5

Mickey’s probation officer suffered from a major case of little man’s complex and approached his job with a strict, by-the-book mentality. Thief, arsonist, rapist, murderer, heroin addict, drug dealer or the father of a missing girl who had beaten the shit out of the man responsible for taking her and two other girls – in Frank Towne’s world, you were all lumped together and afforded the same level of contempt.

Mickey had been on his way out of Boston, heading to a remodelling job he and his friend and business partner, Big Jim Kelly, had booked in Newton, one of the more upscale cities located west of Boston, when Towne called and told him to head over to the probation office in South Boston.

‘I thought we were meeting tomorrow morning,’ Mickey said.

‘We are. This is one of your random drug tests. I need you to swing by, blow in the tube and piss in the cup.’

‘I’m already out of the city.’

‘So turn around.’

Mickey tried to bite his tongue, couldn’t. ‘Really? Today? Of all days?’

‘What’s wrong with today?’

You know today’s the anniversary of my daughter’s abduction, prick.

Mickey, though, kept his mouth shut. He was so close to putting this all behind him and didn’t want to ruin it. And Towne, being the asshole he was, would have no problem telling the court that Mickey Flynn had refused to come to see his PO. So Mickey turned around and, for nearly two hours, fought the crushing gridlock traffic. By the time he got through his meeting with Towne and drove to Newton, the morning would be gone.

Towne, barely thirty and all of five-five and dressed in a suit his mother had probably picked out, dumped his well-worn leather briefcase on top of the counter in the bathroom down the hall from his office.

Towne handed him a plastic cup and said, ‘Fill ’er up.’

The terms of Mickey’s probation required him to take a piss test in front of his PO; it was the only way to make sure the urine sample was, in fact, his. Mickey unzipped his fly, and, once Towne saw that he was, in fact, taking a leak using his dick and not some elaborate tubing connected to a hidden bag holding someone else’s piss, he checked out the condition of his gelled hair in the mirror.

Lying inside Towne’s briefcase was a copy of today’s Globe. The headline ELEVEN YEARS AND QUESTIONS STILL LINGER screamed at him from the front page. The reporters hadn’t used the computer-enhanced pictures of what Claire would look like now.

Next to Claire’s smiling face was a picture of Byrne dressed in a winter coat and using a cane. The photographer had captured Byrne’s frailty, the deathly pallor of his skin.

Mickey, you are one lucky son of a bitch.

The voice belonged to his criminal lawyer, Alex Devine. Nearly a year ago, on a cold winter afternoon in early April, Mickey had been gutting a kitchen in East Boston when his phone rang, Devine’s secretary was on the other end of the line, telling him to drop whatever he was doing and get to the office ASAP. An hour later, Mickey was standing inside Devine’s sixth-floor office, with its sweeping views of the Charles.

‘I had a long conversation this morning with the DA,’ Devine had said.

Mickey felt like his heart was going to explode inside his chest.

For the past three weeks, while Byrne lay in the hospital, recuperating from the attack that had left him with three broken ribs and a severe concussion, Mickey had tried to wrap his brain around the concept of possibly spending five to eight years of his life inside a prison cell. It seemed more like a foreign concept than an actual reality – like someone had asked him to pack for a one-way trip to the moon.

His only regret was that he’d go to jail not having found out what Byrne had done to Claire.

Devine was coming up on sixty, with white, wispy hair and skin that looked like sun-dried leather; he opened a folder on his desk with a wrinkled hand. Mickey’s breath caught in his throat, a feeling of dread wrapping itself around his skin. Here it came, the verdict.

‘Byrne wants to drop all charges,’ Devine said. ‘And he has stated he has no interest in filing a civil suit.’

Mickey exhaled.

‘It’s a smart play on Byrne’s part,’ Devine continued. ‘Doing this shows the world he has compassion, that he’s not a monster. You’re one lucky son of a bitch, Mickey. You dodged a major bullet here – and, before you go thanking me, you’d better listen to the terms of the deal.’

