. I learned that there are civilized ways to conduct your life, ways that won’t land you in prison, or dead in the gutter with a knife in your gut.”

“But—”

“I told you to shut up. I’m not done yet. I know you think
I’m just some rube, some gullible guy who’ll bail you out of hot water every time you land in it. But you severely underestimate me, my friend, because this is the first and last time. I got you out of trouble, and now you owe me. And payback will be a bitch, because I now own your larcenous hide until such time as I believe you’ve sufficiently paid me back. And you
will
pay me back. Is that clear?”

“Come on, dude, it was only a coupla—”

“
I asked if that was clear
!”

There was a moment of silence before Jamal said, quietly, “Yeah. It clear.”

“If it’s the last thing I accomplish in this life, I’m going to teach you that you have to work for what you want. You don’t have a right to take what’s not yours. Are you familiar with the Ten Commandments? Particularly the one that applies to this situation?”

Glumly, the boy said, “Thou shalt not steal.”

“Congratulations. You got it in one. Where do you live?”

“Huh?”

“I asked where you live. We have to pick up your things.”

Harriet Washington’s tiny first-floor apartment on the edge of Roxbury was spotless, mute testimony to how hard she worked, considering that she had four grandchildren ranging in age from six to sixteen to mess it up for her. While Jamal gathered his possessions, Clancy told the boy’s grandmother where he would be staying and with whom. “They’re good people,” he said. “They’ll do everything in their power to help him. The rest is up to him.”

“It’s not that I don’t love the boy,” Mrs. Washington said, a glassy sheen of tears in her eyes. “God knows, I’ve tried to pound some sense into that stubborn head of his. But he just doesn’t listen anymore. I don’t know what to do with him. And he’s setting a bad example for the little ones.”

On the other side of the wall, Jamal slammed things around the bedroom as he packed. “Where are his parents?” Clancy asked quietly.

The woman shook her head in sorrow. “Killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver three years ago. I took the kids in and did the best I could do for them, but it hasn’t been easy, especially for Jamal.” Sadness rolled off her in waves. “He still misses them.”

“And so do you,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

“Frederick was my only child, you know, and losing him almost killed me. I think prayer was the only thing that got me through. That, and the kids.”

He squeezed her hand, released it when Jamal returned toting a boom box and a mountain of CDs, a green trash bag filled with clothes, and his balaphon in its case. “Is that everything?” Clancy said.

“This be it.”

“I can take some of the load for you.” He took the boom box in one hand and swung the trash bag over his shoulder. “I’ll put these in the car while you say goodbye to your grandmother.”

Afterward, they drove across town in silence. His stomach rumbled, and he realized he was ravenous. “Hungry?” he said.

Jamal shrugged.

“Well, I am. If you don’t want to eat, you can watch me eat, instead.” He saw the familiar golden arches looming ahead, and he pulled in, took the boy inside, and watched him inhale three double cheeseburgers and a milkshake. Finishing up his own fish sandwich and watered-down decaf, he wiped crumbs from his hands and said, “I’m glad you weren’t hungry.”

The boy smirked. “So who this Fiona person you talking ‘bout? She some mean old lady?”

“As long as you behave, she won’t be. But try to pull anything on her, and she’ll turn into the queen of mean. She has a finely tuned bullshit meter, and it’s always ticking.”

Jamal eyed him hard and long. “How come you talk that way, dude? You supposed to be a priest.”

“I talk like a priest when it’s appropriate to talk like one. Right now, I’m not in priest mode.”

Jamal raised his eyebrows. “What mode you in, then?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m in—”

He stopped abruptly as it hit him hard in the midsection.
Parent mode
. He was in full-blown, royally-pissed-off parent mode. It was an amazing revelation, especially since he wasn’t the boy’s father. He would never be anybody’s father, and that particular truth was brutal in its finality. He would go through life being Father to many, but Dad to none.

For the first time ever, that knowledge brought him deep sorrow.

“Yo, dude. You still in there somewhere?”

He left his own jumbled thoughts behind and focused on the boy. “Never mind,” he said, setting his empty coffee cup beside a pile of crumpled sandwich wrappers on the plastic tray between them. “Let’s go.”

By the time he got Jamal settled with Fiona and Hugh, it was nearly midnight, and he was exhausted. He drove the few blocks to the rectory in blessed silence and parked beneath the giant elm tree that would provide shade and relief during the sweltering summer weather to come. When he pulled his keys from the ignition and opened the door, the overhead light illuminated his cell phone, still plugged into the charger. He’d been so revved up when he got to the police station, he’d forgotten to take it with him. That was a first. He never went anywhere without it. He unplugged it and checked the readout.

He had three missed calls.

He groaned.
Not tonight, God. Please, not tonight
. All he wanted tonight was a hot shower and twelve hours of deep, restful sleep. He wasn’t crazy enough to think he’d get it, but a man could dream. For just one night, he didn’t want to do any emergency marriage counseling, didn’t want to hear that some elderly parishioner had died in his sleep, didn’t want to deal with anybody else’s crisis. For just one night, he wanted to forget he was a priest.

But thoughts like that were selfish, and he was expected to be a model of selfless behavior. Duty had been drilled into him, and God’s work always came first. It had been that way since the beginning, and it would be that way until the end. With a sigh, he pulled up the call list to find out how and with whom he’d spend the rest of the night.

All three calls had come from the same number, a number with a Revere exchange. The instant he saw it, the memory slammed into him. Dinner. A favor repaid. A forty-dollar bottle of wine.

A beautiful woman he should have the sense to stay away from.

Sarah
. God in heaven, he’d forgotten all about Sarah.

As hangovers went, this one ranked on the lower end of the scale, but opening her eyes to that first ray of morning light was still hell on wheels. Sarah groaned and pulled the pillow over her head. She’d downed too much Tennessee whiskey last night. Way too much. Now she was paying. Her head felt like a five-pound bag of sugar, rock-hard and grainy, and her stomach was singing the chorus to
Please Release Me
. There was only one solution to her problem: a hot shower, a cup of Java, and five or six aspirin.

Then she was going to track down that man and kill him.

She drank the coffee at the kitchen table, her bleary eyes scanning the newspaper for any news of his untimely demise. But there was nothing. If he’d become roadkill, the
Globe
hadn’t yet heard about it. Sarah supposed that was good news, since she was eager to perform the ugly deed herself. She skimmed the comics, the editorial page. Garfield was still overeating, and the locals were still arguing about the upcoming year’s proposed school budget. There was a sale going on at Filene’s. Maybe it was time to add a little pizzazz to her wardrobe. She didn’t have to be at work today until noon. That gave her ample time to commit a homicide and then go shopping as a celebratory gesture.