Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“Grace didn’t know that and Mae’s too young to understand.”

“What can I say, Patrick? Bad day for Kev, good day for me. Oh fucking well.”

I sighed. Trying to talk social conventions and concepts of morality to Bubba is like trying to explain cholesterol to a Big Mac.

“Is Nelson still watching Grace?” I said.

“Like a hawk.”

“Until all this is over, Bubba, he can’t take his eyes off her.”

“Don’t think he wants to. I think he’s falling in love with the woman.”

I almost shuddered. “So what’re Kevin and Jack doing?”

“Packing. Looks like they’re taking a trip.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. We’ll find out.”

I could hear a slightly deflated edge in his voice.

“Hey, Bubba.”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for looking out for Grace and Mae.”

His tone lightened. “Anytime. You’d do the same for me.”

Probably a bit more delicately, but…

“Of course,” I said. “Should you maybe lay low a while?”

“Why?”

“Kevin might come back at you.”

He laughed. “So fucking what?” He snorted. “Kevin.”

“What about Jack? He’ll probably have to save face, whack you for banging up one of his men.”

Bubba sighed. “Jack is all bullshit, Patrick. That’s something you never got. He’s made his bones, he’s dangerous, sure, but only to people who’re vulnerable. Not to someone like me. He knows to take me out he’d have to use fucking humungous amounts of manpower and be ready for an all-out war if he misses me. He’s like…when I served in Beirut, they gave us rifles with no bullets. That’s Jack. He’s a rifle with no bullets. And I’m this deranged Shiite Muslim motherfucker driving a truck full of bombs around his embassy. I’m death. And Jack’s too pussy to fuck with death. I mean, this is the guy who got his first taste of power running EEPA.”

“Eepa?” I said.

“E-E-P-A. The Edward Everett Protection Association. The neighborhood vigilante group. ’Member? Back in the seventies?”

“Vaguely.”

“Shit, yeah. They were all good citizens, all geared up to protect their neighborhood from niggers and spics and people who looked at ’em funny. Hell, they rousted me twice. Your old man gave me an ass-whupping, boy, that—”

“My old man?”

“Yeah. Seems funny now, looking back on it. Hell, the whole group only lasted maybe six months, but they made punks like me pay when we got caught, I’ll give ’em that.”

“When was this?” I said as some of it came back to me a bit—the meetings in my father’s living room, the sound of loud, self-righteous voices and ice clinking in glasses and hollow threats delivered in reference to the car thieves and B&E operators and graffiti artists of the neighborhood.

“I don’t know.” Bubba yawned. “I was stealing hubcaps back then, so I was probably just out of the crib. We were maybe, like, eleven or twelve. Probably seventy-four or-five. Right around busing, yeah.”

“And my father and Jack Rouse…”

“Were the leaders. And then there was, like, lemme see—Paul Burns and Terry Climstich and some small guy always wore a tie, didn’t live in the neighborhood long, and like, oh yeah, two women. I’ll never forget it—they bust me clipping caps off Paul Burns’s car and they’re putting the boots to me, no big deal, but I look up and I see two chicks doing it. I mean, Christ.”

“Who were the women?” I said. “Bubba?”

“Emma Hurlihy and Diedre Rider. You believe that? A couple of chicks kicking my ass. Crazy world. Huh?”

“Gotta go, Bubba. Call you soon. Okay?”

I hung up and dialed Bolton.

28

“What did these people do?” Angie said.

We were standing over her coffee table with Bolton, Devin, Oscar, Erdham, and Fields, all of us staring down at copies of a photo Fields had acquired by waking the editor of The Dorchester Community Sun, a local weekly that had been covering the neighborhoods since 1962.

The photo was from a puff piece done on neighborhood watch groups the week of June 12, 1974. Under the headline NEIGHBORS WHO CARE, the article gushed about the daring exploits of the EEPA, as well as the Adams Corner Neighborhood Watch in Neponset, the Savin Hill Community League, the Field’s Corner Citizens Against Crime, and the Ashmont Civic Pride Protectors.

My father was quoted in the third column: “I’m a fireman, and one thing firemen know is that you have to stop a fire in the low floors, before it gets out of control.”

“Your old man had a feel for the sound bite,” Oscar said. “Even back then.”

“It was one of his favorite sayings. He’d had years of practice with it.”

Fields had blown up the photo of the EEPA members and there they stood on the basketball court of the Ryan Playground, trying to look mean and friendly at the same time.

My father and Jack Rouse were kneeling at the center of the group, on either side of an EEPA sign with shamrocks in the upper corners. They both looked like they were posing for football cards, as if emulating the stance of defensive linemen, fists dug into the ground, opposite hands holding up the sign.

Behind them stood a very young Stan Timpson, the only person wearing a tie, followed from left to right by Diedre Rider, Emma Hurlihy, Paul Burns, and Terry Climstich.

“What’s this?” I said and pointed at a tiny bar of black to the right of the photo.

“The photographer’s name,” Fields said.

“Can we magnify it somehow, get a look at it?”

“I’m ahead of you, Mr. Kenzie.”

We turned and looked at him.

“Diandra Warren took that photograph.”

She looked like death.

Her skin was the color of white formica and the clothes hanging to her skeletal frame were besieged by wrinkles.

“Tell me about the Edward Everett Protection Association, Diandra. Please,” I said.

“The what?” She stared at me with bleary eyes. As she stood before me, I felt I was looking at someone I’d known in youth but hadn’t seen in several decades, only to discover that time had not only worn her down, but had laid waste to her without mercy.

I placed the photograph on the bar in front of her.

“Your husband, my father, Jack Rouse, Emma Hurlihy, Diedre Rider.”