Chapter Thirty-Nine

BY THE TIME Susan and I arrived on the doorstep of Shauna Bulger’s two-story brick house in Manchester-by-the-Sea, the sun was falling, reflecting as red orbs in front windows lined with pots of yellow flowers. Every curtain was drawn, every light off. My truck was nowhere to be seen—probably in the garage. I wasn’t surprised. Whoever the men in the woods had been, they were after Shauna, and I could no longer believe the older woman didn’t know anything about the danger she was in. She was obviously pretending she wasn’t home in case they came looking for her here. I had to knock four times to raise her. She finally answered, carrying what I assumed was a big gun by her side, hidden behind the door. I could see the weight of it dragging at her shoulder.

“You’ve got some explaining to do,” I said. Shauna looked us over—the front of Susan’s shirt soaked in blood from her nose, both of us dirty and scratched up from scrambling through the woods. She backed up, pulled open the door, and let us in.

I wheeled on her immediately.

“What in the name of—” I barked.

“You guys want a drink?” she asked. “I was just about to have one.”

“I’ll have one,” Susan said. I turned on her now. She made a soothing gesture and mouthed “Chill out” as Shauna headed for the kitchen.

I watched Shauna put the shotgun on the island benchtop. She pulled a bottle of scotch from a cupboard. The strange sensation struck me that I was looking at someone I didn’t know, a stranger residing in the body of my friend. She was wearing jeans, boots, and a black leather jacket. Her close-cropped silver hair and cold, empty eyes contained a sort of war-weariness that didn’t make sense to me. It was as though the Shauna I’d known until yesterday had gone off into another universe and come back scarred and possessed.

“Who’s the woman in the bag?” I asked, the question seeming absurd as it left my lips.

“She was a junkie,” Shauna said as she handed Susan a scotch, then poured one for herself. “A drug peddler of some sort. She and a man named Pooney broke into my house two nights ago. They wanted the contents of Mark’s safe.”

I looked at Susan, who was sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, her chin in her palm, listening to the words like she was listening to a bartender tell a wandering joke as he served cocktails in a fancy restaurant.

“I killed the woman,” Shauna continued, wincing as the scotch hit her throat. “Then I went after her boss.”

Shauna told us about the night of the break-in, the safe she hadn’t even known about the existence of, and her eventual reprisal against Norman Driver. I stood in the middle of the kitchen and tried to imagine it, Shauna leaning on the hood of the car she had borrowed from me, firing potshots into the house and truck of the head of Driver Construction Services while he crawled across the floor of his home to safety. When she trailed off, I could hear the distant waves and boat lines clanging in the nearby harbor. I waited for a punch line. There wasn’t one. This was really happening; my old friend had dragged me and my girlfriend into a deadly game of tit-for-tat with what sounded like a seasoned killer. I put my head in my hands.

“Who is Norman Driver?” Susan asked. “You said the people who broke into your house were druggies. Is Driver a drug dealer?”

“I think he may be the biggest drug dealer this side of Boston,” Shauna said, nodding. “This afternoon I took a little drive-by of all of his current construction projects. He has a total of eleven houses between here and Ipswich having asbestos exterior cladding removed and replaced. That’s a lot of properties that are completely inaccessible to anyone but his crews for days at a time. Great opportunity to get up to no good, and to keep your whole operation mobile.”

“So not only did you use my car to go and shoot up Driver’s house last night,” I said. “You also went and drove it past every single employee he has working for him. Did you make sure you waved out the window as you went by? I should have given you my business cards to hand out.”

“Bill.” Susan made that placating gesture again.

“I don’t know why you’re being so calm, Susan,” I said carefully, fighting the urge to scream. “Whoever this Norman Driver is, he has men working for him who are insane enough to think that putting an FBI agent and a cop in the ground is no big deal. You saw them. Those were experienced killers. And this is their boss we’re talking about. We have no idea what Driver’s capable of, and now we’re in a war with this guy!”

“I know exactly what Norman Driver’s capable of,” Shauna said. “I’ve seen his handiwork.” Shauna told Susan and me about the contents of Mark’s safe. About what had happened to Georgette Winter-Lee. “Norman Driver is somebody who deserves to be taught a little lesson. And don’t worry. I’m not asking you to do it. I’m going to do it myself.”

