Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“Stop with the fucking buts, Phil. I swear to God. You convince yourself that this never happened. It was all a bad dream. Kevin and Jack are on vacation somewhere. Because if you don’t get clear on that concept, you’ll talk.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. You’ll tell your wife or your girlfriend or someone in a bar, and then we’re all dead. And the person you told is dead, too. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be watched.”

“What?”

I nodded. “Face it and find a way to live with it. For quite a while, you’ll be watched.”

He swallowed hard and his eyes bulged, and I thought he might get sick again.

Instead he jerked his head around and stared out the window and curled into himself on the seat.

“How do you do this?” he whispered. “Day in and day out?”

I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes and listened to the German engine rumble.

“How do you live with yourself, Patrick?”

I slid the shift into first and didn’t speak again as we drove through Southie and down into the neighborhood.

I left the Porsche in front of my house and headed for the Crown Victoria, parked a few cars back, because a ’63 Porsche is just about the last thing you want to be driving in my neighborhood if you want to remain anonymous.

Phil stood by the passenger door, and I shook my head.

“What?” he said.

“You’re staying behind, Phil. I’m alone on this one.”

He shook his head. “No. I was married to her, Patrick, and this prick shot her.”

“Want him to shoot you, too, Phil?”

He shrugged. “You think I’m not up to this?”

I nodded. “I think you’re not up to this, Phil.”

“Why? Because of the bowling alley? Kevin—he was someone we grew up with. A friend once. So okay, I didn’t handle him getting shot real well. But Gerry?” He held his gun up on the car top, worked the slide, and jacked a round into the chamber. “Gerry’s dogshit. Gerry dies.”

I stared at him, waited for him to see how silly he looked working the slide like a character in a movie, spitting out his bravado.

He stared back, and the muzzle of his gun slowly turned until it was facing me over the roof.

“You going to shoot me, Phil? Huh?”

His hand was firm. The gun never wavered.

“Answer me, Phil. You going to shoot me?”

“You don’t open this door, Patrick, I’ll blow the window out, climb in anyway.”

I looked steadily at the gun in his hand.

“I love her, too, Patrick.” He lowered the gun.

I got in the car. He rapped on the window with the gun and I took a deep breath, knowing he’d follow me on foot if it came down to it or shoot out the window of my Porsche and hot-wire it.

I reached across the seat and unlocked the door.

The rain started around midnight, not even a drizzle at first, just a few spits that mingled with the dirt on my windows and bled down to my wipers.

We parked in front of a senior citizens home on Dorchester Avenue, a half block up from The Black Emerald. Then the clouds broke and the rain clattered the roof and swept down the avenue in great dark sheets. It was a freezing rain, identical to yesterday’s, and the only effect it had on the ice still clinging to sidewalks and buildings was to make it seem simultaneously cleaner and more lethal.

Initially, we were grateful for it, because our windows steamed up, and unless someone was standing right beside the car, he wouldn’t be able to see the two of us inside.

But this worked against us, too, because pretty soon we couldn’t see the bar very well or the door to Gerry’s apartment. The defrost in the car was broken, and so was the heater, and damp cold bit into my bones. I cracked my window, and Phil cracked his, and I used my elbow to wipe at the condensation on the inside until Gerry’s doorway and the doorway to the Emerald reappeared, diluted and rubbery.

“How’re you so sure it’s Gerry who’s been working with Hardiman?” Phil said.

“I’m not,” I said. “But it feels right.”

“So why aren’t we calling the cops?”

“To tell them what? Two guys with fresh bullet holes in their heads told us Gerry was a bad guy?”

“What about the FBI then?”

“Same problem. We don’t have any proof. If it is Gerry, and we tip him too early, maybe he slips away again, goes into hibernation or whatever, only kills runaways nobody’s looking for.”

“So why are we here?”

“Because if he makes a move, any kind of move, I want to see it, Phil.”

Phil wiped at his side of the windshield, peered out at the bar. “Maybe we should just go in there, ask him some questions.”

I looked at him. “Are you nuts?”

“Why not?”

“Because if it is him, he’ll kill us, Phil.”

“There’s two of us, Patrick. We’re both armed.”

I could see he was trying to talk himself into it, to suck up the courage necessary to go through that door. But he was still a long way from doing it.

“It’s the tension,” I said. “The waiting.”

“What about it?”

“Sometimes it seems a lot worse than any confrontation could be, like if you could just do something, you’d stop feeling like you need to climb out of your skin.”

He nodded. “That’s the feeling, yeah.”

“Problem is, Phil, if Gerry’s the guy we think he is, the confrontation will be a lot worse than the wait. He’ll kill us, guns or no guns.”

He swallowed once, then nodded.

For a full minute I stared hard at the door to the Emerald. In the time we’d been here, I’d seen no one enter or exit, and that was more than a little odd just after midnight at a bar in this neighborhood. A solid sheet of water the size of a building swept along the avenue, its edges curling, and the wind howled distantly.

“How many people?” Phil said.

“What?”

Phil tilted his head in the direction of the Emerald. “If he is the guy, how many people you think he’s killed? Over his entire lifetime? I mean, taking into consideration that maybe he killed all those runaways over the years, and maybe a shitload of people no one even knows about and—”

“Phil.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m nervous enough. There are some things I don’t want to think about just now.”