The Strangler

49

Sap gloves were leather gloves with powdered shot sewn into the knuckles. The shot, seven or eight ounces of steel or lead, was ground fine enough that it would form to the knuckles. For a hundred years, they were the copper’s secret weapon when wading into a bar brawl or street riot or other slurry of blood. Joe’s pair was well worn. When he laid them down the fingers curled exactly as his own fingers would, and when he glimpsed them at rest in his locker or glove compartment, palm to palm like praying hands, they stirred an emotion in him that was very like love. We adore certain objects because they are in one way or another extensions of our own egos, and so it was with Joe’s sap gloves. He did not consider them weapons because, unlike a gun or a knife, they did not endow him with an ability he did not already have; they simply improved his own nature, like eyeglasses. On his hands, they became part of him. The weapon was still the punch. But with the sap gloves, a good hard punch became a stunner, and a stunning punch became a knockout. What a high, to throw a fist so enhanced, so weighted and unbreakable-to spread your legs and get a good base under you, and with your own thighs, hips, back, and shoulders to whirl up such bone-crushing power. And all with no change in your appearance except those ordinary-looking black gloves.

“Finish it,” Gargano said.

Joe was panting and sweaty.

At his feet a man lay balled on the concrete floor. The man’s filthy raincoat trailed away behind him, like a sleeping child’s tossed-off blanket.

“Come on, stand up.”

“No.”

“Get up, asshole!”

“No!”

Gargano intervened. He said in low voice, “Stand the fuck up, you piece of shit, or you’ll never get off that floor.”

The guy’s name was Slots. He booked out of a bar called Chiambi’s, a bucket of blood near the corner of Bennington and Brooks in East Boston. He was a numbers guy but had also been a roughneck in his day and he was slow to accept the new order. For a while he had refused to pay any tribute at all to Charlie Capobianco, which had earned him an educational beating. Then his payments had slipped again and The Office had noticed because Capobianco always noticed when money went missing. The boss’s first impulse was to squash the guy out, but someone in The Office had intervened on behalf of Slots, some friend of a friend of Nicky Capobianco, another North End book named Gerry Angiulo-Joe could never keep it all straight, all the crazy dago names and shifting alliances. Alls he knew was that by some shadowy miracle Slots-whose nickname referred to the fact that he had lost an arm in the Pacific twenty years before and was said to resemble a right-armed slot machine-was not scheduled to check out on this night, although he might have wished otherwise by the end. A couple of Gargano’s men had driven Slots to a bar up on Blue Hill Avenue. The place was owned by Gargano. Its basement, mildewy and cluttered with beer cases, was the last thing a lot of guys ever saw.

“Shoulda stuck him in a chair.” Gargano sighed ruefully. He turned to his guys. “Get him up.”

Slots was yanked to his feet.

“Go ahead, Joe, we don’t got all night,” Gargano said.

Slots gave Joe a bleary smile, which Joe admired. The guy had balls. Already he looked pretty bad. His face was beef-red. His right eye had swelled nearly shut.

Joe hefted his gloved fist, cocked it by his ear, and fired it at the corner of the man’s left eye, where the heavy bones of the skull thinned into the more delicate orbital bones of the eye. Through the steel on his knuckles he felt the side of the face give way, the skin, the bony substructure, the mush behind it all.

Slots’s head snapped back and his knees gave way simultaneously. He arched down and backward like a dancer, already unconscious, hung there, then collapsed.

“Alright, go clean yourself up, Joe.”

Joe stared at the sprawled body. Blood was smeared on the floor and on the man’s clothes. Joe searched his head for a thought, a reaction, but there was nothing, not remorse or pity, not even a practical concern for his own situation (a clean shirt, a ride home). The nullity was not unpleasant. Just a white, open space to drift in.

“There’s a sink right over there.”

“I know where it is.”

“Don’t put your shirt back on. First take off that undershirt, leave it here.”

“Alright.”

“Hell of a fuckin’ shot you got there.” Gargano snorted to the other two, “D’you see that? Jesus Christ, that was fuckin’ beautiful, man. Fuckin’ A. Just fuckin’ beautiful.”

Joe shuffled between the stacks of cardboard liquor cases. The sink was on the opposite side of the basement. He did not like to think about what might have been rinsed down the drain of that sink over the years. Not just beer, certainly. He heard his own panting, felt the weight of the gloves dangling from his arms. He paused to look back down the aisle between the boxes.

Gargano took off his jacket and laid it aside. He wore a scarlet pimp shirt, slim black slacks, and mod ankle boots with a big finger-loop in the back. His gut bulked against the shirt fabric. Gargano looked down at the unconscious body and sighed again. A single red brick lay on the floor nearby, tossed away by someone, misplaced-the building was wood with a poured concrete foundation, not a brick in it except this one. Gargano picked the brick up, raised the right leg of the body, and slid the brick under the knee so that the joint was flexed a few inches off the concrete floor. He stood, raised his own leg up like a drum major, then stomped down on the man’s shin, just below the knee. The tibia dislocated with a snick. Gargano slipped the brick out, came around the body, and propped the other leg the same way. He stomped again, just once, like a good carpenter driving a nail with one slap of his hammer.