Small Mercies

19

Bobby’s not even through the door of the station house when Pete Torchio, the duty sergeant, holds a phone aloft and says, “For you.”

“Who?”

Pete winks. “Says his name is Special.”

“What?”

“Special Agent Stansfield.”

Pete thinks he’s hilarious. That’s why he’s on his third wife and he’s only thirty-two.

Bobby points at his desk as he passes through the gate. “You can put him through.”

“Fills me with a deep pleasure, Bobby. Tickles my warm parts. You know that.”

Bobby gets to his desk and the phone is ringing, the button for line two blinking. He presses it and puts the phone to his ear. “Giles?”

“Bobby. How’s tricks?”

“Oh, you know. You?”

“You hear the busing protesters busted up one of the windows to our building?”

“I did.”

“They were chanting ‘Niggers suck’ for over half an hour, Bobby.” There’s a tone in his voice that suggests somehow Bobby either a) is responsible or b) can explain the behavior. “I mean, half an hour.”

“That’s a long time for one chant,” Bobby says. “You’d think they would have mixed it up.”

“Should be kept in cages, people like that.”

Giles Stansfield grew up in Connecticut. Went to Brown, then Yale Law. Until he joined the Bureau, he probably never met a black person who didn’t work a service job for the Stansfields or for Yale. Same went for poor whites.

“What’s up, Giles?”

“I hear you’re sniffing around the Butler crew.” His voice is suddenly convivial, as if they’re chatting over a bowl of punch at a garden party.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I’m just thinking you might want to communicate with us, so no signals get crossed.”

“What signals could get crossed?”

“Just, well, signals.” Giles’s voice is still convivial but also a bit fretful, like the conversation is playing out differently than it had played out in his head.

“Why don’t you tell me what those signals could be, and I’ll know whether I could cross them with my own?”

He can hear Giles trying not to sigh. “I blame Nixon.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Bobby puts his service revolver in his desk drawer, adds his car keys for good measure.

“He created that Drug Enforcement Administration horseshit. Took the Bureau of Narcotics and folded them in with the ODEA. Then they grabbed a bunch of cowboys and rejects from precincts all over the Northeast, and now they call it an agency.”

“I thought they called it an administration.” Bobby doesn’t know why he loves to fuck with Bureau guys so much, but he does.

“Whatever they call it, those little worms with guns, those little gerbils with badges, they’re up on the Butlers too, apparently, which we didn’t know until they busted one of his guys.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“He was our guy. Been working one of Marty’s chop shops for six months, and DEA went and cocked the whole thing up.”

“That’s too bad.” Bobby pats his pockets for his cigarettes, gets a bolt of panic when he realizes they’re not there. He looks around wildly, spies them right there on his desk, where he laid them about thirty seconds ago.

Across the bullpen, Vincent sticks his head out of Interview Room B and bulges his eyes at Bobby with a clear Get in here message. He scowls and closes the door again.

“Yeah, it is too bad,” Giles is saying. “Duplication of effort doesn’t help anyone. The solution is to just pick one team to run point.”

Bobby scoops up his cigarettes and matches. “Great idea,” he says, grinning from ear to ear. “We’ll take it.”

“Oh, no,” Giles says quickly, “you guys got enough on your plate. Why don’t you let us run point?”

“Why don’t we schedule a meeting over it?”

“Sure, but until then we could just have a handshake deal that—”

“I’ll have my girl reach out to your girl. We’ll get a meeting on the books.”

“Okay, but Bobby—”

“Gotta go, Giles.” Bobby hangs up.

My girl reach out to your girl. Where does he come up with this shit?

In Interview Room B, Ronald “Rum” Collins is sitting on the far side of the table looking like someone used his face for golf practice. Some of the damage is older, and Bobby recalls that Mary Pat got to the kid in a bar about a week ago. The new damage consists of a torn right eyebrow, a swollen left ear, a black, bulbous right eye socket (on top of the older yellowed bruising from a week ago), teeth blackened with blood, and cuts to his neck that look like they came from a razor blade or the flick of an extremely sharp knife.

