“Can’t you lie low for a while?” Jake Brogan wasn’t used to this, telling someone to duck and cover.
Grady Houlihan obviously wasn’t used to hearing it. The kid fidgeted in the battered wooden swivel chair Jake inherited from the last detective assigned to sit at the corner desk, left row, in the BPD homicide office. Jake hoped there wasn’t residual bad juju from that guy, now in disgrace somewhere, bitter that he’d been caught—by Jake—taking kickbacks. Jake had not only gotten the glory, but in a bit of copshop humor, he’d also gotten the guy’s chair.
This corner of the now open-floor-plan squad room did have some privacy. Former superintendent Rivera had installed waist-high fabric dividers designed to “open up the place” and “prevent closed doors.” The gray panels were now layered with push-pinned newspaper clippings, Red Sox schedules, hand-drawn maps, union announcements, and the occasional what Jane would call inappropriate cartoon. Moments ago, the other cubicled cops had acknowledged Jake’s arrival with his young informant, but now ignored them, returning to paperwork and phone calling.
Jake watched Grady consider the “lie low” suggestion, and knew from experience—and years of reading criminals’ body language—that the snitch had already decided the answer was no. How did someone so young get in so deep, so soon? But this was Boston, and traditions died hard. Sometimes young men did, too. Clearly Grady was worried he’d be next, and he might be right. Problem was, nothing Jake could do about it.
“Don’t you guys have, like, a thing, a protection thing?” Grady’s voice held a taut undercurrent, not quite a whine, not quite a demand, that Jake figured came from some bone-weary feeling in the kid that he was always on the losing side. Never getting the break. But that assessment was demonstrably not true.
Grady certainly’d gotten a break, big-time, when Jake arranged for his immunity in the Charlestown stabbing. And then the Hyde Park drug episode. That’s when young Grady McWhirter Houlihan—white male, age 19, charged with felony firearm possession—had realized he could have a career simply listening, then telling the cops what he heard. Not the safest of jobs, but it was why he sat here at police headquarters sipping root beer instead of in the Suffolk County Jail awaiting trial. In one of those who-can-understand-how-a-criminal-mind-works situations, Grady talked only to Jake. Little did Boston’s skulking lowlifes know how many of their colleagues were behind bars because of this kid they assumed was their friend. This time he was asking Jake to be his friend.
Yes, Suffolk County had “a protection thing.” But for so many reasons it wasn’t going to work. And that left Jake in a pile-of-crap situation. Law enforcement needed Grady for his entrée into the world of illegal chutes and ladders, for his clues to its transactions and its participants. But if he was in danger? What was Jake’s responsibility to protect him?
“Jake? You hearing me? I’ll go, like, anywhere. No big deal. You buy, I’ll fly. I’m telling you, Jake, they’re onto me.”
“They?” Jake took a sip of rancid squad room coffee. D was bringing the afternoon Dunkin’s and was late, as usual. Jake actually knew who Grady’s “they” was—the Sholto operation, a Charlestown tradition in the most unpleasant of ways, a merger of the two most powerful families in the neighborhood. In a much-discussed union ten years ago, everyone knew, big gun Clooney Sholto, more reclusive than Howard Hughes and nastier than Whitey Bulger, had married the flamboyant Violet O’Baron, terminating an entire generation of intra-neighborhood warfare and competition.
With those wedding vows, the O’Barons’ drug-and-money territory had ceded to the Sholtos. Now, with Grady’s help, the impenetrable Sholtos—patriarch, wife, allies, and underlings—were in Jake’s sights. No matter what the kid wanted, Jake would have to send Grady back on the street. No other choice. Though this choice sucked.
“The Sholtos? How do you know they’re onto you?”
“Dude,” Grady said.
“Indulge me,” Jake said.
“It’s like…” Grady blew out a breath, remembering. “I come into the room, they stop talking, they go out of the room.” Used his hands to illustrate. In. Out.
Bitten cuticles, Jake saw, but no tattoos, no remnants of incarceration or indelible indications of gang affiliation. He could have been a regular college kid, except for a few disastrously wrong choices and the uncaring randomness of the universe. And an ironclad agreement with the cops.
“I leave the room, they go back in, start talking again. Dude. Somebody swiped my freakin’ phone. When I found it—like suddenly it was on the table, you know? Like it was never gone.” He held it up, the black plastic-cased evidence. “But I mean—why? Who? They’re onto me, Jake. I gotta split, or I’m like—Jake. I scratched you guys’ back, right? So now—we done. Call it a day.”
