It was another bottle morning for Lieutenant. Kay Boyd of Boston's Special Organized Crime Task Force, or more rightly, it was a morning that would have gone much better than it was going if there had only been a bottle the night before. She was slogging through her fifth month of detox and it wasn't much of an improvement over the first. Sure, the night sweats were gone, the shakes—the sheer physiological disgust at being alive. She could kick the physical addiction in just days of agony and weeks of regret. What she couldn't kick was the sleeplessness, the haunted, inexplicable need, the sense of raw betrayal at being exposed to a brutal, relentless reality without the wooly protective buffer of a soft blur of alcohol blooming up from the hot spot in her chest so it could surround and cushion her throbbing head.
Now it was strictly clarity marked by heartburn, exacerbated by Boyd's new passion for popping chocolates. Sugar for alcohol, cocoa for love.
The minor fix replacing the major.
The trivial eating the grandiose.
Every day since the removal of that haggard spirit of misery from her life, career mook Joey X, informant from hell, she had been teetering between coping well and spiraling down. Joey X—Null!—damaged tough-ass punk resurrected from a nightmare of garbage looming over her, evoking guilt and the single best promise he could make. The only promise he could fulfill:
Death.
She was teetering between doing fine and falling flat on her ass now that Null was no longer prosecuting his shadowy stream of homicidal mayhem to fuck up the balance of things. But what landed before her on the desk managed to fuck it up just as well, or perhaps even better. A case file.
She looked up bleary-eyed as if drunk, but instead met the moment sober, weary and knowing.
Byron Wurdalaka, in his cutesy way of playing servile Hegelian second banana, had dropped in on her to press his disadvantage, piss her off and prove his point to ultimate redundancy as to the unsuitability of the new gynocrats who came in under former Commissioner Queen Kathleen. He had dropped in on her to slam her with this new murder file she was now reviewing while making the not unexpected groaning noises. “Byron, you realize that, as per the new commissioner's newest dictum, you only report to me in matters of homicide that overlap onto OC Taskforce territory.”
“Oh, but I'm a stickler for that LT. You know that from past experience.”
Her expression and demeanor were void yet sweet.
“What I know from past experience, Byron, is that you're an out-and-out prick.”
Wurdalaka clicked his tongue. “And we never even dated, did we?”
Kay gave the case file an expert thumb-through then slid it back over to Wurdalaka. “Prostitutes don't qualify, Byron—even if they happen to murder their johns. I don't think she was a contract hitter. There's no overlap here. Thanks for stopping by.”
“Read it again, why don't you? Maybe you missed a detail or two?” He smacked his head and winced, typical bad theater of the police. “What am I saying?” he droned with weighty sarcasm. “You're the extra-educated, specially certified MSW what doesn't miss a trick, but for maybe when it comes down to human fucking nature.”
“I know your fucking nature, Byron. Show or blow. I got meetings and budgetary pleas to make.”
“Do a little light reading, LT, would you?” He was smug about something—the hick urbanite high ward redneck grin was slick with spittle. He was drooling at the chance to give her a little grief for having wound up his technical superior in grade and command due to the recent regime change at One Schroeder Place.
She could write him up for insubordination if he didn't comply with her orders and in the current climate of backlash have it actually go through. She knew this made him crazy.
“There's no time and you know it. I've got about a hundred forty of these piled up so I can redo the Ork family tree and see who's doing whom within the new order—”
“Since when is a clusterfuck a tree?”
“Since the power vacuum sucked one into growing.”
“You mean now that your buddy the corpse offed the entire Family down to the last soldier who didn't manage to run clear. That's what you're talkin' about?”
“I'll bet even you can hear in your head just how fucking obtuse that sounds, Byron.”
“Maybe, but we never got a good clear ID on who the scarecrow was you capped Andromeda for in order to protect.” It wasn't “for” and “order” but “faw” and “awduh.” Wurdalaka was afflicted by the guttural, repellant Boston honk. Kay had flattened hers with education and mixing through education with the more moneyed and mobile classes.
“You know who it was.”
“Stop fucking telling me it was Null. Fucker died for the all the little white slave kiddies after we decoyed him out to cover for a Family informant that they already sent to the grave in bite-sized chunks.”
Boyd flushed with emotion. It was in her head, the torture, death, heroism and pain.
Null eviscerated in a chair under the straight razor of crime lord Giorgio “Gomez” Gomelsky.
Emaciated pale bodies, even when black and Asian, of the lost children earmarked to be sold for sex, writhing like worms in container tanks.