His two years of probation included a mandatory five-week stay at an alcohol treatment programme. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at least three days a week and a special breathalyser installed inside his truck that he had to blow into every time he got behind the wheel. If he had any booze in his system, the truck wouldn’t start and the device would alert his probation officer. His probation officer could perform a breathalyser test at any time, and he had to submit to random drug testing – fail either and he’d be riding the bus to Walpole to serve a minimum of five years. Six hundred hours of community service at a place to be determined by the state. Mandatory anger-management classes and private therapy, everything paid out of Mickey’s pocket.

Mickey capped the urine sample and placed it on the bathroom counter.

‘Still on that job in Newton?’ Towne asked.

‘Still there.’

‘How long?’

‘End of the month.’ Another part of his probation required showing proof of employment. That meant handing over cheque stubs, receipts – anything Towne wanted. Towne examined everything. Nothing was going to slide by him on his watch, no sir, no way. Frank Towne was going places, just you watch.

Towne held out the breathalyser. Mickey stared at it.

‘There a problem?’ Towne asked.

Mickey washed his hands. ‘You guys made me install one of these things in my truck, remember? Costs me two hundred a month, I have to blow into it every time I start my truck, and pull over when it asks me to blow into it again.’

‘Your point?’

‘If I’d been boozing, I wouldn’t have been able to drive here, would I?’

‘Are you refusing the breathalyser?’

Mickey took it and blew into the tube, inhaled and then blew into it again. The device beeped and spit out the reading on the display: 0.0.

‘Imagine that,’ Mickey said. ‘Clean and sober at eleven in the morning.’

‘Joke about it all you want, but a lot of alkies booze it up in the morning, figuring I won’t catch ’em.’

Mickey thought about correcting him, saying that even at his worst, he had never taken a drink in the morning, ever, or slipped behind the wheel after he’d had a few pops. In Towne’s world, a drunk was a drunk and always would be a drunk, and Mickey wasn’t about to justify himself to this punk midget suffering from a terminal case of asshole-itis.

‘What time you kicking off work?’ Towne asked.

‘Around six or so.’

‘And after that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What are your plans after work?’

‘Home.’

‘Make sure you stay nice and dry. Remember what happened the last time you got caught on the sauce?’

Strike two: Mickey had made the mistake of getting good and loaded last year on the eve of Claire’s anniversary, doing it at home alone, when Towne decided to pay a surprise visit. Mickey flunked the terms of his probation – which he was sure delighted Towne no end – but the judge didn’t send him to jail. Instead, the guy ordered another round of therapy sessions and another stay at an alcohol-treatment programme and more AA meetings. Mickey had had to start at zero again, work his way back up.

‘You get caught drinking again,’ Towne said, ‘then it’s strike three my friend, game over. You go to prison. Or you can behave yourself, do what you’re told and get your life back. How you want to play this out is entirely up to you.’

Mickey opened the bathroom door, wondering what life Towne was referring to.

Mickey spent the early afternoon with Big Jim installing the windows for Margaret Van Buren’s sprawling two-floor addition in Newton. At two thirty, they broke for lunch. The three young guys they had working for them were in their early twenties, single, and talked incessantly about the upcoming weekend: the bars they were going to hit, the different girls they were seeing and the ones they wanted to dump.

Jim picked up his lunch. ‘I can’t listen to this shit any more,’ he whispered to Mickey. ‘I’m locked in a house with four women who want to kill each other on a daily basis and these guys are having hot-tub parties with bikini models.’

If Death had a bodyguard, it would be Jim Kelly. He stood six-six and had shoulders as wide as a car fender and weighed three hundred pounds, most of it still solid muscle. He had a diamond stud in each ear and he wore a black-knit winter hat with a Harley Davidson logo pulled low over his wide forehead, and every time he ate, even back when they were kids, Big Jim shovelled food into his mouth with the quickness and ferocity of a starving man.

