Brothers and Bones (49 page)

Lippincott turned toward Jessica. “You wouldn’t—” But of course she would, and he could see it on her face. He looked at me with eyes more insane than Bonz’s could have been on his worst day. “Who the fuck do you think you are, Charlie? Who the fuck do you think you are, to try to take me down? I was appointed by the president of the United fucking States.”

“I’m a federal prosecutor, hired by
you
, appointed by the attorney general of the United States. Or at least I was. Now I guess I’m just a relatively honest citizen. Something you haven’t been for a long, long time.”

Lippincott closed his eyes and roughly dragged both his hands through his hair. He stayed like that, a fistful of fashionably graying hair in each hand, for a full minute. I figured he’d open his eyes eventually. I didn’t know what to expect when he did. Here was a man unused to failure. A man at the top of his profession. A pillar of the Boston legal community. And he would soon lose everything. So maybe he was wondering what more he had to lose by pulling his gun and shooting me, and maybe Jessica. I slipped my hand into the pocket of my jacket, where my own gun was, and tried to determine by feel whether the safety was engaged. It occurred to me that I probably should have done that earlier.

Then Lippincott opened his eyes. He took a deep breath. He smoothed down the hair he had ruffled. He tugged at his tie, tightening the knot at his throat. He threw back his shoulders. He pulled his shirt cuffs, making them perfectly even.

“I’ll beat this,” he said. “You watch, Charlie. I’ll beat this. Sure, I made a mistake, but that was a long time ago.”

“Your ‘mistake’ was having your autistic son murdered to save you some money.”

“That was a long time ago. I’ve done a lot of good since then. Swept a lot of filth off the streets. Everyone will know that. They’ll remember that. I’ll beat this,” he repeated.

He turned and started to walk away. I expected him to keep walking into the fog, but instead he sat down on a nearby headstone.

“I’ll beat this,” he said a final time, though it wasn’t clear whom he was trying to convince. Then he looked off into the void.

I slipped my arm around Jessica. I could tell she was okay now, so my thoughts turned to Bonz. He was out in that white nothing, maybe dead, hopefully still alive. And even if he was still breathing, he had several Mafia killers hunting for him. I looked at my watch. It was 12:24. The police would get there soon. Bonz had warned them that if they came early, I’d disappear. They wanted me badly enough, I thought, to heed that warning. So that should put them six minutes away. Would they arrive in time to save Bonz? Was he even still capable of being saved, or was he already dead?

I watched the fog, which only seemed to be growing thicker. I listened for something, anything telling me Bonz was still alive.

Then I heard a grunt. At least, I thought I did. Then what sounded like a silenced gunshot from nearby. Then the squawk of a radio. Apparently, Siracuse had thought to send his men out in radio communication with each other. I hadn’t expected that. I heard another radio squawk followed by a pained cry, which was abruptly cut short. That had to be Bonz out there. The question, however, was whether he was the one who had felt that pain, or inflicted it.

Moments sneaked by on silent feet as Jessica and I stood waiting. Waiting for Bonz to walk out of the fog. Waiting for the cops to ride in and save the day. Maybe waiting for Siracuse’s men, having killed Bonz, to finish the job by eliminating Jessica and me.

I decided the time had come to determine definitively whether my handgun’s safety was off.

And then I heard the soft scrape of a shoe on pavement. I turned and saw a figure materialize out of the nothingness that surrounded us. It was maybe twenty feet away and walking toward us with slow steps, too far away to be more than a hazy shape.

“Bonz?” I called.

“It’s me.” It was Bonz’s voice, sounding flat in the dense air.

The relief I felt surprised me. I hadn’t known the man for long, and he was possibly one of the least likable people I’ve ever spent time with, but we’d walked through fire together—well, Bonz had walked through it, carrying me, I guess—and I had wanted him to get through this even more than I realized.

“I got four of them,” he said as he approached. “Not sure if that’s—”

Bonz grunted suddenly and fell down at nearly the same instant I heard the soft exhalation of a silenced weapon. Bonz had been shot. Goddamn it, he’d been shot right in front of me. I raised my handgun and started toward him. Jessica grabbed my arm.

“Charlie, please, don’t!”

“I have to!”

“But you don’t—look!”

