The Given Day (81 page)

Raphelson came down the aisle with a sick smile plastered to his face and a stiff gait. He climbed the steps to the stage and shook Danny's hand and whispered, "I'll get you for this, Coughlin."

"Yeah?" Danny gripped his hand tight, squeezing the bones, and smiled big. "I fucking hope you choke to death."

He dropped the hand and walked to the back of the stage as Raphelson took the podium and Mark sidled up to Danny.

672DENNIS LEHANE

"He selling us out?"

"He already sold us."

"It gets worse," Mark said.

Danny turned, saw that Mark's eyes were damp, the pockets beneath them dark.

"Jesus, how could it get worse?"

"This is a telegram Samuel Gompers sent to Governor Coolidge this morning. Coolidge released it to the press. Just read the circled part."

Danny's eyes scanned the page until he found the sentence circled in pencil:

While it is our belief that the Boston Police were poorly served and their rights as workingmen denied by both yourself and Police Commissioner Curtis, it has always been the position of the American Federation of Labor to discourage all government employees from striking.

The men were booing Raphelson now, most on their feet. Several chairs toppled.

Danny dropped the copy of the telegram to the floor of the stage. "We're done."

"There's still hope, Dan."

"For what?" Danny looked at him. "The American Federation of Labor and the Central Labor Union both just sold us down the river on the same day. Fucking hope?"

"We could still get our jobs back."

Several men rushed the stage and Ralph Raphelson took a half dozen steps backward.

"They'll never give us our jobs back," Danny said. "Never."

The el ride back to the North End was bad. Luther had never seen Danny in so dark a mood. It covered him like a cloak. He sat beside Luther and offered hard eyes to the other passengers who gave THE GIVEN DAYhim a funny look. Nora sat beside him and rubbed his hand nervous ly, as if to calm him, but it was really to calm herself, Luther knew.

Luther had known Danny long enough to know you'd have to be insane to take the guy on in a fair fight. He was too big, too fearless, too impervious to pain. So he'd never be dumb enough to question Danny's strength, but he'd never been close enough before to feel this capacity for violence that lived in the man like a second, deeper soul.

The other men on the car stopped giving them funny looks. Stopped giving them any looks at all. Danny just sat there, staring out at the rest of the car, never seeming to blink, those eyes of his gone dark, just waiting for an excuse to let the rest of him erupt.

They got off in the North End and walked up Hanover toward Salem Street. Night had come on while they rode the el, but the streets were near empty due to the State Guard presence. About halfway along Hanover, as they were passing the Prado, someone called Danny's name. It was a hoarse, weak voice. They turned and Nora let out a small yelp as a man stepped out of the shadows of the Prado with a hole in his coat that expelled smoke.

"Jesus, Steve," Danny said and caught the man as he fell into his arms. "Nora, honey, can you find a guardsman, tell him a cop's been shot?"

"I'm not a cop," Steve said.

"You're a cop, you're a cop."

He lowered Steve to the ground as Nora went running up the street.

"Steve, Steve."

Steve opened his eyes as the smoke continued to flow from the hole in his chest. "All this time asking around? And I just ran into her. Turned into the alley between Stillman and Cooper? Just looked up and there she was. Tessa. Pop."

His eyelids fluttered. Danny pulled up his shirt and tore off a length of it, wadded it up and pressed it to the hole.

674DENNIS LEHANE

Steve opened his eyes. "She's gotta be . . . moving now, Dan. Right now."

A guardsman's whistle blew and Danny saw Nora running back down the street toward them. He turned to Luther. "Put your hand on this. Press hard."

Luther followed his instructions, pressed the heel of his palm against the wadded-up shirt, watched it redden.

Danny stood.

"Wait! Where you going?"

"Get the person who did this. You tell the guardsmen it was a woman named Tessa Ficara. You got that name?"

"Yeah, yeah. Tessa Ficara."

Danny ran through the Prado.

He caught her coming down the fire escape. He was in the rear doorway of a haberdashery on the other side of the alley and she came out of a window on the third floor onto the fire escape and walked down to the landing below. She lifted the ladder until its hooks disengaged from the housing and then latched onto the iron again as she lowered it to the pavement. When she turned her body to begin the climb down, he drew his revolver and crossed the alley. When she reached the last rung and stepped to the pavement, he placed the gun to the side of her neck.

