10

DeMarco woke up in the emergency room of a hospital, lying on a gurney, in a space closed off by a curtain. The back of his head had a large, tender knot on it; it felt like someone had hit him with a brick. In fact, his entire face hurt like it had been bricked, and when he tried to move, his ribs on the right side screamed that he should stay still. He thought about trying to stand, but decided not to, and a few minutes later the curtain was pulled back by a dark-complexioned woman wearing black-framed glasses and blue hospital scrubs.

“Ah, you’re awake again,” she said.

Again? He didn’t remember being awake the first time. She stepped over to him, took his pulse and blood pressure, then said, “Follow my finger with your eyes.” She moved a slim brown finger back and forth in front of his face to see if the muscles controlling his eyeballs still worked. “Good,” she said. “But we need to get an MRI.”

“Where am I?” DeMarco asked.

“Mass General. I’m Dr. Bhaduri. Do you know your name?”

“What?” DeMarco said.

“I asked if you know your name.”

“Yeah, it’s Joe DeMarco.”

“And can you remember what happened to you?”

“No. I had drinks with a couple of friends at a place called the Warren Tavern, but I can’t remember anything after that.”

“It appears you were mugged. Some college kids found you unconscious and were nice enough to call nine-one-one. You have a concussion, which is always a concern. You were also hit or kicked in the face several times, though none of those injuries are significant.”

“My ribs hurt, too.”

“We’ll take X-rays,” Dr. Bhaduri said.

The MRI showed that he had a short hairline crack in his skull that Dr. Bhaduri said would mend in time and wasn’t anything for him to worry about. Easy for her to say since it wasn’t her skull. The X-rays showed that two of his ribs were also cracked, but like the skull fracture, the ribs would mend. When he looked into a mirror, he saw that somebody had used his face for a punching bag. There was a large blue-black bruise on his right cheek and his nose was encrusted with dried blood. He touched his nose and it hurt, but it didn’t appear to be broken. Thankfully, all his teeth were still in his mouth.

His wallet was missing but he still had his cell phone and his car keys—and it was the car keys that helped him remember: he’d walked into a garage to get his rental car and . . . He didn’t remember what happened after that. It was apparent, however, that someone had hit him on the back of the head with something hard, and then kicked the shit out of him. Because it was a public garage and the streets of Charlestown were full of people at even eleven at night, whoever did it only had time to get in half a dozen kicks or punches before they took his wallet and fled.

So what happened? Had some opportunistic thief decided to relieve him of his wallet when he stepped into the parking garage? Or was it the McNulty brothers? He remembered the McNultys coming down the steps in front of Elinore’s building as he was telling Dooley that he’d meet him at the Warren Tavern at eight. Did the McNultys go to the tavern, wait for him to come out, follow him to the garage, and beat him senseless? And if so, why?

He could come up with two answers to that question. A: it was a strategic move on the part of the McNultys. They didn’t want him hanging around, protecting Elinore Dobbs, as his presence made it harder for them to drive her out of her apartment. Or B, the answer he liked better: beating the hell out of him wasn’t at all strategic. The McNultys had just decided to tune him up because he’d threatened them and pissed them off, and because they were a couple of violent morons.

He called Dooley since he couldn’t think of anyone else to call, and told him what had happened. “Oh, my God!” was Dooley’s reaction. Dooley and his wife came to the emergency room, gave him a ride back to his hotel, and loaned him five hundred bucks since DeMarco didn’t have any money or credit cards. In fact, he needed Dooley’s help to convince the hotel clerk that the battered man standing before him in a bloodstained T-shirt was indeed a registered guest at the Park Plaza even though he didn’t have any ID and had lost the key card to his room, which had been in his wallet. The first thing DeMarco did once inside his room was to cancel his Visa card and tell the Visa folks to express a new one to the hotel. Then he took a long, hot shower and collapsed into bed.

The next morning—his head throbbing and his ribs aching—he called Mahoney and told him what had happened. Mahoney’s reaction was about what he’d expected.

“That son of a bitch Callahan,” Mahoney said.

“I’m not sure Callahan had anything to do with this,” DeMarco said.

“Sure he did. Those guys work for him. He’s responsible.”

Mahoney was angry that DeMarco had been attacked, and he was concerned for the health of his faithful employee—but there was something else. DeMarco had seen the movie Gladiator, the one with Russell Crowe, where the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius sent an emissary to negotiate a peace treaty with some barbarian tribe—and the barbarians sent the emissary back to the emperor, tied to his horse, minus his head. And that was Mahoney’s attitude: Mahoney, the emperor, had sent his emissary to Boston and Callahan had tried to send him back without a head. What Callahan had done was an insult to the emperor; DeMarco’s head was a secondary issue.

After he spoke to Mahoney, DeMarco called Emma. She thought he was calling about Congressmen Sims’s Purple Heart and immediately said, “I got call from a friend at the Pentagon yesterday and—”

“I almost got my head caved in last night,” DeMarco said.

