The Burning Soul (24 page)
Authors: John Connolly
Tags: #Mystery, #Azizex666, #Horror, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Thriller
After the delivery trucks went out to the restaurants, Joey would often disappear for a few hours to take care of matters unrelated to the purchase and sale of seafood, then come back in the late afternoon to balance the books, count the cash, and deal with any minor problems that might have arisen during the day. Recently, these were increasingly related to extensions of credit, and bills that were past due but were different in nature from those that might lead to Joey and his kind taking an interest in the business. They were, for now, temporary setbacks being endured by those who had been on Joey’s books for decades, men who were wise to Joey’s ways but knew him also as a fair trader, a man who kept his word and didn’t gouge honest men. True, there was a side to Joey that should be avoided, but he was by no means unique in this, and some of his customers were at least as hard as he was. Joey didn’t cheat. He didn’t mix frozen lobster meat in with the fresh. He didn’t soak his scallops overnight, knowing that they would absorb their own weight in water, transforming one pound into two; and you could do the same with haddock too, although they didn’t absorb as much. If he was forced to freeze fish, he froze only the oilier kinds – tuna, sword, salmon – but he would tell the buyer that it had been frozen, and therefore wouldn’t taste as good, even as he priced it lighter. With Joey Tuna, you knew what you were getting.
The recession was bad for everyone, and Joey sympathized, but if he let his sympathies get in the way of common sense he’d be on the United Way list, he and the men and women who worked for him. It was all a question of balance. Joey had his competitors, just like anyone else, and they’d be happy to take disgruntled customers off his hands. In this city, the jungle drums beat all the time; an hour after someone mentioned that he was unhappy about the price per pound, you could be damn sure there would be a phone call, and the offer of a better rate. Joey himself wasn’t above hustling, so why should anyone else be? He didn’t like losing customers, though, and three times since the summer he’d been forced to offer gentle discouragement to a couple of restaurateurs who’d been tempted to take their business elsewhere, the threat made more palatable by some temporary sweeteners.
Hard times for honest men, and some dishonest ones too.
That evening, only the desk light burned in Joey’s office. The pot of tea on the electric ring had brewed to a rich yellow-brown, and tasted as strong as sucking on the leaves themselves, but Joey didn’t care. A mug of it sat at his right hand, and it was warming his bones. Joey didn’t touch alcohol. He wasn’t a prude about it, and he didn’t mind others doing it, but he’d seen the damage it had inflicted on friends and family, and had decided that it wasn’t for him. He had learned from the mistakes of the Winter Hill Gang, whose members he had watched succumb to some of the very vices they had encouraged in others. He also understood his own nature: He suspected that he had an addictive personality, and was afraid that if he started boozing, or gambling, or whoring he might never stop. So he drank tea, and ignored the horses, and remained faithful to his wife, and anyone who judged him by appearances only, and heard him joke about his fear of addiction, might wonder whether such a man, so self-aware, so mindful of his flaws, really had any reason to be concerned that, once he began to engage in a certain act, he might doubt his inability to pull back from it.
But such an individual would not have seen Joey’s fists at work, because Joey Tuna liked to work with his hands. Once Joey started pounding on someone he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, because his world would go black and there would be only the rhythm of flesh on flesh, over and over, methodical yet unreasoning, expelling the life from the body punch by punch. And when at last the light began to pierce the murk – a red beam, like a shepherd’s warning dawn – and he saw the work that his hands had wrought, his body aching, the muscles in his stomach and back on the verge of tearing, the meat that was left behind gave him no more pause for thought than a gutted fish or a headless shrimp.
