Small Mercies

22

Back in Southie, George leads them down the dark, empty blocks of cab companies and trucking depots. It’s past one now, and Mary Pat kills her lights so George won’t notice her behind him. There’s no one down here, it seems, just the two of them bumping along old cobblestone streets in the dark. Few functioning streetlights, one bar that caters to Teamsters and closes at eleven. Mary Pat slows to a crawl. Even with her headlights off, if he rolls down his window, George will probably be able to hear her lurching along the cobblestones behind him. She hangs back a full two blocks and does her best to avoid potholes.

He pulls into a parking lot in front of a low-slung stretch of one-car garages. Gets out. Unlocks the third garage from the right and pulls up the door. He fishes in his pockets before entering the garage and walking to the back of a Chevy Nova. He opens the trunk. Comes back out, grabs the duffel bag from the Impala trunk. Without the rifles, it’s much lighter than it was when he and Brian Shea lugged it across Bayside Road, but it’s still heavy enough that his right shoulder dips a bit and his head tilts along with it as he carries the bag to the Nova and deposits it in the trunk.

He closes the trunk, locks it. Closes the garage door. Locks that too. Gets in the Impala.

And off they go again.

It’s a short trip. George parks the Impala on East Second, up the street from his mother’s official house. Mary Pat watches him cut between two houses and then, she presumes, he hops fences through backyards until he reaches his mother’s house and slips in through the back. This suspicion is confirmed a few minutes later when a light goes on in the corner room of the second floor of Lorraine Dunbar’s house.

Half an hour later, the light goes out. Mary Pat stays where she is for another ten minutes in case he’s coming back out, but he doesn’t. He’s gone to bed, she’s pretty sure. It’s two in the morning. Anyone with common sense is asleep by now.

She drives Bess up East Second and heads back to that garage.

The parking lot and surrounding streets are as dark and quiet as when she left them, so she parks in the lot on the assumption that anyone else who rolls up here at this time of night won’t be up to any good either, so she may as well keep Bess close in case she needs to make a quick getaway.

The padlock George attached to the garage door is as basic as they come, but it’s nevertheless resistant to Dukie’s picks. Or to her use of them, at least. This is a shame — she was just starting to get cocky about her ability to pick a lock; was, in her mind, giving Dukie posthumous shit for his common refrain that there was a “skill” to picking a lock that the average person didn’t appreciate. After her fourth unsuccessful try, she gives up and goes with the bolt cutters.

As the bottom of the lock clatters to the ground and the top of it sits clamped in the blades of the bolt cutters, she thinks, Fuck skill.

But then changes her mind again when she picks the lock of the Nova’s trunk on the first try.

“I still got it, Dukie,” she tells him as she opens the trunk and shines her flashlight in.

The bag is unzipped and she can see right into it, but what she sees there doesn’t compute. It should — what else had she thought could be in there? — but still it doesn’t. There was a code in Southie. There were things you didn’t do:

You didn’t rat.

You never turned your back on a family member (even if you hated him).

You never told anyone outside the neighborhood what was going on inside the neighborhood.

And...

You never sold drugs.

Never.

Not ever.

The bag was filled with drugs. Kilos of brown powder, kilos of white powder, bricks of pot, plastic tubs filled with pills.

These aren’t George Dunbar’s drugs. They’ve been given to him. Entrusted to him. By Brian Shea.

These are Marty Butler’s drugs.

All these years, everyone has wondered why Marty and his crew can’t keep the drugs out of Southie.

And now she knows the answer — because they’re the ones bringing the drugs in.

They’ve been killing their own.

They’ve been enslaving a whole generation of kids — to the pills, to the mirror and the rolled-up bill, to the needle and the spoon.

Drugs didn’t kill Noel.

The Butler crew killed Noel. Just like they killed his father. Just like they killed his sister.

The Butler crew killed Mary Pat’s family.

She leans against the wall at the back of the garage and considers that. For some reason, instead of tears or rage, all that exits her mouth is a dry chuckle.

She can see Marty Butler’s bland catalog-model face floating in front of her own.

“You killed my family,” she whispers in the silence of the garage.

He smiles back at her.

“I’m going to kill yours,” she promises him.

George Dunbar arrives at the garage at eight a.m. He notices the missing lock first thing. He stares at the space where it was.

He looks around the parking lot. She can see through Dukie’s binoculars that he’s putting something together — the drugs that were stolen yesterday and now this. He’s realizing that 1 + 1 = someone’s targeting him.

He puts his hand against the outside wall of the garage.

He throws up. Twice.

When he finishes, he wipes his mouth. He bends and slowly rolls the garage door up.

His face relaxes a tad when he sees the Nova in there, just as he left it. He rushes to the back of it.

Mary Pat puts Bess in gear and rolls her up to a point about twenty feet from the garage door. She gets out. Leans against the hood. Waits. She can hear him in there as he rummages around the mostly empty trunk. He makes frantic squeaky sounds.

He closes the trunk. He comes toward the garage door with his lips moving, mumbling to himself. And then his eyes fall on her.

And he knows.

