House Revenge (11 page)

16

A cheap briefcase in his right hand—the briefcase and its contents courtesy of Sean Callahan—DeMarco entered the Lansdowne Pub. The Lansdowne is directly across a narrow street from Fenway, about the same distance the pitcher's mound is from home plate. The place was jam-packed with boisterous Red Sox fans, most of them already drunk even though the game wouldn't start for another two hours.

The Lansdowne is the quintessential Irish pub with a long dark bar, cone-shaped stained glass lamps over the bar, Jameson Whiskey and Guinness signs on the walls. DeMarco knew from prior visits that the wood forming the shelves behind the bar had been imported directly from Ireland. For some reason he'd never understood, there was an elaborate mahogany-and-glass bookcase on one wall filled with old tomes and various other knickknacks. Sitting near the bookcase, alone at a table for four, was Delray drinking a draft beer. As full as the place was, it seemed as if there was an invisible barrier surrounding Delray's table; even Boston's most aggressive drunks sensed that Delray wasn't a guy whose space you wanted to invade.

Delray was dressed in khaki-colored Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless white T-shirt; crudely drawn blue-ink prison tats were visible on his upper arms. Maybe the prison tats were another reason the Lansdowne's patrons decided it wouldn't be smart to jostle Delray's table and spill the beer he was drinking. As always, Delray's Ray-Bans covered his eyes.

DeMarco took a seat across from him and said, “You couldn't think of a quieter place for this meeting?”

“I'm going to the game. I've never seen a game at Fenway before and I wanted to see one there before they tear it down and build another stadium.”

“If you don't have a ticket already, it's going to cost you a fortune to buy one.”

“I know a guy,” Delray said.

That figured.

“Everything all set?” DeMarco asked.

“Yeah, just like you wanted. Provided you got the money.”

DeMarco offered him the briefcase and Delray took it from him. “I didn't think we'd be meeting in a place like this,” DeMarco said. “You might want to find someplace safe to put that briefcase before you go to the game.”

Delray flashed one of his rare smiles. “You think somebody might try to take it from me, DeMarco?”

DeMarco ignored the rhetorical question. “How long will it take to get the goods?”

“We already got 'em. When you called yesterday and said you had the money, Al didn't think you'd stiff him, so he paid the guy to deliver what you wanted. They're in a rented storage unit in Greenfield.”

“Can anyone trace who rented the storage unit?”

“Don't worry about that,” Delray said. Meaning: don't try to teach your daddy to suck eggs.

“And they're in a big crate like I told you?” DeMarco said.

“Yeah. And the guy tossed a couple sandbags into the box to add weight. It'll take two men to move it.”

“Good. And Providence is ready for the call?”

“Yeah. Stop worrying. Al's taken care of everything.”

At that moment a lanky black kid, tall enough to play in the NBA, walked over to the table where Delray and DeMarco were sitting. “You Delray?” he asked Delray.

“Yeah.”

The kid handed him an envelope. “Two tickets, two rows up, halfway between the plate and first base.”

“Thanks, and tell your boss thanks,” Delray said.

The kid walked away and DeMarco said, “Two tickets?” He was half hoping Delray might invite him to join him. And the location of those tickets . . . Hell,
movie stars
would have a hard time getting those seats in Fenway. Delray would probably be seated right behind Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

“When do you want to meet with the McNultys?” DeMarco asked.

“How 'bout tomorrow around three? I'll call their bar first to make sure they're there. So you pick me up at my hotel at two thirty and after the meet, you can drop me off at Logan.”

DeMarco had been reduced to playing chauffeur in this little drama. “Where are you staying?” he asked.

“The Ritz-Carlton, near the Common.”

You gotta be shitting me!
was DeMarco's reaction. A room at the Ritz was probably six hundred bucks a night. How much did Castiglia pay this guy?

“Now it's time for you to go,” Delray said.

“What?” DeMarco said. He'd been distracted by a woman coming toward Delray's table. She was at least six feet tall in sandals and was wearing shorts displaying coffee-colored legs that seemed to go on forever. Two large unrestrained breasts were moving beneath a thin white tank top. She had the body of a Vegas showgirl or an NFL cheerleader—and every drunk in the Lansdowne Pub had his eyes glued to her.

