Chapter Twenty-Seven

NONE OF THIS Bulger thing made sense, and that worried Norman Driver. He stood in his kitchen, setting out the objects he needed to prepare his dinner, relishing the simplicity and orderliness of the task. Cutting board. Knife. Potatoes. Steak. His phone was propped against the edge of the window that looked out onto the lush driveway lined with sunset-lit trees. On the phone’s screen, he watched two of his men, Chiat and Fuller, live-streaming themselves to him as they drove along a highway toward the Canadian border.

Driver toyed with the idea that Pooney had been telling the truth. That he and Marris had broken into Mark Bulger’s house, beaten up the widow, and that she’d turned around and blown Marris’s head off with a 12 gauge. Pooney said he’d hightailed it through a bathroom window after the lady was distracted by a knock at the front door. It all seemed credible. Crazy but credible. There were enough fine details—the bathroom window, the type of shotgun used—for Driver to believe Poon. But he’d checked the story out and there had been no calls to police that night, no bodies discovered in or around Needham. Two of his guys had checked out the house and found no crime scene. The woman had indeed been home. She’d even invited a couple of young neighbors inside, and after an hour or so all three had left, apparently calm and cheerful. When Driver’s guys had gone in later, they’d discovered a safe hidden in the floor of the garden shed. It was unlocked, and empty.

So where was Marris? Where was Mark Bulger’s wife? Where was his collection of incriminating evidence?

If Driver could find the evidence, he could relieve himself of a decades-old knot of worry in the back of his mind that one of these days, as Bulger had always threatened, the truth about what Driver had done to Georgette Winter-Lee would rise to the surface. That the glove he’d left behind in her apartment would find its way into a forensic lab somewhere, and Driver’s life would be over.

Driver set aside the potatoes he’d sliced. He checked his phone. Chiat and Fuller were pulling up to the border. Driver heard the truck’s breaks squeal. Chiat’s face, pitted with acne scars, was cast icy white in the beam of the border officer’s flashlight as Fuller rolled down the window. Driver listened while he rubbed spices into his steak.

“Evening, gentlemen.”

“Hey.”

“’Sup.”

“What’s the purpose of your visit to Canada tonight?”

“Just dumping a bunch of construction material.” Fuller sniffed as he dragged his nose across the back of his hand. “We’ll be back through again in a couple of hours.”

“Why do the job in America and dump the materials in Canada?” the officer asked. “That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?”

An itch worked its way up Driver’s spine. He didn’t like nosy customs officers. He washed his hands and listened to Fuller and Chiat describing the long day they’d had, the early start in the morning on a new job, the instructions from their overbearing boss.

Driver could see the officer’s flashlight picking its way around the cabin of the truck. Driver’s back teeth locked together, tension balling in his chest.

“We’re dumping asbestos,” Chiat said. “Nastiest shit on earth. It’s basically cancer in a bag. Landfills get paid by the government to dispose of it. This place we’re goin’ to near Sutton cut a deal, I guess.”

Driver watched the screen as the silence ticked by. He said a silent prayer that the whole notion of why the Canadian government would pay one of their own landfill operators to take US-born asbestos seemed too complicated for the kind of dunderhead who spent all day looking for smuggled fruit and vegetables at a customs checkpoint. For months, Driver’s guys had been crossing back and forth over the border without being glanced at twice. Now this.

“It’s a bit late in the day to be dumping stuff, isn’t it? Couldn’t it wait until morning?”

Don’t ask to take a look,Driver prayed. If this guy decided he wanted to look in the back of the truck, he’d find enough fentanyl to kill an army of elephants.

“Can I take a look?” the guy said.

Driver stabbed the cutting board with his carving knife.

“Go ahead.” Fuller shrugged, as Driver watched on his phone. “It’s your funeral.”

More silence. The officer’s flashlight beam, which had settled on the dashboard, didn’t move.

“OK. You can go on through,” the officer said finally. “Take your ‘cancer in a bag’ with you.”

Driver exhaled in relief. Chiat and Fuller nodded and waved as they drove on through the checkpoint. Driver tugged the tip of the knife from the cutting board and set it aside. After a few moments, the men in the truck looked at each other and started laughing.

“What are you two idiots laughing about?” Driver asked. “You just stared down twenty years in prison.”

“Yeah, right.” Chiat lounged back in his seat. “You wouldn’t let us get all the way to prison, boss.”

“You’d have us snuffed in the first holding cell we ever got to,” Fuller said.

“That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard you two say all day,” Driver said as he started arranging the chunks of potato on a paper-lined tray. “Text me when you’re back through the border.”

Driver hung up. Darkness had fallen outside. His thoughts about getting a border-patrol officer on his payroll competed with the Marris puzzle. He tried to remember if Mark Bulger had a son. If so, perhaps the son had a hand in all this. Or maybe some cop friend of the old man. Driver was so distracted by his problems, he didn’t see the distant light at the end of his driveway that appeared and then immediately snapped out as the cabin light of a car went on and off.

Then the window in front of him exploded.