Killers (33 page)

I never figured myself as “collateral damage,” just as I'd never expected to be an extra in somebody else's movie. Sally and I had turned the other cheek for far too long. It was time for some payback. I knew just what I was going to do. I was going to shoot out the stoplights at the intersection of Broadway and the McGrath/O'Brien Highway. Back during the Charlestown gang war, I'd considered it, to the point of spending some time with the engineer from the Traffic and Parking Department at City Hall. I could have used a guy down below at the lights to turn them off, but that was one more witness, and I've always been a believer in the old axiom, if you want something done right, you'd better do it yourself.

I knew I could knock the lights out with a couple of shots. That would stop traffic, and then the people in the cars would be sitting ducks. Back then it was going to be Charlestown gunsels, now it would be illegals from East Boston.

I'd even picked out the building I was going to shoot from, a four-story office building on the southeast side of Broadway. Hobart still had the keys to get onto the roof of the building. I parked my car behind the Alibi on Marshall Street. Hobart was waiting for me in the stolen hit car—the boiler, as we called it. He'd picked a nondescript gray Chevy that looked like a million other gray Chevys.

*   *   *

There wasn't much time, but I told Hobart to keep the car running and wait while I ran upstairs. I told you I had a small freezer built into the floor in my office upstairs, but I didn't tell you what I kept in it. A few years back, before I buried the rat bastard cocksucker who ran the Charlestown crew, Beezo Watson, it occurred to me to chop his right hand off and save it for just such a moment as this.

Talk about baffling the cops—this one would drive them crazy, if they found Beezo's prints on the rifle I was planning to use. If the Bushmaster was good enough for the D.C. sniper, it was good enough for me. As for Beezo's hand, I'd had a lock put on the freezer, and it had been a while since I'd shaken hands with my old rival. He was cold, very cold, and stiff. Dammit, I should have taken him out to thaw a few hours earlier.

I briefly considered taking Beezo downstairs and putting him on “defrost” in the microwave behind the bar. But I didn't want to take any chances on “degrading” the quality of the fingerprints, as the forensic pathologists say. I slipped Beezo's hand into a white plastic CVS bag, ran back downstairs and jumped into the boiler.

Hobart had the Bushmaster under an Army-surplus blanket in the backseat, along with a silencer and a pair of gloves. I called our guy who was trailing the Python car and in as few words as possible filled him in on what was going to happen. The shooters were driving a dark green Toyota Celica; for some reason illegals just love Toyotas. My guy said it was banged up, again just what you'd expect in a typical illegal mobile. They'd just passed the Mount Vernon Restaurant on the Charlestown line. They were about four minutes away.

Hobart dropped me off outside the four-story building, and I slipped on my gloves, unlocked the door and then started climbing to the roof. All the while I was talking to our guy trailing the green Toyota Celica. I told him to let me know when he was within a half block east of the McGrath/O'Brien intersection with Broadway. That was when I would shoot out the stoplights. Once the Python car was stopped, my guy was to flash his lights, and then pull a U turn and get the hell out of there.

He understood perfectly.

It was sunset, with just enough light left to make the first shot easy. As soon as he told me how close they were to the lights, I fired four shots at the signal box. It wasn't a difficult shot, but I had to make sure. I reloaded as traffic halted in all directions, and then I saw my guy flash his lights, pull a u-ie and take off back toward Charlestown.

The Toyota from the Python was the second car at the lights, just where I wanted it.

I drew a bead on the Python driver's front side window. I'd take him out first, so that the others would have to get out of the car and start running. Actually, they probably would have had a better chance of surviving if they had just stayed in the car and hit the floor. They would have known that if they'd been in the military, but I very much doubted they covered this point in Guatemalan basic training. They were going to panic and make a run for it.

I fired at the driver's window. It exploded, and so did the driver's head. He was dark, wearing a baseball cap. I could see the guy in the shotgun seat, snapping his own head around in wild panic, trying to decide what to do. He didn't quite make his decision in time. I blew his head off. He must have already had the passenger door open to escape when the bullet struck him, because as the force of the shot hurled his body against the door, it flew open, and his corpse tumbled headfirst out of the car onto Broadway.