Theron “Thing” LeCoeur, capping Grove Hall street kids, his suckerfish lips on her as he tried to rape her on George’s Island.
A near thing. A very near thing.
Post-resurrection Null coming down, flack-jacketed, semi-automatic rifles in each hand, dealing death, calm as some dark god, unprepossessing as a stone gargoyle.
“Null was a hero. City should have done something for him, but he didn’t fit the profile. They didn’t even get around to dumping his outstanding parking tickets.”
“You want a drug addicted low-life mook to be a role model?”
“Who else ya got? George Dub-ya Bush? Same difference in my book.”
Wurdalaka chuckled, getting off on the exchange now that he was sure the power had shifted in his favor. “Why not? Better the failure and fuckup that made it than the one that didn't.”
“Get out, Byron. Come back when you have something more than your inch-dick in your hand.”
“Uh-uh, LT. Privilege begets privilege.”
“Filth breeds filth, you mean.”
Wurdalaka chuckled and plopped himself down in an uncomfortable interview seat in Boyd's office, kicking back as he sat, seeming to bask in the silvery sheen of the Boston murk of alleged spring.
“Chew or screw, Byron.”
He folded his fingers behind his head, stretched his legs, let his soiled suit flop open.
“Chew on my dick.”
Boyd stood up, incensed.
“Tell me the fuck what you want or get the fuck out of my office!”
Deputy Chief Inspector Phil LaCuna, old, obscenely tall, lantern-jawed and rutabaga-faced, loomed at the door, his ill-cut gray Brooks Brothers causing odd shadows as the gloom outside the windows darkened further. “What is this little interplay about here we're having—a lover's spat?”
“The LT just needs to calm down—she's sensitive.”
“Fuck the both of you.”
“Need a drink, do we, now?”
“Yeah, Phil. Brompton's cocktail, maybe.”
LaCuna's distorted shadow merged with the murk of the hopeless early spring Boston skyline to subsume Boyd's office and eclipse the pasty, craggy face of Byron Wurdalaka. It was as if shadows conspired with LaCuna to blot out all light from the room. Wurdalaka flicked on a light, which was anything but bright. “Well, I could get all avuncular and wise right now and give you some illustrative anecdote me da told me, but instead, why don't I write the pair of yez up? That might stimulate some solidarity between yez, bein' docked pay, sanctioned and all.”
“I don't want that, Phil,” Wurdalaka said with genuine meaning, covered by sarcastic innocence.
“Phil, you can shove—”
LaCuna stepped forward, loomed over her desk, mirthful intent steeled in his eyes. “Kay, you can think it, but you don't want to say it. Friends and supporters at the top take their nod from the ones below. Get the drift?”
“Fuck—”
“Think it through, Kay.” A low growl. Teeth gritted.
Head bowed, he added, “—This.”
“Youse two can't play nice, I'll have to take your toys away.” Cop authority of the old school swaggering, trousers hitched. He left that way, walking like he was back in the 60s, swinging his baton on the beat, squaring up his turf. “You would not like that,” he had said, winking.
“No fucking joke, LT, this case has you all over it, whether I want it or not.”
She had busied herself by fast-typing e-mails.
“I don't see how, Byron—your perp's a club kid—kind of a reach to tie that to OC, considering the nature of Boston's remaining gangs, crews and clusterfucks. You're bustin' my balls here, Byron, and no mistake.”
Wurdalaka reached for the file, paged through and clipped a single report page to the outside of the folder.
“Just read the fine print, LT, and then give me your take.”
She took the file and obliged. “Anything to get you to leave.”
“Oh, you're gonna want me around, to be sure, you see what's there.”
Boyd placed the file neatly atop her in-box case pile and had to react fast to keep it from toppling over. She hugged it with both arms and blushed, knowing she looked slightly foolish in front of the smug Wurdalaka. She sat down and paged through it, looking unmoved.
“You got it, right?”
The pile held firm. Boyd herself did not, knew it, and fixed her hair by reflex to help conceal that fact. “Yes. I got it Byron, like a cramp. Pull up a chair and let's get to it.”
“It doesn't look like a coincidence, does it?”
Boyd looked grave. “No. Not this one.”
“Ain't no innocent, plain-Jane murder.”
“Not when you're talking about the throat-slashing of a chief accountant—”
“Yeah, especially when it's the chief accountant for Malek “The Mallet” Turbot, supreme psychopath, what runs Boston's worst murder crew to date.”
She met his smirk with cold eyes and added: “How could it be?”