Small Mercies

31

Marty calls out a second time, “The more you make us wait, the longer we’ll draw out the pain.”

Frank opens his mouth to call back, and she puts the muzzle of the .38 to his nose. Raises her eyebrows at him. He shuts his mouth.

Judging by the strength of the headlight beams, the volume of Marty’s voice, and the stray scuffing she hears as they mill around out there, she guesses they’re pretty close. Maybe fifteen yards. No more. She counted four car doors opening and closing, so that means there’s at least four of them, maybe six if they went full clown-car. But that would have been conspicuous, and Marty’s not known to be conspicuous.

Four, then.

She can hear them spreading out, footsteps of varying distance on the dirt of the parade grounds. And one set of footsteps is growing very close.

She lifts Frank to his good foot and leads him toward the doorway.

The footsteps outside the doorway stop. The owner, she assumes, can hear them.

Mary Pat steps out with her gun to Frank Toomey’s neck.

Brian Shea, caught by surprise three feet from Mary Pat, starts to raise his gun.

“No, no, no,” Mary Pat says.

Brian takes one look at Frank Toomey — the mangled leg, the bloody coat duct-taped around his bloody waist — and lowers his gun.

“Drop it to the ground,” Mary Pat says. “This is my only warning.”

He looks in her eyes. Looks in Frank’s. Drops the gun.

The other three are fanned out in a crescent about ten yards past Brian. Larry Foyle is the farthest away, taking up the left side of the crescent. Marty stands in the middle of the curvature, like one bad tooth in an ugly smile, and Weeds loiters to the far right. They all have pistols held loosely by their sides.

“You all right there, Frank?” Marty asks.

“Pretty far from that, Marty,” Frank says.

“We’ll get you patched right up.”

“I know you will, Marty. Thanks.”

“You sure about that?” Mary Pat pulls the trigger and blows a tunnel from one side of Frank Toomey’s neck to the other.

For men used to casual violence, none of them seems to have prepared for this moment. Larry and Weeds just look shocked, mouths agape.

Marty screams, “Noooooooo!” as if his heart is breaking for the first time in his life.

Brian Shea reaches for his gun.

Frank drops to the ground, his body nothing but a bag for nonfunctioning organs, his soul already halfway to hell.

She shoots Brian somewhere in the middle of his body and hears him scream.

Marty is raising his pistol when she fires right at him — Bang! Bang! Bang!

She has no idea if she hits him, only that he’s not there anymore as the other two return fire, the bullets hitting high on the walls behind her, Larry and Weeds running for cover behind the car and not taking much aim as they shoot.

She grabs the back of Brian Shea’s collar. He’s arching his back and kicking his heels against the ground. Making loud yips and yelps. She stays low, keeps his body in front of her as best she can, and pulls him back into the storage room with her. Once they’re in there, he grabs her around the knees and slams his head into her stomach. She boxes his ears, one of her hands holding that heavy .38, and he lets go.

She pushes him into the corner and she kicks the ever-living shit of him. Literally kicks. Over and over, fast and dirty and indiscriminate. She doesn’t stop until long after she knows he’s no longer a danger.

“Is that all you motherfuckers understand?” she hisses at him. “Is there nothing else?”

He curls into a ball and she gives him a minute in case he might puke, then she comes behind him and pulls him tight to her, straddling him, her legs hooked over his. She tosses aside the .38 — she emptied it out there — and reaches in her bag for Frank’s .45. She pulls it out, flicks the safety off, places the extra clip on the dirt floor beside her. There’s no way out for her, but there’s only one way in. They have to stick their heads through that doorway if they want to get to her. She keeps Brian in front and points the .45 at the doorway.

“You just fucking killed him,” Brian Shea says eventually, as if he can’t comprehend the tragedy of Tombstone Frank Toomey’s death. As if he’s just been stripped of all the illusions he’s held of a gentler world.

“Sure did.”

“And you blew my fucking hip off.”

“Well, if you make it out of here, Brian, you’ll have a bad limp and a good story.”

Outside, she can hear more scuffing sounds. Judging by the distance, she suspects they’re over by the car.

“You just fucking killed him.”

“Why are you shocked by this? You kill people all the time.”

“We,” he says. “Not you.”

Beyond the doorway, someone opens the trunk of the car.

She snakes her arm around Brian’s abdomen and puts the muzzle of the big .45 against his crotch.

“The fuck you doing?”

“Were you there when my daughter was killed?” she whispers in his ear.

“I wasn’t there,” he says wearily. “I was called after.”

She hears a thump on the ground outside, followed by the clack of metal against metal. To look, she’d have to move Brian off her and stick her head into the doorway, risk getting it blown right the fuck off, so she’ll let them do whatever they’re doing out there, thank you very much. But she admits to being curious.

“Who was there when my daughter was killed?” she asks Brian.

“Frank. Marty was in another room.”

“So what happened?”

“I heard her and Frankie got in a fight, she kept coming at him, he whipped out a knife and, ya know.”

“‘Ya know,’” she says bitterly.

“Yeah.”

She removes the gun from his crotch.