“Oh, fantastic!” I wailed, the fury finally escaping. “Well, I suppose I should thank you for doing me and the whole world such a generous service. Thank you so much, Shauna. This is just great!”

“There is no reason for you to get involved.” Shauna shrugged. “I’m handling things just fine on my own. Mark taught me some stuff over the years. You think a Boston police chief’s wife would be completely incapable of defending herself? I don’t need you, Bill.”

“Good for you, Shauna, but this guy knows our names,” I said. “He knows my car. His people just tried to kill us. We don’t have a choice but to be involved. You’ve involved us!”

“Your truck will be fine. I’m leaving it in the garage and swapping into the Honda we keep here,” Shauna said. She waved dismissively toward the garage. “I hope you don’t mind that I swapped out the batteries.”

“Shauna!”

“I’ll be sure to let Driver know you mean him no harm,” Shauna said. “Next time I chat with him.”

“Next time you chat with him?”

Susan grabbed my arm and led me into the den. I shrugged her off me, harder than I meant to, and felt angrier still that I’d been forced into this position, blocked on all sides by a cage of loyalty and fear.

“Bill, listen—”

“No, you listen,” I said. I took a long breath. “This isn’t OK. Look at her. Look at what she’s doing. Look at what she’s done to us.” I pointed to a mirror above the fireplace. Susan glanced at her battered and bruised reflection. “Most people, when they decide to have a late-life crisis, they buy a convertible. They book a cruise. They don’t decide to go toe-to-toe with a murderous criminal overlord.”

“You’re right,” Susan said. “They don’t. So it’s pretty clear that that’s not what this is, Bill. This isn’t a late-life crisis. It’s something far more dangerous.”

Susan sat on the corner of a couch near me. She took one of my hands, smoothed my knuckles with her fingers.

“I was married to a dangerous man for ten years,” Susan said.

The little hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Susan so rarely talked about her ex. All my senses were immediately on high alert, mentally recording, searching, decoding. Because I loved her, and I knew there was hurt and suffering there, something she carried around with her at all times, day and night. The opportunity to ease, or at least understand, that suffering awakened me. I watched her playing with my fingers, her voice soft, her mind elsewhere.

“It’s a lifestyle,” she said. “It’s not something you pick up and put down. The danger is there in every interaction you have with him, from handing him his plate of breakfast in the morning to rolling over in bed beside him at night. You train yourself to be quiet. Compliant. Submissive. You monitor him constantly, taking his temperature, looking for clues to upcoming threats. For me, I was the object of my husband’s violence. But Shauna, she could only guess who her husband was turning his violence on every day.”

In the kitchen, I heard Shauna pottering around, rinsing the glasses in the sink.

“She must have known who he really was,” Susan said. “From what you told me about Mark and Shauna on the drive to Boston, there was too much money around in this woman’s life for her to believe Mark was legit. I’ve met plenty of wives of mobsters in my time at the bureau. There would have been too many secret phone calls and messages. Too many meetings with nefarious characters. Too many nights when she woke up and found all the lights in the house on and him nowhere to be found. I can’t imagine how exhausting that would be, pretending you don’t know you’re married to a monster. And Shauna did it for what? Five decades?”

“But how does all that explain this?” I whispered, gesturing toward the kitchen. “Mark’s dead. The danger is gone. She’s free now.”

“Yeah.” Susan nodded knowingly. “And so is her rage. She has so much rage now for what she endured, and nobody to take it out on. Well, until Norman Driver came along and volunteered himself.”

My phone bleeped in my pocket. I took it out, glanced at the message from Angelica without really taking it in.

Man here, possible new guest. Shall I assume responsibility for the transaction?

“Do you have that?” I asked Susan.

“What?”

“A whole bunch of pent-up rage at what your ex put you through, and no one to direct it toward.”

She smirked. “Oh, probably. I’m probably headed for a late-life crisis myself. But I’ll make sure I take the vacation cruise route and not the criminal overlord route, just to save your hair going any whiter than it already is.”

“It’s going white?” I stroked my temple.

“Let’s get back in there,” she said, nodding toward the door.

“Look,” I began as I marched back into the semidark kitchen. “Shauna, Susan, let’s just take a minute here. We’ll make a plan, and—”

I stopped talking as soon as I realized the kitchen was empty. Two glasses were sitting draining on the edge of the sink.

Shauna and the gun were gone.