“Hey, baby,” she said to Delray in a voice coated with sugar. DeMarco stood up and said, “I was just leaving.” Neither Delray nor the woman acknowledged him.

When DeMarco picked up Delray the next day he suspected Delray was in an excellent mood, having spent the night with a long-stemmed beauty. But with Delray it was impossible to tell since the man had the emotional range of cork. When DeMarco asked, “How was the game?” Delray just grunted. But it sounded like a positive grunt. They drove to Revere without speaking and DeMarco stopped half a block from the McNulty brothers' tavern.

DeMarco noticed the neon sign saying
THE SHAMROCK
was on the ground, leaning against the side of the tavern, and two guys in a cherry picker were in the process of putting up a new sign that said
M
c
NULTY'S
. The Shamrock—or McNulty's—was getting a makeover.

Delray opened the passenger-side door and left the car without a word to DeMarco.

Delray walked into the bar and stopped so his eyes could adjust to the dim light. There were two old boozehounds at one end of the bar bickering about politics. He heard one of them say, “I'm telling you, that fuckin' Obama—” Then he stopped abruptly when he saw Delray—or Delray's complexion. Delray didn't care; he hadn't voted for Obama.

At the other end of the bar was a hefty female bartender with frizzy red hair talking to an old lady who was drinking beer and wearing a black stocking cap even though it was almost a hundred degrees outside. The McNultys were sitting at a table—DeMarco had described them accurately—and as Delray got closer he could see they were looking at furniture in a bar supply catalog. They looked up when they saw Delray standing there looking down at them and one of them said, “What the hell do you want?”

“I'm the guy who called earlier. Like I told you on the phone, Soriano's got a job for you,” Delray said. “And you speak to me that way again, I'll knock your teeth out.”

Thanks to the influence of their late parents, the McNulty brothers hated every race and religion on earth, whites and Catholics sometimes, but not always, being the exception. As their mother and father sat in front of the television, smoking and drinking beer—they went through a case of beer almost every night—Roy and Ray learned about the duplicitous natures of niggers and spics and chinks and kikes and ragheads. White people who had money were disparaged because they'd been born with a silver spoon stuck up their ass, and priests were all faggots, according to Mom and Dad.

So they didn't like Delray before he opened his mouth. They didn't know if he was black—it was hard to tell—but he was something other than white. Maybe a dark-skinned wop—maybe his ancestors had been Sicilians screwed by Moorish invaders—or maybe he was a spic or possibly even an Arab. Nah, he wouldn't be an Arab. No way would Soriano have anything to do with a Muslim; Soriano may have been a degenerate criminal but he was a patriot.

And when the guy said he was going to knock out Roy's teeth, their initial reaction was to jump up and pound the shit out of him. But then—and simultaneously—they realized that this guy was likely to whip them both and, on top of that, was probably packing a gun.

“Sorry,” Ray said. “Didn't realize you were Soriano's guy. You want a beer?”

“No,” Delray said. “I want to finish my business with you and get out of this dump.”

“Hey!” Roy said, but Ray placed a restraining hand on his brother's forearm. Roy could really be an idiot at times.

“Well, maybe it's a dump now,” Ray said. “But as you can see we're fixing it up.”

“Yeah, it'll be the next Studio 54 when you're done,” Delray said.

Ray didn't know what Studio 54 was. Some fancy bar in Providence?

“There's a crate in a storage unit in Greenfield,” Delray said. “Soriano said you have a van, which you'll need to transport it. And the crate's heavy. It'll take two guys to move it but you won't need a forklift or anything like that. So you pick up the crate tomorrow and deliver it to Soriano in Providence.”

“How much?”

“Two grand.”

Ray did the math: Two hours to Greenfield, maybe half an hour to pick up the crate, two hours to Providence from Greenfield, then an hour from Providence back to Boston. Five and a half hours of driving for two grand.

“What's in the crate? Cigarettes?” Ray asked.

“Guns.”

“Whoa!” Roy said. “You can do major time for guns.”

Delray didn't respond.

“Why'd Soriano send you to us?” Ray said, now not so certain two grand was worth the risk.

