I pulled the Beretta and thumbed back the hammer.
Goloria whitened and said, “Take it easy, Boyle,” and as he said it his own hand jerked toward the inside of his brown suit.
Boyle said, “I’ll see to your wife and kids, Goloria,” and he turned one gun on Solanis, and that’s when everything blew up at once.
Solanis dropped just as Boyle fired the Python. A strip of oak splintered off the bar and bottles exploded from the shelf.
I saw the movement again from above on the landing, and I looked up. A man stepped out of the shadows and swung a sawed-off in my direction.
I dived, and then there was thunder, and the card table heaved up at my side and seemed to come apart. Something tore away at my cheek. I squeezed the trigger on the nine as I fell, aiming in the direction of the landing, the Beretta jumping in my hand, my knuckles white-hard on the grip. I saw a figure tumble and fall through the smoke of the muzzle and the ejecting shells, and then I saw a man in black twills convulsing at the base of the stairs.
Boyle walked across the room, firing both guns into Goloria, alternating shots from the Python to the. 38. Goloria was covering his face with his hands, and one of his hands was without fingers now, and he was dancing backward, shaking his head furiously like he was coming out of water, fighting for breath. Goloria’s knees buckled and he toppled onto his back, his hands crossed now as if tied at the wrist. The heels of his brown shoes kicked at the floor.
Boyle dropped the. 38, turned toward the bar, and switched the Python to his right hand. He yelled, “He’s coming up, Stefanos!” and Solanis stood straight from behind the bar, the dreamy smile on his face, his eyes wet and black, a. 45 in his hand.
Solanis howled and fired blindly in my direction, the round fragmenting the arm of a wooden chair beside me. Boyle shot Solanis once in the chest. The slug threw him hard against the liquor shelf and the mirror, and Solanis’s back was blown out, his blood and cartilage spraying the mirror. Pieces of the stained mirhe e='3'›Sror shattered and flew off, and Solanis fell to the floor.
Sinatra sang from the box.
Boyle said, “Cover the front door.”
I pointed the Beretta there, keeping both shaking hands on the grip. I looked down at the blood on my shirt. The blood seemed to run from my cheek.
Boyle moved through the gun smoke, his arm extended, the Python at the end of it, and walked behind the bar. He pointed the barrel down at Solanis and clicked off an empty round.
Boyle turned, switched the radio off, and went to Bonanno at the foot of the stairs, kicking the shotgun across the room. He bent at the knees, pressed a finger to Bonanno’s neck, then holstered the Python inside his jacket as he stood. He didn’t bother to check Goloria.
“Dead,” Boyle said. “All of ’em.”
“I took one in the face,” I said.
Boyle rubbed his nose as he walked to my side. I sat on the floor and held the Beretta at the door. Boyle crouched down and looked me over. He put two thick fingers to my cheek, and pulled something away. There was raw pain, and the pain blinded me for a short second, and then it went away. Boyle focused his pinball eyes on the fragment of red poker chip he held in his hand.
“You’ll live,” he said.
I rubbed my cheek and surveyed the ruins. “Jesus Christ, Boyle.”
“You can lower that gun. Martin’s long gone. You better get going too.”
“What are you going to do?”
Boyle said, “Fix it.”
I dropped the Beretta to the hardwood floor. Boyle drew a handkerchief from his jacket and rubbed my prints from the gun as I stood. He moved to Goloria and placed the automatic in the hand that still had fingers, and he wrapped the fingers of that hand around the grip. Then he drew t he Python and the. 38 and walked around the bar to Solanis. Boyle bent down, and when he came back up the guns were no longer in his hands. I knew then what he was going to do. Boyle looked at me with impatience.
“Get going,” he said, turning to put his hand around a bottle of Jack Daniels that stood with a few remaining bottles on the liquor shelf. He undid the cap.
I nodded, said nothing, and walked out the front door. Standing on the porch, I saw a set of headlights pointed in the direction of the Maryland line on Gallatin Street, and I heard the faint wail of sirens. I looked down at the base of the porch. In shadow, Frank Martin’s body lay like a large crumpled bird, the head twisted at an odd angle to the shoulders. A vague black line ran open beneath his chin.
I looked back through the lace curtains of the porch window, to the heavy figure with the bushy gray sideburns heaped at the foot of the stairs. Boyle was standing over Bonanno, the sole of one shoe resting on the dead man’s chest, the bottle of Jack tilted back to his lips. k turns
I stepped off the porch and walked through the trees, toward the lights that burned at the end of the gravel road.
THIRTY
Boyle fixed it.
In the three days that followed, an article ran daily on the front page of the Post ’s Metro section, detailing the violent events that transpired in the house near Fort Totten Park. Every day that week, when I arrived for my shift at the Spot, a newspaper was left for me by Darnell, folded behind the register to the story’s page.
Darnell had not spoken one word on the ride back that night, had never mentioned the name Frank Martin, and he would never speak about any of it again. With Boyle it was the same, though he could not enjoy Darnell’s anonymity. Boyle’s daily entrance at the Spot invariably created a nervous flurry of whispers from the regulars. The papers had made him out to be the city’s premier badass, a Wyatt Earp-style lawman in a town whose initials had come to stand for Dodge City. No one took a stool next to Boyle at the bar again.
By the time of the last article, some basic facts had been embedded in the public’s mind: Two detectives, Boyle and Goloria, had gone into a house without backup and had attempted to arrest a group of low-level bookmakers headed by a man named Bonanno. After the gun battle, in which Bonanno, his cohorts, and Goloria were killed, Boyle came upon evidence, through the notes of a young reporter killed months earlier, linking the group to a series of arsons, which in turn connected them to the reporter’s own murder. The murderer turned out to be a cop killer named Solanis, wanted in several states by the FBI.
As for Goloria, he had died a hero, and he was given a hero’s burial, with separate features on his career in the Post and on the local TV news. His family was the recipient of a full pension, along with several remunerative gifts from local police associations and booster clubs. In one of the pictures that ran in the newspaper, Goloria’s wife and children stood graveside, the veiled wife holding a handkerchief to her grimacing face. Behind her in the picture, posture-straight and stone-faced, her badge clipped to her breast pocket, stood a stoic Detective Wallace.
A card arrived at my apartment a few days later. The envelope was postmarked D.C., without a return address, and the card was plain white. Inside the card was a short note, in handwriting I didn’t recognize. The note read, “Nice work, Stefanos. And thanks.” It was signed, “A Fan.”
I threw away the newspaper clippings on the case shortly thereafter and kept the card.
A couple of weeks passed. February announced itself with a sunny, seventy-degree day. Two days after that a front traveled down from Canada and dropped a foot of snow on the area, and the cold air that hovered above for the next week kept the snow in place. Temperatures inched back up into the forties, and after another week the snow was gone. ‹ ab/p›
On one of those dull gray days in late February, as I was sifting through the mail at the Spot, I opened an envelope addressed to me from Billy Goodrich. Inside the envelope a check had been made out in my name for services rendered.
