Dez got it then. "Yeah, whatever. You think?"
"Let's go see something, take a look around."
Dez nodded, excited, reaching for his coat. They had a mission.
* * *
DOWNSTAIRS, DOUG SAID GOOD-BYE to Ma, who held her cigarette away to receive his kiss on her cheek. "Watch out for my Dezi, now."
"Always do, Mrs. E."
And so Dez had to pop in for a kiss too, still tasting the smoke on his lips as he moved to the door. "We're gonna catch a flick."
"Meet some girls," she called after them. "Preferably Catholic ones."
Dez patted his pockets as they moved through the low gate onto the sidewalk, ritually checking for his wallet. The night was cloudless and cool. He scanned the street on which he had lived his entire life, a car parked a few houses down catching his eye. Dez continued forward a few steps with Doug before tugging his leather jacket sleeve, turning him around.
"Look, this is maybe stupid, but... today I was out in Chestnut Hill, this neighborhood set off the parkway, family area, lotsa money? I'm up on a pole checking a reading, and I could see the whole street from up there-- and I notice this red sedan, like a Chevy Cavalier, keeps cruising past. Like it's circling the block or something, every couple of minutes. As I said, it's a family area, kids roaming around. So I keep an eye out. I know he can't see me with the trees up there, my truck's parked around the corner. Then, just as I'm thinking maybe something needs to be done about this, the Cavalier stops coming around. I finish up, climb down, move on."
"Beautiful story, Desmond."
Dez pointed to his own sternum, indicating the street behind them. "Couple of houses down. Red Cavalier parked across the street. Or else I'm just paranoid."
Doug's eyes going dead gave Dez a chill.
"We can head up this way," said Dez, pointing up at Perkins Street. "Loop around, take the shortcut back to-- "
Doug was out in the street, striding right out toward the dark Cavalier.
Dez hesitated, surprised, then went after him, but staying on the near sidewalk.
When Doug was more than halfway there, the Cavalier's engine gunned to life. Headlights came on and it swung out into the one-way road.
Doug stopped where he was in the street and the Cavalier had to brake, stopping just a few inches from Doug's knees. It was beaten and dull-looking, its sour headlights throwing Doug's shadow over the street.
As Doug moved around to the driver's-side window, the car peeled out, Doug thumping the side with his fist before watching it go. Brake lights reddened the intersection with Perkins, the Cavalier veering hard left.
Doug took off the other way, running fast toward Cambridge Street, and Dez followed, adrenaline surging now. They reached the corner just in time to see the Cavalier empty out one street over and rev past them, speeding under the interstate, lifting over the rise before plummeting toward Spice Street, back to the Town.
"The fuck was
that
?" said Dez, out of breath.
Doug stared after the disappeared car.
"A cop?" said Dez.
"Cop would have gotten out, badged me. Not hid. Not run."
"Then what?"
"Fuck,"
spat Doug, kicking at the sidewalk.
A bus hissed past them, turning into Sully Square, gassing them with a lead-colored cloud of exhaust. "But if it's the G, how'd they... wait, through
me
?"
"Maybe we pushed the phone stuff too hard. Mother
fuck
."
"You get a good look? I didn't."
"Birthmark," said Doug, waving at the side of his face. "Like a rash."
"What, one of those, a port-wine stain?"
"Yeah. His hand too." Doug squeezed his own hand into a fist. "Fuck it, Dez. I gotta pass on the movies."
"Right," said Dez. Then: "You sure?"
Doug was looking toward home, the old candy-factory tower, the hilltop steeple of St. Frank's.
"What do I do?" said Dez. "Am I made? What's it mean?"
A gleaming black Mercedes wheeled past them into Somerville, pumping bass-heavy rap. "We gotta huddle up," said Doug. "Let me talk to the others. You just keep your eyes open like you did. Making him-- that was good work."
Doug held out his fist for a smack, then jogged across the street back toward the Town. Dez watched him go, wanting to run after him and help him piece this thing together, but maybe Dez was too hot now.
The G parked there on his mother's street. Dez jammed his hands deep into his pockets, spooked, watching for red Cavaliers as he walked back home.
Part II
When Love Comes to Town
15. The Meet
16. The Girl Who Got Robbed
17. Demo
18. Dating the Vic
19. Sandman
20. Workout
21. Clocking It
22. The Visit
23. Reception
24. The Surv
15
The Meet
T
HE FREEDOM TRAIL WAS a tourist thing, an inlaid-brick sidewalk trail retracing the "birth of America." It started downtown at the Boston Common training field and snaked north through the city, past the site of the Boston Massacre, past Paul Revere's House in the North End, all the way across the Charlestown Bridge to end at the 221-foot granite obelisk marking the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
The second-to-last stop along the trail was the oldest commissioned floating warship in the world, the USS
Constitution,
also known as
Old Ironsides
for her thick, cannonball-repelling hull. In the warming of early May, the pavilion at the southern edge of the old navy yard saw a surge in attendance from school field trips: teachers in sun visors and knee-length shorts, parent chaperones gripping huge cups of iced coffee, and fifth-graders with lunch bags and foil-wrapped cans of soda, all squinting up at the flags tracing the sail outline along the ship's three tall masts.