"Keep your hands on the ladder and do not turn around."

"Officer Danny," she said. She started to turn and he slapped the side of her face with his free hand.

"What did I say? Hands on the ladder and don't turn around." "As you wish."

He ran his hands through the pockets of her coat and then the folds of her clothing.

"You like that?" she said. "You like feeling me?"

"You want to get hit again?" he said.

"If you must hit," she said, "hit harder."

His hand bumped a hard bulge by her groin and he felt her body stiffen.

THE GIVEN DAY"I'll assume you didn't grow a dick, Tessa."

He reached down her leg, then ran his hands up under her dress and chemise. He pulled the Derringer from the waistband of her underwear and pocketed it.

"Satisfied?" she said.

"Not by a fair sight."

"What about your dick, Danny?" she said, the word coming out "deke," as if she were trying it out for the first time. Although, from experience, he knew she wasn't.

"Raise your right leg," he said.

She complied. "Is it hard?"

She wore a gunmetal-lace boot with a Cuban heel and black velveteen top. He ran his hand up and around it.

"Now the other one."

She lowered her right leg. As she raised the left, she bumped her ass back against him. "Oh, it is. Very hard."

He found the knife in her left boot. It was small and thin but, he had little doubt, very sharp. He pulled it out with the crude scabbard attached and pocketed it beside the gun.

"Would you like me to lower my leg or do you want to fuck me where I stand?"

He could see his breath in the cold. "Fucking you ain't in my plans tonight, bitch."

He ran his hand up her body again and heard her take slow even breaths. Her hat was a broad-brimmed crepe sailor with a red ribbon across the brim tied off into a bow at the front. He removed it and stepped back from her and ran his hand over the trim. He found two razor blades tucked beneath the silk and he tossed them to the alley along with the hat.

"You dirtied my hat," she said. "Poor, poor hat."

He placed a hand on her back and removed all the pins from her hair until it spilled down her neck and back and then he threw the pins away and stepped back again.

"Turn around."

676DENNIS LEHANE

"Yes, master."

She turned and leaned back against the ladder and crossed her hands at the waist. She smiled and it made him want to slap her again. "You think you will arrest me now?"

He produced a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and dangled them from his fi nger.

She nodded and the smile remained. "You are no longer a police officer, Danny. I know these things."

"Citizen's arrest," he said.

"If you arrest me, I'll hang myself."

It was his turn to shrug. "Okay."

"And the baby in my belly will die as well."

He said, "Knocked up again, are we?"

"Si."

She stared at him, her eyes wide and dark as always. She ran a hand over her belly. "A life lives in me."

"Uh-uh," Danny said. "Try another one, honey."

"I don't have to. Bring me to jail and the jail doctor will confi rm that I am pregnant. I promise you, I will hang myself. And a child will die in my womb."

He locked the cuffs over her wrists and then yanked on them so that her body slammed into his and their faces almost touched.

"Don't fucking play me, whore. You pulled it off once, but twice ain't going to happen in your time on earth."

"I know that," she said, and he could taste her breath. "I am a revolutionary, Danny, and I--"

"You're a fucking terrorist. A bomb maker." He grabbed the cuff chain and pulled her close. "You just shot a guy who spent the last nine months looking for a job. He was of 'the people.' Just another working stiff trying to get by and you fucking shot him."

"Ex-officer Danny," she said and her tone was that of an elderly woman speaking to a child, "casualties are a part of war. Just ask my dead husband."

The metal shot from between her hands and into his body. It bit his THE GIVEN DAYflesh and then hit bone and chiseled through that and his hip caught fire and the bolt of pain shot down through his thigh and reached his knee.

He pushed her back and she stumbled and looked at him with her hair in her face and her lips wet with spittle.

Danny glanced at the knife sticking out of his hip and then his leg gave way and he dropped to his ass in the alley and watched the blood sluice down his outer thigh. He raised his .45 and pointed it at her.

The pain came in bolts that shook his entire body. It was worse than anything he'd experienced when he'd been shot in the chest.

"I'm carrying a child," she said and took a step backward.

Danny took a bite from the air and sucked it through his teeth.

