Grizzly ran other dealers, Django’d always known it. Grizz told Django he was the favourite of the Grizz. Hell, Grizz had saved Django’s black ass, blowing away that dude right there in the alley, hadn’t he? Took Django in, got the Gypsy to bandage his messed-up hand, gave Django a bit of action, some walking around money. Most of all, Grizz gave him protection, staying close under Grizzly’s wing, yes.
Django had met a couple of them, guys who worked other neighbourhoods for Grizzly, but Grizzly made everybody keep their distance from the others, never liked getting them all together. Fact is, Grizz couldn’t trust guys like them. They’re liable to get together, figure out how much action Grizz is making off them, taking no risks, carrying nothing on his own self, even staying in three different places, three different addresses. Bunch of rooms in the wormy old Warrenton, paying Django’s rent. And a place down on Dorchester, corner of a warehouse, just a john and a cot but Grizzly didn’t need much more. And a little old house in the South End out on Albany, kitchen and all. The Gypsy liked that place best but it was too far from the action for the Grizz, he needed to be downtown, needed to see things happen.
Grizzly operated like a company sales manager, products and territories, everybody had their own. Django, he did the medicine, other side of Tremont, down among the gooks and the deadheads left over from the old Combat Zone. There was a Spanish guy, maybe a Cuban, tough little hood named Garcia but Grizzly always called him Garce, he worked the waterfront, selling mostly hash, good Moroccan shit, running it for Grizz, turning a profit.
And a skinny white-faced peckerwood, Drew something his name was, pumped crack and anything else the Boston University kids wanted, working out of Kenmore Square, never carrying, always arranging drops for kids he knew, keeping the risk down, feeding the Good Green back to Grizz.
It was Drew, last name Middleton, birthplace Knoxville, Tennessee, it was Drew Middleton who Grizz told to watch Django while Django was watching Billie, Django hoping she’d lead him to McGuire. It was Drew who timed his stroll across Dalton Street so he could pass Donovan just as the cop re-entered the dance club after nailing Django in the dark doorway of the Convention Center, Django talking a blue streak before hustling his ass back downtown.
What’s Django doin’ meetin’ a cop up here, so far from home turf, Drew wondered. Drew never thought much a Django. Selling little white pills, that was pussy work.
Drew spiked Donovan as a cop, told Grizzly about it the night before, gave Grizzly all night to think about what he had to do, how he had to know what Django was up to, stupid dumb fuck talking to a cop when he’s supposed to be nailing the Jolt.
Early in the morning, not a good time for him but business was business, Grizzly made a couple enquiries around, subtle stuff, till he got a call from the man he wanted, the man who made things go, and then he sent the word for Django to come around, Grizz had to talk with him right now, so haul ass. Sent the word with Drew and Garce and Dewey, let Dewey know about it, Dewey back on the street with the Bird gone, Dewey looking for some action of his own now but not thinking about working for Grizz, not forever, no sir. Dewey’d want to run his own show and there wasn’t room for Grizz and Dewey together, but that was a problem Grizz’d deal with later.
Dewey, Garce, Drew, they’d get the message to Django, see that he got his little black ass back to Grizz, count on it.
Grizz climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Warrenton Hotel and stomped along the corridor to the four rooms at the end that he shared with the Gypsy and Django, the force of his footsteps shaking the old brass wall fixtures as he passed.
Inside the room the Gypsy was huddled naked on the floor in the corner, her legs drawn up, her chin resting on her bony knees, her eyes wild. “Get some leather on,” Grizzly said, and he peeled off his heavy coat, looking to kill some time searching for new perversions, his crotch jacked already just thinking about what he might have to do when Django showed up.
McGuire left Micki sleeping, curled like a child in the oversized bed where her sister had taken countless men, driven there by the frenzy of their own libidos. She had always hated getting up, she loved to stay warm in her bed, and so he left her there. He stepped into his trousers, put on his shirt and tip-toed from the room.
