The kindness in Gerry’s eyes disappeared into a vortex of pure black cold, and he glanced at me as if I were a bug under a microscope.
And I knew all pretense had ended.
I reached for my gun as tires screeched to a stop outside and Gerry reached under the bar.
Phil was still frozen when Gerry said, “lago!”
It wasn’t just the name of a Shakespeare character, it was an attack code.
I had my gun clear of my waistband when Patton burst out of the darkness and I saw the hard glint of the straight razor in Gerry’s hand.
Phil said, “Oh, no. No.” And ducked.
And Patton vaulted over his shoulder toward me.
Gerry’s arm shot out and I leaned back as the razor cleaved through the flesh by my cheekbone and Patton hit me like a wrecking ball and knocked me off my stool.
“No, Gerry! No!” Phil screamed, his hand stuck in his belt as he dug for his gun.
The dog’s teeth bounced off my forehead and its head reared back and its jaws opened and plunged toward my right eye.
Someone screamed.
I grasped Patton’s neck with my free hand and the noise he made was a savage combination of screaming and barking. I squeezed his throat but it constricted and my hand slid up his sweaty fur and his head plunged toward my face again.
I shoved the gun into his midsection as he kicked at my arm with his back feet and when I pulled the trigger—twice—Patton’s head snapped back as if he heard his name being called, and then he jerked and shuddered and a low hissing sound escaped his mouth. His flesh went soft in my hands as he tipped to his right and toppled into the row of bar stools.
I sat up and fired six rounds into the mirrors and bottles behind the bar, but Gerry wasn’t there.
Phil was on the floor by his stool, grasping his throat.
The front door shattered off its hinges as I crawled to him and I heard Devin yell, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! He’s a good guy!” Then, “Kenzie, put your gun down!”
I laid it on the floor beside Phil as I reached him.
Most of the blood came from the right side of his throat, where Gerry had made his initial incision before cutting a smile toward the other side.
“An ambulance!” I screamed. “We need an ambulance!”
Phil looked up at me, confused, as the bright blood flowed between his fingers and over his hand.
Devin handed me a bar towel and I pressed it to Phil’s throat, placed my hands tightly on either side.
“Shit,” he said.
“Don’t speak, Phil.”
“Shit,” he said again.
Twin pearls of defeat were imprinted in his eyes as if he’d been expecting this since he was born, as if you come out of a womb with a winner’s luck or a loser’s and he’d always known he’d find himself on the floor of a bar some night, the stench of stale beer soaked in rubber tile all around him, his throat cut.
He tried to smile and tears spilled from the corners of his eyes, slid across his temples, and were lost in his dark hair.
“Phil,” I said, “you’re going to be okay.”
“I know,” he said.
And died.
39
Gerry had run down to the cellar and crossed into the building next door, let himself out the back door as he’d done the night he’d shot Angie. He hopped into his Grand Torino in the alley behind the bar and drove toward Crescent Avenue.
A cruiser almost collided with him as he shot out the alley onto Crescent, and by the time he squealed onto Dorchester Avenue, four police cars were in pursuit.
Two more cruisers and an FBI Lincoln came down the Avenue and formed a blockade by the corner with Harborview Street as Gerry’s car slid along the ice toward them.
Gerry spun the wheel at the Ryan Playground and drove straight up entrance stairs so slick with ice they might as well have been a ramp.
He fishtailed in the center of the playground as the cops and the Feds were getting out of their cars and aiming their weapons and then he popped the trunk and pulled his hostages out.
One was a twenty-one-year-old woman named Danielle Rawson, who’d been missing from her parents’ house in Reading since this morning. The other hostage was her two-year-old son, Campbell.
When Gerry pulled Danielle out of the trunk, there was a twelve-gauge attached to her head by electrical tape.
He strapped Campbell to his back using the backpack Danielle had been wearing when he kidnapped them.
Both of them had been drugged and only Danielle came
to as Gerry wrapped his finger around the shotgun trigger and doused himself and Danielle in gasoline, then poured a circle of it around the three of them in the ice. Then Gerry asked for me.
I was still in the bar.
I was kneeling over Phil’s body, weeping into his chest.
I hadn’t cried since I was sixteen years old, and my tears flooded out in waves as I knelt by my oldest friend’s body and felt sheared, in strips, of anything I’d ever known by which to define myself or my world.
“Phil,” I said and buried my head in his chest.
“He’s asking for you,” Devin said.
I looked up at him and felt removed from everything and everyone.
I noticed a fresh swath of blood on Phil’s shirt, where my head had been, and remembered that Gerry had cut me.
“Who?” I said.
“Glynn,” Oscar said. “He’s trapped in the playground. With hostages.”
“You got sharpshooters?”
“Yes,” Devin said.
I shrugged. “So shoot him.”
“Can’t do it.” Devin handed me a towel for my cheek.
Then Oscar told me about the baby strapped to Glynn’s back and the shotgun taped to the mother’s head and the gasoline.
It didn’t seem real to me, though.
“He killed Phil,” I said.
Devin grasped my arm roughly and pulled me to my feet.
“Yes, Patrick, he did. And now he might kill two more people. Care to help us prevent that?”
“Yeah,” I said, and my voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded dead. “Sure.”
They followed me out to my car as I shrugged on the bulletproof vest they gave me and put a fresh clip in my Beretta. Bolton joined us on the avenue.
“He’s surrounded,” he said. “Boxed in.”
I felt as numb as I’ve ever felt, as if I’d been cored clean of emotions as swiftly as you’d core an apple.
“Be quick,” Oscar said. “You got five minutes or he maims a hostage.”
I nodded, pulled my shirt and jacket on over the vest as we reached my car.