Tessa held out her hands and he shot her once in the chin and once between her breasts and she fell down in the alley and flopped like a fish. Her heels kicked the cobblestones, and then she tried to sit up, taking a loud gulp of the air as the blood spilled down her coat. Danny watched her eyes roll back in her head and then her head hit the alley and she was still. Lights came on in the windows.

He went to lay back and something punched him in the thigh. He heard the pistol report a half a second before the next bullet hit him high on the right side of his chest. He tried to lift his own pistol. He raised his head and saw a man standing on the fire escape. His pistol flashed and the bullet chunked into the cobblestones. Danny kept trying to raise his own pistol but his arm wouldn't follow commands, and the next shot hit his left hand. The whole time, he couldn't help thinking: Now who the fuck is this guy?

He rested on his elbows and let the gun fall from his right hand. He wished he could have died on any other day but this. This one had carried too much defeat with it, too much despair, and he would have liked to leave the world believing in something.

The man on the fire escape rested his elbows on the rail and took aim. Danny closed his eyes.

He heard a scream, a bellow really, and wondered if it was his own. A clank of metal, a higher pitched scream. He opened his eyes and saw 678DENNIS LEHANE the man fall through the air, and his head made a loud pop against the cobblestones and his body folded in half.

Luther heard the first shot after he'd already passed the alley. He stood still on the sidewalk and heard nothing for almost a minute and was about to walk away when he heard the second one--a sharp pop followed immediately by another one. He jogged back to the alley. Some lights had come on and he could see two figures lying in the middle of the alley, one of them trying to raise a gun off the stone. Danny.

A man stood up on the fire escape. He wore a black bowler and pointed a gun down at Danny. Luther saw the brick lying by a trash can, thought it might be a rat at first even as he reached for it, but the rat didn't move, and he closed his hand over it and came up with, yup, a brick.

When Danny lay back on his elbows, Luther saw that execution coming, could feel it in his chest, and he let loose the loudest yell he was capable of, a nonsensical "Aaaahhhh" that seemed to empty his heart and soul of its blood.

The man on the fire escape looked up and Luther already had his arm cocked. He could feel grass underfoot, the smell of a field in late August, the scent of leather and dirt and sweat, see the runner trying to take home, take home against his arm, trying to show him up like that? Luther's feet left the alley, and his arm turned into a catapult. He saw a catcher's mitt waiting, and the air sizzled when he unleashed the brick into it. That brick got up there in a goddamned hurry, too, like it had been pulled from the fire of its maker but for no other purpose. That brick had ambition.

Hit that son of a bitch right in the side of his silly hat. Crushed the hat and half his head. The guy lurched. The guy canted. He fell over the fire escape and tried to grab it, tried kicking at it, but there wasn't no hope in that. He just fell. Fell straight down, screaming like a girl, and landed on his head.

Danny smiled. Blood pumping out of him like it was heading to put out a fire, and he fucking smiles!

THE GIVEN DAY"Twice you saved my life."

"Sssh."

Nora came running up the alley, her shoes clicking on the stones. She dropped to her knees over her husband.

"Compress, honey," Danny said. "Your scarf. Forget the leg. The chest, the chest, the chest."

She used her scarf on the left hole in his chest and Luther took off his jacket and applied it to the bigger hole in his leg. They knelt over him pressing all their weight into his chest.

"Danny, don't leave me."

"Not leaving," Danny said. "Strong. Love you."

Nora's tears poured down into his face. "Yes, yes, you're strong." "Luther."

"Yeah?"

A siren bleated in the night, followed by another.

"Hell of a throw."

"Sssh."

"You should . . ."--Danny smiled and blood bubbled over his lips--". . . be a baseball player or something."

The BABE GOES SOUTH chapter forty Luther arrived back in Tulsa in late September during a dogged heat wave and a humid breeze that kicked the dust up and caked the city tan. He'd spent some time in East St. Louis with his Uncle Hollis, enough time in which to grow a beard. He stopped grooming his hair as well and traded his bowler for a broke- down cavalryman's hat with a sloopy brim and a crown that the moths had gotten to. He even allowed Uncle Hollis to overfeed him so that for the first time in his life he had a little belly on him and some extra flesh beneath his jaw. By the time he got off the freight car in Tulsa, he looked like a tramp. Which was the point. A tramp with a duffel bag.