He shrugged into his jacket and descended the stairs, emerging in the late morning traffic on Newbury Street to find a newspaper, put himself in touch with the world again. At a newsstand on Boylston across from the Lenox, he bought a Globe from the newsdealer who sucked on a hand-rolled cigarette set in the middle of his mouth, the man shifting his weight from side to side, trying to warm himself with the motion. McGuire scanned the headlines and the sky and walked back to Newbury, feeling something close to affection for the people he passed, street people and Back Bay condominium residents, B.U. students and delivery people, all of them more driven by than engaged in their lives, rarely questioning themselves, and he envied them for it.
On his way to the apartment McGuire thought of Heather, picturing her face, its quick smile and dark eyes, and her compact body: square shoulders, deep chest, hips that flared from a taut waist and dancer’s legs, the thighs strong, the calves delicately sculpted.
He had never known a woman so entranced with her own place in the world, so firmly fixed upon her own status and so driven toward some goal or objective visible only to her, her progress measured according to her own secret calibrations.
McGuire and Heather had shared nothing warmer than a truce, although more than once at parties and social events, Heather passed behind him and drew the fingertips of one hand across McGuire’s buttocks, murmuring “Nice ass” from the corner of her mouth before breaking into that strange laughter she had, that way of finding every incident that touched her life either secretly humorous or sinister and dangerous.
In the beginning McGuire told himself the gulf between the two of them existed because they both loved Micki, and Heather, as the older sister, the protective sibling, would always be jealous of McGuire’s influence over Micki, filling a role that had once been her own.
But Heather’s view was different. “You know why we don’t get along, gumshoe?” she once said to McGuire, a glass of wine in her hand and a laugh poised to explode from her mouth. “It’s because we’re too much alike.” And before McGuire could reply, there was the laughter and she added, “Of course, I’m also a hell of a lot smarter than you are.”
There had been a desperation about Heather, McGuire recalled, unfathomable in its source, and in combination with Heather’s anger it would drive her to achieve any goal, no matter how outrageous. “What makes her so angry?” McGuire once asked Micki, and Micki said it was something that had happened to Heather when she was a child, something about an uncle who had sexually abused her, something the family never openly acknowledged or discussed.
“Heather told me once,” Micki said, “that when Mom heard about it, she blamed Heather for leading Uncle Jack on and Heather realized later that Mom had been jealous. Mom hadn’t been angry about her husband’s brother screwing her daughter, she was jealous.” Micki had smiled and shook her head and said, “Aren’t some families totally messed up?”
It was Heather who detonated the explosion that destroyed McGuire’s marriage by telling him of Micki’s lover, revealing her long-term affair with a lawyer in Cambridge, and when McGuire awoke to the meaning of Micki’s many lies and disappearances over recent weeks, it was Heather who had laughed and mocked him, who taunted him as a cuckold.
When Tim Fox and Micki told McGuire of Heather’s crude blackmailing of her lovers, McGuire knew that Heather had gained more enjoyment from the dominance, from the fear her threats generated in the men she betrayed, and from the rush of power and danger than from the money it earned her.
McGuire climbed the stairs to the kitchen, made coffee and ascended the steep stairway to the fourth level. He crossed the alcove beyond the bedroom where Micki was still sleeping, and walked down the short hall to the office.
He remembered.
It had begun returning to him on the street, watching the people, envying them their concerns, their purposes. Now the memory was crystallizing, solidifying, the facts butting edge to edge like cellular growth.
Heather had sent a message to him with Django, a note on her personal lilac-coloured stationery, Django handing it to him furtively across a table in the Flamingo. He remembered that.
And before that, a week after their meeting in the Esplanade, she had found McGuire in the Public Garden, waiting for Django to appear. She proposed the idea then, the first time.
“Make yourself some money,” she told him. “You still have friends over on Berkeley Street, haven’t you? All you have to do is tell me a few things about them, about one of them anyway. And maybe hold on to some stuff for me.”
He recalled how she was dressed: a fur coat swinging open over a flowered print dress, her neck ringed in heavy gold and large diamond earrings flashing fire in the low autumn sun.
In the most eloquent manner he could summon at the time, McGuire had told her to go away.
“Hey, if you won’t do this for me,” she had said, “I’ll find somebody who will.” And that quick cold smile. “But I’d rather get you to do it for me. And I will.”