I turned as another shape appeared in the mist, moving fast toward Bonz’s fallen figure with a slight limp. Grossi! I raised my gun.

Suddenly, the unmoving mass that was Bonz moved, rolling quickly, scrambling behind a headstone. Grossi immediately dove behind a big above-ground sarcophagus. Then his gun made a spitting sound and I heard a ricochet off stone. Bonz fired back, without a silencer, the shot sounding like a cannon after all the stealth and silenced gunshots.

From where we stood, Bonz’s and Grossi’s actions looked like they were taking place on the other side of an opaque shower curtain. They each fired a few more times. They moved from one grave marker to another, from marble cross to granite headstone, angling for a better position.

And I stood by impotently clutching my gun. “I have to help him,” I said.

“You can’t, Charlie. You go out there you could be shot.”

Jessica dropped to her knees and pulled insistently on my arm. Without taking my eyes off Bonz’s and Grossi’s figures in the mist, I knelt beside her. With all the headstones between us and them, getting hit by a stray bullet where we knelt was unlikely.

The shadowy figures moved through the fog, sometimes drifting far enough away that they faded to nothingness, then drifting back again, indistinct shapes in the grayness around them.

“Jess,” I said, “please, let me—”

She interrupted me. “At this point, you can’t even tell who’s who. You might shoot your friend.”

She was right. I felt so helpless. I looked at my watch. It was 12:27. Where were the cops when you needed them?

Then I realized that the shooting had stopped. I stared out into the fog. I’d lost sight of them. I squinted.
There
. A shape detaching from a solid, square shape—a man moving from behind a headstone. Suddenly, another figure flashed from out of nowhere, slamming into the other. They both went down. I heard animal grunts, growls, snarls, vicious sounds, like two wolves at each other’s throats. Then the two rose up from the ground as one, the hazy mass changing shape as, no doubt, the grappling men thrust with arm, leg, fist, elbow.

“Damn it, Jess, I’m going out there,” I said.

“Charlie, please don’t! So many times over the last couple of days I thought I lost you for good and it nearly killed me. I can’t let it happen now. I won’t.”

I looked into her pleading eyes.

“Let him go.” It was Lippincott. He still sat on that headstone, watching the men fight in the fog as if he was sitting in the orchestra section of a Broadway theater watching a play unfold on stage.

I turned to look at the gray shadows locked in combat. They broke free of each other’s grasp. There was a pause, an unspoken, brief truce. Perhaps they were staring into each other’s eyes, gauging how much fight was left in the other. I wondered how much longer Bonz could go on, as he seemed to have a bullet in him somewhere.

I rose to my feet with Jessica holding my arm.

“Bonz,” I called. “I’ve got my gun. I’m coming over there.”

“Stay away, Charlie. Grossi’s dangerous.” Bonz was breathing hard.

“I’ll shoot him from here then. Which one are you? Right or left?”

“No, thanks,” Bonz said. “My fight.”

I couldn’t tell which figure had spoken. They were only a few feet apart. If I was going to take a shot, I’d have to get a lot closer, both to see which figure to aim at, and to have any chance of hitting my intended target.

“I mean it, Charlie,” Bonz called between raspy breaths. “Stay out of this.”

“Listen to him,” Jessica said to me. “Please.”

“Shoot them both,” Lippincott said.

I pounded the fist of my free hand against my forehead.

Suddenly, as if a silent signal passed between them, the ghostly figures in the fog flew at each other, arms and legs in violent motion. Grunts of exertion, grunts of pain. Labored breathing. Muffled curses. As they battled, I couldn’t help but recall their savage hand-to-hand clash in Sal Barrone’s office, the one in which Bonz seemed overmatched before a fortuitous stumble over an unconscious wiseguy lying on the floor gave him the opening he needed to sink his teeth into Grossi’s ear. Incredible as it seemed to me—having seen Bonz in action before—until that lucky stumble, he’d been losing. And now he was out there with Grossi, having already taken a bullet, having already engaged and defeated four Mafia killers, trying to get the upper hand on a younger, bigger, stronger foe. I barely breathed through the long seconds that passed as they fought on.

Then, suddenly, a raspy, guttural cry cut through the fog, a terrible sound, ripped painfully from deep inside one of them.

Someone was killing someone. Maybe they were each killing each other.