They sat inside Mickey’s truck, eating the subs Jim had picked up downtown, Jim talking about last night’s escapades with his twins, Grace and Emma, the ten-year-olds deciding 2 a.m. was a good time to get into a fight over a missing American Girl doll named Clara. Mickey tried to listen – tried to keep himself in the moment and out of his head. His head, he had learned, was a dangerous neighbourhood where he could get lost – and he was lost in it right now. As Jim talked about his crazy kids and his crazy family life, Mickey had the sensation that someone was sitting on his chest, then standing on it, then jumping, Mickey thinking all the while, I’d chop off one or both of my legs right now, myself, if I could get just five minutes with my daughter. Just five minutes to tell her how much I love her.

And then he thought of Byrne sitting inside his house, the seconds ticking by turning to minutes and hours – the monster was dying, and he was going to take the knowledge of what he’d done to Mickey’s daughter to his grave. Mickey was gripped by crushing waves of loss and sadness and regret so powerful that he thought he was going to explode into tears.

Christ, I need a drink, Mickey thought.

And a voice answered: Then go get one.

‘Something I need to tell you,’ Jim said, his voice snapping Mickey back to the present. ‘Got a call from Win this morning.’

Win, Mickey knew, was Stan Winston, a Belham plain-clothes cop who was tight with Jim.

Jim took a bite of his Italian sub. ‘Darby’s back in town,’ he said, chewing.

‘Darby McCormick?’

‘The one and only.’ Jim turned his head to him and smiled, his eyes crinkling in humour. ‘She had a private meeting with whatshisname there, the guy heading up the cold-case squad.’

‘Kennedy.’

‘Yeah. Him. Don’t know what they talked about, but Win said Kennedy hired her to look into some shit.’

‘Claire’s case?’

‘Dunno. Win wasn’t privy, as they say, to the conversation. You know she’s a doctor now? Not a doctor-doctor but a college doctor. Went to Harvard.’

‘She was always smart.’

‘Win said she’s held up really well, still looks smokin’.’ Big Jim chuckled.

‘What?’

‘I was just thinking of that time in our junior year, that party Todd Bouchard threw at his house when his parents went to Florida. Peter McGee went up and grabbed her ass and Darby – I mean she hauled off on him, broke his nose with one solid punch.’ Big Jim grinned. ‘That girl always knew how to fight.’

‘That article in Sunday’s Globe magazine,’ Mickey said, changing the subject.

‘What about it?’

‘You read the interview with Sean?’

Big Jim nodded and took another bite of his sub, grinning as he chewed. ‘Your old man missed his calling as a comic.’

‘The ice queen thinks Sean’s gonna reach out to me. You know, try to patch things up.’

‘You serious?’

‘She was,’ Mickey said, and took another bite of his meatball sub.

‘You should arrange a get-together. She spends a minute talking with him, I guarantee you she’ll walk away feeling like she’s got bite marks all over her skin.’

Or he’d just kill her, Mickey thought. Bury her someplace where nobody will ever find her, like my mother. Like –

No, he told himself. Don’t say it. If you don’t say it, it can’t be true.

‘Dotty Conasta called again,’ Mickey said, wanting to stay out of his head. ‘She has a couple of questions she wants answered before she signs. I’ll swing by tonight, after we’ve finished up here.’

‘Have you met her?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I was over there two nights ago, about to go over the plans for her addition, when she tells me to wait, wants her husband to join us.’

‘So?’

‘So her husband’s in an urn.’ Big Jim shoved the remains of his sub into his mouth and sighed. ‘That job’s got Excedrin written all over it.’

In his rearview mirror he saw a car pull in behind him – a white Honda Accord that looked like it had come straight from the car wash. The driver’s side door opened to a flash of black leather and auburn hair, and when he turned around in his seat Mickey saw Darby McCormick striding up the driveway, heading right towards him.