Brothers and Bones (36 page)

Big Frank was sitting with his back to the wall with a thug to either side of him. The thugs looked to be eating pasta while their boss had restricted himself to a huge salad. Bonz stopped at their table. Big Frank looked up with irritation, the wiseguys looked up in surprise, and Bonz grabbed one of the goons’ shoulders and pulled back hard, tipping the chair over onto its back. The guy’s head smacked off the hard black-and-white tile floor. A waiter dropped a tray. Somebody screamed. Bonz stepped over the fallen thug, right up to D’Amico, and put his gun to the man’s temple. The goon who was still seated reached into his jacket.

“Do it and I blow his fucking head off.”

Somebody screamed again. The goon hesitated, then pulled his hand out of his jacket. Bonz kicked back with his foot without looking, catching the guy on the ground square in the ribs, and said, “Go for your gun and your boss dies, understand?” No reply. “Answer me.” He kicked again and the guy grunted affirmatively.

Bonz kept his gun pressed against D’Amico’s head and looked at the guy sitting just inside the door. He was young, clearly short on experience, and looked as if he might have soiled himself, or was seriously thinking about doing so.

“You pull your piece, Big Frank here loses his head. You move from that chair, Big Frank loses his head. Got it?”

The kid by the door nodded. If D’Amico lived through this, I doubted any of his bodyguards here would do so for very long after tonight.

Bonz looked down at Big Frank. So did I. His bald head was sweating like mad. He looked like he probably sweated a lot under the best of conditions, as he was a good sixty pounds overweight, and these definitely weren’t the best of conditions. He had a gun to his head, a gun held by a scar-faced madman with wild, merciless eyes and blood-covered lips. Big Frank had to be scared shitless. If he was, though, he wasn’t showing it, other than by sweating enough for half a dozen sumo wrestlers.

“You know who the fuck I am?” D’Amico said.

“Yeah,” Bonz replied, “that’s why we’re here, you dumb shit.”

“If you know who I am, you know this is suicide.”

“And if you know who we are, and I think you probably do, Frank, then you know we got absolutely nothing to lose. And I mean nothing. So shut the fuck up until I tell you to talk. Now I’m gonna ask you a question and you’re gonna answer it, then I’m gonna let you live.”

Bonz was focused on D’Amico but I sensed that he’d know if any of the bodyguards tried to make a move. Still, I kept shifting my eyes from one to the other—the guy on his back at my feet, the guy across the table from him, the kid by the door. The sirens reached their crescendo not far away, then fell silent. They’d reached Sal’s place.

Bonz kept his gun pressed hard against D’Amico’s head as he leaned down slowly, his lips not far from Big Frank’s ear. He said, very quietly, so quietly that I’m sure I was the only other person in the room to hear, “I’m doing it this way, Frank, so no one knows what I’m asking. That way, Uncle Carmen won’t be able to blame you for anything, see?”

“Fuck you,” D’Amico said.

Bonz ignored that and said, still very quietly, “Here’s what I need to know…there’s an audiotape that Uncle Carmen wants to get his hands on, one that scares the shit out of him, and he killed a reporter over it thirteen years ago, and he’s got all his spare guys out looking for us because of it right now.”

D’Amico said nothing.

“I know that you know all this. What I want to know now is what’s on that tape. What’s Uncle Carmen so fucking afraid of?”

D’Amico said nothing.

“You know what’s on the tape, don’t you, Frank? Uncle Carmen loves you like a brother they say, trusts you with his life. So I think you know what’s on the tape and I think—no, I fucking
know
—that you’re gonna tell us.”

Big Frank remained silent and motionless, but something must have shown in his eyes, something I didn’t see. But Bonz saw it. He smiled. “You do know,” he said. “I thought so. Spit it out, Frank, and right fucking now, or that dumb-faced fuck sitting next to you will be pulling pieces of your brain and skull from his hair for a week.”

“I’ll say it again, fuck you.”

“Bad move,” Bonz said, but he said it loudly, his head snapping around, and I realized he wasn’t talking to D’Amico, but to the kid by the door, who had drawn his gun and was pointing it our way. Bonz aimed and fired at the same instant the kid did. The kid’s face registered surprise, then profound sadness, then nothing. He slumped in his chair, staring. Somebody screamed yet again. Might have been me.