He doesn’t know how he knows yet, but he knows.

He charges. He runs straight for her with his arms out like Frankenstein.

She pulls his own gun on him and places the muzzle to the center of his chest. “I can pull this trigger right now, and no court in the country will convict me. Probably give me a fucking medal. So, George, how would you like to proceed?”

He lowers his hands.

In the garage, with the door down, she pats him down for a weapon, but he’s not carrying this morning. She notices a work light encased in orange plastic hanging in one corner and plugged into an extension cord. She gets it and hangs it from a hook above the hood of the car and watches George regain some of his confidence. It shows in his eyes first — and it’s less a flowering than a recession — the way they go flat, stripped of everything but self-regard. Confidence was a quality she noticed in him way back, when he was best friends with Noel and used to come over their apartment all the time, back before drugs, before girls, even. Back when they talked about sports nonstop and argued over trading cards. Even then George had a self-possession that was noticeable. He seemed unconcerned what anyone thought about him and felt no need to express himself. An inability to express oneself wasn’t uncommon in kids from Southie, but George’s reticence didn’t stem from inability; it stemmed, Mary Pat always felt, from will. And an internal arrogance. George, since as long as she could remember, seemed secure in the knowledge that he was better than anyone else — smarter, shrewder, less sentimental. With his lean features and close-cropped blond hair, eyes as green and cold as the land of his ancestors, George Dunbar’s innate stillness gave most who knew him the disconcerting feeling that he was smarter and shrewder. He was better.

George has been doing the act so long, she can see that he believes it himself.

George says, “This must have been fun for you.”

She gives him a quizzical look.

“The fantasy you had of how this would play out.”

“And how did I think it would play out?”

“You’d steal my product, and I’d tell you what I know about your daughter.”

“That’s my fantasy?” She makes a show of considering the idea.

“But here’s how it’s really going to go.”

She waits, an agreeable smile on her face.

He leans back against his car, not a care in the world, head tilted toward the ceiling. “You’re gonna give me back my product, or my suppliers will kill you by the end of the day. And then it won’t matter what you find out about your daughter.”

“You keep calling her ‘your daughter,’ like you don’t know her name.”

He sighs. “But if you give me back my product, I won’t say a word to my suppliers.” He comes off the car, his eyes open yet unkind. “And you can go back to your... life.”

“By ‘suppliers,’ you mean Marty.”

He grimaces. “Whatever.”

“So your deal is you let me live and you don’t tell Marty I jacked your drugs because... you’re a nice guy?” She closes some of the distance between them. “Or because if Marty or any of his crew found out you lost two loads in one day, well, George, I mean” — she chuckles — “your life will be fucking done.”

George meets her chuckle with his own, his gaze darting a bit, though. “Okay, I’ll grant you my job would go away. But I’ll just go back to college.”

“Oh, George. George.” She shakes her head softly. “You failed Marty twice. Plus, you can help the police prove he’s the reason drugs are getting into Southie. You know his routes, his suppliers, I’ll assume. You probably know at least a few of the cops on his payroll.” She can see her words have landed like body blows. She gets close enough for him to feel her breath on his face. “George, if you live for twenty-four hours after word gets out that you lost Marty’s latest supply, I would lose all faith in the way the world works.”

“My mother is—”

“Marty’s piece of ass, yes. I know. It won’t be enough to save you. Marty likes pussy but not as much as Marty loves money.”

He says nothing for a minute. He looks down at her hands. “If you didn’t have that gun...”

She steps back. Holds it up. “This gun?” She places the gun in her waistband at the small of her back. “No more gun.”

He looks at the door behind her. Doesn’t move.

“All you have to do is go through me,” she tells him.

He considers his options.

“Just push me aside, George.”

“Think I can’t?”

She laughs loud. She can’t help herself. “That’s exactly what I think, George. You’re running out of time.”

“Wait.”

“No,” she says. “Make your move. Get me out of your way.”

“Give me my product.”

“Fuck your drugs.”

“Give me—”

She steps close to him again. “You will not get your drugs until I walk out of here with everything I want. So either try to fight me right now, or drop the act and let’s move this along.”

George goes back to the dead eyes. She can see him practicing it in the mirror over the years in his mother’s house.

“I’m a businessman,” he says. “Let’s negotiate.”

“You’re a fucking boy,” she says. “Did you notice what was in your trunk?”

“It wasn’t my product.”

“The drugs are what’s not in your trunk, yes. Did you notice what was in there, though?”

He thinks about it. “There was a gym bag.”

“What’d you do with it?”

“I dunno.”

She indicates with her head. “You tossed it aside, George. It’s right behind you. Go get it.”

His face scrunches in contempt. “You go get it.”

She pulls the gun from behind her back and hits him in the forehead with the butt.

His eyes water and he stumbles backward. “Holy fuck!”

“Next time it’s your perfect nose.”

He gets the bag.

“Put it on the hood and open it.”

He does. Stares inside. Can’t compute what he’s seeing. After a bit, she’s pretty sure the hesitation on his face stems from understanding what the items in the bag mean, as opposed to any confusion.