But as Vincent warned Bobby, the worst of him is just below the waist. He smells like piss and even some shit, and his jeans are stuck to him with blood.

“What’s up, Rum?” Bobby sits across from him, trying not to smile at the absurdity of the sentence he’s just uttered. Why is everything so funny tonight? Then it hits him: Because — for the moment, anyway — I’ve got someone in my life. Makes everything a little brighter.

And the next thought: Christ, let this one last.

Rum is biting the inside of his lip like it’s his job. Bobby doesn’t even want to think what it looks like in there. “She’s gonna kill me.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say.”

“Let me take a wild guess — Mary Pat Fennessy.”

“I can’t fucking say! I won’t fucking say!”

Bobby leans over the table, gets a good look at the bloody crotch of Rum’s jeans. “What’d she do to you, kid? She cut it off?”

“No!” Rum looks away for a bit, chewing on his lower lip like a rabbit now. “Said she would, though.”

“So where’s the blood from?”

“She, like, sliced at it.”

“Your dick?”

“Under my balls.”

“This is Mary Pat Fennessy we’re talking about?”

Rum almost nods and then snaps to, and a wave of fear smell — rank and metallic — pops through all his pores. “I’m not going to fucking say, no matter how much you ask.”

“Okay.” Bobby offers him a cigarette. “Well, what will you say?”

Rum takes the cigarette and the light Bobby offers next. “I’ll tell you what happened on the platform that night.”

Behind Rum, Vincent raises his eyebrows at Bobby as if to say: See?

Bobby places an ashtray in front of him. “You mind if my partner takes notes?”

Rum shakes his head, his eyes on the table. “Sure.”

Behind Rum, Vincent beams, his eyes the size of headlights.

When the group of kids broke up at Columbia Park around midnight, Rum, George Dunbar, Brenda Morello, and Jules Fennessy started for Carson Beach. But just before they reached Day Boulevard and prepared to cross to the beach, Brenda realized she’d left her keys back in the park somewhere. They were on a ring along with a white rabbit’s foot and a bottle opener, the latter of which had come into play a few dozen times that night.

So they went back to the park to search for the keys. They were just about to give up when Jules spotted something white under one of the bleacher seats and — voilà — Brenda’s keys. Columbia Park was empty now, so they sat back down and opened four more beers, and George passed around a joint. This was the good shit, he assured them, not the Mexican colitas he sold to schmucks but real Southern Californian sinsemilla. Truth was, Rum Collins couldn’t tell the difference, but he figured all the booze was clouding his taste buds.

That was when George Dunbar, looking out at the road, said, “That’s right — don’t even fucking look at me.”

At first no one knew who he was talking to, but then they all got a look at the car passing them, its exhaust belching, nigger kid behind the wheel looking at them.

“Drop those fucking eyes, spook,” George said in a voice so low they could barely hear it. “Or I won’t be responsible for what I do.”

The black kid did drop his eyes — either by coincidence or due to some sixth sense for imminent danger — and the car belched and sputtered its way past them, going so slow it almost seemed to be floating. It passed under the expressway, where they lost it in the vast shadow cast by the overpass, and they didn’t hear it anymore.

Jules was talking to Brenda in harsh, desperate whispers. She said, “I’m calling him.”

Brenda said, “No. Wait till tomorrow. Cool off.”

“He doesn’t have to call it his own, he just has to pay for it.”

Bobby stops Rum for a second. “You’re saying Jules Fennessy was pregnant?”

“What?”

Bobby says, “She said, ‘He doesn’t have to call it his own, he just has to pay for it.’”

Rum thinks about it. “She coulda been talking about anything.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Like a pet. Or a car.”

This moron can fucking vote, Bobby despairs. And breed.

“All right,” he tells Rum, “after she says she’s gonna call him — and who’s ‘him,’ by the way?”

Rum pauses quite a while before he gives it all up: “Well, Frankie.”

It takes Bobby a few seconds, but then somehow he knows, out of all the Frankies in the world, who the kid’s referring to. “Frank Toomey?”

“Yeah.”

