The Burning Soul (25 page)
Authors: John Connolly
Tags: #Mystery, #Azizex666, #Horror, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Thriller
‘People were concerned. They just wanted to be sure.’
‘That I was sound.’
‘Exactly, that you were sound. I knew you were, Tommy. I told them so. I said to them, “Tommy Morris is sound. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll bring him in, and we’ll talk, and you’ll see the kind of man he is: a sound man.” I came looking for you, Tommy, but I couldn’t find you. When that happens, well, you can’t blame someone for being concerned.’
‘So you enlisted Oweny’s boys to help you.’
‘Oweny has his own questions for you. He wants to buy you out. He wants to do it right.’
‘Is that so?’
‘You know it. Oweny’s sound too. Always has been. Just like you. Two sound men.’
‘Oweny, sound? If Oweny was a fish you wouldn’t feed him to birds. He was always a traitorous little shit. You know that Oweny’s boys kicked down the door of a friend of mine? Two nights ago. They roughed her up. She lost teeth. They wanted to know where I was, but she couldn’t tell them. I hadn’t been to see her in weeks. I was keeping my distance from her to protect her, and look what happened.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Joey. ‘A man should only raise a hand to a woman as a last resort.’
‘Funny thing is, I didn’t think that Oweny knew about her. I’d been very careful. I’ll bet you knew about her, though. You know everyone’s affairs. That’s why you’re the man to turn to, because you have your finger on the pulse.’
Joey laid an index finger on his desk, the pulse finger itself, and tapped it hard on the wood to emphasize each word as he spoke: ‘People. Were.
Concerned!
You weren’t going to come in of your own volition. You had to be made to come in.’
Concerned!
You weren’t going to come in of your own volition. You had to be made to come in.’
‘Is that why they took my niece?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told your boy Martin the same.’
‘She’s my sister’s girl. She lives in a quiet little town, far away from any of this. Did you find her? Did Oweny find her?’
There was something in Tommy’s tone, a kind of madness, as he spoke about his niece, that sent a deep ache of fear through Joey’s belly, as though Tommy, knowing that he himself was doomed, had fixed upon the girl as his salvation. Joey had seen it before in men who were about to die. They began obsessing upon a friend, a parent, a picture in a wallet, a Miraculous Medal, anything to keep out the reality of what was coming.
‘We don’t kidnap little girls, Tommy. That’s not our style.’
‘Yeah? Since when?’
‘Jesus, Tommy, what do you think we are, pedophiles? Deviants? Oweny doesn’t have her. People don’t do that, not to their own, not sound people. They just wanted to talk. If they had the girl, they’d have let you know. A message would have been sent, and then the girl would have been allowed to go home once you’d come in. Our people wouldn’t behave any other way. We’re not like the Russians. We’re not animals.’
Tommy nodded. The gun wavered in his hand. Joey saw his advantage, and pressed it.
‘Come on, now, Tommy. Put the gun away and we’ll forget about this. I’ll make some calls. I’ll let everyone know they can relax. I’ll tell them that Tommy Morris is as sound as he ever was. Sound as a bell, eh, Tommy? Sound as a bell.’
Tommy began to button the overalls. They were too small for him, and he struggled with the buttons, but he didn’t look down.
‘And the meet? The sit-down where Oweny didn’t show but you did? Martin seemed to think that a message was being sent.’
‘A message? Sure, Tommy, there’s always a message. The message was that you should come in and clear all this up, put people’s minds at rest. Now you’ve had it from the horse’s mouth.’
‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘That wasn’t the message Martin picked up at all.’
‘Well, he was wrong, Tommy. My mind is at rest.’
‘Good,’ said Tommy. ‘Then your body can join it.’
He kept the gun low and against his belly as he fired, so that the overalls took the blowback. The first shot took Joey in the belly. Joey said, ‘Ah.’ He sounded disappointed, as though he’d caught Tommy doing something shameful. He supported himself against the desk and Tommy shot him again. Joey tumbled to the floor, taking a handful of invoices with him. His mug fell to the floor and broke. He lay beside the shards of broken crockery, the tea dripping through the gaps in the boards. His breath came in short gasps, and there was blood in his mouth. His hands hovered above his wounds, for he could not quite bring himself to touch them. He kept blinking, like a man fearful of facing a bright light.
‘Ah,’ he said again. ‘Ah, no.’
