JOE MEARS woke up and for a moment didn’t know where he was. He’d scattered himself all over Boston: stored his books in a little house in Jamaica Plain, hid his money in a Gibraltar Street apartment, kept his stash in a hotel for hobos on West Dedham.
He opened his eyes. He saw a water-damaged ceiling and heard rummies arguing in the hall, which told Mears he was on West Dedham Street. Mears got up and examined the furnished room for signs of entry. The night manager had once let himself in while Mears was gone, checking a gas leak, he said. Rifling my shit, Mears believed. He jumped the night man in the basement and put a carving fork to his eye. After that, everybody left him alone.
Mears checked at the front desk for messages, and was told his friend had called. Mears knew this was Caesar Raines looking for product.
“He leave a number?” Mears asked the desk clerk. The clerk’s hands shook as he gave Mears a scrawled-on matchbook. Mears crossed the lobby to a pay phone and called the number.
“Gilda’s,” a woman said.
“Caesar around?” Mears heard a busy restaurant in the background. He liked Caesar’s methods: a few words on pay phones, all business, then a pickup. Never any bullshit about money. Not since Garrett Hays.
Caesar got on. “Yeah?”
Mears said, “You called.”
Caesar got shaky-voiced, forever reliving his dead nephew, just the way Mears liked him: “Can I see you?”
Mears let Caesar dangle, then said, “Okay.”
Caesar: “Up the bar?”
Mears: “Yeah. Tonight, late.”
The headaches had been fading since Mears came to Boston, but as Mears hung up on Caesar, a bad one hit. They struck in front, behind his eyes, then split like a cell and spread to both temples. Mears climbed the stairs of the old hotel like a blind man, finding his room by feeling the numbers on the doors. He lay in a ball on the floor. Mears thought that his headache was a message: get out. Cut off Caesar, cut off Bennie, go west. He dragged himself across the floor, sat against the wall.
The headache passed. Mears tried to think it through. If staying was a problem, so was leaving. Caesar was the weak link—the narcs’ way into Mears. That was clear. But Caesar couldn’t be killed, because his street network gave Mears access to the junkies, and but for the junkies, dope was just powder. Mears could find other outlets, but that was risky in a different way, and took time. If Mears was going to start fresh someplace else, he’d need to do a few more packages with Caesar to finance the move.
He could just flee, of course. He could be on a bus that night and be across the country in a week, but that wasn’t right. Why should he scrape out of town like a beat dog? Years ago, Mears had promised himself that he would never again be the little man, the dipshit, the throwaway. This promise had gotten him through the electroshock and druggings in Portsmouth, and he couldn’t go back on it now.
People should know what had happened to Joe Mears. People should know what the Navy had done, what the doctors had done, and people should know that priests went along too. Mears would do something big before he left. Something that would teach them all that he was not their victim.
He sometimes wondered why the New Hampshire cops had never come for him. In a sense, he’d been waiting for them all along. He had left enough clues to make it clear who killed Poole, and why. Mears had figured the murder would start a kind of chain scandal. Was it possible that no one cared?
People should know about Joe Mears, and if they knew and didn’t care, they should suffer what he had suffered.
Mears caught a cab to Quincy Center, and a bus to the gates of City & County Psychopathic Hospital. He crossed the street and then crossed back, checking out the foot traffic, which looked innocent. He settled at a covered bus stop to wait. It got dark. He’d been there an hour when he saw the Chevy leave the island.
LEM CHILDS got off work, drove down the causeway and through the checkpoint. He came around a corner and put his headlights on. Joe Mears was in the road, standing with both hands up: stop.
Childs fought the urge to lock him out and run him down. Mears let himself in on the passenger’s side.
“Get going,” Mears said. He directed Childs off Squantum Street and south, through Quincy, to a golf course parking lot. Mears was looking for tails.
“Okay,” he said. “Park here.”
Childs killed the engine and the headlights. He had sweated through his shirt, and his shoulders ached from tension. The clinician in him said, Face him, make eye contact, but Childs couldn’t. He looked across a dark golf course covered in old snow.