Next I aimed the rifle at the back window and started firing. The guy on the passenger side was quick enough to get out and take off running. He got away. The one nearer to me slumped over, so I kept firing through the door, just to make sure. The silencer had cost me a grand, but it was really coming in handy. Nobody else stuck at the lights was panicking because they were too busy honking their horns, as if that would make the traffic signals flicker back on more quickly.

I reached into the CVS bag and took out Beezo's hand. It had thawed just enough. I pressed his dead fingers around the trigger, then made a couple of palm prints on the stock of the Bushmaster. Maybe I was overdoing it, but I had to make sure there were enough prints to get the cops' attention. I figured that once the cops saw whose prints were on the trigger, they'd be too busy running around like chickens with their heads chopped off to worry about any other clues. I left the rifle on the roof but kept my gloves on. I dropped Beezo's hand back in the plastic bag. He had one more job to finish tonight. Then I ran down the four flights, taking the stairs two steps at a time, and jumped into Hobart's boiler.

“We got time to get to Roxbury?” I asked.

“Wow, you're on fire tonight,” he said.

“Why should Salt 'n' Peppa have all the fun?” I said, turning around to see what else was in the backseat—an AR-15. I called the trail car on the second vehicle out of the Python. There'd been an accident in the Sumner Tunnel and it was total gridlock—beautiful, I'd have plenty of time to beat them to Roxbury.

Then I called Peppa, who was a better shot than Salt. He was already in position on top of the abandoned old factory building across the street from our garage.

“They're in a minivan, black,” I said. “If they pull up in front of the garage, don't start nothing. A gray Chevy is gonna roll past.”

“I'm just backup?” He sounded disappointed.

“Anybody makes it out of there onto the sidewalk, they're all yours.”

He laughed. “I know how you work, boss. Looks like a slow night for me.”

“They also serve who only sit and wait.”

“Thanks, Mr. McCarthy.” He only called me Mr. McCarthy when he was trying to give me the needle.

“Just let me know,” I said, “when they pull up in front of the garage.”

By the time we got to the garage the sun had set. It was perfect hunting weather. Nobody was out. Nobody is ever out after dark in Roxbury, unless they're in the mood to commit suicide or homicide. It had cost a lot, having to put up new barbed-wire fencing around the garage, but otherwise the place would have been looted within days, maybe hours. Still, I liked having a place over here. I needed a garage somewhere, and the police couldn't ever stake it out, that's for sure.

“Cops gonna be confused tonight,” Hobart said. “Two shootouts, one on the Hill, one in Roxbury.”

I smiled. “Do you think they'll be ‘baffled'?”

“Not for long,” he said. He didn't know about Beezo. Hobart wouldn't have thought of asking why I was carrying around that little plastic bag. “The reporters, they'll be baffled for sure, but the cops'll fill them in.” He tapped on the steering wheel. “Will this be the end of it?”

“I hope so, but I got a feeling not quite. I think this is just what those bastards are looking for, a gang war, quote-unquote.”

“So why are we giving them ammunition?” He smiled. “Bad choice of words.”

“They keep trying to kill us,” I explained patiently. “You know my policy. Do unto others before they do unto you. No exceptions. They were going to machine-gun the Alibi tonight. That would make twice in four days, three times in a week if you count the other time. What am I, a fucking clay pigeon?”

We had pulled over outside an abandoned Catholic school a couple of blocks from the garage. Hobart's cell phone rang. He said “okay” a couple of times and then hung up.

“They're just sitting there, in front of the garage. Our guys broke off and are heading back to Somerville.”

“Anybody left in the garage?”

“No,” said Hobart. “Rocco was the last to leave. Salt 'n' Peppa turned on all the lights, then locked the doors and went up on the roof. There's two guys in the car, they're just sitting out front, like they're waiting for somebody to come out.”

I shook my head and reached into the backseat for the AR-15. I released the safety and told Hobart to pull up alongside them, without lights.