“Because this thing came up fast. The guy with the guns called Soriano yesterday, said he needed to unload 'em to pay a lawyer, and he gave Soriano a good price. I just happened to be here in Boston on some other business, but I'm not driving a truck or a van, so Soriano told me to come see you. He said he's used you before.”

“Two grand seems kind of low, considering the risk,” Ray said.

“Hey, if you're not interested, I don't give a shit. I'm not going to sit here and dicker with you. You want the job or not?”

“How do we know Soriano sent you?” Roy said. “You could be FBI, for all we know.”

Delray made a noise that might have been a laugh. “Do I look like FBI to you? Anyway, call Soriano if you want to be sure. You have his number.”

Ray took a cell phone from his pocket and said, “I'll do that. What's your name?”

“You don't need my name. Just describe me to Soriano”—and then Delray removed his sunglasses.

When the McNultys saw his pure-white right eye, Ray just raised his eyebrows, but Roy said, “Jesus.” Then he added, “Uh, sorry.”

Delray put the glasses back over his eyes.

Ray punched a number into his phone and after a couple of rings, he said, “Mr. Soriano? It's Ray McNulty. There's a guy here in our bar, kind of a, a dark-skinned guy with one eye that's sort of, uh, fucked up. Anyway, he said you sent him.”

Ray listened as Soriano talked, Soriano basically saying the same thing as the guy with the eye had said, how this deal came up just yesterday and he needed someone with a van to go to Greenfield right away.

“Why didn't you just call us?” Ray said.

“Because, unless you're an idiot,” Soriano said, “you don't talk about shit like this on a phone.”

“Two seems a little low,” Ray said. He listened for another minute, then smiled. “Okay,” Ray said and disconnected the call. To Delray, he said, “Soriano said we get twenty-five hundred.”

Delray said, “That's between you and Soriano. He'll pay you when he's got the merchandise.”

Ray started to say something but Delray cut him off. “Has Soriano ever stiffed you before?”

“No,” Ray said.

“All right then,” Delray said. “You just make sure those guns make it to Providence by tomorrow night. They don't make it, if you decide to find your own buyer . . . Believe me, you don't want me coming back here again.”

“Hey!” Roy said, insulted that this nigger—or whatever he was—would say something like that to them. But before he could do anything, his brother pressed down on his forearm again, like yanking on a dog's collar.

Delray dropped a yellow Post-it sticker on the table. “That's the name of the storage place, the unit the crate's in, and the combination for the lock on the door.”

Delray took one last look around the bar, shook his head, and left.

After Delray had passed through the door, Roy said to his brother, “We should have kicked his ass, talking to us like that.”

“Yeah, we should have,” Ray said. But Roy could tell that he didn't mean it. “The good news is we can use the money. Sean may be picking up the cost of the remodel but a little extra cash would be good, especially now that he isn't paying us to get that old lady out of that building.”

“I wonder how she's doing,” Roy said.

“Who gives a shit? She was a pain in the ass. Hey, Doreen, how 'bout bringing us a couple of beers?”

“Get your own damn beer,” Doreen said.

“I just hope Greg doesn't make it back here anytime soon,” Roy said.

“How's he gonna get back?” Ray said. “By now, he already drank the money we gave him.”

The McNultys had given Greg Canyon, the bum who helped them with Elinore Dobbs, a hundred bucks, and two hours after Elinore was injured Roy put him on a bus with a one-way ticket to New York. They told him not to come back to Boston for a month, but they figured they might never see him again. Since Canyon spent every dime he panhandled on booze, he might not ever earn enough to afford a ticket back. The only problem was that Canyon had been raised in Boston and he didn't know anyplace else so it was possible he might make the effort to return. But then, so what if he did? The McNultys knew the cops were trying to find Canyon because cops had stopped by places near their bar that sold cheap booze looking for him, but it wasn't like he was number one on the FBI's Most Wanted list.

For an alkie, Canyon was actually a fairly bright guy. He'd even gone to college before he became a full-time drunk and lost everything he owned. The McNultys had used him a few times when he came around the bar looking for a handout and they had some shitty job that ­Doreen was too lazy to do, like cleaning the restrooms the time the sewer backed up.