Chapter Twelve

THE CONFRONTATION WITH Henry Bulger at the house in Needham brought a tension into my neck that lingered all the way through the rest of the wake and into Boston. I carried it through two pubs and into a third—Durty Nelly’s, the Black Rose, and Biddy Early’s. No amount of stretching or rubbing the muscle would ease it.

For some officers of the Boston PD, my murky involvement in my partner’s rip-off of a drug dealer, and his spectacular death from a high-rise building in the company of yet another drug dealer, was a passing and forgivable curiosity, trumped by pity over my wife’s death. I was granted leave to stand at the edge of small groups of men I’d once known well while surface-level conversations played out. There was shop talk that flew right over my head—policy and management changes I hadn’t kept up with since I left, bitching about hopeless young rookies I’d never meet. I felt stressed and tired and excluded, staring at colorful lanterns behind the cluttered bar and the old dark wood finishing of the poky little bar by the water.

Nick wasn’t helping my stress levels: still obsessed with his phone and too jumpy for my liking. Around midnight I was starting to reach my limit with the sidelong glances I was getting from certain former colleagues of mine. Boston had a long history of cops bending and twisting the law, and the man of the hour, Mark Bulger, had certainly outshone me in that department. But for others, it was an opportunity for a bit of teasing.

I was squeezing past a group of men playing darts when a guy I’d known in the academy but whose name I couldn’t remember reached out from the huddle he was in and grabbed my arm.

“Next round’s on you, huh, Robinson?” He grinned. The guys standing around him, none of whom I recognized, had eyes bright with mean-spirited intrigue.

“Is it?” I asked.

“Sure,” the guy said. “You can afford it, right? What with all your extracurricular activities over the past few years.”

“Oh yeah? And what activities were those?” I asked, turned square to him. The huddle of men stepped back, anticipating a swing, maybe a shove, something to light up their evening. Around us men were singing and spilling beer on the peanut shells on the floor and yelling at the Red Sox game playing on a set behind the bar. The muscle in my neck was taut as a wire. The guy sized me up and seemed to lose interest in the idea of a fight.

“You—you know—you’ve been running a hotel or whatever it is you do now.” The guy swirled his beer dismissively at me. “Forget about it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s hope I just forget about it.”

At the bar, I pulled out my phone and saw Susan was already calling me. Synchronicity. I slipped through a door into the alleyway and stood looking up at the gold lights of apartment blocks reaching for the sky.

“I know exactly where you are,” I said in answering.

“Oh yeah?” she said. I could hear the smile in her voice. “Tell me.”

“You’re in that bed of ours,” I said. “Only, you’re on my side because you like the smell of my pillow. You got all the blankets piled up. Even the gray one from the cupboard. Soon you’ll get too hot and dump them all on the floor. You got your book, laptop, glass of wine. Bag of chips. You started in on the book but you got bored and Netflix lured you away, so instead you’ve been watching bad reality TV shows.”

She laughed. I pictured her in the attic room we’d renovated together, the one with the round window looking out to the sea. The window had been boarded up when we moved in, Siobhan and I. Breaking it open had been a big step for me. Lying there that first night with Susan, and not with my wife, had felt less like a betrayal than I’d imagined. There was a rightness and an easiness to being around Susan, a security, the kind a boat feels when its anchor hooks on to a big, steady rock.

“I tried. I really tried.” I heard the thunk of her tossing the book onto the nightstand. “I want to be literary but I’m just not. I’m on page 200 and nobody’s dead.”

“No grisly injuries, even?”

“Not so much as a stubbed toe.”

“Might as well be reading a gardening manual.”

“How’s the crowd? Have they sung ‘Body of an American’ yet?”

“Only fifty-six times.”

“And Nick?” she asked.

“The guy’s still worrying me.” I looked through the bar’s windows. Nick was leaning against a pillar, pretending to listen to a woman who was jabbering at him animatedly, and waving a Budweiser around. There was no mistaking it—my best buddy was a good-looking man. Women got sucked into his presence, clung to him sometimes like lint on an old mohair cardigan, particularly in bars. He looked like he worked out for three hours a day every day—because he actually did—and the scars and the soulful eyes did all the right things to drunk ladies searching for a fixer-upper. But this woman was getting nowhere with him. She gave up and walked away.

“I’m watching him right now completely ignore the third woman tonight who’s tried to get eye contact with him,” I told Susan.

“Maybe he needs to see somebody,” she said.

“You’re telling me. He hasn’t had a proper girlfriend in all the time I’ve known him.”

“No, I mean a better psychologist,” Susan said. “Somebody big-city. Nobody in Gloucester has the resources to deal with what happened to him.”

“It might help if we had any idea at all what that actually was,” I said. I left a pause for her to fill with information, but all I got was a gentle sigh.

“Come on,” I said. “I know you used your contacts at the Bureau to screen everybody in the house before you moved in. You must know Nick’s story.”

“I know he served. I don’t know what went so wrong over there.”

“So look it up,” I said.

“You say that very casually,” Susan said. Her words were getting short, clipped, defensive. “But it’s not a casual thing to do. My departure from the Bureau was problematic. And I have my own reasons for not going further into that. But Bill: I only looked up everybody in the house because I wanted to protect myself. It was wrong, and I won’t be doing it again. I can’t just fish around in someone’s past for my own entertainment.”

“It wouldn’t be for your own entertainment,” I said. “It’s to help him. Nick’s on the edge. He thinks people are coming for him. If we knew who these people are and why he thinks that, maybe—”

“No, I’m not doing it,” Susan said. “I love you but I’m not doing it. Nick will be OK. With some help from a professional. I promise you, he will be OK.”

I didn’t have a chance to respond. The door to the bar beside me burst open and a guy flew out so hard he hit the street between two parked cars and rolled twice. A taxi that was cruising for patrons had to swerve to avoid hitting him. Nick came storming out after the guy, his fists balled and murder in his eyes.