_________________________
Scollay Square, Downtown
DANTE KNEW HOW to play the rag doll. It was as though he’d turned boneless and shut off his nerves so every punch from Grabowski merely echoed in his flesh. He could feel what the damage would be, and the hurt would come later: the rupture of skin on his jaw, a swollen eye, the bruising of a rib, two teeth loosening from his blood-soaked gums. A debt a month old wasn’t a ticket to the morgue, even with Sully and his Irish and Polish goons, the Catholic Pride of Dorchester Avenue, but lingering in the back of his head, there was the chance that they’d get carried away, make a mistake, and kill him.
“Dante, you’re such a fuckin’ waste. You know, back in the old days we all thought you’d make something of yourself. But now look at you with your pants down and your face all pretty. Jesus, a no-good waste, a true piece of shit.”
Grabowski held Dante’s limp body up with his two scarred hands. He released his right hand, cocking his arm to the side, and sent another blow across Dante’s chin. He pulled back again and lowered with a hard rip into the stomach. The thug had been a boxer once, but never much good. Without any discipline or strategy, he’d always been more at home fighting bare-knuckled in the back alleys and outside the social halls up and down the Avenue.
He grabbed a fistful of Dante’s unkempt hair and pulled him back toward the stall. Dante made a choking sound and tried to raise an arm. Grabowski hauled his head back and then slammed it into the stall’s oak door. Dante bounced, his head snapping back before he crumpled to the floor. Shaw stepped forward, leaned down over Dante, and flicked his half-smoked cigarette. The embers smoldered in the folds of Dante’s shirt, singed through to his skin.
“Okay, Ski, hold up a bit. Go check his jacket there by the toilet and see if he has any cash.”
Shaw had grown up in Fields Corner with both Cal and Dante. He came from the Shaughnessy family, a ripe brood where the seven sons all wanted to be just like their father, a low-rent criminal who made a substantial mark in gin and whiskey running during Prohibition. Shaw was the youngest, and he was the runt of the litter. As a kid, he was all mouth. He’d always had someone do his dirty work for him. And he hadn’t changed one bit since then, always talking like a tough guy, but with the trim, well-manicured hands of an accountant.
He had a habit of sucking his crooked teeth before he spoke. “Sully always liked you and Cal. Good boys, he says, could have really made it good with us if they just knew where their fuckin’ bread was buttered. He feels for you, he really does. But it’s been over, like, six months since your wife passed on. Sympathy has its limits, it wears thin after a while; even if it’s small change, he goes on principle. A man has to work off of principle, right? Otherwise the whole world goes to shit.”
Dante looked up at the freckled, flabby, pale face, the curly orange hair escaping like a clown’s wig from the sides of the tight hat, and the gray, heavy-lidded eyes. He tried to say something, but blood overflowed his mouth and spilled down his chin. The sharp metallic taste of it filled his nostrils, knotted with the growing pain in his gut as his adrenaline and his high dissolved into sickness.
He tried again. “I’ll get it to you soon…just don’t have it.”
Guttural laughter suddenly came from inside the stall. “The fucker got no money. But he’s got these.”
Ski came and shoved a handful of morphine syrettes at Shaw, four of them capped except the one that Dante had used earlier.
Shaw wrapped them up in one of his leather gloves and then pocketed them inside his long wool coat. He shook his head, sucked his teeth again. “I guess those niggers at those jazz joints really give you a good deal, no? Five caps and they’ll throw in some tubes of morphine just to take the edge off come morning.”
Ski caught his breath, rolled his shoulders, stood above Dante, and shook his head in an exasperated manner. He turned and looked over at Shaw, eyes crossed.
“Jesus Christ, how can somebody get this bad off? I feel kinda bad hurtin’ somebody who can’t even fight back.”
Shaw smirked. “If he wasn’t such a fuckup, I’d feel kinda bad for him too. Sick bastard finds his wife dead of a junk overdose and then crawls into bed next to her. Three days later, the police get a complaint of something smelling foul, so they come and break down the doors and find him still in bed with her.”
“You kiddin’ me?”
“Nope.”
“No, sleeping with your dead wife, that ain’t right.”
“Nothing right about it at all.”
Ski looked down at Dante on the floor. A look of sympathy briefly flickered in his gray face, hard with thickly knit scars, but then a scowl of disgust pulled at his mouth and he grunted loudly, drew back his leg, and brought another heavy boot to Dante’s chest.