“What!”

“I’m okay,” DeMarco said, and proceeded to tell her what was happening to Elinore Dobbs and what had happened to him.

“I’ll catch the next plane up there,” Emma said.

“No, no, that’s not why I called,” DeMarco hastily said. “I just want you to go to my place and get my passport and FedEx it to me so I’ll have some ID to get on a plane when I’m ready to go home. Also my checkbook so I can get cash.” Emma knew where he hid the spare key to his front door and the code to his security system. “Okay,” she said. “But if you need some help . . . People like this Callahan character make me sick and I like that old lady even though I’ve never met her.”

DeMarco figured that Callahan and the McNulty brothers should thank their lucky stars that he didn’t ask Emma to come to Boston to help him.

“By the way, what did you find out about Sims?” DeMarco asked, although Sims was hardly a priority now, and the way he was feeling he really didn’t care.

“There’s no record of him receiving a Purple Heart,” Emma said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t get one, but the marines keep better records than the other services. I could ask my friend to dig some more, to see if there’s a citation letter in some file or a recommendation written by whoever his CO was at the time, but if she does that she’s going to have to talk to a bunch of people.”

“Mahoney wouldn’t want that,” DeMarco said.

“I know. So I’m looking into another way to get more information.”

“Great,” DeMarco said. He didn’t want to spend any more time talking about Sims. And the way his head was throbbing, he wondered if he qualified for a Purple Heart.

“Joe, you let me know if you need help up there.”

“I don’t. I’ve got everything under control.” He didn’t have anything under control but all he wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep some more.

An hour later, a phone call from Anna Dooley woke him. She wanted to see how he was feeling.

“I’m okay,” he said, not wanting to sound like a wimp.

“Well, if you need any succor, let me know.”

Succor? DeMarco thought he knew what the word meant—support, assistance, help—but there was something sexual about the way she’d said it. At any rate, he was in no condition to be succored in the way she seemed to be offering, so he went back to sleep.

At noon, he decided he was hungry but was reluctant to leave his room. His head still ached, although it wasn’t as bad as it had been when he first woke up, and when he pulled a polo shirt over his head his ribs protested, but he was able to walk okay. The bad part was his appearance: the right side of his face was now swollen and various shades of blue and purple. He didn’t feel like subjecting himself to the stares he was going to get in the hotel restaurant, but was starving and didn’t feel like sitting inside his room any longer.

He asked for a table for one and the hostess pretended to ignore the way he looked, then led him to a table at the rear of the restaurant so he wouldn’t frighten the other customers. He ordered a Coke and a ­cheeseburger—glad that he still had teeth and could chew the cheeseburger.

Throughout lunch he thought about two things. The first of those was how to get back at the McNultys. There was no point running to the cops since he hadn’t seen them and couldn’t prove that they’d attacked him. But somehow, some way, he was going to get even with those two stumpy brutes. What he’d really like to do was find some way to separate them so he’d only have to deal with one of them at a time—and then give them a beating, like the beating they’d given him.

It occurred to him that he’d encountered thugs like the McNultys before and he didn’t normally react this way. He normally tried to avoid ­violence—there was rarely an upside to violence—but he was willing to make an exception when it came to the McNultys. It had probably been a long time since they’d been given a good pounding and most likely because they double-teamed whomever they decided to fight. And a few months in jail for assault wasn’t going to change the way they behaved—but a good beatdown might. Then he thought: Who am I trying to fool? He wasn’t trying to change the McNultys’ behavior. It was a matter of male pride: proving to them—and to himself—that he was just as hard as they were, and he wanted to repay them in a way they wouldn’t soon forget.

The problem, however, was that he was currently in no shape to fight anyone bigger than a flyweight, and if he got hit in the head again, he could end up like some punch-drunk NFL lineman. Another problem was that he’d been sent to Boston to help Elinore Dobbs, and if he ended up in jail for assault, he wouldn’t be much help to her.

So, for now, he would forestall the pleasure of getting even with the McNultys, but if the opportunity presented itself . . .

The second thing he thought about was how to help Elinore. He couldn’t hang around Boston forever watching over her, and at some point the McNultys would recommence making her life miserable. He had no doubt that the old gal was stubborn enough and tough enough to hang in there until her lease expired, but he could just see her sitting in her apartment during the winter, her generator running, bundled up in a ski jacket and stocking cap after they cut off her heat. He needed to come up with some way to force Callahan to back off and leave her alone. And since his friend, Lawyer Dooley, hadn’t shown him a way to use the law to protect her, he needed to come up with a different strategy.

And then a different strategy occurred to him.

He called Maggie Dolan, the lady who ran Mahoney’s Boston office. Maggie knew everyone in the city of Boston who was anyone. She’d be able to get him a name. Half an hour later, she called him back and said the guy he wanted would meet him in front of Elinore’s building at nine a.m. tomorrow.