And then the note delivered by Django, saying she knew how much McGuire relied on Django and what Django did, what he sold McGuire. “You do this for me, loser,” she had written. “Or I’ll see that the guy delivering this gets his ass in jail and yours in the harbour. Call me tonight.”
Why me, McGuire had wondered, and the answer came back: Because she wants to humiliate you, because she despises you for rejecting her. And because, as an ex-cop, you know things she doesn’t, you have access to something she needs.
He remembered the murder investigation summary Zelinka had given him and he withdrew it from his pocket, unfolded it and sat heavily in the chair at Heather’s desk. Scanning its contents, thinking of all he had absorbed and pondered since Heather’s death, he pictured Heather fleeing her attacker in the bedroom, running down the hall to this office, turning abruptly again for the door, seeking refuge in the bathroom . . .
And he knew.
He sat back in the chair and nodded his head.
He knew.
Garce found Django in a doughnut shop on Charles Street, there in a back booth, stretching a coffee, trying to stay cool, wasting the morning. “Grizz wanna talk,” Garce said, standing there over the booth, hands in his pockets, a crazy black beret on his head, black nylon windbreaker done to the neck.
“What for?” Django said. “Saw Grizz last night. Don’t need to see the man now.”
“Hell you don’t,” Garce said. He had an upper tooth missing in the front, a black hole in his mouth that made him look like some kid maybe fell off his skateboard or something. “Man says you come, you come.”
“He mad?”
“Grizz never get mad.” Garce stepped aside for Django to get out of the booth, staying close. “Grizz jus’ get along. With evr’body. You know that.”
Django nodded and rose to follow Garce, feeling something inside him, something scratching and clawing, telling him not to go, just run but don’t go, and he ignored it.
Grizz wouldn’t hurt him. Even walking down the corridor to Grizz’s room, Garce behind him now, Django kept telling himself there’s nothing to worry about, just have a talk with Grizz, find out what’s on the man’s mind.
Standing outside Grizzly’s room, Django didn’t know what was going on inside from the sounds coming through the door. Grizz would put something across the Gypsy’s mouth, maybe a leather strap to bite on, Django never knew. But now he could hear her moaning or screaming or whatever behind the door.
Took three knocks on the door by Garce before it opened and there’s Grizz standing there, big belly hanging out over the pants he just pulled on, the Gypsy lying back on the bed, her face red and her hands flying in the air like bats or something, like she can’t control them.
Grizz looked really pissed at first, then he smiled when he saw Django. “Need to talk, you ’n me,” he said. “Gimme couple minutes, go wait in your room.”
Garce had never been in Django’s room before, Garce hardly ever came to the Warrenton, had his own place in Charlestown. But he came in now, followed Django in and leaned against the door frame like he’s being cool while Django sat on his bed, saying here it comes, here it comes to himself, trying not to show the shakes.
Grizz opened the door maybe five minutes later and said, “We gotta talk, over inna alley. Let’s go.”
They walked down the stairs and out onto Washington Street, crossing the road among Oriental families carrying food in plastic bags and gawking tourists looking for what was left of the Combat Zone. They went up the alley to the square formed by the back of the empty buildings, Tremont Adult Novelties and Shawmut Imports and others, Grizz leading the way, Garce behind Django, Django’s mouth dry and his knees weak. In the middle sat the forty-gallon drum, all rusty, two feet of ashes in the bottom.
“You not sayin’ much.” Grizzly slapped the side of the rusted drum as he passed, heading for the back door of Tremont Adult Novelties. “Garce, you ever see Django with his mouth not flappin’?”
“Sure ain’t,” Garce said.
Grizz stopped near the back of the building, turned around, looked up at a sky as cold and gray as the broken concrete Django was staring down at. “Not like the way it was flappin’ at that cop last night.” He looked at Django. “Like I hear.”
“That cop?” Django grinned, looked around, looked at Garce and Grizz, back and forth. “He a jive turd, Grizz.” Django shrugged. “Man jump me ’cause I was trackin’ Lady Billie, jus’ like you say, and he see me. No big deal, Grizz. I tell him I’m lookin’ for cars to hot-wire, tha’s all. Jus’ lookin’ for cars, Buick, Benz, somethin’, but I was gonna lay off, yes sir, stay on my own turf . . .”
