CHAPTER 22
THE HUNT
POV: RONAN
Theo’s voice.
“Boss—they—she’s—”
Then nothing. A cough. Glass. Somebody screaming in the background.
“Theo.”
“Kitchen door. White van. Two—three men. I couldn’t—my arm—Ronan, I had her coat, I had her—”
“Where.”
“Heading south on Hancock. I’ve got one of ours down in the lot. The other car’s chasing. I don’t—”
I don’t hear the rest.
I’m already moving.
Signal.
Green dot. Quincy.
Moving.
Hancock Street. South. Then east. Fast.
The phone in my hand. My hand on the dash. Charlestown to Quincy, and I’m on the wrong side of the harbor. Eleven miles. Twenty minutes if God loves me.
God doesn’t love me.
He’s never had a reason to.
“Faster,” I say.
The driver is doing ninety on the Expressway in snow. He does ninety-five.
Heart rate. The ring. I pull it up.
One forty-eight.
One fifty-five.
One sixty.
She’s alive. She’s scared. She’s fighting. I know the difference now. I know what her heart does when she’s afraid and what it does when she’s angry, and this is angry.
Good.
Good.
The dot turns off Route 3A onto a side road by the water. Squantum. Then back north. Then—
Then it stops moving on the map for a long, terrible second, and my whole body goes cold, and then it moves again, up onto the Southeast Expressway. North. Toward the city. Toward Southie.
Toward Conor.
“Theo.”
“—here—” His breathing is bad. “Ambulance is coming—they want to take me—”
“Let them.”
“—the other car lost them at the rotary, boss, I’m sorry, I’m—”
“I’ve got her.”
I’ve got her. I’ve got a green dot on a map, and a number, one sixty-two, and a gold ring on her finger with my initial on it that she put on herself in a window a thousand years ago because nobody told her to.
I pick up the other phone. The one I don’t use.
“Everyone,” I say. “Every car. Every man. Southie. The fish plants on the Channel. Now.”
***
She’s in the old Gorton cold storage on the Fort Point Channel. A brick box with no windows, built for cod. Conor’s family bought it in the eighties and never cleaned it. From the street, it smells like a hundred years of fish.
The dot is inside. Not moving now.
One thirty-eight. Coming down. Steadier.
Waiting.
I have eleven men on the street. More coming. I don’t wait for them.
The van is parked at the loading dock. White. The back doors hanging open. A little blood on the bumper.
Hers?
I don’t let myself think the rest of that sentence.
There’s a man smoking on the dock by the van. He sees me get out of the car. He drops the cigarette. He reaches into his coat.
I shoot him twice in the chest before his hand comes back out.
He folds over the edge of the dock and falls into the snow.
The steel door at the top of the dock is open a foot. Inside, darkness and the loud drone of compressors and cold air rolling out.
I go in.
***
I don’t remember all of it.
I remember a hallway. Concrete. Frost on the pipes. A man coming around a corner with a shotgun, and the shotgun going off into the ceiling, and ice raining down, and the man going down.
I remember another one in a doorway. Young. Scared. He puts his hands up. He says, “I didn’t touch her, I swear I didn’t touch her, it was—”
“Who.”
“Liam—it was Liam—”
I remember I shoot him anyway. I’m not proud of it. I’m not ashamed of it either. I don’t feel anything about it at all.
I remember the sound of my men coming in behind me, shouting. Doors. Boots. More shots, somewhere else, echoing off the brick.
I remember the heavy freezer door at the end of the hall with a padlock on it. The padlock not closed.
Voices.
A man’s voice. Young, thick, mean. And under it—
Her.
Not crying.
Talking.
I stop outside the door. I don’t know why. My whole body is screaming at me to go through it, and I stop, and I listen.
“—you can’t even hold it,” she’s saying. Low and clear and cold. “Look at you. You need two hands to hold a gun and you only have one.”
“Shut up.”
“He did that. With one bullet. From across a table in a ballroom.”
“I said shut up—”
The sound of a hand hitting a face.
Open. Hard.
My hand is on the freezer door before the sound is done echoing.
***
She’s in a chair in the middle of the cold room.
It’s a big room. Racks of empty metal shelving. Frost on the walls. A single caged bulb swinging over her. Her breath is white.
They’ve tied her hands behind the chair with plastic ties and her ankles to the legs. The camel coat is gone. The veil is gone. She’s in the gray dress and the cardigan and her hair is loose and wild around her face and there’s blood on her lip, fresh, bright, running down her chin.