That was why Joey Tuna now left the beatings to others, although he tried to ensure that they were doled out only when absolutely necessary. Punishments of a more final kind were also strictly controlled; more than ever before, probably, now that Whitey had gone to ground. The necessity for them was less frequent, of course, and such acts less advisable even as a last resort. Oh, there were still young hotheads who thought nothing of waving a piece in someone’s face, who liked the feel of a gun in their waistband; the big men on the block who wanted to ‘make their bones,’ as the greasers would say, by putting one behind some poor bastard’s ear. But most young men like that didn’t live to be old, and a lot of those who survived would grow old with their permanent, limited view interrupted by the vertical lines of prison bars. Joey himself had done time when he was a young hothead and didn’t know any better, but the years inside had cooled him down some, and when he came out he was a different man. He was that rare breed: a man who learned from his mistakes, and didn’t repeat them. Rarer still, he was a criminal who thought that way. He had that in common with Tommy Morris, his protégé, along with the fact that they were both full Irish, a heritage that had marked them as outsiders for so long. In the Boston criminal circles through which they had moved, mongrels were the norm.
Usually Joey enjoyed these moments in the silence of his office. He took pleasure in making the accounts balance, in knowing that his business was running efficiently and profitably. He craved order. He always had, even as a boy. He was neat, and he never lost anything. Everything in its place, and a place for everything. Tonight, though, he was distracted. This Tommy Morris thing was giving him a hernia, but he should have expected that Tommy wouldn’t just lie down and die.
He still struggled to pinpoint exactly when Tommy had begun to lose control of his operations, and why, but once the rot set in there were too many who were prepared to exploit his weakness, and Joey had tacitly, and then actively, encouraged them to do so. There was no room for sentimentality in business, but Joey wished that his relationship with Tommy hadn’t come to such an end. He had a soft spot for Tommy, always had, but Joey had backed his horse now, and the race was running. Oweny Farrell would win it in the end, for it had been rigged from the off, but Tommy needed to be removed quickly at the risk of leaving the track littered with dead riders. They might even have had Tommy by now if it wasn’t for Martin Dempsey. He was a cool one, make no mistake. Joey would almost be sorry to see him dead too.
But Tommy Morris. What to do about Tommy Morris?
And, as if he had summoned him from the darkness, Tommy answered.
‘How are you, Joey?’
Joey looked up from his papers. There was a storage room to his left. He kept his records in there, along with reams of computer paper, and fresh stationery, and anything else that he didn’t want tainted by damp or the smell of the floor below. The door was always open, because his employees knew better than to be in there without his permission, and it was only the door to the office itself that he locked. Now Tommy Morris emerged from the storage room, what little hair he had left cut short, his face unshaved, his paunch lapping at his belt like a pale tongue, peeping out from beneath the fabric of his golf shirt, hairy and somehow obscene. He was wearing a pair of blue overalls from the fish market, open to his crotch. He must have been in there for the best part of an hour, waiting patiently until the market was quiet, until just the two of them were left.
‘Tommy,’ said Joey. ‘You scared the life out of me. What are you doing hanging around in closets. You turning queer on me, Tommy? You a Mary?’
He smiled at his own joke, and Tommy smiled back. He seemed to have more wrinkles than before, and the beard that was coming in was entirely gray. Failure will do that to a man, thought Joey: failure, and the knowledge of the imminence of his own mortality.
Except Tommy wasn’t alone in feeling the Reaper’s breath. In his right hand he held a pistol. The suppressor made it appear both sleeker and uglier than it already was. Not that he’d need it, not really. There was nobody to hear the gun, and the glass and walls were thick. But it was like Tommy to take care of the little details and fail to take account of the bigger picture. It was why he was broke, and running, and why he had only Ryan and Dempsey left at his side.
‘You know me better than that, Joey. I always had an eye for the girls.’
That was true. Tommy was never without a couple of women on the go at the same time. Joey had had the devil of a time finding the girls in his current stable in the hope that he might catch Tommy with his pants around his ankles.
‘You should have settled down like me,’ said Joey. ‘If you do it right, it removes the need for all that kind of nonsense, or most of it. Why don’t you pull up a chair and take the weight off your soles?’
Tommy stayed where he was. The gun hadn’t moved. It was still pointed at Joey, who was unarmed. There was no gun in his desk drawer. He had no call to have one. He was Joey Tuna, the go-between. When he had to be, he was Joey Tombs, the dispenser of justice, but it was justice that had been agreed upon beforehand, settled upon by wise heads. It was always the right thing to do.
