CHAPTER 12
THE PRICE
POV: RONAN
I watch it twice before I go down to the boiler room.
Once in the car on Summer Street with the engine running and Theo pretending to read his phone in the front seat.
Once more with the sound up.
Watch. Are you watching?
Yes.
The stub in pieces on the red silk. The pearls on the nightstand. My mother’s pearls, and her mouth saying my name, and her hand, and her knees wide open under the lamp she turned up on purpose.
She turned it up on purpose.
I sit with the phone dark on my knee after the second time and don’t move for a full minute. Theo doesn’t say anything. He knows better.
“Is he awake?” I ask finally.
“He’s awake.”
“Get me his father.”
Theo dials and hands the phone back over the seat.
Four rings. When Conor picks up, there’s noise behind him. A bar. A television. Men talking too loud.
“Where is he?”
No hello. He knows.
“In my boiler room,” I say. “Awake.”
The noise cuts off. A door. Then only his breathing.
“If you touch my son—”
“You sent your son into a ballroom full of judges with a boat ticket for my wife and told him to put his hand on her.” I look out at the snow coming down on Summer Street.
“You told me in your pub a woman with no husband is whoever’s got the nerve.
She has a husband now, Conor. You sent Liam to find out what that means. ”
“He’s thirty years old. He’s got a little girl—”
“Then he should have kept his hand at home.”
Silence. I can hear him breathing through his nose.
“You’re going to start a war over a nun,” he says finally. Very quietly.
“I’m finishing a conversation you started with a card that said Holloway.”
“Your father won’t stand for this.”
That stops me. Only for a second.
“My father’s in Palm Beach.”
A pause on the line. Longer than it should be.
“Is he?” Conor says.
He hangs up.
I look at the phone in my hand. Theo’s eyes find mine in the mirror.
“Boss.”
“I heard.”
I hand him the phone and open the car door. The snow blows in.
“Let’s not keep Liam waiting,” I say.
***
The boiler room under the Seaport building is hot and loud and smells like oil. The thin one from the chapel is gone. Theo moved him this afternoon to a cold room at the Quincy yard, where he’s still breathing, as ordered.
Liam Kavanagh sits in the thin one’s chair.
Zip ties at the wrists. Rented jacket gone, shirt torn at the collar. A bruise swelling over his left eye where one of mine persuaded him out of his car on Northern Avenue. He looks up when I come in and tries his father’s smile.
It doesn’t fit him tonight.
“You know who I am,” he says.
“You’re the man who touched my wife.”
“I patted her shoulder. Jesus, Draven, it’s a wedding. People touch the bride.”
“Not this one.”
I take off my coat and fold it over the rail of the catwalk. I take off my gloves and put them in the pocket.
Then I hit him.
No gun for the first part. The first part should be hands.
It isn’t skilled. It isn’t meant to be. I hit him until his head rocks and the chair tips and Theo rights it with his boot. I hit him until my knuckles split on his teeth and his blood is on my shirt and mine is on his face and I can’t tell which is which.
When I stop, he’s crying through a broken mouth.
“My father—” he says. “My father will—”
“Your father sent you into a ballroom with a boat ticket in a box and told you to put your hand on her.” I flex my right hand. It stings. “Your father knew what would happen to you. That’s why he sent you instead of coming himself.”
Liam spits blood onto the concrete. “He said you’d gone soft. Crewe said—”
He stops.
The boiler roars. Somewhere a pipe clanks.
“Crewe said what?”
Liam’s eyes go wide. Then they roll a little, the way a man’s do when he’s taken too many to the head. He sags against the ties.
“Crewe said what, Liam?”
Nothing. He’s out.
I look at Theo.
Theo’s already looking at me.
“The bishop,” Theo says quietly.
“Find out.”
“Quietly?”
“Very.”
I take the gun from under my arm. Theo steps back without being asked.
I cut the tie on Liam’s right wrist. His hand flops loose into his lap. I pick it up and lay it flat on the steel arm of the chair, palm down, fingers spread, the way I laid Faraday’s on the hood of a truck.
Different man. Different hand.
Same rule.
I press the end of the suppressor to the back of it, square in the center, where the bones fan out.
He wakes up for this part.
The shot is a cough under the roar of the boiler. The steel arm rings. Liam’s scream is much louder.
“Tell your father,” I say over it, “his gift was too small. Tell him my wife tore it up.”
“You—you shot my—”
“Tell him she tore it into eight pieces and let them fall on the floor.” I holster the gun. “Then tell him that if anyone in his family ever touches her again, it won’t be a hand.”
Theo cuts him loose. Two of mine carry him out between them. He’ll wake up around four on the sidewalk outside his father’s pub on East Broadway, bleeding into a rented shirt.
Conor will get the message.
Conor always gets the message.
***
Draven House is dark at twenty to four.
Except for one window on the third floor.
She left the lamp on.
I take the stairs slowly. My knuckles have stopped bleeding and started to throb. There’s blood on my cuffs, and I don’t change. I go past my own door and stop at hers.
The hallway door. Not the one between us. The one anybody could knock on.
I knock.
“It’s open,” she says.
It is. She hasn’t locked it. She couldn’t if she wanted to.
She’s sitting on the window seat in the black nightgown with her knees up, the veil finally off and folded on the cushion beside her. Her hair is down around her shoulders. The red dress is still on the floor where she stepped out of it. The torn pieces of the stub are still scattered on the silk.
She looks at my face. My shirt. My hands.
“You watched,” she says.
“Twice.”
The color comes up in her cheeks, but she doesn’t look away. That’s new.
“Where were you?”
“With Liam Kavanagh.”
“The man who touched my shoulder.”
“Yes.”
She looks at my knuckles again. Split open. Swollen. Dark.
Her lips part. She closes them. She opens them again.
“Did he scream?”
“Yes.”
A long silence. The fire has burned down to coals. Outside, the snow keeps coming down on Louisburg Square, soft and steady, burying everything.
“Good,” my wife says.
She hears herself. Her hand flies to her mouth.
Too late. It’s out. It’s in the room with us.
I don’t move from the doorway. If I cross this floor I won’t stop, and she hasn’t said it yet. The word. The real one.
“Say it,” I tell her.
She knows what I mean. I watch her know.
Her hand stays over her mouth. Her eyes are wet and bright and fixed on me, on the blood on my cuffs, on my ruined hands. Her knees press together on the window seat.
She doesn’t say it.
Not yet.
I nod, once. I step back into the hall and pull her door closed, softly, the way you close a door on a child who’s finally sleeping.
In my own room, I don’t turn on the light.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark. Something on my pillow shifts under my weight and rolls against my hip.
I pick it up.
Glass. Cold. The lid gone. The smell reaches me before I understand what it is. Vanilla.
Her jar.
She was in here. She sat on my bed. She saw the crucifix. She saw the pins. She found the jar with the lid off and the level gone down, and she knew exactly what it meant.
And she left it on my pillow. Open. So I’d know she knew.
I sit in the dark with my bloody hands around a four-dollar jar of hand cream and breathe her in, and listen to the silence through the wall.
My wife says good.