Grizzly’s hand flew at Django’s head, catching Django just at the corner of his eye, right where Grizz had aimed, and Django was on the ground, his legs drawn up, waiting maybe for a kick.
“Hey, Grizz,” Django said. “What you wanna do that for?”
“You talk at cops,” Garce said. Sometime while Django’d been talking, Garce had pulled a knife from his jacket and he held it now in one hand, lightly, like he was weighing it, judging how heavy it was. Long blade, cut out at the top, ending in a nasty point.
“I answer the man,” Django said. He watched the knife, he couldn’t take his eyes from the knife. “He thinks I trackin’ him and Billie, tha’s all. . . .”
“Wha’s his name?” Grizzly said.
“Man didn’t tell me his—”
This time it was Grizzly’s boot. Django saw it coming and turned his head so that the boot caught him beside the ear and he lost it for a second, blackness and then flashes of light and then the pain, funny how there was that little bit of time when you wait for the pain to come.
“Donovan,” Django said. He kept his eyes closed. If more was coming, he didn’t want to see it.
“Talk to a cop an’ know his name?” Garce said, like he’s surprised and impressed, like Django just told him he’d won a million dollars in a lottery.
“Talk to the Jolt an’ know his name,” Django said. “Grizz know that. Jolt’s a customer, Grizz give me the goods to make a sale, I find him . . .”
“You didn’t find no Jolt,” Grizz said. “Tell you do somethin’ an’ it don’t get done, hell kinda way izzat to work? Huh?”
“I’m lookin’, Grizz.” Django lay where he was, wondering if he was going to be sick.
“Garce say you lay somethin’ heavy on this cop.” Grizz knelt down, got his face closer to Django’s. “That right, Garce?”
“Tha’s right.” Garce was tossing the knife from one hand to the other now, back and forth.
“What’d you tell him?” Grizz said. “What’d you tell this cop, make him so impress with you?”
Do it, Django thought. Let it go, can’t hurt you. Can’t hurt you now. “I tell him what I see,” Django said. “The night the black cop get his, behin’ the Bird, up at the Jolt’s place.”
“You see somethin’ then?”
Django nodded, biting his bottom lip.
Grizz, still watching Django, held a long arm up at Garce, the massive hand open, fingers splayed. Garcia took a step forward, placed the knife in Grizzly’s hand, the white mother-of-pearl handle first.
“Don’ move,” Grizzly said. His voice was calm, gentle. “Don’ move a thing,” and he brought his hand back and lay the blade of the knife on Django’s cheek, the feel of it cold and angry, and he slid the blade until the needle point tickled the inside corner of Django’s right eye, below the bridge of his nose. “You feel that?” Grizzly asked.
Django was afraid to move his head so he whispered, “I feel it, Grizz,” and Grizz said, “Good,” and then Grizz asked him to tell him everything Django had told Donovan, especially what Django had seen in the alley behind the Flamingo the night Tim Fox was killed.
Micki came downstairs with sleep and hair in her eyes. “I smelled the coffee,” she said to McGuire. “Thought you might bring me some.”
McGuire was sitting at the kitchen table, the Globe spread open in front of him next to a cup of black coffee, but he hadn’t been reading. He had been thinking of Heather’s murder and Tim Fox’s death. “Go back to bed,” McGuire said. “I’ll bring a cup up to you.”
“Come with me,” she said.
She led him by the hand upstairs and back to the dishevelled sheets and they lay together, Micki folded into him, her head on his shoulder while he stroked her hair.
“Who are you mixed up with?” McGuire asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Down in Florida. What are you up to?”
“Nothing special.”
“Like the guy in Lauderdale, the dope dealer? You said he was nothing special either.”
“He wasn’t.”
“You lived with him two, three years.”
She shifted against him, avoiding his eyes.
“And when he got caught, he pulled you right in with him. Nice guy.”
“I never said he was nice.”
“You never said you loved him either.”
“I didn’t.”