Doug, Jem, and Gloansy wandered around the dry dock between the ship and its museum, mixing with the school groups and the knee-socked foreign tourists, Doug hoping to confound any parabolic microphones that might be aimed their way. Jem worked the brim curve of his lucky blue Red Sox cap, which not coincidentally had the added effect of flexing his arms. He wore small, smirking, syrup-tinted sunglasses too expensive and European-looking for his bargain-bin American face. Gloansy wore yellow-tinted sport shades that made his toad eyes bulge, his freckled forearms looking like two logs of Hickory Farms cheese.
Jem spit into the ocean and said, "Fucking cunt."
Doug turned on him fast, too fast.
"What?"
"What
what
? Fucking branch manager, who else?"
"What are you talking about?"
"It's fucking gotta be."
"How? What could she have told them?"
"I dunno. Something."
"You tell me. What could she have told them?"
Jem flipped his cap back on top of his head, the brim newly horseshoed. "Easy, kid. How would I know?"
Doug should have stopped himself, didn't. "I don't want to be throwing stuff around like it doesn't matter. Because this matters. This is important-- fucking critical-- and I want to be dealing in certainties. She could tell them what? That there were four of us? What, we drove a
van
?"
"Okay. Then how?"
Doug looked off across the harbor at the Coast Guard piers jutting off the North End. "Could be any number of things. Anything."
"We took a lot of precautions on that job. Fucking drove me nuts, but we did them, and it all went smooth, until the bell."
"I'm saying I don't have any answers yet, and neither do you."
"We bleached it up. I did the tool count, there was nothing left behind."
"Could be an accumulation of things. Could be they put someone on us special. We been pulling a lot recently."
Gloansy said, a one-hand-in-his-pocket shrug, "How do we even know it's anything? Could've been some guy parked on the street."
"Yeah," said Jem, pointing at Gloansy, "Banjo Boy is right. Some Peeping Tom. A Somerville hypo, shooting up. How come you're so sure of yourself here, Duggy?"
"I don't know anything," said Doug. "Except what I know."
A class shuffled past, boys smiling and pointing out Jem's
Yankees Suck!
T-shirt. When they were gone, Jem said, "Sniffing around the Monsignor, that I don't like."
"I talked to him," said Doug. "He knows how to handle it."
"
You
know how to handle it. Gloansy here,
he
knows how to handle it. The Monsignor, I don't have that kinda faith in."
"Here's the thing," said Doug, facing them. "Boozo's crew running wild-- that was our cover. They took every ounce of heat that was out there because they were so fucking Cagney and greedy all the time. It was a vacation in Tahiti working in their shadow. Couldn't
buy
that kind of protection. But now they're good and gone, and the G still sees jobs being pulled. See, that machinery's all still in place. I think they're turning it on us now."
Gloansy said, "The G?"
Doug looked at him,
duh,
and went on, "It's not like they weren't
aware
of us before, but not this close. Maybe they're more focused now, because they can be. What bothers me is-- why Dez? The only one of us with no record?"
Jem set one unlaced high-top sneaker on top of a piling, facing the harbor as though he owned it. "So we're the top dogs now."
Doug threw him a
duh
look too. "That's not a vacancy I'm looking to fill. We don't want to be out there in front, attracting attention. I like us running second, riding the wake of the high-stepping idiot in first place."
"Second place?" snarled Jem, as though Doug had insulted him.
"There is no finish line, kid. The trophy is this, right here, us walking around, money in our pockets, free as the breeze. This is breaking news to you?"
"I'm saying, number one is number one." Big shrug. "Sucks being the best-- but there it is."
A foreign tourist with a crazy accent and his safari-hat-wearing wife approached them with a guidebook, looking for Faneuil Hall, and Jem played his favorite game, kindly directing them to Chelsea Street, up toward the projects.
Gloansy turned to Doug in private. "How bad do you think they have us?"
"Maybe not at all. Maybe they just have Dez right now. Or maybe they have all our houses and our cars, I don't know. Maybe they're up on one of these rooftops right now, watching."
"That means court orders and everything?"
"They don't need anything to start snooping on their own. No probable cause or subpoenas, they can just start tapping into us first, figuring out who's who and what's what, then once they know where to look and what to look for-- then they go legal, get their papers in order, come marching into Town."
Gloansy was lost in thought a moment, a scary thing to see. He leaned closer to Doug. "What about, like, cameras in the bedroom, shit like that?"
Doug was forced to entertain a split-second image of Gloansy and Joanie grinding. "I would say, kid, these guys' jobs are tough enough."
Jem came back to them still muttering about Dez. "Fuckin' nearsighted Pope. Walking around out there with all our fates in his pockets. Makes me fucking nuts."
"I told you I talked to him," said Doug. "He's the one who made this guy in the first place."
Jem said, "This is why the movie thing is good. Changing our whole MO, if they're onto that."
Doug shrugged. "Good, maybe."
"Whoa," said Jem, protesting. "Douglas. C'mon, kid. Don't let these fuckers get you down."
"I think we gotta pull back a while."
"Fuckin'-- no way."
"We gotta coast a bit."
"Why? We'll work around the Monsignor. Hijacking a can means no black-box phone shit, no tech. We'll go in the original Three Musketeers."
Gloansy said to Duggy, "For how long?"
"Listen," said Doug, "if you two've got nothing tucked away in the back of your sock drawers, I got this much sympathy for you."
"It ain't greed," said Jem. "It's knowing a good thing when I see one."
What do you see except what I show you?
"Why you always in such a rush?"