“Simple fucks, just sitting there,” I said. “Let's take a look.” Without lights, Hobart crept up to the corner. The van was there in front of the garage. Its lights were off too.

I took my phone and called Peppa. “Be prepared,” I said, and hung up.

Then I looked over at Hobart: “Go for it,” I said, and he floored the boiler, bringing it to a stop just in front of the minivan so I could fire through its front windshield. All I could see were shadows in the front seat. When the windshield disappeared in the hail of bullets, so did the shadows. I racked the entire vehicle with fire until I was out of ammo and then we sped off toward Warren Street. As we put some distance between ourselves and the garage, I heard more shots. Rifle shots. Peppa was getting in a little target practice too.

I took out Beezo's hand and wrapped it around the trigger of the machine gun. Hobart looked over.

“Is that whose hand I think it is?” he said, his eyes wide with awe.

“You was there when I chopped it off, weren't you?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but I just thought it was some kind of sick demented Whitey Bulger shit.”

“I'll bet you were too freaked out to say anything, right?”

“You ain't kidding.”

“Well, what do you think now?”

He smiled. “I think this is gonna baffle 'em to no end.”

Still wearing gloves, I quickly disassembled the AR-15, then had Hobart pull down a side street with another abandoned warehouse. I put the gun in an old canvas bag, zipped it up and threw it into the doorway. Then we headed back to the Expressway south, got off at Gallivan Boulevard and as we crossed over the Fore River bridge into Quincy, I took Beezo's hand out of the bag and tossed it into the water.

As Hobart turned around in the rotary on the Quincy side of the bridge, I took out one of my throw-down cell phones, called 911 and told the cops about the bag that had been dropped in the doorway. I didn't want any concerned citizens of color or otherwise stumbling across the gun and later using it for something I wouldn't approve of, like sticking up one of Sally's gambling offices. As we crossed the bridge back into Dorchester, I hurled the phone into the water.

*   *   *

I had a pretty good idea what was going to be leading the eleven o'clock news tonight. It'd been a while since I'd topped the local TV news.

“Let's go back to Somerville,” I told Hobart. “I think I'm going to take a vacation for a couple of days.”

 

36

“BOSTON IS A KILLING GROUND”

I sat down with Slip Crowley at J.J. Foley's around nine, but I had actually arrived there much earlier, as soon as I'd gotten back to Boston from my meeting in Dedham with O'Mara. I didn't figure on getting any visits from the cops, but in case anybody had seen me with Bench McCarthy over the last couple of days, I wanted an alibi for the whole evening. I made sure to buy a round for the house as soon as I arrived, so if necessary I would have two or three cops to speak up for me, all that I'd need.

In the meantime, I was shooting the breeze with Slip in the Berkeley Room.

“I got an e-mail today,” I said, and he nodded, without interest. “You know what it said.”

“You're going to tell me, right?” Slip said.

“It said, Albert Crowley has sent you a message on LinkedIn.”

“What?” he said. “What the fuck is LinkedIn?”

“I was gonna ask you the same question,” I said. “Actually, I know what it is, it's some kind of business website, supposed to keep you in touch with the other young Jaycee types, shit like that. I was just wondering, how'd you decide to get onto LinkedIn?”

“I got this intern, good-looking kid from Emerson, about twenty years old, she tells me, I gotta get into social media. I have no idea what she's talking about. She tells me, all her friends are on Facebook. Everybody ‘friends' each other. I told her, anybody wants to ‘friend' me, they can ‘friend' me a C-note at my next time at Anthony's.”

I laughed.

“So did you accept my message?” Slip asked.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Only message I ever get from my ‘friends' is, can you lend me a C-note?”

Slip took a long sip of his 7&7. “You know, I can't even remember how I ever got along without a cell phone. Them fucking phone booths reeking of piss and junkies breaking into the change boxes—remember? It's fucking great not to have to worry about that shit anymore. Then e-mails came along. I hated them at first, but I actually don't mind them anymore either. It's quicker than a letter, plus I don't have to talk to those cocksucker reporters anymore. Even the
Globe
can't misquote an e-mail. But anything beyond that—texting, twittering—”