“You spent three years of your life with him. Still be with him, maybe, if he hadn’t got caught in a D.E.A. raid. What’d he get? Five to ten, something like that?”
She twisted her head to look at him. “Why now?”
“Why what now?”
“Why bring all this up now? Down in Florida, when you came to see me, we never talked about this stuff. We didn’t talk much about anything.”
“Maybe it matters now. More than it did then.”
She exhaled slowly and her eyes drifted. “He reminded me of you.”
“Just what I want to hear. My ex-wife shacks up with a drug dealer because he reminds her of me.”
“I meant you’re both . . . dangerous in a way. That’s what attracted me to you in the first place.”
“Were we that much alike, him and me?”
“No. In other ways you weren’t alike at all. He was cocky, arrogant. You . . . you were always a little . . . sad, a little, I don’t know kind of blue.”
“You miss him?”
“No.” Not a moment’s hesitation in answering.
He wanted to speak, considered the phrases he would use, explored how he might express the anger, the hatred, the way he despised all she had done, but almost as soon as they sprang into his mind, he discarded them and continued to stroke her hair with his hand, wondering how they had arrived at this place and this time, the both of them, together.
Grizzly had cut Django some, little nick under the eye, little slice down his cheek, just laying the edge of the knife in, let him know how sharp it was, how much it could hurt. While Django remained frozen there, his eyes closed, feeling the blood run across his cheek, Garce did what Grizzly told him to do, wrapping a length of wire around Django’s wrists, binding them together behind his back.
“Get up,” Grizzly said when Garce finished. He grabbed Django by an elbow and lifted.
Django stood, opened his eyes, looked at Grizzly. “Grizz, I never did nothin’ ’gainst you,” Django said. He twisted his body to look at Garce who was watching, eyes half-closed in that funny way of his, never know if he was stoned or sleepy or maybe just nearsighted.
“Never said you did,” Grizzly said. He opened the wooden rear door of Tremont Adult Novelties that led into the storage area, a space smaller than Django’s room at the Warrenton. Beyond it was a heavy steel-clad door, barred from the inside. “Move your ass,” Grizzly said.
Django took a small step forward, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness until Grizzly shoved him from behind, sending him sprawling to the concrete floor, and something skittered off among empty cardboard cartons stacked against the wall. He landed on one shoulder, trying to protect his hands, and his head struck the concrete, opening a gash above an eyebrow.
“Didn’t piss me off,” Grizzly said. He angled his head at Garce who brought the heavy door closed, shutting out the sunlight. “Pissed other people off’s what you did.”
Django heard something shoved through the hasp of the door, locking him inside.
The clinging warmth rising from his groin to his scalp exploded in the release, and he was crying words with meaning but without shape. Then he was lying beside her while she watched him catch his breath and swallow and blink several times before covering his eyes with his hand.
“Never in bed,” Micki said, tracing circles on McGuire’s chest with her forefinger. “We never had any problems in bed.”
“In bed with each other, you mean.” McGuire removed his hand and stared across the room at the wall, thinking of nothing.
“You always bring up the good stuff,” she said sarcastically. She smiled and wove her fingers together. “If we only got along, you know, in the rest of our lives as well as we do in bed. . . .”
“We didn’t do that badly.” He twisted his head to look at her. “What happened this morning? Everything was fine and then . . .”
“I don’t know.” She folded her hands and lay her head on them, like a child preparing for sleep. “I heard you come in, I knew you had the morning paper and I thought, ‘It’s like those Sundays when Joe’d go for a walk in the morning and I’d hear him leave and go back to sleep and wake up and smell bacon and coffee and toast and we’d have breakfast together and talk.’ But it’s not like that . . .”
“Would’ve been for one day.” A weight settled in McGuire’s chest. “That’s what I was going to do. . . .”
“That’d be dumb, wouldn’t it?”
“What?”
“Trying . . .” She pulled a tissue from a pocket of the robe and dabbed at her nose and eyes with it as she spoke. “Trying to act like nothing’s happened, having breakfast, pretending it was ten years ago when it’s not.”
“Even last night?”
“No, last night was terrific.” She smiled at him. “Wasn’t it?”
McGuire nodded.
