The Burning Soul

the window, and the device would follow.

‘What’s the delay on it?’ Ryan had asked, causing Dempsey to pause.

‘Where did you learn about delays?’

‘Same place I learned about everything else – from television.’

‘Five or six seconds.’

‘It’s not much. You’d better not trip or wait for the light once it’s set.’

‘I wasn’t planning on helping anyone across the road.’

Even through the rain-spattered windshield, Ryan could see Oweny Farrell’s big head from where they sat. He recognized some of the others as well. There were a couple of women too. He hoped they would leave to go to the bathroom before Dempsey started walking. It might make what was to come easier to live with.

‘You just start the engine as soon as I get out,’ said Dempsey. ‘Be prepared for the blast, let it come, then move. Don’t look at it, and don’t stare once it’s happened. You won’t want to see the aftermath, and I don’t want you freezing.’

‘I understand, Martin.’

‘Okay.’

Dempsey picked up the box and the brick, resting them in the crook of his arm. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt under his coat, and he raised the hood to hide his face as he left the car. Ryan was about to wish him good luck, then didn’t. One of the girls in the bar was laughing, her mouth wide and her head thrown back. She was pretty, and not in the hard way of most of the women who hung around with Oweny and his boys. There was a pale fragility to her features. Her hair was very dark. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. In most bars in Boston, they’d have asked for ID and given her the bum’s rush, but not there, not in Oweny’s place.

He saw Dempsey lift the edge of the shoebox to arm the device as he stepped into the cold night air. Most of the box was wrapped in tape, but Dempsey had left one corner torn and unsealed so that he could easily access the fuse that would ignite the detonating agent. Dempsey started toward the bar, his fingers poised over the gap in the box, and then there were lights in Ryan’s rearview mirror, and he heard sirens, and Dempsey was walking quickly back to the car, the device still in his arms, the brick discarded on the street. Ryan started the engine, and they pulled out behind a beverage truck just as the first of the patrol cars screeched to a halt outside the bar, more coming behind it, and the big black van of the SWAT team in the middle of them all like the queen bug among its subjects.

‘Man,’ said Ryan. ‘This is bad. This is so bad.’

‘Just drive. They’re not looking for us. They couldn’t have known.’

Ryan just kept going straight until they hit the rotary by the water. There he turned left, past the statue of Farragut, past the Francis Murphy ice skating rink. It was only when they reached the empty Castle Island parking lot that Ryan realized he had brought them to a dead end. He swore and began to reverse awkwardly, but Dempsey calmed him down.

‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Take a breath. We’re okay.’

Ryan did as he was told. He breathed deeply once, twice. He felt the monster twitch in the box at Dempsey’s feet. Perhaps Dempsey felt it too, because he opened the car door and walked to the edge of the lot, then tossed the box into the water. They drove back to the rotary and took First Street out of Southie.

‘Why were they there?’ asked Ryan. ‘Why did they come?’

But they didn’t get the answer until later, when Dempsey took the call from Tommy and learned that Joey Tuna was dead.

III

When we creak your step,

when we crack your glass,

when we tap, tap, tap,

that is a bone

that is all we have

though we are very shiny,

and filled with beetles.

We are made entirely of bone.

from The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

by Danielle Pafunda

18

Randall Haight felt the difference in the house as soon as he returned from the store, as though a charge of static electricity held by the carpets and fabrics had been voided. He stood in the hallway, a paper bag cradled in his left arm, the coldness of the ice cream inside making itself felt through the fabric of his sweater. He had chocolate as well, and soda, and cinnamon candies. She liked the smell of all of them, and they had a calming effect on her; quite the opposite of most children, he thought, but then she was so very different from other children.

The trip into town had already provided him with one unsettling experience. He had seen Valerie Kore on the street, accompanied by a man whom he didn’t recognize but who, by his size and stance, he believed to be a policeman of some kind. Mrs. Kendall, who worked part-time at the drugstore, was talking to her, her right hand resting on Valerie’s shoulder, her face close to the younger woman’s as she offered what Randall assumed were words of hope and consolation. Then Danny, the weird but decent kid who ran the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop, came out and gave Valerie a white paper bag loaded up with pastries and muffins, and something inside her broke at this small, unexpected gesture and she had to walk away, the cop trailing in her wake. Randall watched her go, and tried to pin down his feelings at the sight of her. Sadness. Empathy.

Guilt?

The cop had caught him looking at her. Randall hadn’t overreacted, though. He’d just smiled sadly, because that was what he believed a regular person would have done, a normal person. He was an actor inhabiting a role, and he inhabited it well, but as soon as she was gone from his sight he pushed her from his mind. Instead, he found himself looking at the faces of those whom he passed even as he exchanged friendly greetings with them, and peered in the windows of the businesses on Main Street, waiting to see if someone might look back, their eyes lingering a little too long on his, betraying themselves to him.

Which one of you is it? Which one of you knows, or thinks you know?

But there were no answers to be found, no suspicions to be confirmed, and he had driven back to his house in silence, wondering if the mailman had come yet, fearing what he might find in his box. To his relief, there were only bills, and his subscriber’s copy of National Geographic. No photographs, no films, no images of naked children, and he tried to make himself believe that it might be over even as he acknowledged this as just a brief respite.

Now, safe once again inside his home, Randall sensed an unaccustomed emptiness, an absence. He moved from bedroom to bedroom, checking closets and under beds. He looked in the master bathroom and the guest bathroom, the latter of which had never been used. Finally, he went to the basement and stood in front of the door. She liked the basement; it was dark, and cool. Sometimes he heard her singing to herself down there. When he was angry or working he’d tell her to be quiet, but she never listened. She sang jingles from the TV, and old pop songs that he’d almost forgotten existed, and ditties that she’d make up herself, tuneless rhymes that got inside his head