I heard a radio squawk from somewhere behind me and feared that another of Siracuse’s men was still out there, unaccounted for, looking to help Grossi. My hand gripped my gun more tightly. I saw several flashlight beams slicing through the thick fog from different directions, taking different paths to our location. Cops. Had to be the cops.

“Over here!” I called. “It’s Charlie Beckham. I’m over here. Hurry!”

The footsteps quickened. The beams of light bounced as the policemen ran toward us.

I looked back toward Bonz and Grossi. The figures had melted into one again. That terrible groan-growl had stopped, replaced by a weak, ragged, broken wheezing. It faltered, stuttered, then stopped altogether. Then it rose one last time, more torn, more terrible than before, a final, desperate cry, snapped off into silence by a wet thump, like a cantaloupe laid open by a heavy, blunt instrument. I closed my eyes.

The ghost figures separated, one falling to the cemetery ground, the other slowly standing erect.

I held my breath.

The upright figure began to drift toward us through the gray fog, moving slowly, bobbing slightly up and down as it came. Nothing but a shape still, a shade, a shadow sliding between the headstones. As it came closer, it grew more distinct, the fuzzy outlines sharpening. I could hear the figure’s heavy, tired breathing. It came slowly, stumbling with every step. No…not stumbling. Limping. I could see something hanging from the figure’s hand now. A hammer. Oh, God.

I raised the gun. I was going to put a bullet through Grossi’s throat.

The footsteps pounding the pavement behind me were getting close. Beams of light played off a headstone nearby, off Jessica, off a granite cross to my left, off my handgun.

“Drop it!” someone yelled behind me.

Grossi was just ten feet away, limping toward me through the fog.

“I said drop your weapon!” that same someone yelled.

I raised my gun to Grossi’s neck level and tensed my finger on the trigger.

“Drop it now, goddamn it!”

If I pulled the trigger, with several police service revolvers aimed at me, I was as good as dead.

Fuck it. I wasn’t going to let Bonz die unavenged. The instant I fired something slammed into my back. A split second later I heard the reports of the cops’ guns as I landed on my face on the cold, damp graveyard grass.

FIFTY-TWO

There are a lot of things I love about Jessica. One of the things I’ve come to love the most is her athleticism, how her slim, graceful body carries a hidden, physical strength, a surprising quickness. It was that strength and quickness that allowed her to knock me to the ground as the cops fired at me, before any of their bullets could find their mark. As soon as I hit the ground I was covered by police officers—disarming, holding, pinning, cuffing. I never even saw how close my bullet came to Bonz—because it was Bonz, not Grossi, who limped out of the cemetery fog that day. Grossi’s bullet had hit him in the side of his knee, pulverizing bone and ripping ligaments. Even with that game leg, he’d beaten Grossi. The hammer he carried out of the void he’d wrested from Grossi’s grip during the fight and had used to end the sadistic killer’s life with a not-so-gentle touch of poetic justice.

If Lippincott had ever had that eerie sixth sense that both the lawyers who opposed him in court and those who worked for him often attributed to him—that uncanny, legendary clairvoyance—the supernatural ability deserted him in the cemetery that day eight months ago. He’s not going to “beat this,” as he predicted. He’s not going to slither his way out of the dark, black hole he’d made of his life. He’s not going to be remembered for the good he claimed to have done in his career. He’ll be remembered as a killer of his own child, a corrupt public servant who betrayed the people’s trust, a man whose professional legacy is the rat’s nest of potentially illegal convictions he left behind, which will have appeals clogging the court dockets for years to come.

As I promised him, the tapes hit the city and word spread with almost cruel swiftness about what he’d done all those years, about all the criminals he sent to jail while employing or knowingly condoning illegal methods, about him hiring someone to murder his autistic son. Thorough investigation into his many convictions raised enough questions, exposed enough previously unnoticed irregularities, to warrant reopening cases. Confidential informants surfaced, facts fell into place. Lippincott knew I was ready to testify against him, as were Jessica and Bonz. Undoubtedly, other witnesses would come forward over time, looking to cut deals—for example, wiseguys who had been on Siracuse’s payroll, arrested on unrelated charges, who at one time had followed Siracuse’s orders and helped Lippincott’s prosecutions by doing nasty things like threatening or eliminating witnesses or planting evidence.