Lumpy was working the gum, hunched over an antique sorting/wrapping machine run off pedals with pulleys from the floor in rapt fascination—an artifact of the days of the Lowell Mills when Beacon Hill Brahmins were feudal lords and workers were little more than non-unionized, rightless serfs. A bygone era, they said, which was true. In the new world order, the new underground workforce was as rootless as it was rightless, belonging to nothing, to no shrunken, compromised unions, much less to the land, and Lumpy had been part of it long enough to know the best chance was to head further underground. And so he did, sweating with furrowed brow as he commanded thick, awkward fingers to work the louvers of the antique machine, catching and pinching off bits of his flesh that regardless left him undeterred.
Stacks of unpackaged, shining silver sticks of gum surrounded him with a disorganized spillage like distorted dominoes falling on the floor, strewn across the makeshift sawhorse and plywood worktable in the former parlor of the Arlington Edwardian that was now the gum production room. The weedy, scrawny, fawn-like man known as Dr. Benway paced wildly about the space, despairing of ever getting Lumpy to leave. He wrung his hands and hunched, stooped, then stretched up and paced, skirting Lumpy at his perch.
“Listen, umm Lumpy—”
“Filmore,” he grunted, fighting to master the apparatus with sausage fingers that slipped and fumbled at each small lever. Naked sticks of gum flew bent from his fingers. “I am not Lumpy no more.” He said it, knowing full well he would always be Lumpy. People would never stop calling him that. It was simply how their nature coped with his.
“Filmore, we can't do this.”
Boiling sweat, Filmore Lakeworry growled, “We-will-do-it!”
“But Malek—the Ork—they don't want it. We can't take them on. There's just two of us, for God's sake!”
Lumpy worked the gum without pause, making two mangled sticks for every single one folded, stacked, then dumped in a small bundle into the sliding collector chute to be plastic foil wrapped with the hard stamp of a pedal. “Listen, you and me, we make our own crew, Dr. Benway. You're the brain, I'm the muscle. The rest will work out as we go. It's not so hard to figure.”
Benway attacked the table violently, causing naked gum to fall to the floor. Lumpy went on undeterred, mastering the wrapping. “Goddamn it, it's done. Malek gave me a thumbs down. Now I'm a candidate for Gary Lee Obidowski's Garage, and so are you, Heap.”
“Don't call me Heap, neither. Call me Filmore, please. It's not much to ask.”
“Filmore—whatever—we're over. It's done.”
“Not over until I say.”
“You're not listening!”
Lumpy looked up and smiled. He nevertheless fumbled the gum. “You know, I hear pretty good—maybe better than you. No need to shout, be rude.”
“Look, Filmore, I barely escaped from the basement of Armenian Specialties two days ago. The muscle was taking me down to the garage. You know what that means. Lucky for me, it turned into some kind of major clusterfuck for hitters. If that lone gunman hadn't shown up looking like some half-dead scarecrow and coming on like Clint Eastwood, you'd have broken every bone in my body by now.”
Lumpy shrugged. “It could have gone that way.”
“It would have.”
“God makes funny jokes.”
“Yes, and usually I get to write them, but not this time. Now, I'm like a ghost, a shadow, a silverfish at the edges of the filing drawer. No registered ID, no prints on file, three sets of passports, birth certificates, licenses, no credit history, disposable social security numbers. This house isn't even on the tax rolls and the title is historied and pedigreed under the name Freddy Cannon.”
“Buzz-Buzz-A-Diddle-It. Tallahassie Lassie. So?”
“So, you found me, anyway.”
“I tracked you. I always want to know where everyone does business with the Ork lives. Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“In case of anything.”
“That makes no sense.”
“You don't get the gang logic, do you, Doc? Now, if you'd a survived a place like Assault ‘n' Stall when you was coming up, you'd know by now how to be ten steps ahead of the guy holding that motherfuckin' knife to your throat. But you not that way, not you, no, you the type meant to be a punk, which is why I'm here. Can't have just a punk do this gum alone. No way.”
Benway blinked, as he strained to think like Lumpy for a moment. It just didn't work. “The point is, you found me, they'll find me.”
“Don't worry. We find them first, then it'll be okay.”
“Okay? You call a bunch of fucking hitters coming down here to make grease spots out of both of us, okay?”
