They were down by the detritus at the banks of the channel, where the bay separated Southie from Boston proper. The newsies surrounded them off the Congress Street Bridge, perched with panel trucks on the embanked remains of the sunken boondoggle of the Central Artery. News helicopters hovered overhead, blasting herring gulls out of the way and whipping up chill Boston mist over the perma-stench of the harbor channel where in the shallows four well-suited bodies lay.
“Clusterfuck,” said Chief Inspector Phil LaCuna to no one in particular. “This is a clusterfuck of major proportions.”
Capt. Parseeman grunted assent and kicked at the collar of a corpse as wiry, stylishly coifed Yonah Shimmel, senior forensics specialist, protested.
Wurdalaka and Boyd arrived, pushing through a confusion of thick blue uniforms holding back the curious. Monad was already there, coordinating a hip wader canvassing crew.
“We got us a bum dump,” said Wurdalaka.
“Muscle of the Ork,” said Shimmel. “Tell me something I don't know.”
“Don't get testy with me, Shimmy.”
Specialist Shimmel: “You know what happens if you piss me off, right?”
“Woe is me. I'll be last at Suffolk to get good blood work. Why don't you work this, you weird little fuck?”
“I was going to say I'd have to kick your ass, but I think I'll let Lieutenant Boyd do it for me. She always does such a good job kicking your ass, anyways.”
Boyd’s cheeks reddened, and she laughed for cover.
LaCuna clapped his hands for attention. “Children, children, do you mind distractin' yourselves from your little pissin' fracas there and getting back to the clusterfuck at hand? Kay, why don't you sing us the song while Shimmel provides the bouncing ball? Do the honors, will ya?”
Shimmel studiously rolled over each top-coated, be-suited corpse in the shallows until their bloated, ruined faces were visible and his team helped drag them up further onto the smashed concrete, rusted pig-iron and garbage strewn shoreline. His crew, like herring gulls themselves, began picking at the corpses in tugs of curious hunger.
“Good news, everyone. It's not a war.”
“So we're over-reacting?” LaCuna delivered with a half-humored leer.
“It's not like you don't know it, Phil.”
“Just sing the song, Kay.”
“It's a dump, is what it is. This isn't the Dorchester Gangsta Boyz sending a message to the Ork, or the Charlestown Cholos off on some vendetta. No, no, what we have here is housecleaning. Malek the Mallet trying to get some mileage out of a dead loss of manpower. No, these dudes had a run in with someone and they got the bad end of it, but I don't think the doer put them here as any kind of sign.”
LaCuna's face took a purple tinge of impatience, making his rum blossoms spider out from his face in relief like vines. “What if I think he did—staged it to piss us all off and pick a fight with the Mallet?”
“Then you'd be wrong, sir,” said Wurdalaka with a honk that was as disrespectful as his phrasing was deferential. “That little freak Shimmel has it bagged already, spices—bay leaves, cumin, tumeric, preserved lamb—shit, these guys all bought it in the same place and that place wasn't here.”
“You forgot about the lack of water in the throat and lungs.”
“No, you're just presuming that, ya weird little fairy.”
“Stop trying to date me and get to the point.”
“The point,” said a husky, self-assured voice from the embankment above them by the shoulder of the nearly demolished Surface Artery, “is Armenian Specialties down on South Street. That's the story the soles of the shoes tell. They all died in one of Malek's chosen playpens, no doubt in the basement where the stock is kept.” Andromeda, looking down upon them all with harshly narrowed eyes, his topcoat flapping hard like a tarp in the lacerating harbor wind.
“You get the gold star as usual, Nicky,” said Boyd, yawning. “The appearance of these corpses is pure Malek, sending a message of a kind we're not supposed to pick up.”
“You sure as shit love to overcomplicate the obvious, don't you, Lieutenant?”
“Indeed I do, Inspector. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was a gender thing, if we didn't have a female-friendly police commissioner who was already a wee tad sensitive about such old-time department pigeon-holing.”
“Don't give up your day job for standup comedy anytime soon, Kay. Your delivery needs work.”
“True enough. But Malek's doesn't. This is strictly a face-saving move.”
“I don't get it,” said LaCuna, feigning ignorance to goad her.
