Chapter 24
24
PATRICK
M y fingers spread wide across the back of Fiona’s head as I shove her to the floor of the car. “Stay down,” I growl as she protests. Flooring the accelerator, I fight the gut-wrench of desperation as the engine shrieks before the wheels grip the road. The Bell clangs, loud and clear inside my head, urging me to wheel around and send those shitehawks running. Driving away from Southie gunmen is starting to feel far too familiar.
This time, no shots are fired.
I don’t know if that’s because Dowd calls them off, shouting orders through their high-end earpieces, or because they think better of starting a shooting war in the middle of Boston, or maybe it’s the unmarked car I hurtle past at the end of the street.
The brain squirrels start justifying the space they take up inside my skull. I’m handling half a dozen things, and I’m ready to manage twenty more.
One hand hovers over Fiona, as if that will keep her safe from danger. I’m steering clear of the curbs, grateful the Crew’s ban on parking still applies to this street, glad I don’t have to lose time sideswiping vehicles. I’m watching the eejits in my rear-view mirror, making sure they lower their arms, waiting for them to holster their weapons. I’m thinking of where I’ll take Fiona, where she’ll be safe, where we can be certain no one is following us, because the last thing I want is to draw Dowd’s men to the Back Bay apartment. I’m watching a group of boys beside the streetlight, still dressed in their Sunday best, and if they’re anything like I was at that age, they’re lying about touching some girl’s tit or getting a hand beneath her pants, but all I care about now is that they don’t decide to dart across the street, don’t decide now’s the time to head home for Sunday roast. I’m watching Michelangelo Barbieri stare at me from behind the wheel of his Chevy Tahoe, a paper cup of coffee halfway to his mouth.
Mike Barbieri.
Fuck.
The brain squirrels pelt me with a shitload of memories, all of them bad. Twenty-five years ago, Barbieri was a kid fresh out of the FBI Academy. If there was a rulebook, he had it memorized. If there was a risk, he’d jump in arse-first.
He was the agent who turned my father. I first saw Barbieri at the back of a bar, buying Da rounds of Guinness that no man with cirrhosis should ever have touched, Irishman or no. I saw Barbieri in the power tools aisle at Lucky’s Hardware, pretending to buy a nail gun as my father coughed up facts about Kieran Ingram. I saw him under an umbrella outside St. Brigid’s after a priest told lies about Da’s saved soul.
Barbieri must be forty pounds heavier than he was back then; his neck swells over his collar. He’s lost most of the thick black hair he used to wear slicked back like a Wall Street banker. He’s drinking Starbucks coffee, instead of Dunkin’ like a proper Boston boy.
Courtesy of the brain squirrels, I clock all of that as the Land Rover shoots across the intersection. It takes me another block to realize I’ve already seen him on this trip to Boston. He was Other Guy, sitting across from Dowd in the Back Bay Dunkin’.
The feds are surveilling the dún —not just Ingram’s wake, but daily operations. They had enough leverage on Dowd to force him to a meeting outside of Southie. They’re running him, same as they ran my da.
Fiona’s swearing from the floor. I gather she’s broken a motherfucking nail, and Dowd’s a cocksucker if he thinks she’ll give him the Crew just because he says he’ll put a ring on her goddamn finger, and if he tries, she’ll shove it up his jizz-stained arse.
She’s creative, that one. Colorful, too. And I figure I better let her off the floor after my third stop at a traffic light, or she’ll turn some of her rage on me.
The Bell’s a constant jingle as Fiona settles back in her seat. I manage to sound neutral as I ask, “Dowd thinks he’ll marry you?”
She lets loose with another stream of profanity, all adding up to the fact that Dowd says he’ll drag her to the altar. As Fiona goes through a show of yanking her corset and twitching her trousers, I realize the steering wheel is cutting into my palms.
Aran Dowd has finally gone too far.
He’s talking to the feds, the very thing that put my da in the dún’s basement twenty-five years ago. Dowd didn’t make my father turn traitor; I’ve always known that. I never tried to get revenge against the man—not for Da, not for Jenn or Athawn, and not for my poor mam.
