CHAPTER 18
THE TRAITOR
POV: RONAN
“Put him in the chair.”
Theo puts him in the chair.
It’s my chair. The leather one in front of the nine screens, where I’ve sat most nights for two years watching her sleep.
Declan Byrne fills it badly. He’s too wide.
His knees knock the underside of the desk.
Theo has zip-tied his wrists behind the backrest and his ankles to the steel legs, and he’s still chewing.
Nobody took the gum. Nobody thought of it.
“Spit it out,” I say.
He looks up at me. Then he spits it onto the concrete between my shoes.
“Boss—”
“Don’t.”
I stand in front of him with my hands at my sides. The gauze on my knuckles is fresh from this morning and already going pink.
Behind him, on the bottom row of screens, the center one shows the chapel.
She’s still there. She’s stopped kneeling. She’s sitting on the altar step with her arms around her knees and the black veil trailing down her back onto the stone, and she’s looking at the door.
Waiting for me.
I look at her for three seconds. Then I look at Declan.
“Fourteen months,” I say.
He doesn’t pretend. That’s the first thing I’ll give him. He doesn’t make me say laundromat. He sees my face and his shoulders drop an inch, and he breathes out through his nose.
“Yeah.”
“Twenty-five hundred on the first.”
“Yeah.”
“I pay you ninety-six thousand a year, Declan.”
“And Conor pays me for things you don’t.” He rolls his neck. “You know what travel hockey costs? For a girl? Skates alone—”
“I know what it costs. I paid for her skates last Christmas.”
That lands. I watch it land.
“Before her,” I say. “Fourteen months ago, my wife was on her knees in a convent scrubbing floors. Nobody in Southie knew her name. What did Conor want with you?”
“You.” He shrugs as far as the ties will let him. “What you did with your nights. Where you drove. Who you met. Conor always wanted to know what Conrad’s boy was up to. So I told him.”
“Told him what?”
“That you sat outside a convent in Dorchester four nights a week.” A laugh comes out of him, short and ugly. “They thought I was lying. They laughed for a week. Ronan Draven, the king of the harbor, parked on Adams Street staring up at a nun’s window like a kid outside a candy store.”
“And then?”
“And then Frank Holloway came around the Ironside again, drunk, looking for a game.” He meets my eyes. “And Conor stopped laughing.”
The servers hum. On the screen, she shifts on the altar step and tucks the veil tighter around her shoulders against the cold.
So that’s the shape of it.
Frank didn’t wander back to Conor’s table by accident. Conor let him in. Conor gave him credit. Conor wanted a marker on the one thing I’d ever been seen wanting.
Because of the man in this chair.
“Albright,” I say.
“Crewe’s boy.”
“Explain.”
“The Bishop’s got shelters. Our Lady of the Harbor, that place in Southie, the one in Chelsea. Girls come in off the street. Runaways. Girls whose fathers owe people.” Declan’s eyes flick to the screen, then away. “Most of them go home. Some don’t. Albright did the intake. He picked which.”
“For Conor.”
“For the boats. Conor moves them. Crewe blesses the paperwork and keeps his cathedral roof dry.”
“I paid for his roof.”
“So did Conor.” Declan almost smiles. “He’s a bishop, boss. He takes everybody’s money. It’s practically a sacrament.”
I don’t smile back.
“Christmas Eve,” I say.
He knows I know. I can see him decide whether it’s worth lying. It isn’t.
“Midnight Mass,” he says. “At the cathedral. She’d want to go. They all want to go. I’d have been walking her. Halfway through the homily I’d take her out the side door for some air. She’d be pale, she’d come. There’s a car on Washington Street.”
“And Crewe?”
“Crewe’s the paper.” He licks his split lip.
“After, he annuls you. He’s got it all worked out.
Fraud. Duress. A marriage in a hurry, in Advent, bride doesn’t even get to call her family.
He says there’s always a way to find a marriage invalid if you’ve got the right bishop.
” His eyes go down my body and back up. “Might be harder now. Heard she screamed the chapel down Friday night.”
I don’t move.
“Anyway,” Declan says. “She stops being yours on paper. Then she’s nobody’s. And nobody’s belongs to Conor.”
Theo, behind him, has gone very still.
On the screen, Mae stands up off the altar step. She walks to the chapel door. She puts her hand on the latch and doesn’t open it. She just stands there with her palm on the wood, her head bowed, the way she stood at the window of her cell every night with the blind up.
I watch her do it.
“She’s a good little liar, your nun,” Declan says.
I turn back to him.
“Smiled at me the whole way through the house.” He shakes his head. Almost admiring. “How nice, Declan. She sounds lovely, Declan. Didn’t blink. Didn’t sweat. You know what they say about girls that lie that good? They’re good at a lot of other—”
I hit him.
Not with my fist. With the desk.
I take a handful of his hair and put his face into the edge of the steel, once, twice, and the third time something in his cheek gives and blood sprays across the keyboard and up the bottom row of screens. Across her, standing at the chapel door. A red line across her veil.
He roars. He throws his weight sideways, and the chair tips, and the zip tie on his left wrist, the one Theo pulled too fast, snaps.
His hand comes up. Not for me.
For Theo’s holster.
Theo twists away. Declan’s fingers close on air. Then I’m on him, and the chair goes over, and we go down onto the concrete together, his free hand clawing at my face, at the scar, at my eyes.
I get my hands around his throat.
Both of them. The ones she bandaged with her eyes this morning when Rosa did it with gauze. The knuckles split open under the pressure, I feel them go, and my blood runs down into his collar and mixes with his.
He’s strong. He was a cop for twenty years. He bucks and kicks and his heel catches Theo in the knee.
I hold on.
I think about a hockey rink in Quincy on a Saturday morning, his daughter in skates I paid for.
I think about a side door at the cathedral, and a car on Washington Street, and her pale in the cold air, saying thank you, Declan.
I think about the word nobody’s.
His face goes red, then dark. His eyes bulge. His free hand slaps weakly at my wrist.
“Who else,” I say. “In my house.”
His mouth opens. A sound comes out. Air, and blood, and something like a word.
I loosen my hands one inch.
“Who else, Declan?”
“Crewe—” It comes out of him in a wet rasp. “Crewe—knows—”
“Knows what?”
His eyes roll up and find mine. There’s something in them I don’t like. Something that looks, for one second, like pity.
“Crewe,” he says.
That’s all.
I close my hands.
It takes a long time after that. It always takes longer than people think. Theo stands over us and doesn’t say a word, and the servers hum, and on the bloody screen above us, my wife stands at the chapel door with her hand on the latch, waiting.
When it’s done, I sit back on my heels on the concrete.
My hands are shaking. Not the way they shook in the chapel when she sang. A different way.
Theo holds out a towel. I don’t take it.
“His wife,” I say.
“Boss?”
“She gets the house paid off. The girl’s hockey gets paid through college. You tell her it was his heart.”
Theo looks at me for a long moment. Then he nods.
“And him?”
“The yard in Quincy. Next to the thin one.” I stand. My knees crack. My shirt is soaked to the skin on one side, red and cold. “Keep the thin one breathing. I want Conor to have somebody who can tell him what the Crypt looks like.”
“And Crewe?”
I look up at the screen.
She’s taken her hand off the latch. She’s turned around. She’s looking up, at the corner of the chapel ceiling, right into the lens.
Like she knows I’m there.
She always knows now.
“Crewe’s mine,” I say.
I leave Theo with the body and go up the stairs.
Declan Byrne’s last word was a bishop’s name.
On the screen behind me, through a smear of his blood, my wife is still looking straight at me.