“We take it to them, not them take it to us.” More gum came out, neat and clean, as lumpy interpolated a greasy rag into the process to mop up the blood from the plentiful little wounds in his fingers. He stepped up production, peddling furiously, his thick arms stubbornly straining and bulging at the material of his denim jacket in an effort to keep up.
Benway wet his finger, adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and proclaimed as if he had the power to do so. “I'm going away now, Lumpy, and that's it. You can have it all. The house, the gum—take all of it. Hold court here for all I care. Whatever you do, I'm lighting out through Canada and up through Vancouver Isle out onto the west coast of the US.”
“Maybe later you will, sure. But for now, you go nowhere, Doctor, or I'll hurt you bad. You know I can do that easy. And not just for calling me Lumpy, either. You know I can stop you way before you ever make it out the door. No trying involved.”
Their eyes met and Benway's gaze broke away almost immediately.
“So, you're gonna make us have a last stand against the muscle of the Ork right here—Boston's worst and biggest crew? You just want to call them all down, and have them annihilate you so I can watch, so that later they can drag me back to Gary Lee's garage—make some repairs until I wind up another tortured corpse in the muddy Charles. Good thinking, Filmore. One hundred odd mooks against two. There's a plan.”
Lumpy held up a shining stick of wrapped gum, smiling, widened his fish-eyes without blinking, shook his head slowly side to side and said. “No, Dr. Benway. Way I got it figured, it'll be like maybe 100 odd mooks versus about as much of this fucking city as ol' Lumpy wants.”
Benway's face went blank after he got Lumpy's thought. It was a small, clear, fleeting thought, and he almost missed it. But when he got it, he knew what it meant instantly and its meaning was crazier than the fear of the half-dead scarecrow that Malek the Mallet no doubt had by now.
“Tell me, what happened to Gary Lee Obidowski.”
“He retired to Florida when Malek bought him out.”
“Bullshit. Malek doesn't do that.”
“Sure he does, Cochese. I swear we sent him to a real nice place near New Smyrna Beach.” He pronounced Smyrna as “some-earn-a.”
“Where is that?”
“Near Orlando, Daytona.”
“Nice,” said Benway absently.
“'Course, you know we had to send him there in about forty-seven different suitcases, though.”
Benway sighed. “I suppose I did know.”
With that, Lumpy gave him a wink, with a broad smile that cracked like a fault-line across his even broader F-A-S Mic-Mac face and went back to working the gum.
The fucker Null was nothing.
That was all Andromeda had, working Null as he worked six other just as muddled, just as dead-ended cases. This was what they stuck him with, even at OC. This was the thankless task he had been bribed to do in service to LaCuna, the Ork and by the forces down at One Schroeder close to his eminence, mayor Tommyknockers. The better you were, the worse the work you got turned out to be. He was made early on for a talented baggage-handler, so early on the bad tasks kept falling his way. That was how he made public relations as a patrolman. That was how he made detective, no beat ever having been walked.
All he had really discovered so far on this drudge run was that Null was dead before he ever had lived.
His father died a rank-and-file casualty of the Winter Hill Gang over a small time dope burn. Prostitute Mom died hard in a knife fight with a john, but not before white-haired, portly and florid-faced Eamon “Uncle Jimmy” Cuchulain had moved in to fuck his older sister and then pimp her out on the street. Innocent waif-like Joey started life as look-out, then graduated to runner, then did post doc' street work as the defunct Family's bagman of choice for all the lower order jobs. Blew it all on the ponies, touting a system that could never work, since it relied on an element of chance. Everyone who was anyone knew that in modern times there was no chance allowed in horseracing. Sure, sis was a National Merit Scholar. What did it get her but a berth in an AIDS hospice with Joey X “DQ” Null giving up a scholarship to Harvard, thinking he could extend her life with his nimble advocacy? He might as well have given himself a hotshot of horse right then and there.
As it is in the course of high stakes commerce, so it is in the business of the street. When you're fucked, you're fucked. Period. End of report.
Null had begun fucked. End of the line right from the start.
There's just no way written or theorized or whispered about in the dark alleys, broken bridges and lost cul-de-sacs of Boston to unfuck yourself. In Boston, as in most other narrow, cozened places stuck close by an unforgiving sea, fortune favors its own.
Yet wasn't Null in some way chosen, fucked as he was?
Yes, Andromeda had thought, zig-zagging his ‘99 Saturn through the traffic on 3A heading back from Fields Corner, Uphams Corner, Codman Square and other doomed mostly race-mixed South Shore ghetto enclaves of wolf pack crews that made up much of the bottom end of the nation's secret economy.