‘This place hasn’t changed,’ said Tommy. ‘I think those may even be the same papers on your desk.’
‘There’s no cause to change what has always worked, Tommy. I make money. Until the downturn, we were even growing a little every year. We do things right here. We dot the i’s and cross the t’s. We’re so clean, the IRS is sure that we’re dirty. It was like that when I took over the business from my uncle, and God willing it will stay like that when I’m gone.’
He didn’t flinch as he spoke those words. He wasn’t going to give Tommy the satisfaction. Anyway, it wasn’t over yet. He might still talk the younger man around.
‘You remember when I gave you your first job here?’ he said.
‘I remember,’ said Tommy. ‘Cleaning up guts and scales and slime. I hated the smell of it. I could never get it off my hands.’
‘Clean work always smells dirty,’ said Joey. ‘Honest work.’
‘Sometimes dirty work smells dirty too. It smells of blood and shit. It smells like this place. I think you’ve been here so long that you’ve become confused. You can’t tell the difference anymore.’
Joey looked affronted. ‘You know, you were always a lazy bastard. You didn’t like hard work.’
‘I had no problem with hard work, Joey. My old man worked the piers, and my mother cleaned office floors. They taught me the value of honest labor. It was you who dangled the soft option in front of me, the promise of easier money.’
‘So you’re blaming me for what you’ve become? There’s a coward talking, if ever I heard one.’
‘No, I’m not blaming you. It wouldn’t have mattered who suggested it to me first, I’d still have turned. I was a kid. Stealing from trucks, breaking into warehouses – that was all second nature to me. Still, you opened the door. You showed me the way. I was always going to fall, but you were the one who gave me the push.’
Joey reddened. He licked at his lips, and the fighter in him was revealed. Under other circumstances, he would have been rolling up his shirt sleeves by now and balling his meaty fists.
‘I looked out for you too,’ he said. ‘Don’t you forget that. When you overstepped the line, when you got above yourself, I stopped them from hurting you. There were men who wanted to break a hand, a leg. That bastard Brogan wanted to blind you for dealing on the side, but I spoke up for you. I told them you were ambitious, that you could make something of yourself with the right guidance. You got off lightly: a bit of a beating, when it could have been much worse. And when they were done, I gave you the space to work. It was the making of you.
I
was the making of you. When Whitey thought you were a threat, I talked him down. You’d be rotting under Tenean Beach or in a shallow grave by the Neponset River if it wasn’t for me. I told him you were sound. I told them all that you were sound. I gave them my word on it, and no more could a man ask for than the word of Joey Tuna. It was always sound. You judge a man by his soundness, Tommy. You know that.’
I
was the making of you. When Whitey thought you were a threat, I talked him down. You’d be rotting under Tenean Beach or in a shallow grave by the Neponset River if it wasn’t for me. I told him you were sound. I told them all that you were sound. I gave them my word on it, and no more could a man ask for than the word of Joey Tuna. It was always sound. You judge a man by his soundness, Tommy. You know that.’
‘And are you looking out for me now, Joey? Do you have my best interests at heart.’
‘You’re in trouble. You’re vulnerable. It’s when a man is vulnerable that temptation comes knocking. There are people who want to know that you’re sound, that’s all. A sound man has nothing to fear. So they came to me. They always come to Joey Tuna. I bear no grudge and no man bears a grudge against me. Both sides can always sit down in safety when Joey Tuna is involved. It’s been that way for forty years.’
‘Like you said, why change what’s always worked, right?’
‘That’s right. Never a truer word spoken.’
‘So why change now? I don’t see a neutral man here.’
‘I have everyone’s best interests at heart, Tommy. All we wanted to do was talk with you, clear the air.’
‘Is that why Oweny’s boys have been looking for me, to clear the air? I never took them for the conversational kind. Most of them can’t put two words together without stumbling or swearing.’
‘You’ve been keeping your head down, Tommy. People were worried. They didn’t know where you were. You could have been lying dead in a ditch by the side of the road.’
‘I could have been sitting in the Federal Building, you mean, spilling my guts like a fish on one of your blocks.’
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