Holy fuck. Bobby turns in his chair, meets Vincent’s eyes. Vincent looks as flabbergasted as Bobby feels.

“Jules Fennessy was seeing Frank Toomey?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re telling us this now because...?”

“Because she said she’d fucking kill me if I didn’t.”

Bobby looks down the table at Vincent to make sure he didn’t write that last exchange into the record. Vincent is holding his pen aloft, so Bobby knows he didn’t.

No more questions to Rum about why he’s talking, Bobby reminds himself, just let him talk.

“Go back to your story,” Bobby tells the kid.

Jules decided she was going to call Frankie at home. Where he lived with his wife and kids. At quarter past midnight. Nobody thought this was a good idea. They all tried to talk her out of it. But she marched across Columbia Road, a dime in her hand, and stopped at the pay phone just outside the subway station and dropped the dime in the slot. The boys stayed where they were, but Brenda jogged across the road to Jules and stood by her while she talked into the phone, ended up screaming something that sounded like “Well, you spend the money!” She slammed the phone down so hard on the cradle that they heard it on the other side of the road.

Rum and George Dunbar considered moving toward the girls, but they could tell by the way Jules was waving her hands and making ugly scrunch-faces that she was crying, and who the fuck wanted any part of that? Then the same spook kid who had driven by in the dying car walked out of the block of shadow thrown by the overpass, and who knew what he had in mind because he seemed to be staring at the girls, so Rum and George jogged across the street in time to hear him say, “Are you okay?”

“We don’t have any money,” Brenda said.

“Who asked for money?” Bobby asks Rum now.

“What? No one.”

“So why did Brenda say she didn’t have any money?”

Rum shrugs. “Why else was he talking to them?”

Even Vincent, no friend to the black man, is bewildered. “To see if she was okay?”

“Fuck that,” Rum says. “He’s not supposed to ask that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s none of his business. Look, we all get how it works. Maybe you don’t, but we do. You don’t talk to each other. It’s that simple. I don’t want no trouble in my life — I really don’t — but if I was stupid enough to roll up on some colored girls in Mattapan Square and start talking to them and their boyfriends showed up? I would fucking expect them to beat the ever-living piss out of me. Nothing personal. Just the way it works. But here’s the difference between me and that dumbass spook — I am not gonna roll up on a pair of spook girls and start talking to them. About anything. Because I’m not looking for trouble.”

“But Auggie Williamson was?”

“Well, yeah.”

Bobby and Vincent exchange a look.

Bobby says, “Keep talking.”

“This nigger asking you for money?” George Dunbar asked Brenda.

Brenda looked into George’s eyes and immediately sensed a major shift in mood on that sidewalk. “Just get the fuck outta here,” she said to the colored guy.

He tried to take her advice, but George blocked his path. “You trying to get money from my girl?”

“No,” the guy said quietly with a tiny smile that he might not have been aware of. “I was asking if her friend was okay.”

“Why do you care about her friend?” George’s voice was so quiet you could barely hear him. And they all knew what that meant.

“I don’t anymore.” The black guy held up his hands and tried to edge past George.

“Just fucking let him go,” Jules said.

“You’re right,” George agreed. “You’ll probably see him in school next week.”

Jules snapped her head up, and something unreasonable found her eyes. “I told you to fucking go.”

The black kid said, “I’m trying.”

He sounded so afraid. Terrified. Of them. It surprised Rum. And offended him at the same time. Maybe they all felt the same way, because the next thing that happened was—

“You happy?” Jules screamed. No one knew at first who she was screaming at. “You got your buses, you got our fucking school, you’re gonna move on to our neighborhood next?”

The black kid started walking a lot faster.

George got a big smile on his face and drained his beer. Practically in the same motion, he threw it at the black guy. It made a loud pop when it shattered.

Brenda laughed. So did Jules. Rum had never seen a person laugh and look so hopeless at the same time. The look stuck with him for days.

“Hey, wait up,” George said just as the black guy reached for one of the doors to the station. “Wait up.”

Now the black guy started to really move.

“We just want to talk to you,” George said.