I caught movement out of the corner or my eye and looked down to see the guy on the floor reach into his jacket and come out with a gun. Without thinking, I kicked him in the ear and his gun popped out of his hand. Bonz swept the gun a few feet away with his foot, then glanced up at me in mild surprise. Then he looked at the guard still seated, who hadn’t moved, and said, “Smart boy. Why don’t you drop your gun and kick it over to me, just so we don’t have any more accidents?”

The guy sneered but did as he was told, slowly taking the gun out from under his jacket and dropping it on the floor. He kicked it and it slid under the table to Bonz, who kicked it away.

A gurgling sound drew our attention back to D’Amico, who had a ragged hole in his neck, from which blood was pouring, running over his starched white shirt.

“Shit,” Bonz said. “Fucking kid hit Frank. That really cranks the heat up on this whole situation.”

My heart stopped for an instant. “They’re going to think you and I killed Big Frank.”

“Yeah, and Uncle Carmen’s not gonna like that.”

I found I was shaking. So was D’Amico. He was burbling and shaking, his eyes wide and panicked, his hands at his throat, blood rushing through his fingers.

“Can you talk, Frank?” Bonz asked.

“F-f-fuh-fuh…”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck me. Now look at me, you dumb shit. Calm down. Can you talk?”

D’Amico looked up at Bonz and nodded. “Y-y-yuh.”

“Okay then. You’re gonna die, you know that, right? Frank? You hear me? You realize you’re dying, don’t you?”

Big Frank hesitated, then nodded. He looked like he was going to cry. I thought I might throw up.

“Look, Frank,” Bonz said, “you got nothing to lose now. You might as well tell us what we want to know.”

D’Amico gurgled but said nothing.

“Frank,” Bonz pressed, “you got just a few more minutes in this world. You can go out a good guy or a bad guy. In other words, you can tell us what we want to know and we’ll use that information do something good, or you can die in silence and go to hell. Your choice.”

D’Amico looked up at Bonz. “H-h-hell.”

Bonz sighed. More sirens sounded from outside now, closer than before.

“Okay, let’s try something else,” Bonz said, apparently realizing that Big Frank, in his final few seconds of life, wasn’t going to choose a different path than he’d walked for the first fifty-odd years of it. “You listening, Frank? ’Cause here’s the thing. You can spend your last few seconds on earth in relative peace, bleeding to death, beyond pain, slipping quietly away, or I can fill those seconds with blinding pain. I can shoot you in the balls. I can take your spoon there and dig out one of your eyes. I can think of a lot of other shit, too, Frank, shit they did to me thirteen years ago, shit you probably knew all about, maybe talked with Uncle Carmen about from time to time, got a few laughs out of. You know what they did to me, Frank, I know you do. And I can do it to you, while you’re waiting, while you’re praying, to die. Don’t go out like that, Frank. Go out peacefully.”

D’Amico was staring up at Bonz in horror.

“Look into my eyes, Frank. I’ll do it. You know what Uncle Carmen put me through. I can’t duplicate it on you, seeing as I don’t have two weeks here, but I swear to God I’ll show you the highlights. Now what’s on that tape?”

D’Amico hesitated and Bonz sighed again. He plucked a spoon from the table and went for D’Amico’s left eye.

“N-n-no!” Big Frank said, his voice wet. “T-t-talkkk…pl-pleeeez.”

“What’s on the tape, Frank?”

“M-mi-k-k…kellll…kellllll….”

“What are you saying?”

“K-kid…K-k-kidddd…”

“What’s that?”

“K-k-k-id…kidddd….” Then he gasped. A final breath rattled raggedly from his throat. His hands dropped into his lap. Bonz dropped the spoon onto the table. He looked down at the goon sitting in his chair, staring uncomprehendingly at his boss, then down at the guy on his back on the floor, who looked dazed from the shoe I put in his ear.

“Don’t do anything stupid while we walk out of here, okay, fellas?”

They said nothing. We hurried toward the door. As we did, I said to the room, to no one in particular, “He shot in self-defense.” I pointed to the dead kid in the corner. “That guy shot first, shot Big Frank D’Amico, and we, I mean, he—” I meant Bonz, of course “—he shot back in self-defense. You all saw it.”

They were cringing. The mother and father each hugged one of their children. Couples clutched each other. They watched us leave in horror. I realized I’d be figuring prominently in countless nightmares in a dozen different heads for years to come.

As sirens screamed close by, Bonz and I walked out of the restaurant and into our own nightmare, worse than any of the people back there could imagine.