“Simple, Phil: What these bodies of the muscle of the Ork say loud and clear is ‘So what—you offed some of my guys. Big whoop. I have an inexhaustible supply of them, soldiers up the ass. In fact, I have so many goddamn soldiers that I can give these punks to you no problem, show Boston and God I have no shame about putting my soldiers anywhere, even in the mud of the fucking Channel. It doesn't matter. And why doesn't it matter? Why, I have so many more soldiers up the ass that eventually I am going to shove a good number of them right up your ass. And there's nowhere in Boston that I won't do it. Wherever you think you can hide, you won't be safe. Gloat all you want, but if I have dead soldiers in the Channel today, you can bet your mother's pearls I'll be having some live ones in your house tomorrow.' You better believe that this is the message he's sending to the crew that did this, in clear terms.”
“You nailed it, Kay,” Andromeda said with admiration that lacked any trace of irony. “Pure Malek.”
“Neither of you quite nailed it,” drawled LaCuna, with that high ward, South Shore nearly British yet almost Australian sneer. “The point really is the crew what ripped off the crew what ripped off one hot million bucks worth of crystal meth from the machinations of the Ork, and how many Malek has to kill either to get it back, or make sure such like never can happen again. No, our boy Malek is in a pickle, no two ways about it.”
“A weak king,” Capt. Parseeman chimed in happily after for so long having gloomily kept his silence, his eyes idly tracking the stilted progress of the gulls. “I think we should pick him up.”
“No,” said Boyd stiffly. “He's perfect as is. If weak king he be, then the crew will be coming for him and the rest of the Ork to take over their supply chain of street drugs and earn turf quickly with a take-over rather than a build-out. No, we could get ol' Malek on a host of middle-grade misdemeanors and several counts of a class B felony of improper burial of a corpse. We can get him anytime, so why not get him and the guys that did this and nip some new crew in the bud at the same time, nuke the cancer before it metastasizes.”
“We'll have to have a budget meeting on it,” said Parseeman, “but I'm sure we can work up something.”
“I think it's a tasty proposition.” This from LaCuna.
“I'm down for it if Kay thinks we can nab them all.” Andromeda. This might free him of Malek and yet make him more lucratively useful to the swine at the same time. He grinned, broadly creasing new keloid scars across his face.
“Problem is, we don't know who this new crew is,” Wurdalaka offered snidely. “We don't got nothin' comin on the street about it. And that's not normal for this kind of thing. Guys that do this, they got a hell of a lot of ego, lotta social wounds to recover from. Why ain't there more noise about it? Why ain't they crowing?”
“What if these guys are slightly smarter, with a bit more self-control?” proffered Parseeman.
“If they could do that, why not play the market and bilk the real criminals in town instead of these gang bozos?” LaCuna adding a gem.
“What if it ain't a crew?” said Wurdalaka, hitting it and knowing that he did.
A fat gull above them let out a cry, then plummeted like a stone into the bay.
Boyd and Shimmel stared at one another, sharing the same single, chilling thought that locked their gazes hard in the silence:
“What if it's just one guy?”
The banging was fiercer and more primitive than the blues, the screaming of the kid or the mimicked screaming of Null combined. It was a heavy metallic pounding whose rest stops were filled by drawling Boston ghetto voices cursing. The immaculate, white-lit room, bare but for the expensive, unobtrusive Bose speakers fresh from the warehouse in Framingham, was under attack at the ancient fire-exit door whose alarm mechanism was long ago frozen by plaster and paint. The door itself was clotted by both, thick, steel reinforced, and already threatening to crumble at the hinges under pummeling of the unseen but presumed battering ram behind it.
Kenny Embers, the sick kid, was already up and at it, throwing himself against the door, already sizing up what was happening, straight from his nightmares as if they simply bled over from dreams to reality and swept him along. “Help me, Lord!” he cried, “or they'll get in.”
Null blinked and said nothing.
He dug his fingers in the package of meth', careful not to violate the surrounding plastic beneath the paper bundle, pulled up a palm full of powder and shoved it into his face, snorting deeply. He let the remains from his hand sift back into the bag then secured it under his coat.
The pounding worsened, with creaks of give at the hinges added. Laughing curses were interspersed.
Null approached and pulled Kenny off the door without a thought. The force made the kid stagger backwards. “Why not let them in? Better yet, we'll let ourselves out.”
“They'll kill us is why.”