And they all fell in behind George as he kind of half skipped toward the station doors. Whatever was going to happen, it was now in motion. No turning back.

And who would want to? Rum hadn’t felt this alive in years. Maybe ever.

Inside the station, the spook had already jumped the turnstiles. They all jumped them right after him.

Brenda called, “You run slow for a nigger.”

Jules said, “Yeah, I thought you were all track stars and shit.”

“Hey,” George called to the guy again, “we just want to talk to you.”

On the platform, as they all heard the train barrel down the track toward the station, George threw another beer bottle. It exploded at the black guy’s feet, and the black guy turned with his hands up and said, “Let’s just forget all about this.”

“About what?” George said.

The black guy tripped over his own feet and fell on his back, and George and the two girls found this hilarious. Then—

“Hold up,” Bobby says to Rum Collins. “Where the fuck are you in all this?”

“Huh?”

“Where are you in this story?”

“I’m, like, watching?”

“Then who threw the second beer bottle, numb nuts?” Vincent asks.

Rum stares back at them, a blank slate.

“George threw a beer bottle at Auggie Williamson outside the station, right?”

A nod.

“So that bottle’s gone. Now you want us to believe he threw another one at him inside the station.”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d he get it?”

Rum turns a shade or two whiter. His lips part, but no words leave his mouth. Somewhere back in that pebble of a brain of his, he’s backhoeing like a motherfucker.

“You threw the second bottle,” Bobby says.

“No.”

“Then you threw the first,” Vincent says.

“No.”

“Pick one.”

“No.”

“Fucking pick one!” Vincent flings a black ashtray made of hard plastic right at the kid’s head. The ashtray misses, but the message lands.

“I threw the second one,” Rum says.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Bobby says.

“Forget about what?” George Dunbar asked, standing over Auggie Williamson.

“Whatever,” Auggie said, and they could all hear the shakes in his voice and see them in his hands. “Forget this ever happened.”

“We can’t,” George said, “because you keep coming into our fucking neighborhood.”

It was Jules who delivered the first kick.

“Jules Fennessy kicked him?”

Rum nods. “She was pissed, man. Just out of her head. It was like you could tell she felt bad for him? And the worse she felt for him, the madder she got. It made no sense.”

Brenda kicked the guy next. Then George.

“Then you,” Vincent says to Rum Collins.

Rum stares at them for a bit, eventually nods.

When Rum kicked the spook lying on his back, it felt better than anything he could remember feeling since maybe his ninth birthday, when he got that three-speed bike he’d been asking for since he was seven. Rum knew what he was staring down — the rest of life in Southie with every day looking exactly like the last. Maybe he’d move up at the supermarket, make his way from produce to deli, but after that, where would he go? He didn’t have a head for numbers, he wasn’t a leader, he knew that much. That meant any type of management position was off the table. So he’d spend his life in produce or deli or dairy. His life. From now to sixty-five. Find some dishrag hag for a wife and pop out four or five little Rums and watch them lose the only good thing about the life their father had known — at least, when Rum was a kid, you knew your neighbors. You shared your food and your rituals and your music. Nothing changed. It was the one fucking thing they couldn’t take from you.

But they could. They would. They were. Forcing their notions and their ways and their lies on you. Lies because they told you change was going to make you happier, it was going to make you richer, it was going to brighten your world.

It wasn’t bright. It was fucking dark. He kicked and kept kicking until he missed, which caused him to fall on his own ass, and then his “friends” were laughing at him and the black guy was on his feet and running—

Straight into the oncoming train.

“So the train hit him.” Vincent’s pen is poised over his notepad.

“More like he hit the train,” Rum says.

“Explain.”

“He bounced off it. Like, he probably thought he was gonna jump onto the tracks to get away? Well, one second the train wasn’t there. Next second it was. And he ran right into it. Snapped around and bounced off the wall — you know where the sign is with all the train routes? — and then, yeah, he hit the platform.”

“And rolled over and fell under the tracks?” Bobby says helpfully.

“Yup.”

Bobby and Vincent nod at each other. Makes perfect sense.

Bobby smiles at Rum. “You know how much space lies between a subway car and the platform edge?”