Outside, more scuffing, more metal sliding against metal, and then Marty’s voice. “Grab the tripod.”

The tripod?

Brian exhales heavily through his nostrils. She suspects it’s his attempt at managing his pain.

“’Member in sophomore year,” he starts, “when we—”

“Here we go. Memory lane.”

He chuckles. “No, no, it was funny. We rigged all those toilets in the teachers’ bathroom with—”

“Firecrackers,” she says. “Yeah, I remember.”

“We had a lot of laughs back then.”

“We sure did,” she says. “You think it’ll save me?”

He says nothing.

She nods. “So why the fuck should it save you?”

His face grows flat again. “Marty can’t let you live now. He loved Frank like a brother.”

“Like a brother?” she says.

“Yeah. What else?”

“The way he screamed when I killed Frank? You tell me.”

He gives it some thought, and his face grows panic-stricken. “You’re sick.” He spits on the wall across from him. “Fucking depraved.”

She laughs. “You flood our community with heroin. Rent women out to fuck strangers for money. You molest children. Turn other children into worse versions of you. You rob. And you kill. But I’m sick. I’m depraved. Oh, okay, Brian.”

From somewhere off in the dark, Marty calls: “Mary Pat, dear.”

“Marty, dear!” she calls back.

His chuckle carries on the light breeze. “Let my friend Brian go and we’ll let you walk out of here.”

“No, you won’t.”

For a moment the only sound is the night.

“No, I suppose we won’t.” Another chuckle. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“That was a lot of money I gave you.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you just take it and go away?”

“And do what?”

“Make a better life for yourself?”

“I had my better life. Frank destroyed it.”

“But I didn’t,” he says, all guileless innocence. “Yet you came at my whole organization.”

“Oh, Marty,” she says. “Oh, Marty.”

“What’s that, Mary Pat?”

“This is all you. All this sick fucking ugliness. You drive it and it drives you.”

“I’ve lost you — what drives me, dear?”

“Fear,” she says.

“Fear?” He hoots. “What could I be afraid of, Mary Pat?”

“Shit, Marty, that’s between you and God, but I’m pretty sure it’s a long, sad list.”

Silence follows for quite some time. She can hear the distant water lapping softly against the shore.

Marty asks, “Do you know what I did in the war, hon?”

Whatever’s coming, Mary Pat knows it’s coming soon.

“I don’t, Marty, no.”

“I was a rifleman,” he calls.

“Uh-huh...”

“More to the point,” he says, “I was a sniper.”

She hears the report of the rifle only after the bullet has punched its way through the bone and tissue of her right armpit. She pivots in an instant, a survival instinct as old as her body itself, and the next round turns Brian Shea’s face to cherry pie.

He doesn’t make a sound. He probably never realized he died.

She scrambles back into the corner of the room, and now the handguns go off, and she watches two more rounds hit Brian Shea’s body — one through the chest, the other exploding his right kneecap.

“Cease fire,” Marty calls.

Larry and Weeds stop shooting, but her ears continue to ring.

Marty calls to her again. “Do you know what you just received there, hon?”

She can’t speak. She can’t breathe. All her insides have seized up, like a large, cold hand is squeezing her heart as hard as it can.

“That was a 7.62-millimeter steel-jacketed bullet traveling twelve hundred miles an hour, Mary Pat. Once the shock and the adrenaline wear off, which should be any moment, your body will start to react to the damage. I suspect breathing will become difficult. Your blood will grow cold. It’ll be hard to speak. Or think. But I want you to lie there and try. I want you to think about all your mistakes — first and foremost of which was an utter lack of respect for my generosity and my friendship. I want you to ruminate on that,” Marty says, “because I am not going to finish you off. I’m going to sit here and enjoy a cigarette and the night air until you bleed out, you traitorous fucking cow.”

The back of Mary Pat’s throat suddenly fills with hot phlegm. She coughs it up only to realize it’s not phlegm at all. It’s blood.

Well, shit.

She’s known from the moment Marty handed her the bag of money that she would not stop until everyone involved in her daughter’s death answered for their sins. She never got to Marty himself, and that’s too bad, but it’s hard to get to the king. It’s always been hard to get to a king.

But man, did she fuck up the king’s court.

And now he’s telling her to lie here. To bleed out. To wait for the rats.

Be nice to see Dukie again (even if she’ll yearn for Ken Fen all the while). Maybe they can have a few beers and remember how much fun they used to have in the early days of their marriage.

“Hey, Marty,” she calls, alarmed by how feeble she sounds.

“Yes, hon?”

She gets to her feet and the room spins and she falls sideways into a wall. “How did you come under the impression...?” She steadies herself. Her lungs feel as if someone’s dipped them in glue.

And Noel. Won’t it be swell to see her Noel?

“What’s that?”

“Under the impression,” she repeats, “that I would ever take orders...”

She sticks tight to the wall on her left. Steps over Brian Shea and his missing face.

“I can’t hear you,” he calls.

“That I would ever take orders from a gutless... nothing like you?”

Coming home, Jules. Coming home, my baby girl.

She steps through the doorway into the half-moonlight and raises the gun. Actually gets a round off, maybe even two, before they return fire.