The Strangler (34 page)

“What happened?”

“It’s—Look, there’s no other way to say it. I’m sorry—Joe’s dead.”

“What!”

“He got shot. That’s all they know. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“Come on, Michael, right now, we got to go.”

And this was how suddenly it happened. This was how Joe died, for Michael, with those two electric words:
He’s dead.

Then Michael was following Conroy down the hallways. Blood rushed in his ears. Objects seemed to swim—office doors with pebbled-glass windows; a janitor with a mop bucket on wheels; smudgy photos of stern, bushy-bearded politicians from the last century.

Out into the street, where Conroy had an unmarked cruiser waiting. For some reason Michael went to get in the back seat, as if the black Ford was a taxi, and Conroy had to tell him to sit in front. “Come on, Mike, you gotta keep your shit together, Mike. Your mother needs you here.” Michael did as he was told, he sat in the front seat, and even now he detested Brendan Conroy—the worldly paternal tone with its hint that Michael would play novice to Conroy’s mentor; the repetition of his name, Mike, Mike, Mike, as if he had learned the habit in a Dale Carnegie course.
Call me Michael, you prick.
But he was too bewildered to maintain his contempt.

Conroy rushed the car down the back slope of Beacon Hill and shot across Bowdoin Square.

Michael thought: He should have turned right, to make his way west to Boston City Hospital. Joe must have been taken to Mass. General instead. Maybe when a cop got shot even the remorseless Yankees there would find it in their hearts to let an Irishman in the back door. But again, Michael’s cynicism evaporated almost immediately. He could not hold a thought in his head. His mind continually emptied itself.

The siren made its clarinet wail, and a blue flasher strobed on the dashboard.

“They found him on Washington Street,” Conroy was half-shouting, “right in his car, right there on the street. Can you believe that? I mean, can you believe the balls on these guys? The unmitigated balls on these guys.” He clenched the steering wheel at nine and three o’clock, arms stiff.

Once they crossed Cambridge Street, the view through the windshield went black, like looking out over water at night. Then the buildings beside them disappeared and they sailed off the map, off the street grid, into the empty space of the old West End site. The road faltered. Conroy killed the siren and the blinking blue lights. They bounced over the rocky surface.

“Jesus, Brendan, what the hell, where are you going?”

“Hospital.”

“
This
way?”

“Yeah, sorry, I know. Shortcut. Cambridge Street’s a mess. Just let me drive. We’ll be there in a minute. You alright, Michael?”

The answer was no, he was not alright, he was very definitely
not
alright. A late night at the office had exploded into a catastrophe, and the strangeness, the shock of it, left him feeling unmoored, as if that reclining chair in his office really had been the
Friendship 7
and Michael had been rocketed into outer space. He covered his mouth with his left hand and repeated, Joe is dead, Joe is dead, to convince himself of it. How recently had he taken a similar ride, in Joe’s car, to bring similar news to Ricky after Amy was murdered? Six months before. Then, the mantra had been: Amy’s dead, Amy’s dead…What the brain cannot fathom, it simply rejects as untrue.

In front of them stretched a vast empty field, the fifty acres of the old West End razed to the dirt. The light of the moon and the surrounding city illuminated the ground with pale fluorescence. A rubble field of rocks and sandy soil and construction scrap, no trees, no roads. Before them the desolate irradiated landscape sloped gently away to sea level, a quarter mile away, where it ran out into the darkness. Looking over it you could imagine some conquering army had swept across and consumed it. The only things they had left behind were the enormous mounds of building materials heaped up like cairns, bristling with two-by-fours, the remains of demolished buildings. On the far side of the wasteland, lights burned in clusters at Mass. General and, farther away, at the construction site of JFK Park, Farley Sonnenshein’s dream city of the future. The New Boston.

The car yawed and hopped over the rocks. Stones clattered in the wheel wells and chinked against the bottom of the car. Here and there, Conroy had to slow to a crawl to avoid bottoming out on the debris.