Rum shrugs, sensing the boom even before it drops.

“Eight inches. Apparently, there’s an industry standard. Plus, we measured.”

Rum seems to have stopped breathing. He’s that still.

Bobby holds up a hand to Vincent so he’ll stop writing. “Now, Rum,” he says, “judging by your face and the fact you walked in here to tell us the truth, I don’t think now is the time to segue into bullshit. You’re not smart enough to sell it, whatever it is, and if you don’t come clean with us—”

“Like right fucking now,” Vincent says.

“—then we’re going to kick you loose and make sure everyone knows you were uncooperative with us. Which, hey, will buy you some street cred up and down Broadway. But will it endear you to Mary Pat Fennessy?”

Rum goes back to chewing on his lip as if his teeth are clock gears.

“Which nut will she take first?” Vincent asks Bobby.

Bobby says, “Depends on if she’s right- or left-handed.”

Vincent asks Rum, “Is she a righty or a lefty? Did you notice?”

Rum says nothing. It’s like he’s slipping into shock.

“He didn’t notice,” Vincent says.

“If she’s right-handed,” Bobby says, “we gotta assume it’s the left side of his ball sac that’s easiest to, you know, grab and then chop into.”

Vincent winces and crosses his legs.

“If she’s left-handed, she goes for the right nut.”

“What about his dick?”

Bobby says, “Well, that’s where you’d really have to get in her head. I mean, does she want to just grab it and yank it like some taffy and chop it off right at the root?”

“Stop,” Rum whispers.

“Or would she start at the top and slice it right down the middle like a banana?”

Rum makes a gagging noise, and when they look over, his tongue thrusts out of his mouth and his head surges far ahead of his neck. He gags some more.

But he doesn’t puke. Which is a relief. Because the shit and piss are enough. Add one more disgusting bodily fluid to the room, and no amount of cigarette smoke will help.

Now the tears come. They well up under his eyes and de-age him five years. “If she cuts off my dick,” he says, “it’s not like I’ll just be walking around with no dick. I mean, I’ll fucking die, won’t I?”

“Depends how close you are to a hospital,” Vincent says.

“And what you have on hand to stanch the blood flow,” Bobby says.

“Well, that goes without saying,” Vincent says.

“Does it? Kid’s never had his dick chopped off before, so he might not know these things.”

Another series of gags. They wait him out.

“Can you stop her?” The tears fall.

“We can arrest her,” Bobby says. “Sure. You just give us a statement, swear she threatened you. And we’ll pick her up.”

“And then what?”

Bobby pushes a box of tissues across the table to him. “She’ll go to court.”

“Will she go to jail?”

Bobby looks at Vincent for his opinion.

“Doubtful,” Vincent says.

“Why the fuck not?” The kid’s half bawling now. “She said she’d cut off my balls. And my dick. She beat me up.”

“Well, if we’re talking about Mrs. Fennessy, she has no priors.”

“Model citizen,” Vincent says.

Bobby decides to slather it on. “Pillar of the community.”

“So she’ll get a low bail.”

“If she gets bail at all.”

“True. She’s an ROR if ever there was one.”

“What’s an ROR?” The sobs have diminished to sniffles.

“Released on one’s own recognizance.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means she won’t have to pay bail.”

“And won’t spend a night in jail.”

“But she threatened my balls.”

“Who did? Who is this ‘she’ you’re so scared of, Rum? Give us a name.”

He shakes his head.

“Then finish telling us what happened the night Auggie Williamson died.”

“And don’t shovel a bunch of shit at us about him bouncing off a train and then bouncing off a wall and dropping onto the tracks, because we know that’s bullshit.”

“How?”

“Witnesses. And the medical examiner’s report. And ten years of fucking police work.”

“You can tell us the truth.” Bobby gives Rum another cigarette and lights it for him. “Or you can take your chances back out that door.”

“And if I tell you the truth and it turns out I did something bad?”

“Then we’ll arrest you.”

“And I won’t have to walk back out that door?”

“Not until you make bond.”