“I meant thinking we could ever have a life together again.” She bit her bottom lip and looked away. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’d better go back to Florida.”
McGuire rose from the bed and began putting on his clothes. “Make it soon,” he muttered. “Soon as you can.”
“Why the hell not, Eddie?”
Phil Donovan stood shaking in the captain’s office, watching Fat Eddie trying to stay cool, popping another thick tablet into his mouth.
“You know why,” Vance said. “It’s classified. You tell me what you’re looking for and I’ll locate it for you.”
“I told you, I got an eyewitness description—”
“From a convicted felon, a street person, probably addicted to the same chemicals he peddles on the streets. You think I’m going to break the commissioner’s instructions on something that weak? Now if you want to bring your witness in here where we can question him correctly and in some depth. . . .”
“The guy’s not gonna risk his ass comin’ down here, not unless we arrest him. And then there’s nothing in it for him if he talks, we got nothing on him.”
“Yes, we have.” Vance smiled. “We could lay trafficking charges very easily, you know that.”
“And he still won’t talk unless we get him protection.” Donovan walked to Vance’s window and back. “Can you promise him that?”
“I can’t promise anything,” Vance said. “But if you want to find this witness and bring him in here, we could assess things.”
“Do you know who he saw?” Donovan asked. “Do you know who he described?”
“I think so,” Vance said. Something was doing somersaults in his intestines. “But I don’t believe it.”
Donovan stared back at Vance, then turned and left, leaving the captain alone in his office reaching for his antacid tablets.
Should he tell Zelinka, Vance wondered. Zelinka, sitting up there in his cubbyhole near Government Center, spinning off requests for files that even Vance himself would normally not have access to except with the commissioner’s directive. Files from everywhere, few of them connected with anything except some convoluted bookkeeping among a few downtown businessmen, none of it decipherable to Vance, none of it directly linked to the murders of Heather Lorenzo and Tim Fox.
No, he decided. There was nothing to tell, all Donovan had was a wild tale from some half-crazed street person. He would rather find a way to rein in Donovan, let him know if he was going to explode like he just had, he’d better back it up with results. That’s what McGuire and Schantz had done.
McGuire and Schantz.
There were times when he almost missed them.
Grizz my buddy, Django repeated to himself. He tell me once, he say, “You okay, some day I let you have a little taste of the Gypsy, show you what a real woman can do, she love a man ’nough.”
Never say that to nobody else, Django assured himself.
He was cold, the concrete beneath his body like the floor of a freezer chest, and the wire cut into the skin of his wrists. The blood on his cheek had hardened to a crust and in spite of his fear and panic he was weary. When Grizzly came and let him go, he’d head back to the Warrenton, crawl into bed, have a good sleep, refresh himself.
Django couldn’t judge time, never owned a watch, but less than an hour had passed before he heard footsteps on the bare dry earth of the square surrounding the rusting barrel. No voices. Just footsteps and a fumbling at the hasp. Django sat up painfully on his haunches, facing the door.
When the door swung open, the gray light that flooded in on Django was like life itself, and he smiled back at the silhouettes of Grizzly and Garce looking down at him. Behind them stood the Gypsy in the massive oversized gray parka, muttering to herself, one hand rising to stroke a fresh raw welt on the side of her neck then falling, rising and falling, over and over, like a mechanical device marking the time or signaling danger.
“Hey, Grizz,” Django said. “Everything cool, right?”
Grizzly looked back at Django, his face cold and unyielding like the pitted concrete floor, and when Django looked at Garce, the Cuban turned his head away and Django began to panic.
“Goddamn it, Grizz!” Django tried to rise to one knee but with his hands behind his back he had no balance, no momentum, and he fell sideways, feeling more vulnerable than ever. “I good to you, Grizz,” Django said. “I good to you, I your man, Grizz!” He rose to his knees again, a man shouldn’t die on his knees but he didn’t want to die lying there on the floor, giving up, either.
Garce had taken a step back from the door and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking around, staying cool.
“Tol’ you,” Grizz said. “You good to me but other people, they better to me, you know that. Need them more’n I need you. An’ they don’ need you at all. Don’ even want you around.”