Michael tried to gauge his location, but the streets had been completely effaced. So he surrendered to disorientation and simply gawked at what was close: the haystacks of two-by-fours that rose to four and five times the height of the car; the scraps strewn on the ground, concrete, metal, brick; the odd personal item, a mangled baby carriage, a shoe. And stones—stones everywhere, the same rocky untillable soil the ancient pilgrims had found here. He thought—as everyone thought and everyone commented, because the memory was so near, the comparison so irresistible—that it all looked exactly like the old newspaper photos of bombed-out cities in Europe. And this thought, too, led back to Joe. Joe who had marched across Europe all the way to Berlin, only to die here. Joe was dead.

“Who did it? Are there witnesses?”

“Yeah. But don’t you worry about that, Michael. We’ll get the guy. You worry about your family.”

“I should have done something, shouldn’t I? I don’t know; you know? I should’ve helped him.”

“Can’t think like that, boyo, can’t do that to yourself.”

“I should’ve—”

“Nothing anyone could do. Joe got himself into it. It’s nobody else’s fault. It’s over now anyway.”

Conroy picked his way over the rubble. In some places where the roads had been, the ground still bore their impression. On the ghost road of Chambers Street, he could move a little faster, briefly, until it vanished. He aimed the car toward the lights of Mass. General, tacking left and right around obstructions. Near the middle of the expanse St. Joseph’s Church stood alone, islanded. A hunkered-down Romanesque church—it looked more like a mausoleum for a secret society than a church. St. Joe’s had not been designed for splendid isolation. It was a city church, meant to be hemmed in by narrow streets. Now its plain sandstone walls looked unfinished. The car beetled past it and kept on, bearing north through the debris field.

“What do you mean, Joe got himself into it?”

“Huh?”

“Joe got himself into what? How do
you
know?”

“I just know, is how I know. It’s no big secret.”

“No? So who else knows?”

“Michael? Jesus, would you give it a rest? The hell does it matter now?”

As they neared the northern edge of the rubble field, the lights of Mass. General approached and, to the right, the JFK Park construction site. Construction was already under way on two of the apartment towers. Framed with I-beams that formed ladders and cubes in the air, the towers seemed impossibly high. Barely begun, they were already among the tallest buildings in the city.

Conroy jerked the car toward the construction site. The rear wheels spun out, and the car fishtailed. Rocks chunked off the undercarriage.

“The fuck, Brendan!”

“Hang on.”

“What are you doing! The hospital’s—”

Conroy skidded through an open gate into the construction site, among the skeletal towers. He drove clumsily, hampered by the darkness and the narrow beam of the headlights and the rough surface.

The car slid to a stop at the edge of an enormous pit which had been excavated for yet another apartment tower. A bubble of pale light illuminated the pit, cast by buzzing portable arc lights.

The buildings in JFK Park were named for famous local politicians, in keeping with the presidential theme. This particular hole in the ground would eventually become a tower called Adams. For now it was just a crater, about half the size of a city block and two or three stories deep. The foundation walls were not poured yet; the pit was lined with corrugated steel walls. A dozen I-beams rose above the pit like ships’ masts. These were the steel piles that would carry the weight of the building in the soft subsoil. A crane loomed, and a towering pile driver to ram them into the ground.

“What the fuck is this?” Michael asked. “What are you doing?”

Conroy bolted out of the car.

Michael saw a man walking toward them. Round-shouldered bull of a guy in mod slacks and short jacket zipped over a bulging belly. He tossed away a shovel.

Conroy dogtrotted around the front of the car, through the field of the headlights.

The second man produced a pistol from inside his jacket.

Michael struggled to connect these things, to make sense of it, but already the door was flying open beside him and Conroy was tugging on his arm saying, “Get out here, get out here,” and he heard this other man say, “Come on, get him the fuck out of there already. We don’t have all fuckin’ night.”