“You’ll be safe and sound in a nice comfy jail cell. We’ll even throw in a pillow.”

Rum takes a long drag and a longer exhale, staring up at the ceiling. Then he says, “He did run into the train, he did bounce off the wall. It knocked him out and he, like, laid on the platform all shaking and shit, and then he stopped shaking, so we thought he was dead.”

“But he wasn’t?”

He shakes his head. “I mean, we thought he was, but...”

They wait.

After a while, Bobby says, “Help us out with ‘but.’”

When the black guy banged his face into the train, they all laughed, George Dunbar the loudest. When the guy bounced back into the wall and then dropped to the platform like he’d been dropped from a helicopter, they laughed harder. But then, as the car doors opened, they noticed he was having this weird seizure, as if he’d been electrocuted. His heels hammered the ground, his arms flung out and back to his sides, his head rolled from side to side, and his eyes pinned themselves so far back into his skull they looked like egg whites.

The four of them stood over him so that it would be hard for anyone passing by to get a clear glimpse of what they were standing over.

The train left the station.

George said, “Fuck you looking at?” to one couple, and they hurried off the platform.

The black guy went still. A single strand of white foam trickled out of the side of his mouth. Blood leaked from his ears.

Rum noticed an outbound train departing from the opposite track and saw one guy walking away from it with his head down. Big guy, not one you’d want to fuck with, but he clearly knew the score around here — if you don’t see it, no one can ever make you say you did.

Suddenly, they were all screaming at one another. Rum can’t, to this day, tell you what exactly was said, but he knows George was worried about witnesses, and Brenda was worried about her parents finding out, and Jules was screaming — really screaming — about how this is their fault, they’re going to prison. Rum remembers pointing out that aside from kicking him, they hadn’t really hurt this guy. He hurt himself. Rum had beat up a couple kids in his life, and he knew the difference.

Brenda slapped Jules to get her to stop screaming. Then George called Rum a fucking retard and said, “Let’s book.”

They left the colored guy on his back on the platform and climbed the stairs to the Columbia Road exit, and when they pushed open the doors, Frankie Toomey was standing against his car, waiting for them. Frank didn’t acknowledge any of them but Jules. That was par for the course. Jules claimed to Brenda that he could be funny and surprisingly tender but, if so, he saved that part of himself for private or for the little kids he charmed up and down Broadway. Otherwise, he was as cold and hard as the nickname Tombstone implied. His body was hard, his face was hard, his eyes were as dead as a GI Joe doll’s. He opened his car door and Jules got in. That’s where they split up — George and Brenda left in George’s car, Frankie and Jules left in Frankie’s car. And Rum, odd man out as always, walked home.

“Let’s back up,” Bobby says.

Rum gulps from the cup of water they brought him, a look on his face like he knows he’s never gonna sell this bullshit to anyone. “Sure, sure.”

“How’d Auggie Williamson end up under the platform?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he, like, rolled?”

“Okay...”

“We left him where he was.”

“On the platform with white foam coming out of his mouth?”

“Just one side of his mouth.”

“So, you go upstairs,” Vincent says, “and find Frank Toomey waiting?”

A nod.

“What’s his mood?”

A shrug.

“Come on. What’s the groove coming off the man?”

Rum looks extremely uncomfortable, as if maybe the cut under his balls is showing the first signs of infection. Either that or he’s acclimating to a new source of terror. “I don’t know. I don’t know him. I can’t judge his ‘groove.’”

“You know him,” Bobby says. “You grew up seeing him around. He’s famous for walking into candy stores and buying a round of sweets for all the kids. He’s like every kid’s favorite uncle on Broadway.”

“Yeah, well, that was then.”

“Plus, you’re his beard,” Vincent says.

“Good point,” Bobby says.

“His what?”

“His beard.” Vincent explains, “You covered for him by pretending to be Jules Fennessy’s boyfriend so his wife wouldn’t know Frank was fucking a sixteen-year-old.”

“Jules is seventeen.”

“Ah.” Bobby wags a finger at him. “She wasn’t when she started up with Frankie, though, was she?”