Yes, Null was chosen, alright.
Chosen for crime, solitude and death.
His ex-wife murdered by Family hitters, Wednesday and Pugsley Impetigo, smothered to death under 500 puffy pounds of Wednesday's obese feminine charm. Uncle Jimmy taken out likely enough by Thing LeCoeur, a much tidier smother job wherein the old pimp pegged out, choking on his own vomit. Null himself done slowly to a turn, disemboweled in Cousin It Cavilli's dentist's chair. Hospitalized, a hopeless catatonic after three solid months of non-stop torture, wherein a finger was severed, a testicle removed, a hamstring sliced through, fingernails yanked free, a drill sunk into his flesh up to the bit again and again—a host of precise and angry pains delivered against him until his consciousness broke free like a helium balloon relinquished by a child and gone forever.
Like a scene out of Fritz Lang's “M.”
In its merciful way, pneumonia carried off what was left of his body as he lay wrecked in a hospital bed in deep psychosis, and that was that.
All well and good.
So, who was Dr. Benway then, the geek-mook who passed himself off as a psych' resident and who worked Null right into an early grave with a bogus new therapy for catatonia?
And who then if not Null was the lone hitter that took out the Family like a hot knife cutting through butter?
No mercy, no hesitation, no mistakes.
And who was it then that Boyd would have shattered his collarbone for with a single distance shot from a scope rifle, in order to prevent him from capping the cerebral cortex of the deadly ace hitter, whoever the fuck he was. Who if not DQ Null, dimwitted, decoy informant in a game far larger than his niggling comprehension of heroin baggies and the Racing Form could ever embrace?
The only person who might know was stone crazy—
Which was the reason why he aimed the Saturn straight for Lemuel Shattuck State Rehab, for what he expected would only be some weirdly cryptic and disconnected answers. All part of a thorough kill, all part of leaving nothing to chance.
All part of wholesale death delivered directly to the retail provider.
Andromeda's badge got him access to the day room with a minimum of fuss. He came to the place of the marginally functional crazies, depressives, mopes and dopes armed with hot cocoa. He came to the last gasp of the once much-feared number one crime power of the streets, the Family, to meet its one remaining ranking soldier. The behemoth in the purple robe and gleaming, thinning grease-black hair sat slack in a chaise-longue baking his well-leathered face in the sun, lolling the stub of a dead cigar up and down with his pouch of a mouth, his thin lips making a tight seal about the butt as it moved. His eyes squinted into the light, his head bobbing slightly with a muffled chuckle stuck in his throat.
Nadio Solecise, better known as Uncle Fester the Confessor, kiddie porn lord, blackmailer, enforcer, loan shark leg-breaker, ace hitter, now the last remaining survivor of Joseph Xavier Null’s alleged vendetta against the now defunct Family.
Andromeda handed him the cocoa as he sat down on the ottoman by his swollen, venous calves.
“Drink it slow, Fester. It’s hot.”
“Thanks, scumbag. Like you think you actually fooled us with your mope act. That’ll be the fuckin’ day.”
“I was doing just fine, Fester, and you know it. But as we both know, I was superseded. You had much bigger problems than me.”
“Fuckin’ mutt,” Fester mumbled, sipping cocoa resonantly through his teeth.”
“Yeah, he’s a fuckin’ mutt alright.”
“You got no fuckin; idea about that shitbird. He’s got no scruples about killin’ anyone for any reason. Mutt don’t care, like one those scum-bum Al-Qaeda’s and ISIS’s. But colder, sneakier, the little prick.”
Andromeda leaned in and whispered: “Is that right? Think he can hear you, Fes’? Think he’s still watching you and knows? Think he’s listening in right now, like he’s the goddamn NSA?”
Fester’s eyes went wide.
A blur distracted Andromeda, made him jerk left an inch.
It was the cup of cocoa sailing past him only to carom against the elongated, capped head of a recently medicated schizophrenic who was too slow to react. The cocoa cup splattered against solarium glass and male constable attendants in blue security uniforms came, warded off by Andromeda flashing his badge.
“Your story is that DQ fucking Null came back from the dead to wreak revenge on The Family.”
“Old news, fuckstick. He already did that. I'm the last one. The only capo left, and when I beat the kiddie porn, murder, attempted murder and RICO charges with the whacked monkey routine I'm doing here, I'll be back running things and that fucking Mutt will be a throw rug in my outer office.”
