Chapter Nineteen

NORMAN DRIVER STOOD with two of his men at his side, his arms folded against the wind and his chin tucked against his flannelette jacket, listening to Pooney, who was staring at the gravel at his feet. Beyond their little pocket of solitude bounded by boat sheds and their trucks, the marina was loud with early morning life. Fishermen were bringing in catches made in the darkness before dawn. There was sawing and grinding coming from the dry dock, and the distant whistle of boats passing the breakwater. Half of Pooney’s face was still dusted by a fine blood mist that looked like brown freckles.

“She-she came out of nowhere with this gun and just-just-just…” Pooney struggled, running his hands through his greasy hair and gripping at his throat as though to wring the words out. “She’s dead. I can’t believe Marris is dead. Aw, boss, we were just trying to do a good thing.”

“Did she tell you where the safe was, in the end?” Driver asked.

“No. I ran, man. I just got the hell out of there.”

“What’s your best guess. Is she alive? You said you kicked her pretty hard.”

“I don’t know. I honestly d-d-don’t know.”

Driver closed his eyes. He’d been angry in his life, plenty of times. Sweating, seething, shakingly mad. Murderously so. But there was a rare kind of fury Driver sometimes felt that was so deep in his core, so dark, it created only stillness and silence as it spread throughout him. Because as he stood there, Pooney before him quivering and quaking and blubbering like a pathetic, emaciated child, Driver’s mind was hopping from one aspect of this disaster to another and never finding an end point.

His secondary drug cook was dead. Her phone was at the crime scene, a phone that almost certainly contained all manner of incriminating messages and calls that directly identified Pooney and Driver and his men, and everything they had been building since they arrived in Gloucester. And nightmare of all nightmares: the safe. If Mark Bulger’s widow had survived the attack, she now knew what Pooney and Marris had been after when they broke into the house. And if she didn’t already know about Mark Bulger’s precious little collection, his private box of secrets, she would soon. And so would the cops who responded to the incident and conducted a search of the house. Driver pinched the bridge of his nose and felt the quiet fury consuming his insides like a fast-acting acid.

“Get down there,” he finally said to the men at his side. “I’ll call ahead and try to get some Boston cops I have on the hook to weasel in on the crime scene. Maybe we can head this off. If we can just get a hold of Marris’s phone, we can protect the business. If we got the contents of the safe, that would be even better. But that might be too much to hope for. See what you can do and keep me updated.”

“What about him?” The guy nearest to Driver pointed at Pooney. Driver just waved the men away, and they turned and went, because they had enough brain cells to rub together to know that a boss like Driver wasn’t someone you stood around questioning. Driver took Pooney by the arm and led him over to Pooney’s pickup truck. A pair of curious seagulls fluttered down and stood on the gravel watching as Driver guided Pooney silently into the driver’s seat.

“Listen, boss,” Pooney said as Driver rummaged in the back of the cluttered, dusty truck. “I was just trying to m-m-make an impression, you know? I was trying to show you how valuable I can be, so that maybe you’d trust me with a bigger stake in the business. When I heard Mark Bulger was dead, I remembered what you told me about h-h-his collection. I thought maybe this was a chance for someone to step up and—”

“See. That’s the problem,” Driver said calmly. “You thought. You heard Bulger was dead and you thought. You made a plan. You made a decision. And that’s never been good for you, Pooney. If you had just told me that the man had died, I might have sent someone capable down there. Someone whose mind isn’t so addled by drugs he can hardly string a sentence together.”

Driver found what he was looking for. He ripped a strip of duct tape from the roll and wound it around Pooney’s hands. The drug cook sat numbly in the driver’s seat as Driver bound his hands to the steering wheel. He was too paralyzed by fear, or too shell-shocked from the night’s events, to conceive of what was happening to him.

“It’s my fault,” Driver said as he bent and jammed the roll of tape under the brake pedal. “When you said you were planning something, I should have known then that there was only trouble on the horizon.”

“Boss,” Pooney pleaded. He was starting to struggle now, the numbness wearing off. “Boss. Boss. Boss. Wait—just—hear me out—just—”

“Don’t worry, Pooney,” Driver said as he rolled down the window. He reached over, put the car into neutral, and let off the hand brake, then leaned back and slammed the driver’s door.

“You don’t have to think any more,” Driver said.

He went to the front of the vehicle, put his hands on the bumper and pushed. The car rolled backward, down the boat ramp, into the icy water, gathering speed as it went. It slid gently under the surface, the freezing waters of the bay swallowing Pooney’s screams as the gulls took flight again.