Grizzly held a hand out toward the Gypsy, keeping his eyes on Django, and the Gypsy, still muttering to herself, reached inside the parka and withdrew a blue-steel snub-nosed revolver.
At the sight of the gun, Django panicked and tried to stand and run until Grizzly’s boot shot out and the blow to Django’s chest sent him rolling on his side, deep within the storage shed, facing the open door, watching it all.
The Gypsy was staring down at the gun, turning it over in her hand like maybe her name was written on it somewhere.
Grizzly raised his right arm again, stretching it out toward the Gypsy, his fingers moving in an impatient give-it-to-me motion while Django watched, unable to take his eyes off her and the gun in her hand.
The Gypsy was still muttering something to herself and her other hand, the free one, rose to stroke the welt on her neck. She took a step toward Grizzly, raising the gun.
Django didn’t hear what she said, never heard anything above the sound of traffic out on Washington, but Grizzly heard it. A puzzled expression crossed his face, and when the big man turned to look at her for the first time, she raised the gun to the level of his head and fired.
The bullet struck Grizzly in the face, shattering his lower jaw. He dropped to his knees, keeping his arm outstretched to her, still wanting the gun and she repeated the words and fired into his shoulder. Still Grizzly remained kneeling until a third and a fourth bullet entered his chest, the Gypsy talking to herself between each squeeze of the trigger. She stepped toward Grizzly’s prone body and shot him again, repeated the words and shot him a sixth time before squeezing the trigger on an empty chamber.
Garce had ducked against the building at the first shot, crouching there, watching it all. Now the Gypsy raised the gun in his direction and pulled the trigger again, then swung her arm toward Django and tried to shoot him. Django heard the hammer click harmlessly, watching as the Gypsy slouched to the ground where she sat and stared openmouthed at Grizzly’s body.
Django wriggled through the open doorway. Garce, circling Grizzly’s body, his eyes on the river of blood running down the slight incline toward the alley, almost tripped over him.
“He’p me, Garce,’ Django said. “Get the wires. Or cops’ll find me, we all be in shit.” Garce knelt beside Django and untwisted the wire before bolting away, Django behind him, glancing briefly back at the Gypsy who was still watching Grizzly, the empty gun pointed at him like she was daring him to get up. Like she could do anything about it if he suddenly came alive to hurt her again.
Django and Garce ran together down the lane and along Washington in the direction of the Common until Garce noticed people watching them, a Cuban and a black, street people, running in panic, one of them with fresh blood on his face. Had to be bad news, keep an eye on those hoodlums, and Garce and Django ducked around the corner on Oak Street, through a parking lot and down a service lane. At the end Garce sat against a dumpster smelling of rotting Oriental food and rested his head in his hands, his breath sounding like a steam engine at rest.
Django paced in circles in front of him. “D’ja know he doin’ that?” Django said. “He ready to blast me?”
Garce shook his head. “Said you had a lesson comin’,” Garce said. “Din’t know wha’ kind.”
“Listen,” Django said. “Hear?”
They both held their breath as a police siren approached from the north, and Garce leaned forward to look down the lane toward Washington, watching two police cars scream past.
“See you ’round,” Garce said, standing. He grinned almost shyly at Django. “You gotta be the luckiest black man in Boston.”
Django nodded. He was thinking of his hotel room, the few belongings he had, the little bit of his money stashed away behind the loose baseboard under the bed. Two thousand dollars nearly. Enough to get him started, set him up, think about where he’d go, what he’d do.
Garce was already walking down the lane, hands in the back pockets of his tight black jeans, swivel-hipping away.
“Hey, Garce,” Django called.
Garce stopped and turned to look at Django warily. “Wha’?”
“What she be sayin’?” Django asked. “The Gypsy, she mutterin’ somethin’, I couldn’t hear. You hear what that crazy woman sayin’?”
Garce smiled and nodded. “She prayin’. But she couldn’t get pas’ the firs’ par’.”
“Prayin’?”
Garce nodded again. “She say, ‘Our father, who art in heaven, hallow be thy name,’ thas’ what the craz’ bitch sayin’ over and over. Craz’ bitch.”