“Can't kill the dead, kid. Didn't they teach you that in school?”
“I'm not dead yet and you can't kill God.”
“We're both dead, kid. You just don't know it yet.” Null grabbed the kid's arm to steady him. “But trust me. They're deader still.”
“I trust you.”
Null unbolted the door and kicked it open with everything he had, setting the battering rammers on their ass in the dank, rotted tenement plastered squat-flat that abutted his own personally rehabbed illegal space. There was no pirate line of electricity coming in, so a painter's lamp clipped to a broken joist with a cord running out to a utility plug on the side of the building had to do. Two Dorchester Gangsta Boyz were flat on their asses in the urban dust with a heavy steampipe weighing them down on the floor. A third one, short and pockmarked with a do-rag tied as a burnoose watched nervously off to the side. The fourth, a tall, big bellied rust-hued thirtysomething in oversized gang leathers multi-colored with standout reds and golds gleaming in the half-light regaled them and brandished a chrome plated magnum.
“Thanks for opening up, cuz. We heard you had the nicest squat in town and we thought we'd take it for our own selves. Bring it back to the community from a white ass thug pimp, know I'm sayin'. Heard you gots drugs too, some load of gak. You oughts to know down on Dot Ave. that shit be mines.”
“Gonna smoke Mr. Fucking Skeleton's ass,” muttered one of the rammers pushing himself up from under the pipe.
Null kicked him back down again, seemingly lost in thought.
Ken Embers squeezed the twin knives in his falling-down-to-his ass baggy prison jeans pockets hard at the hilts. He was aching to use them.
“Gimme the gak, chief, you and your boyfriend live. If you don't, I kills ya and I takes it, anyways.” He flashed a gold-capped grill smile from his slack and sodden mouth.
“Cap the fucker, Cheese, and just take the shit.”
“Who is this guy?” Null asked without interest.
The short, fat pockmarked one with the fancy do-rag had this to say: “That's Heavy Cheese Petomane, bitch, number one drug lord of the South Shore and movin' in on Back Bay. Show some respect.”
“You're number two, then?”
“There ain't no motherfuckin' number two.”
“Sounds fair to me,” Null more parsed than said, and tossed the package of Meth straight at the big-bellied Gangsta Boy called “Cheese.” When the dealer jerked forward to catch it, Null spun about almost too fast to see. Cheese went down, clutching the package minus a face and most of his head.
Null stood rail-rigid, the sawed-off held parallel to the pitted, rubbled floor, its lanyard still around his neck. The fat one in the do-rag standing in the shadows looked as if he were having a heart attack when Null hunched over, the sawed-off locked hard into his body, and calmly took out the two on the floor with a close grouping of shots.
“I think this might mean you’re number one now.”
Kenny Embers made for the do-rag sporting Gangsta Boy, both knives out, but Null stopped him. “Not yet, kid.” He looked back at Null, wounded eyes lusting for blood.
Do-Rag trembled, rendered inarticulate by death and survival, while Null gathered up the weapons, tossing the chromium magnum up and down in his hand under the painter's light to test its heft. “The fuck you want with me?”
“You're number one, aren't you?”
“Fuck!” Null swooped down on him like a falling shadow as the painter's light swung. He took his guns, the cheap low carbon steel sling-style switchblade, mace and stun gun, braced him against the wall and leveled a middle-grade punch to the face to get his attention.
“You're going to deal a little Crystal Meth for me, number one. Got that?”
Do-Rag stuttered in terror, in the full knowledge that he was directly in the hands of death that could at this moment do with him whatever they would: “What-what—what it cost?”
“Information, number one. And a good, clear work ethic.”
“Say what?”
“Well, you work for me now, and since I lack humanity, mistakes just aren't as well tolerated. You'll have to be very careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Inefficiency. You could be fired for that.”
“Yeah? So what?”
“So this: When I fire you, you can be sure it will be done with a bullet straight through the brain.”
Ken Embers gathered up the array of weapons from Null and took them back to the immaculate, blinding white squat as Null watched Do-Rag silently figure out what was expected of him. Null didn't have to say a word, as it had been made clear in the matchstick pantomime of the street:
First you get rid of the bodies; then you pick up the drugs.
Ken Embers, meanwhile, had no trouble with God suddenly becoming a drug dealer.
After all, hadn't he really always been one?