Phones rang, doors slammed, cops complained. With the fragrance of bad coffee surrounding them and the August heat defeating the muttering air conditioners, Jake let Grady talk. The longer Grady talked, the less Jake had to, and Jake had no good news and zero options. With only casual attendance at high school, and two parents and two brothers already doing time, Grady didn’t have many career choices. He possessed no skills, and no talent to speak of, except for a Boston-friendly demeanor—including ginger hair, green eyes, a stubby body comfortable on a soccer field or harbor trawler—and a good ear. Grady knew when to keep quiet, and, lucky for Jake and for the kid’s so-far-pristine criminal record, when to talk.
Even so, Jake worried he’d become the kid’s father figure. That was Jane’s prediction. He should never have told her about the Houlihan situation, but too late to take that back. At least Grady didn’t know about Jane.
The kid was Jake’s eyes and ears in two big cases. After a back-and-forth with the DA’s office, the department even let a couple of low-level drug deals Grady’d reported go through, to convince the bad guys there was no leak.
If Grady split, Jake was screwed.
One phone, insistent, jangled from across the room. “Somebody get that,” a voice complained. “Somebody who?” someone else yelled back. “Somebody’s not here,” another called out. “Budget cuts.” The phone rang again.
“Here’s the thing, Grady,” Jake began. “The budget for the Suffolk County witness protection program, such as it is, is part of the—”
“Hey. Grab one of these puppies.” DeLuca’s voice came from behind a flimsy cardboard carrier barely managing to contain three teetering Styrofoam cups. “If one goes over, it’ll burn ya to death. Shoulda gotten iced.”
Jake’s partner shoved over a stack of paperwork on an unoccupied desk and deposited the coffees on the pitted surface. “Jake, you about done? Grady? Got one of these for you, cream, three sugars, like Jake said. But hey, you two about done with whatever you’re doing? We have to—”
“Hey?” Grady stood, crossing his arms over his gray T-shirt. Looked at the wall. Ignored the coffee.
Grady and DeLuca had a push-pull relationship. If DeLuca didn’t push him, Grady wouldn’t pull out of the deal. But Paul DeLuca, Jake’s longtime partner and at age forty-seven moving ever closer to his dream of early retirement, had no patience with snitches. “Rats,” he called them. Even in the situationally moral world of cops and robbers, DeLuca’d explained to Jake, you had to pick a side.
“What if I ratted you out, Harvard?” D put the question to him one late night last year, after a case closed, over a third Guinness at the Sevens. “Say, about Jane? It’d be the ‘right’ thing to do, I guess, but hell. Even though you went to that phony-ass school, we’re partners. Partners don’t rat.”
DeLuca, though aware of law enforcement’s need for the type of intel only an insider could provide, barely managed to hide his disdain for Jake’s young informant. This afternoon’s coffee had been Jake’s idea.
“Hey, D.” Jake removed his steaming extra-large from the carrier. The flimsy Styro cup, squeaking against the cardboard, seemed about to implode. “What up?”
“The nine-one-one came to a Brookline tower.” D extracted a spiral notebook from the back pocket of his jeans and flipped through the pages. “From a cell. But turns out the vic—”
“Jake?” Grady scratched a cheek, making a red line on his pale skin. “You were saying?”
DeLuca took a step back. Dramatically gestured, yielding Grady the floor. “The vic can wait,” D said.
“Look. Grady. Can you just lie low?” Jake paused. Started again. “Look, I understand. I’ll put in your witness protection paperwork. But there’s a waiting list, and the red tape’s gonna screw us. There’s no budget for it, Grady, that’s the hard reality. I’ll expedite. Best I can. But until then…”
“Dude. They’ll body me before that.” Grady muttered the words to the murky gray carpet.
“Kill you?” Jake narrowed his eyes. Options clicked though his mind, none of them workable.
“Whatever,” Grady said.
“Jake?” DeLuca flapped his notebook against his palm. “We gotta go.”
“Brookline?”
“Nah. Call actually came from Boston. The Reserve, doncha know. She’s ours.”
“Who?” Jake asked, collecting his phone and notebook. Grady would hear the answer, but no matter. It was nothing he wouldn’t see on TV. TV. Jake’s body registered Jane, even before his brain did. But she wouldn’t be involved, not with her new assignment at Channel 2. “Who’s the victim?”
“That’s what we have to find out.” DeLuca checked the cream-sugar markings on the side of one cup, then the other, selected the second one. “Dead woman, in a bathing suit. In a pool. No longer swimming.”
“Drowned?” Jake asked.
“Like I said, Harvard.” D toasted with his cup. “Let’s go find out.”