Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“Damn,” she said.

“And there’ll be other restrictions to talk about, but—”

“What about…?” She looked at Phil and me and then away.

“Yes?” Barnett said.

“Well,” she said, “the bullet sort of rattled around down in my lower regions and…”

“It affected none of your reproductive organs, Ms. Gennaro.”

“Oh,” she said and caught me smiling, glared at me. “Don’t say a damn word, Patrick.”

The pain returned in force around five and they shot her up with enough Demerol to mellow out a Bengal tiger.

I touched my palm to her cheek as she blinked at the drug’s effect.

“The guy who shot me?” she said thickly.

“Yeah?”

“You identify him yet?”

“No.”

“But you will, won’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, then…”

“Yeah?”

“Go get him, Patrick,” she said. “Shut his ass down.”

36

Four eleven South Street was the only vacant building on a street of artist’s lofts and carpet makers, costumers, rag merchants, and by-appointment-only galleries. Boston’s two-block equivalent of SoHo.

Four eleven was four stories tall and had been a parking garage before the city actually needed one. It changed hands in the late forties and the new owner turned it into an entertainment complex for sailors. The first floor had been a bar and billiards parlor, the second a casino, and the third a whorehouse.

The place had been vacant most of my life, so I never knew what the fourth floor was used for until my Porsche rose up past the dark floors in an ancient car elevator and the doors opened onto a dank, musty bowling alley.

Light fixtures hung haphazardly from a section of caved-in ceiling and several alleys were nothing but corridors of rubble. Shattered bowling pins lay in heaps of white dust in the gutters and the hand dryers had long ago been ripped from the floors and presumably sold for parts. Several of the runway shelves still held bowling balls, though, and I could see target arrows through the dust and grime on a couple of alleys.

Bubba sat in a captain’s chair by the center alley as we left the car and exited the elevator. The chair still bore screws at the base from wherever he’d torn it up, and the leather was ripped in several places and spilling foam stuffing onto the floor by his feet.

“Who owns this place?” I said.

“Freddy.” He sipped from a bottle of Finlandia. His face was ruddy and his eyes slightly watery, and I knew that he was easily into his second bottle, never a good sign.

“Freddy keeps an abandoned building on his books for fun?”

He shook his head. “The second and third floor only look like shit from the elevator. They’re actually pretty nice. Freddy and his boys use them for functions sometimes, shit like that.” He looked at Phil and there was nothing friendly in his glance. “Fuck you doing here, pussy?”

Phil took a step back, but still did better than most people facing Bubba in full psychotic tilt.

“I’m in this now, Bubba. All the way.”

Bubba smiled and the darkness that covered the entire rear of the alleys seemed to rise up behind him. “Well, now,” he said. “How nice for you. Pissed off someone put Angie in the hospital and it wasn’t you this time? Someone stepping into your area of expertise, faggot?”

Phil shifted toward me a step. “This has nothing to do with the bad blood between us, Bubba.”

Bubba raised his eyebrows at me. “He grow some balls or’s he just stupid?”

I’d seen Bubba like this only a few times before, and it was always a case of being far too close to the demon for my liking. By my amended estimate, he had to be three bottles of vodka in, and there was no telling if he’d allow his blacker instincts to be reined in.

Bubba cared about exactly two people in the world—me and Angie. And Phil had spent too much time hurting Angie over the years for Bubba to feel anything for him but pure hate. Being the object of another’s hate is relative. If the person who hates you is an advertising exec whose Infiniti you cut off in traffic, you’re probably not going to worry much. If Bubba hates you, though, putting a couple of continents between the two of you is not a bad idea.

“Bubba,” I said.

He turned his head slowly to look up at me and his gaze was muddy.

“Phil is on our side for this one. That’s all you need to

know right now. He wants to be in on whatever we do.”

He showed no reaction, just turned his head back toward Phil, fixed that muddy gaze on him.

Phil held the look for as long as he could, long after sweat had slid down by his ears, but eventually he looked at the floor.

“All right, douche,” Bubba said. “We’ll let you sit in for a few hands, you want to find redemption for what you did to your wife or whatever bullshit you told yourself.” He stood and towered over Phil until Phil looked up. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding—Patrick forgives. Angie forgives. I don’t. Someday I’m going to hurt you.”

Phil nodded. “I know that, Bubba.”

Bubba used his index finger to prop Phil’s chin up. “And if anything that happens in this room leaks, I’ll know it didn’t come from Patrick. Which means I’ll kill you, Phil. Got it?”

Phil tried to nod, but Bubba’s finger kept his head from moving.

“Yes,” Phil said through gritted teeth.

Bubba looked up at a dark wall on the other side of the elevator. “Lights,” he called.

Someone behind the wall flicked a switch and a sickly green-and-white neon flickered in the few remaining light fixtures over the back half of the alleys. There was more sputtering and several gauzy yellow bars of light shafted over the bowling pits themselves.

Bubba raised his arms and turned around grandly, like Moses parting the Red Sea, and we looked down the alleys as a rat scurried for safety along one of the gutters.

“Holy shit,” Phil said under his breath.

“You say something?” Bubba said.

“No. Nothing,” Phil managed.

At the end of the alley directly in front of me, Kevin Hurlihy was kneeling in the pit. His hands were tied behind his back and his legs were tied at the ankles and a noose around his neck was tied to a nail in the wall over the pit. His face was swollen and shiny with bloody welts. The nose Bubba had broken was flabby and blue, and his broken jaw was wired shut.