Rum’s eyes zip in the sockets like marbles flung into a bowl. “I’m not here to talk about fucking Frankie.”

“Yet here we are, talking about him.”

“You want his ‘groove’? He’s death. That’s his fucking groove. He’s the coldest, scariest motherfucker I ever met.” Rum holds up his hands. “I’m not saying nothing about Frankie Toomey.”

“Nothing?”

Rum gives them his best tough-guy impression — hooded eyes, small sneer — and shakes his head slow. “Not one fucking thing.”

“Then you,” Bobby walks to the door and opens it, “are free to go.”

Rum watches Vincent close his notebook and return the pen to the inside of his pleather sport coat.

“Chop-chop,” Bobby says to Rum. “I wanna get home.”

Rum says, “You guys said you’d charge me.”

“For what?” Vincent lights a cigarette with his imitation gold lighter that works only a third of the time.

“For what happened.”

“You didn’t tell us what happened,” Bobby says. “You told us some bullshit about Auggie Williamson running into a train, which, since you were chasing him, would maybe lead to a third-degree involuntary manslaughter charge...”

“Which no DA’s gonna waste his fucking time on.” Vincent reaches the door alongside Bobby. “I’m gonna pop down to JJ’s. You?”

“I might join you.”

“Nickle ’Gansies from midnight to two.”

“Draft?”

“Yeah.”

Bobby makes a face. “Draft Narragansetts give me the shits the next day.”

“Me too. But hey, I’m off tomorrow.”

They leave the interview room. Wander into the bullpen. Bobby sees he has three messages taped to the shade of his small banker’s lamp. He checks them.

“Come back!” Rum calls from the interview room.

“Are you really going to JJ’s?” Bobby asks Vincent.

“Thinking about it. Hungry too. Might grab a spuckie somewhere on my way. You?”

“I was supposed to be off tonight,” Bobby says. “I just want to go home.”

“Come back!”

Vincent lowers his voice slightly. “You know that chick in Property? One with the big brown eyes? The lips?”

Bobby laughs.

“What?” Vincent’s already half indignant. “You know who I’m talking about?”

“Deb DePitrio?” Bobby says.

“Come on! Come back!” Now Rum is standing in the doorway of the room.

“Yeah, Deb.”

“She only dates doctors.”

“She’s a clerk.”

“Who looks like Raquel Welch. Are you fucking kidding me? You got a better chance dating the real Raquel than you do dating Deb.”

“What, she’s a friend of yours?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“So you think you gotta shot with her.”

Bobby snorts at the notion. “I’m an out-of-shape cop ten years older than her. I got zero shot. And I know it. Which is why she doesn’t mind chatting with me. You, on the other hand, I bet you slap on some Aqua Velva, go leaning into her counter all ‘What color lipstick you wearing?’”

“Fuck you.”

“‘You do something with your hair?’”

“No, really. Fuck you.”

“Officers, please!”

“We’re fucking detectives,” Vincent shouts. Then to Bobby: “No chance, uh?”

Bobby shakes his head. “Two of you stranded on a desert island, she’d still probably hold out two, three years — at least — in case of a rescue.”

“You’re such a prick.”

Bobby gives it some thought. “You’re not wrong.”

“Please!”

They both look over at him. He’s leaning on the doorjamb, not wanting to risk stepping into a room of heavily armed people who, if they glance at him at all, do so with contempt. His blood-encrusted jeans are definitely stuck to his thighs and groin. His eyes are leaky again. “I can’t go back out there.”

Bobby and Vincent stare back at him with vacancy signs in their eyes.

“Please don’t make me.”

“We have nothing to hold you on,” Bobby says.

“Go with God,” Vincent says.

“Arrivederci,” Bobby says.

“Vaya con dios,” Vincent says.

“You just said that,” Bobby tells him.

“No, I didn’t. I said, ‘Go with God.’”

“Frank Toomey,” Rum says, “made us go back into the station.”

Someone in the squad room whistles, low and long. Everyone’s looking at Rum Collins now.

Rum looks at Bobby like a guy who knows his life will never be the same again. “He told us we had to finish the job.”