Michael dove toward the steering wheel and grabbed it, first the ridged plastic wheel and then the steering column itself, and he hugged it, held on. He heard himself say, “No! No! No!”

The second man came around the car to the driver’s side and smashed Michael’s hands with the butt of his pistol until Michael’s grip loosened and he was dragged across the bench on his belly, out of the car—his forehead banged against the doorsill—and he lay on the ground, shivering with cold and shock and fright.

Above him, Conroy grimaced like a man getting down to an unpleasant chore.

The second man was coming back around the car, crossing through the headlights as Conroy had a moment before, and—impossible—racking his pistol, and it was that sound, the metallic
clack-clack
of the slide that obliterated all thought and sent Michael scrambling ahead on all fours, toward the pit. It was impossible—impossible—impossible. It was just impossible to die. But Joe was dead. Is this what Joe had felt in his last moment, this frantic denial of one’s own annihilation—impossible!—together with a subsiding sense that one was already gone?

The man was coming on, the gun extended now in one hand, expressionless, mindless.

Michael clambered forward fast, beating ahead on hands and knees. The soil was cold and wet under his hands, it seeped through the knees of his wool pants. Pebbles bit his palms. Left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand, then he set his left hand down on—nothing—air—and the hand went down into the hole, and his arm and shoulder went down after it, then his head was pulled in too. The lip of the steel retaining wall scraped his belly and he tumbled over it, into the black space in the pit, and he was in the air, turning.

Conroy said, “Jesus. Get down there and finish this. For Christ’s sake. For Christ’s sake.”

The second man glowered. “Go finish it yourself, pig.”

“I’ve got a homicide scene to get to.”

Michael plummeted through darkness, wind drumming past his ears. The steel retaining wall invisible but perceptibly close; he could sense it beside him. There was a moment of weightlessness, no up or down—aware he was moving through space at fantastic speed, but with no sense which direction he was traveling. Where was the ground? He flailed, then stiffly he dropped through an atmosphere of thickening blackness and wintry cold.

Then the earth drove into him.

On the floor of the pit, thirty feet below the surface, gloom collected in corners and pooled at the base of the high walls. The darkness in these shaded places had a texture, a moist blue density so thick you wanted to dip your finger in it. Overhead, the steel piles tapered upward. The blue dome of the sky was illuminated from beneath by the city’s incandescent light, and some of that radiance washed back down into the pit, even reached the floor, weakly. But none penetrated as far as the corners.

The man with the gun foraged along the base of the steel wall. He paused, looked up its sheer face to estimate his own position and the spot where Michael Daley had gone over the side. He figured that the body ought to be here, right here at his feet, crumpled, dead or dying. But he must have gotten it wrong; again and again he looked up to recalculate. In the gloom, dim silhouettes came forward which might have been bodies in various back-broken poses. But each, upon closer inspection, turned out to be something else, a rolled-up canvas tarp, a toss-pile of debris, or nothing at all, just a wrinkle in the darkness. Shit, what he wouldn’t have given for a flashlight! Without one, there was no choice but to work his way along the wall, pausing now and then to crane his head forward for a better look or to nudge at something with his toe.

A rock chattered nearby. To his left. A few feet away, low in the shadows.

He jerked his gun around and fired, fired, fired, eager for release, as if he had been holding the bullets uncomfortably in his body.

The noise was deafening. The corrugated crazy-angled steel walls echoed the sounds and, it became clear, the bullets themselves.

The man cringed at the ricochets, crouched down, and it was in this position that he felt his right shinbone crack in two, heard the dry snap, then—after a delay, an extended moment—he felt a burst of pain in his leg. He looked down to see his shin grotesquely segmented, his leg two-kneed like an insect’s. He stared, uncomprehending. His right foot lay flat on the ground, instep down. It reminded him of an empty boot dropped on its side. He understood, briefly, that the rock had been tossed to distract him, but already he was toppling onto his back.