Under the sudden harsh light, the items in the bag pick up a sallow, garish glow—

A needle, a spoon, a lighter, a length of rubber tubing, an eyedropper filled with water, and a small plastic baggie with brown powder inside.

“I assume you recognize your own supply.”

He looks at it. “So?”

She sighs. “I’ve always given you credit for a brain. Maybe not a heart but a brain.” She indicates the items with a flick of the gun. “You sell it. Now you’re gonna try it. Or you will never see your ‘product’ again.”

He laughs. It’s supposed to sound derisive, but it sounds scared. “No fucking way.”

She fires at his feet. He jumps. Grabs his ears.

She doesn’t grab her own, but now she can’t hear shit. That’s what happens when you fire a round in a seven-by-four box with a metal door. Stupid, Mary Pat. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Maybe the time for talk is over, though, because George is reaching into the bag. He wraps the rubber tube around his bicep, ties it off. He slaps the flesh around the inside crook of his elbow, looking for a vein. He’s not very good at it because he’s not acting from experience, only from years of observing the poor saps from whom he made his money.

Eventually, the ringing in her ears subsides enough for her to speak. “Lemme help.”

She puts the gun back by the base of her spine. Prepares the powder on the spoon, adds the water, and cooks it with the lighter. She watched Noel do it once, near the end, after she’d thrown him out of the house before there’d be nothing left to steal. At that point he was beyond caring and sat on the bench in the playground under the half-broken streetlight. She watched him from the other side of the playground, out of his sight line as she leaned against the Jefferson Building, aware that she was watching suicide. Might take months, might take weeks (it took somewhere in between), but it was premeditated murder of the self nonetheless. He’d been in and out of rehab by that point, had robbed from her, robbed from his sister, robbed from Ken Fen, robbed from every friend he had until he had no friends left.

Except George. His supplier.

She sees George patting the flesh around the inside of his elbow again, and she reaches out and pinches the flesh so hard he yelps. “Hey!”

“That’s how you get a vein.”

He takes the needle and draws the mixture off the spoon. Once the syringe is full, he holds it out to her.

She shakes her head. “I’m not helping you shoot yourself up with your own poison.”

It takes him four hesitant pokes before he hisses and drives the needle into the vein. He meets her eyes, his thumb over the plunger, and she waits him out.

He depresses the plunger.

He pulls the needle out. Hands it to her. “What now?”

“We wait.”

Noel would talk about anything in the early stages of a high, back when he still lived with them and would use the bathroom to shoot up. He’d come out all dreamy-eyed and relaxed, sit at the kitchen table with her, and shoot the shit about anything — no defenses — for about ten minutes before she’d lose him. It’s that sweet spot — about five minutes in but no longer than fifteen — that she waits for.

“What happened to Jules after you killed Auggie Williamson?”

He shrugs.

“George,” she says, “what happened?”

Another shrug. “Dunno. She left with Frank.”

“And after that?”

“Told ya — dunno.”

She stares at him. Is he slick enough to lie under the influence of his first hit of heroin? Does he — does anyone — have that kind of willpower?

He smiles at her. A dreamy, distant smile. Knowing but not arrogant.

“You know how to pour concrete?” he asks her.

“You mix it, you pour it.”

He sighs. “You’ve never done it, have you?”

“No, George, I haven’t.”

“Most people think it’s easy. You grab a bag of it, mix it with some water, lay it down with a trowel, wait for it to dry.”

She can sense this is not a random topic between them. She’s aware that his family business — started by his uncles and his late father shortly after World War II — is cement.

“But it’s not easy?” she offers.

A long slow shake of his head. “Not if you’ve never done it before, not if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not if your basement is eighty-five fucking degrees on a summer day and you mixed it wrong anyway, so it’s already cracking five minutes after it fucking dries, and it fucking dries five minutes after you lay it down. What you got then is a mess. You can’t get to what you’re trying to seal over, but you haven’t totally sealed it over either. I mean, it’s there, what you tried to cover, like a fucking bug trapped in ice. And the fumes will knock you out.”

He slides down the side of the car and sits against the tire and looks off at nothing. “I had this tricycle once. Metal. Heavy. It had a red seat.”

She waits for more — a point, perhaps — but that’s all she’s getting.

“George,” she says.

“Hmmm?”

“What were you trying to seal over?”

“Hmmm?”

“You said you were trying to seal something over in a hot basement.”

He drifts, and then it’s as if her words finally reach him at the other end of a long tunnel. “I wasn’t the one who fucked up.”

“No?”

Another slow headshake. “I don’t fucking make mistakes with cement. They did.”

“Who?”

He licks his lips several times. “You know.”

“No, I—”

“Marty and Frank.” He stares at her through half-mast eyes.

“What about them?”

“They tried to bury her in the basement, but they mixed the cement wrong, so they had to do it all over again.”

Two thick veins, one on either side of Mary Pat’s larynx, start to throb. “Say her name.”

“Jules.” A lazy smile for her as the heroin bathes his inner body from head to toe. “They had to bury her twice.”