And on her teeth.
Liam Kavanagh stands in front of her. His right hand is in a black brace. His left is raised, open, halfway back from her face.
There’s a bite on the side of it. Deep. Bleeding. Somebody else’s teeth.
She looks past him. At the door. At me.
Her face does something I will see every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life.
It doesn’t crumple. It doesn’t cry.
It lights.
“There you are,” my wife says.
Liam turns.
He sees me. He sees the gun. He sees my face, and whatever he sees there, he’s seen it before, in a boiler room, with his hand flat on a steel chair.
He opens his mouth.
“She bit me,” he says. Stupidly. Like a child. “She fucking bit me.”
“She’s my wife,” I say.
I told Conor what would happen. I told him through his son’s own mouth, in the boiler room, with a bullet. If anyone in his family ever touches her again, it won’t be a hand.
Liam put his hand on her face.
I keep my word.
I don’t shoot him in the hand.
***
After, I’m on my knees on the frozen concrete in front of her chair.
I don’t remember crossing the room. I don’t remember putting the gun down. I’ve got my knife out and I’m cutting the ties on her ankles and my hands are shaking so hard I nearly cut her. I stop. I breathe. I cut again.
Her wrists. Behind the chair. The plastic has bitten into the skin and it’s red and raw, and there’s a line of blood where she fought it.
“Mae.”
It’s all I can say.
“Mae. Mae.”
“I’m here.”
“Mae—”
“I’m here, Ronan.” Her hands are free. She puts them on my face. They’re like ice. “I’m here.”
I put my forehead down on her knees.
I’ve never done this. I’ve never put my head down on anyone. I stay there with her cold hands on the back of my neck, in my hair, holding on, and I breathe the fish and the frost and, under it, her.
Vanilla. Starch. Her.
“I told you,” she says against my hair. “I said I’d go without arguing if anyone touched me. Nobody touched me until we got here.”
I laugh. It comes out wrong. It comes out like something breaking.
“I bit him,” she says.
“I saw.”
“I bit the man in the diner, too. The one who carried me. I think I took a piece.”
“Of course you did.”
“The cook. I hit him with a sugar jar.”
“That’s my wife.”
“Theo—”
“Alive. Ambulance.”
She lets out a breath that shakes her whole body.
I lift my head. I look at her face. The split lip. The blood on her chin. The mark across her cheek where Liam’s open hand landed, already going red.
I touch it. Very lightly. With one finger.
“He did this.”
“He’s dead now,” she says. She looks past me, at what’s on the floor behind me. She doesn’t look away from it. “Isn’t he.”
“Yes.”
She looks at it for a long moment. At Liam Kavanagh on the concrete, the braced hand flung out.
“Good,” she says.
My men are in the doorway now. Four of them. Breathing hard. Nobody comes in. One of them says, “Boss,” very quietly, and when I look up, he tips his head toward the hall.
“The van out back,” he says. “Second one. Trying to leave. We got it.”
“Who.”
“One driver.” He hesitates. “And an old guy. In the back. With an envelope.”
Mae goes still under my hands.
I stand. I take off my coat and put it around her shoulders and do up the buttons myself, one by one, the way I did on our wedding night with the camel coat in the chapel. She lets me. Her eyes don’t leave the doorway.
“Conor?” I ask.
“Not here. Wasn’t here.”
“The envelope?”
“Twenty grand. He was counting it again when we opened the doors.”
I pick her up out of the chair.
She’s light. She’s always so light. She puts her arms around my neck and her face against my throat, and her heart is going hard against my chest, one twenty, one fifteen, coming down.
I carry her out of the cold room. Past Liam. Down the frost-white hall. Out onto the loading dock, into the snow, where the sky is going dark over the Channel and the city lights are coming on across the water.
Two of my men are standing by the second van. They have someone on his knees between them in the slush. Bruins jacket. Two sizes too big.
He looks up when he sees us. His face is gray. There’s twenty thousand dollars in a white envelope in the snow in front of him.
“Maggie,” he says. “Baby, I—”
She lifts her head off my shoulder. She looks at him.
She doesn’t say anything to him.
She turns her face up to me.
“My father?” she asks.
The snow falls between us. On her hair. On the blood on her chin. On my hands, holding her.
“Alive,” I say. “For you to decide.”