“Unless he kills you first.”
Fester chuckled cagily.
“Nah, he's not gonna kill me, not as long as I keep pumpin' intelligence into his Irish white ass. Not as long as he thinks I'm crazy and punked out enough to wet his little ear with all the things he wants to hear.” Fester rocked his head like a black bear rending a salmon, sniggering his anticipated triumph over his tormentor.
“You've got some time left to visiting hours, don't you, Fes'?”
“You're here, ain't ya?”
“I'm different. I'm the law.”
“There is no law, fuckwad. We both know that.”
“No, there are laws Fes'. It's just that the laws we live by you have to know in your ass—like a boot from your old man. Otherwise your ass gets served on a platter to the more successful rats what know that cold.”
“Okay, fuckstick, whatever you say. But your bein' here tells me a lot. For instance. It tells me you have a job of work to do for the scuzzball who owns your ass down at One Schroeder.”
“I'm here on police business, sonny boy.”
Fester belched and stuck out his beefy tongue, rolled it then retracted it back into his slack lipped pouch of a mouth. “Semi-police business, maybe you mean. Pally, there ain't no flies on me and I'll tell yez why: You're here as bag man for that wall-eyed freak Malek just like DQ Fucking Null was a bagman for me back in the day.”
With a sigh, Andromeda buried his fist into Fester's pallid yet beefy face, sinking sagging lips in below yellowed teeth and drawing if not spattering blood. The twenty-something constable rushed over with the brio of a bouncer on steroids to deal with this, and Andromeda kicked his legs out from under him without a thought before he could make a sound, watching him go down comically while Fester blubbered bloodily with laughter. When the constable got up looking like he might rush Andromeda, the detective pulled his Ruger 44 semi-automatic from his shoulder holster, aiming the black hole at the end of the barrel straight at the tip of his bulbous nose. The constable flinched and stayed down. Andromeda smiled broadly, then holstered his weapon smoothly.
“Simmer down, kid. Fester-boy here don't need no help here, do ya Fezzy?”
Fester snuffled into a bloodied napkin juicily: “Fuckin' A.”
“You don't need no lawyer, do you, shit-heel?”
“Nope,” Fester said, muted with a jarring liquid snuffle into the bloody napkin.
The constable shuffled off in his ill-fitting uniform, looking at Andromeda poisonously over his shoulder, then snapping his head to the front as soon as Andromeda caught this.
“I'm gonna visit with you a while more, Fes. You care?”
“Like I got a choice.” He stuffed the saturated napkin up one nostril and tilted his head back to stop the bleeding.
“Like you do.”
“Fuck, this crazy routine made me fucking stupid. I shoulda seen it. It's righteous obvious. Oh, I gotta get out of here before I lose my edge all together.”
“What do you mean?”
Fester fell prey to a coughing jag that hocked up blood, which soon transformed into a chuckle.
“You ain't here as a bag man, Pally. You is here as a button man.”
After this fact lay leaden in the air for two minutes, nothing further was said between them. Nearly an hour later, as Andromeda was dozing off, Fester got up from his lounge chair, animated and attentive. He began speaking shakily, almost frantically, falling all over himself as if in the presence of a senior mob boss or a celebrity.
Or some person or being he was terribly afraid of—
Null!
Andromeda bolted up and had the Ruger out and cocked with a round in the chamber ready to fly. But he did nothing. Instead, he stood transfixed in a kind of awe.
Fester was backpedaling, making excuses, apologizing, dickering and speaking in servile tones with trumped up laughter to absolutely no one. There was nobody there! With his gun extended, he stood there trembling with rage and humiliation. That fucker Fester, he was either actually crazy or, worse, using him as a prop in his crazy routine. His knuckles went white around the handle of the gun.
Either way, he had been fucking had.
Either way, before leaving, he threw Fester the worst beating of his entire career, which none of the constables, by the time they were called, had the courage to stop in the face of his wildly waving Ruger and his repeated, “I'm-a-fucking-cop-god-damn-you!” status.
Either way, he left the huge former enforcer of what was once Boston's worst criminal crew a bloody, pulpy mess on the solarium floor as he strode off, hardly having worked up a sweat, looking for Null.
And when he found him, he would put two careful rounds right in Null's brain, neat as you please, and that was a steadfast promise he made to Jesus and Mary both as he lumbered into the front seat of the 99 Saturn and gunned her up hard.