Tommy stood over him. ‘I never liked you anyway,’ he said. ‘You were never sound.’
And he left Joey Tuna to die in that place, with his face against the cool boards and the taste of it infusing his final breaths, his last gift to the old thug who had created him.
17
A
cold night in Boston, and the rain now beating down. It had fallen continuously throughout the day, varying only in its intensity, as though the heavens were determined to sluice the world clean. The lights of the taller buildings, always out of place in Beantown, seemed to brush the clouds above, piercing them and letting the rain pour through the holes. Tonight it was a city of sodden clothing, of suspect shoes that welcomed the damp, of plastered hair that curled and frizzed, and raindrops cold-kissing necks and breasts, of fuzzed neon reflected in puddles like swirls of paint, of slow-moving traffic and impatient pedestrians skipping dangerously past wheels and fenders, ignoring warning beeps and flashing lights. Even the girls heading for the clubs and bars had been forced to swathe their legs and arms for fear of goose bumps, and their frustration was writ large on their faces. Later, the ones who hadn’t found a partner for the night would give up the fight and let the rain ruin their coiffure and smear their mascara, and they’d swear and giggle as they struggled to find a cab, for the cabdrivers would make a killing that night.
cold night in Boston, and the rain now beating down. It had fallen continuously throughout the day, varying only in its intensity, as though the heavens were determined to sluice the world clean. The lights of the taller buildings, always out of place in Beantown, seemed to brush the clouds above, piercing them and letting the rain pour through the holes. Tonight it was a city of sodden clothing, of suspect shoes that welcomed the damp, of plastered hair that curled and frizzed, and raindrops cold-kissing necks and breasts, of fuzzed neon reflected in puddles like swirls of paint, of slow-moving traffic and impatient pedestrians skipping dangerously past wheels and fenders, ignoring warning beeps and flashing lights. Even the girls heading for the clubs and bars had been forced to swathe their legs and arms for fear of goose bumps, and their frustration was writ large on their faces. Later, the ones who hadn’t found a partner for the night would give up the fight and let the rain ruin their coiffure and smear their mascara, and they’d swear and giggle as they struggled to find a cab, for the cabdrivers would make a killing that night.
But the cold: God, that was the worst of it. It bit and gnawed, its white teeth working on fingertips and toes, noses and ears, like a carrion feeder picking at a corpse in the snow. Winter was one thing: winter, with snow on the ground and clear blue skies. You knew where you stood with winter. But this, this bastard weather, no accommodation could be reached with it. Better not to have come out at all, but that would be to give in to it, to allow it to have its sway over the city, to sacrifice a night out because the elements were conspiring against you, especially when you were young, and nubile, and had money in your pocket. Maybe when you were older, and had less to seek and to prove, the weather might give you pause, but not now. No, such nights were precious, and hard-earned. Let the rain fall; let the cold bite. The warmth and the company will be more welcome for the struggle that it took to find it, and there is little that is more lovely than to watch rain fall in the darkness from the comfort of a chair, a glass in your hand and a voice softly whispering smiling words in your ear.
Seated in their car on East Broadway in Southie, waiting for their moment, Dempsey and Ryan watched the local kids go by. The two men were thankful for the rain, for it kept heads down and obscured the view through the windshield. Both wore headgear: Dempsey a black wool hat, Ryan a Celtics cap, making him look like any one of a dozen mooks gorilla-walking their way along the main drag at this time. They came out of central casting, those guys, with their tats and their oversized T-shirts, with their misplaced sentiment for an island that meant nothing to them in actual terms, a place they could identify on a map only because of its shape. Dempsey and Ryan knew their kind well. They held ancestral grievances passed on by their parents, and their parents’ parents. Their racism was ingrained but inconsistent. They hated blacks but cheered on the Celtics, who had barely a white face among them. They had older brothers who could still recall the busing program of the mid to late seventies, when Garrity and his so-called experts ignored the warnings from both inside and outside South Boston and paired poor white Southie with poor black Roxbury, two sections of Boston’s immigrant community that had suffered more than most because of the consequences of bad urban planning; the intransigence of the all-white Boston School Committee that played upon fears of integration, and effective ghettoization, including the deeply flawed B-BURG experiment which walled the blacks inside the former Jewish neighborhoods of North Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. Sure, there were racists and bigots in Southie and the Town, because there were racists and bigots everywhere, but busing played into the hands of the worst of them, and even succeeded in uniting the previously warring Irish and Italian communities against a single common foe with a different skin. Hell, Ryan’s old man, who was smarter than most of his neighbors put together and was a member of the Boston branch of the International Socialist Organization, had found himself on the receiving end of threats from the assholes on the Tactical Patrol Force because he’d formed a council to help ensure the safety of black pupils at his son’s high school. Ryan hadn’t thanked him for his liberal views since he was the one who had taken the beatings for his father being a ‘nigger-lover,’ but he respected his old man more now for what he’d done.