But now? The gobshite’s singing to the FBI. The clan must have its due. And I’ll get my revenge too, because that fat fuck was stupid enough to go after my little girl.
All I have to do is prove Dowd’s sold out to Barbieri.
For now, though, I need to figure out where to take Fiona— someplace Dowd will never think to look. Somewhere she can relax and forget the shitehawk mauled her.
I don’t know if Mary’s Place is still standing. Jenn’s been gone for two and a half decades, and she was always one of their best customers. But I’m already heading north and west of downtown, and if it’s not still there, I’ll find something else.
The neighborhood is a lot more built up. Entire blocks of old frame houses have been replaced by modern mansions. But just as I’m thinking I’ll have to come up with Plan B, there’s a change to the buildings. Houses give way to a run of small stores—baby clothes covered with dinosaurs, a bakery for dogs, another for humans with a sign in the window that says they have four dozen flavors of cupcakes.
And there, at the end of the next block, is Mary’s Place. The little parking lot still stretches on the side, ten angled spaces. The front room is filled with the “curiosities” Jenn loved—antique coffee tins and silver serving spoons and mugs shaped like animals. The back room is an old-fashioned soda fountain—black-and-white tile, a counter lined with red-leather stools, and five matching booths.
At the counter, a harried mother asks for extra jimmies on her kid’s double scoop of chocolate. Two teen-age boys are sampling every one of the thirteen flavors in the ice cream case. Everyone gapes as Fiona enters in front of me, staring at the leather laces barely keeping her corset from bursting open, at the trousers so tight I know she had to lie on the bed to zip them.
I lead Fiona to the last booth. She sits with her back to the door. I keep an eye on things, just in case.
“What is this place?” she asks.
I pluck the menu from the side of the display that shows all the songs on the jukebox. At first glance, it’s the same list as the one Jenn ordered from twenty-five years ago. Ice cream, shakes, and malts on the front. Boozy versions of the same on the back .
But things have changed. The prices are ten times what they used to be. And the jukebox takes credit cards, one dollar a play.
“Figure out what you want,” I tell her. “I’ll order at the counter.”
She doesn’t want to give in that easy. “You’ve been here before?”
I give her a look. There’s no way in hell I just happened to drive to this old-fashioned little storefront by accident, on this quiet street, in this particular suburb. “What do you want?” I ask, pushing the menu toward her again.
She barely glances at the laminated page. “A Millionaire Malt,” she says.
My girl has good taste. It’s twice the price of anything else on the menu, made with eighteen-year-old Glenfiddich.
I wait until the counter’s clear before I place our order. One Millionaire for Fiona. A bowl of vanilla ice cream for me.
Back at the table, I make a show of choosing music. The options are old— even for me—big band and barbershop and crooners my gran used to love. I punch in codes for a Rat Pack serenade—Dean Martin’s “The Lady is a Tramp,” Frank singing “You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You,” Sammy Davis Jr. going after “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
The old man who brings us our ice cream looks like he’s been here for fifty years. His face is a perfect mask as he serves Fiona’s malt. He leaves her the metal mixing cup and a long spoon, along with a whipped-cream-capped glass.
Fiona laughs at my bowl of ice cream. “Vanilla?” she asks.
“It’s a flavor,” I say defensively.
“Not one I ever thought you’d be interested in.” Daddy. She starts to say it. I see her tongue curl behind her upper teeth. But something makes her think better of yanking my chain in public.
Maybe she’s remembering the look on Oona’s face. Maybe she’s thinking about Dowd .
Her fingers go to the red marks on her arm, the ones already turning to bruises.
She’s definitely thinking about Dowd.
My own fingers curl into fists by my thighs.
But she takes a sip of her malt, drawing on a straw that’s as big as my little finger. The hollows of her cheeks tug something inside me, something that turns to melted beeswax as she registers the taste. “This is amazing,” she says.
I nod, because I knew she’d like it.