“There’s plainclothes on Gibraltar Street,” Joe Mears said. “And then I’m waiting for you and I see two more cops in a Chevy come through the gate. What the hell is going on?”
“They wanted to know about Sedgewick, Zimquist, and Poole. They came to me because I’m the last one left.”
“What were their names?”
“Manning,” Childs said. “The other one was a DA, Dunn.”
“Manny Manning?” Mears asked.
Childs nodded. “Do you know him?”
“He’s a narc sergeant. His men are tailing Caesar Raines. What do they got?”
“A hunch about Portsmouth.” Childs was desperate to calm Mears down. Childs was the only living witness, and if Mears panicked, Childs would die.
“They got nothing more than the New Hampshire prosecutor had,” Childs reassured him. “Without the records, they can’t find you, and the Navy deep-sixed those long ago.”
“They ask about Gibraltar?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“Not at all.”
Mears nodded. “Manny Manning,” he said again and studied the parking lot.
Childs pushed a package wrapped in butcher’s paper across the seat to Mears’s thigh.
Mears kept his eyes on the parking lot. “That my dope?”
“Yes.”
Mears took the package on his lap. “I need something special,” he said. “Five hundred grams of the other stuff.”
Childs was appalled. It was a massive order.
“Get it,” Mears said. “Remember Poole, remember Sedgewick.”
Childs had heard this veiled threat many times before. He had never called the bluff—if it was a bluff. “Nobody has that much product lying around,” he said. “I’ll need time. I’ll have to go to the underground, call New York, maybe Switzerland—”
“Same price?”
“It’s going up,” Childs said. “The crackdown’s coming. Everybody’s stockpiling before the drought.”
Both men were silent, letting a car pass.
“Give me some time,” Childs said. “I’m not a miracle-worker.”
“Sure you are,” Mears said. “Look what you did for me in Portsmouth.”
MEARS made Childs drop him at the Ashmont trolley. Mears and his butcher’s-paper package rode inbound to Park, doubling back on the subway to Copley. Mears hiked to the Back Bay train station, ducked in one door, out another, and was satisfied that he was alone. He walked into a drugstore on the corner of Dartmouth and Newbury, the dope still under his arm, and bought a box of chocolate-covered cherries, a roll of sappy flowered wrapping paper, a dollar in stamps, and a card that said From a Secret Admirer.
The girl who took his money smiled at the card. “Will that be all?” she asked.
“This too.” Mears gave her a bottle of magnesium hydrochloride concentrate, the most powerful laxative in the store.
The girl rang it up. Mears wore the hangdog grin of a guy with a crush on a girl and big problems in the bowels.
He went to his place on West Dedham Street and unwrapped the package. He cut the fentanyl with milk sugar, closed the package, and slipped it in his coat pocket.
He took the box of chocolate-covered cherries from the shopping bag and got a fine-point hypodermic needle from the bathroom. He worked quickly, ignoring the dilution instructions on the magnesium hydrochloride, drawing a needleful of the creamy gunk. He shook the box of chocolates, then probed it lightly with his fingers, finding the candies through the sealed box. He gently sank the needle in the cardboard box bottom, where the pin-sized hole wouldn’t be noticed. He felt the needle hit a soft chocolate and injected some gunk. He did this a dozen times until he was sure the candy cherries were good and dosed, then he taped the card to the box, wrapped it in the flowered paper, addressed it, first-class, to a girl in Squantum, and dropped it in a mailbox on his way to meet Caesar Raines.
MANNY MANNING came home from the plant the following evening and found the youngest of his seven daughters coloring on the kitchen floor. Her name was Louise. She was six.
“Where’s dinner?” Manny asked her.
Louise shrugged. “Ask Mom.”
“Where’s Mom?” Manny asked her.
“Upstairs with Meg and Jo and Nancy in the bathroom.”
Manny got a beer from the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table. He opened the can with one hand and drank. “All four of them are in the bathroom?” he asked.
Louise nodded, intent on coloring.
Manny rubbed his temples and sniffed his armpits, then took a swallow of beer. “Lu?” he said.
“Mmm.”
“Why are all four of them in the bathroom?”
She colored carefully. “’Cause they ate the pretty candies that the mailman brought,” she said.