The years had changed Ryan, but he kept many of those changes hidden.
Now he sat behind the wheel and wondered at what they were about to do. By Dempsey’s feet lay the shoebox they had taken from the Napier house, but it was no longer filled with money. The device that it contained was crude but effective: little more than a lead-azide detonator and two pounds of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN. The explosive’s lethality had been compounded by the carpet tacks that Dempsey sprinkled liberally through the mix. Ryan had watched, appalled, as Dempsey put it together in the motel room earlier.
‘What are they for?’ he asked
‘They’re for added value.’
‘But they’ll . . .’
He trailed off. His mouth felt too dry. This was wrong. It should be stopped.
‘They’ll what? Hurt people? Scar them? What do you think the point of this is, Francis?’
Ryan found some saliva. ‘To take out Oweny Farrell.’
‘No, it’s to take out Oweny Farrell and everyone around him. It’s to leave nobody from his inner circle standing. It’s to send a message that Tommy Morris isn’t down and he isn’t out, and his meal tickets aren’t up for grabs.’
‘They won’t let it slide. They can’t.’
‘They will if he gives them no other choice. They sat back and waited to see what Oweny would do, and how Tommy would respond. This is Tommy’s response. This is his way back.’
Ryan turned away. His fingers shook. He lit a cigarette to calm himself.
‘This is not right, Martin. This is not what we are. There’ll be people in there who have nothing to do with it.’
He tried to visualize the damage that a hail of tacks would do in an enclosed space, and felt vomit well up in his throat. Had Tommy told Dempsey to do this, or had Dempsey come up with the idea himself? Dempsey was the one to whom Tommy relayed his orders, unless, as with Helen Napier, Dempsey was otherwise occupied. Ryan had to take it on trust that what he heard from Dempsey was the true substance of their conversations. If Tommy had really endorsed this course of action, then all was lost and there was no longer any rightness to his cause.
‘Look,’ said Dempsey, ‘it’s this or Tommy rolls over and dies.’
Seconds ticked by.
‘That might be for the best,’ said Ryan. He said it so slowly, and so softly, that Dempsey had to lean forward to be sure he was hearing him right. Ryan’s face was still turned away from him. The cigarette was in his left hand, but his right hand was no longer visible. From the angle of his arm, it was somewhere close to his belt. Dempsey grew still. On the table beside him was his gun. Casually, he rested his hand inches from it.
‘I thought we’d had this conversation already, Francis,’ he said. He was surprised at how relaxed he sounded. His fingertips brushed the grips.
Ryan’s shoulders trembled. Dempsey thought that he might be on the verge of tears. There was a tremor in his voice when he spoke again.
‘I mean, look at us. We’re making a bomb. We’re going to slaughter and maim. I’m not like you, Martin. Maybe I’m not as tough as you. I’ve delivered beatings with the best of them, but I’ve never killed. I don’t want to kill anyone, not even Oweny Farrell.’
‘How did you think this was going to end?’
‘I don’t know: with a sit-down, maybe, with everybody compromising. I thought Joey Tuna would see us right. I thought—’
‘You thought what: that you were dealing with reasonable men?’ There was no mockery to Dempsey’s tone. He merely sounded tired, and there was a horror in his voice at what he had allowed himself to become.
‘No,’ said Ryan. ‘Just men. Just ordinary men.’
‘They were never ordinary, Francis. Ordinary men lead ordinary lives, but not them. They all had blood on their hands and on their souls. We’re tainted by it too, just by being around them.’
‘Have you killed, Martin?’
Now he turned to look at the older man. Ryan had heard stories: Dempsey worked alone, and the people he took care of didn’t surface again. Wherever they were, they were buried deep. Now Ryan wanted to hear confirmation from Dempsey’s own mouth.
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