She takes another long draw. And then, casually, like she’s commenting on the music: “I’m going to kill him.”
Not if I get there first. But I humor her. “That’ll cost you, in the long run.”
Defiance turns her jaw to stone. “I’ve done it before. Four times.”
I keep my gaze steady. “More like seven, from what I’ve heard.”
She sucks on the straw, like she doesn’t care. But sometime in the past three weeks, I’ve learned to read the expressions on her face. She’s embarrassed. Angry. Determined as fuck.
“Who were they?” I ask, when she’s swallowed enough whiskey and cream to soften the blow.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” I argue. “Because killing your own uncle will haunt you like those three you don’t want to count. The ones you forget to mention when you tell men how tough you are. The ones you want to erase.”
She pours from the silver cup into her glass, concentrating like it’s brain surgery. She applies the same careful attention to her lipstick-stained straw, placing it in the bottom of the glass like it’s a fuse on a nuclear bomb before she matches the print of her lips.
When she’s finished, not getting close to answering my question, she sits back on her side of the booth. “I’d like another one of those,” she says .
I think about telling her to slow down, but she’s the one who got pawed back at the dún . And she’s the one fighting, body and soul, to keep from telling me about her past. If she’s not afraid of an ice cream headache, then she can do as she wants.
I play my role all over again, going to the counter and ordering her drink. I choose more music—“You Make Me Feel So Young,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and “The Things We Did Last Summer.”
She’s halfway through her second Millionaire before she starts to talk. She looks at the glass instead of at me. She traces a pool of condensation on the table, running her fingertip in circles.
“Some men need to die.”
I nod, because that’s obviously true.
“But da said a good King chooses his battles .”
I wait, because that’s another truth. And finally she goes on: “There were two of them. But Da said it must have been my fault. I picked a fight. Went irregular with my uniform. Whatever—I started it, Da said, and he’d have nothing to do with ending it.”
I still don’t know what it is, but I’m pretty sure I can take a guess.
“I made things look like a robbery,” she says. “And I gave the money to St. Vincent-de-Paul’s.”
“Good thinking, that."
“I wasn’t keeping blood money.”
She’s half-drunk by now. Her words are slippery in a way that might mean her mouth is cold from the ice cream. But I’m willing to bet it’s the four shots of Glenfiddich that have softened her lips, especially after her adrenaline-fueled flight from Dowd’s office. She stares at me defiantly, like she thinks I’ll say she was wrong to give to charity.
Instead, I say, “I’m sorry.”
She focuses on transferring the last of her second malted from the silver cup to her glass .
“Your father should have protected you,” I say.
Her straw makes a slurping sound as she polishes off the dregs.
“Your da should’ve been the one to get revenge.”
She shrugs, like she doesn’t care. But she pushes her glass toward me. “One more?”
I don’t know where she’ll put it, but I know she can eat me under the table with pizza, so I shouldn’t be surprised. Once I’m up at the counter, I think about ordering some food, French fries or a burger, something to soak up some of the booze.
But Fiona doesn’t want food. She wants another malted. That’s what she needs , and the only reason I’m in Boston is to help her, to protect her, so another Millionaire Malt it is.
This time, she’s drinking to get drunk. She doesn’t bother with a straw. That’s a shame, because the shape of her lips closing around that bit of plastic is a feckin’ work of art.
Then again, when she drinks from her glass, she ends up with a healthy dose of cream on her upper lip. I think about wiping it off with a napkin. I want to taste it with the tip of my tongue. But I settle for watching her swallow.
“Mmm. Like mother’s milk.” She fakes an Irish accent. Or maybe that’s supposed to be Scottish. I can’t tell.
“Your mam fed you Scotch by the glassful?”
“My mother died the day I was born.”
Somewhere in the back of my brain, beneath the leaf litter left by all the squirrels, I knew Kieran Ingram’s wife died giving birth to his only child. “I’m sorry,” I say, which is part a condolence on her loss and part an apology for forgetting it.
She shrugs. “Can’t miss what I never had.” She peers at me over the rim of her glass. I’m not sure what she sees, but it makes her want to talk. “What about you?” she says.