THIRTY-NINE

“Shit,” I said as we hurried through the narrow streets of the North End, past open, aromatic doorways, past pedestrians strolling the scenic neighborhood—until they stopped and stared at us in open-mouthed surprise. “Shit, shit, shit,” I repeated.

“Yeah,” Bonz said, “that didn’t go well.”

“Really? You think?” The casualties were piling up in our wake—Big Frank dead, his young bodyguard dead, Grossi missing half an ear, the guy I kicked in the head, seven or eight wiseguys at Sal’s restaurant with knots on the backs of their skulls. Bonz and I weren’t making any friends lately.

I must have looked as panicked as I felt, because Bonz said, “Settle down, Charlie. At least we got something from Big Frank.”

“We did?”

I thought about it. What had he said just as he died? It sounded like he’d said “Michael.” And “Kid” a couple of times. Was it possible? No, surely not. Maybe he was referring to the kid Bonz had shot, his bodyguard, maybe his name was Michael, and he said his name, then referred to him as the “kid.” But I wasn’t so sure. Having been shot himself in the exchange, he probably didn’t even realize the kid had been hit. So I asked myself again whether it was possible. Could Big Frank have been saying “Michael Kidder?” Was First Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Kidder, Andrew Lippincott’s right-hand man, somehow involved with Carmen Siracuse? It was a long shot, but…but was it really? The idea should have stunned me but, for some reason, it didn’t. I guess I’d never thought much of Kidder. Now, with the possibility of a connection between him and a Mafia don, I thought even less of him. Come to think of it, I remembered Jessica saying that she wasn’t sure her father ever truly trusted Kidder, either. Maybe there was something there, something Lippincott knew but couldn’t prove.

“I’m pretty sure I gave him that limp, too, you know,” Bonz said.

“Who?”

“That piece of shit Grossi. I think I gave him that limp when I escaped that day.”

I looked over and saw Bonz with a beer in one hand and a white cloth napkin in the other. He must have taken them from one of the tables as we left the restaurant, while I was justifying our actions to the patrons. He handed them to me as we walked, then took off his suede jacket. Then he grabbed the beer from me and poured it over the bullet wound on his bicep without a hint of a wince. He took the napkin and folded it, making it as long as possible, and handed it back to me. We stopped and I tied the bandage in place. He slipped his coat back on, drained the rest of the beer, and dropped the bottle into a trash can we passed.

“That fucker,” he said.

“Which fucker?”

“Grossi.”

I didn’t like the look I saw in his eyes at all, a forty-sixty split between intensity and insanity. Maybe thirty-seventy. “Bonz?”

“Yeah?”

“You losing it?”

“Fuck you. No, I’m not losing it. Just thinking about being face-to-ugly-face with Grossi again, after all these years, after all he did to me. Wish I’d had the time to snap his fucking neck.”

I was relieved when we left the North End behind, but only slightly. We hit Congress Street, walked north for a couple of blocks, then cut up a side street to Cambridge Street. We were walking quickly, without a specific destination, knowing only that we had to get far from the North End. Not that we expected the rest of the city to be much less dangerous for us. We walked as casually as we could, trying not to attract the attention of the occasional cop, who we could see here and there, or the occasional mob guy, who we didn’t see—and wouldn’t until it was too late. As we moved, changing directions, staying off main streets, I thought about where we were in our dual investigations, which wasn’t far along.

I still thought Jake had probably hidden the tape in Saint John’s church in Belmont, though I couldn’t for the life of me imagine where he’d put it, and my mental slideshow wasn’t telling me anything. The text and history of the prayers we’d researched and which I’d recited dozens of times until the words seemed to lose all meaning to me weren’t revealing any answers, either. We had done a little more, but just a little, in our second line of investigation—figuring out what was on the tape. All we knew was that it might—just
might—
have something to do with Michael Kidder. And that’s when I decided what we should do. It was bold, yes, and probably stupid. But I saw no other options at the moment. I told Bonz my idea, and he thought I was right, that it was risky and stupid, but not too risky or stupid to give it a shot.

And that’s how we ended up in Louisburg Square, the most expensive block in Beacon Hill, which in turn is the most expensive neighborhood in Boston. Louisburg Square is a smallish rectangle of grass and trees surrounded on three sides by brownstones that each sell for millions. Now and then, a senator or successful author buys one of these places for a few million, then spends another million or two renovating it, making it just perfect, even though the previous occupant had done the same thing, making it just perfect for him or her. Usually, though, when you buy a place in Louisburg Square, you do so because it already has more charm than any place you’ve ever seen.