“What about me?”
“Were you close to your mother?”
I don’t know how to answer the question. My mother moved to Boston when she was twenty-five years old, after a fire burned down her house in Providence, Rhode Island. She caught Da’s eye her first morning, walking down a street in Southie. Tommy Moran marched her to the altar, she had me, and she never looked back.
Mam knew all my favorite foods, and she made them on my birthday. She spent hours poring over doctor’s reports and fighting with my schools to get me even a fraction of the help I needed. She did her best to hide my father’s violent world until it became clear I was walking in his footsteps, as close as I could follow.
After Da died, and Jenn and Athawn too, Mam took a header off the Longfellow Bridge, the night before her forty-sixth birthday.
Christ. I’m older than Mam ever was.
Fiona’s not too drunk to see she’s touched a nerve. She makes a show of finishing off the drink that’s in her glass then, with the careful precision of a driver at a sobriety checkpoint, works the metal-cup transfer one last time. She gives a sly glance to my long-empty bowl of vanilla ice cream and makes a show of licking her lips. “Want a taste, Daddy?”
I want to pull her onto the table between us. I want to shove a hand down that corset. I want to squeeze a hand into those trousers, to see if she’s as wet as I think she is.
I think about telling her she’s a marvel. She’s smart and she’s strong and she’s gorgeous, and I’m lucky to be the man she’s taunting.
But as intriguing as the game would be—can I get her off without actually laying a finger on her?—I won’t take advantage of her when she’s drunk.
So I shake my head. I load up one last round of songs on the jukebox—“Hit the Road to Dreamland,” and “Let Me Go Lover,” and “Fools Rush In.” I tell her to drink up.
By the time I get her to the Back Bay apartment, she’s unsteady on her feet, like Bambi on an ice-covered pond. Four flights of stairs are a lot longer when I’m half-carrying a girl who’s trying to get her hand past my zipper.
Once I work the lock on the squeaky front door, she’s a lot more docile. Back in the bedroom, she stares at my fingers as I strip the laces on her corset. She raises her arms when I ask, and she lets me slip off the boned leather. She sits on the edge of the bed and gives me one foot and then the other, watching as I toss her shoes into the closet. The trousers are a bit more of a struggle, but I finally get her under the sheet, and under the blanket too, resting her head on her pillow.
“Go to sleep, little girl.”
“I’m not tired,” she says, slurring like a professional drunk. But before she can argue further, she yawns. “Keep me company?” she asks.
I want to. I want to peel off my clothes and climb under the covers and rail her till we’re both blind, until Dowd’s threat seems like an idiotic joke and not a legitimate bid to steal the Crew out from under her.
But more than that, I want to protect Fiona. I want to keep her safe. I want to be closer to her than I’ve ever been before. So I lean over and brush a kiss on her forehead. “You need your rest. We’ll have a full day tomorrow.”
“What’s tomorrow?” Her held tilts. I’m pretty sure she’s shooting for rebellious , but she miscalculates badly and lands on sweet.
“We’re going to the doctor.”
“I don’t like doctors.”
“No one likes doctors.”
“Why do we have to go? I’m not sick.”
I stroke her hair off her forehead. “That’s exactly what we’ll check for. Make sure neither of us can pass anything to the other. Because I won’t be satisfied with johnnies for much longer.”
“You don’t need to wear one. I’ll be fine.”
I head to the jacks, but I’m not going after a string of foil squares. Instead, I shake some Advil out of a bottle. I fill a glass of water. By the time I bring her both, she’s fallen asleep, lying on her back, arms and legs spread like she’s trying to fill as much of the bed as possible.
I leave the tablets on the nightstand, and then I head out to the living room with my phone. First, I need to see if Jenn’s doctor is still in practice. I remember the woman’s name, and I can picture the medical building we visited for sonograms.
After, I’ll find out what Mike Barbieri’s been up to for the last twenty-five years.
And then I’ll try to figure out what leverage the feds have on Aran Dowd.