Дэвид Гейтс - The Blue Mirror

“McGill’s got no reason to think our clients are about to testify against him,” Andy put in, “and we wouldn’t want to give him one, but that’s the lawyer in me talking.”

“Makes our situation a little ticklish,” Quinn observed.

He didn’t actually seem that bothered by it. I figured his way would be to jam McGill up and take whatever came next.

Kitty thought the same, apparently. “You know, Max, a full frontal assault might be counterproductive,” she commented.

“Shortest distance between two points,” he said. “You got your Polish grandfather on the one hand, and you got Chip McGill on the other. I’d sooner take McGill off the board.”

“So would I,” Andy said. “I know we’ve got an obligation to those kids, Kitty, they’re our clients, but if Chip McGill is trying to muscle Papá Stan, I vote we ask him about it.”

“Ask?” Quinn didn’t sound too thrilled.

“Feel him out, I mean,” Andy said. “If he’s got legitimate concerns, we put his mind at rest.”

It sounded a little too much like a euphemism for me. Andy seemed to be giving Quinn the go-ahead to lean on McGill.

“Your grandfather went to Jack, remember. He didn’t come to you,” Kitty said. “Maybe he doesn’t want us involved.”

Quinn gave her a sleepy glance.

“Well?” Andy was looking at me. “What do you say to that, Jack? You want to fly solo?”

“Give me a day, maybe,” I said.

“Max?” Andy asked him.

“No problem,” Quinn said.

“Watch your step,” Kitty Dwyer said to me.

Did she mean with Max or McGill? I wondered.

“You’ll keep us in the loop?” Andy asked.

“Of course,” I said.

Kitty walked me out, leaving Quinn and Andy together. She could have wanted a minute alone with me, and she seemed to be making up her mind whether or not to tell me something. We were out on the landing at the top of the stairs when she spoke up.

“It might be personal,” she said.

“You mean, nothing to do with one of the law firm’s cases?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Andy have any skeletons in his closet?”

“I’m not the one to ask,” she said, which only suggested to me that she was.

“If you think of something, will you give me a call?”

“I was thinking I’d call you anyway,” she said, smiling.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but I was all too aware of her eyes on my back as I went down to the street.

~ * ~

I’d parked over by India Wharf. I was walking back along the waterfront toward my car when I passed an espresso bar with an outside deck and decided to get a cup of coffee. I went in and ordered a latte and took it out onto the deck, where I could sip it and look at the harbor.

It was Indian summer, late October, when the nights are crisp but during the day it can be almost balmy. The sky was nearly cloudless, and sunlight glanced off the oily water. Herring gulls swooped for floating trash and fought over it when they got something. A container ship moved down the channel, headed out toward the bay. It might be going up the coast to the Maritimes or south through the Cape Cod Canal to New York or the mouth of the Chesapeake.

There is a romance to ships, to cast off on a voyage and leave the land behind. The sea is a different place, with different rules, where the hopes and vanities of men have small effect. The kinds of problems I dealt with in my line of work usually boiled down to basic, base motivations. Envy. Lust. Greed. They might seem like primal forces of nature to the people they took possession of, but if you balanced them against the brute power of the North Atlantic, they stood for nothing.

It helped to put things in a healthier perspective. I thought about Stanley in the belly of a bomber, where life could be measured in moments, the flak and the German fighters, the odds against survival. I finished my coffee and turned away from the briny smell of the harbor, the moving water slopping at the pilings, and went inside to use the pay phone.

I called a cop I knew downtown. Frank Dugan owed me a favor, and I was lucky enough to catch him at his desk. There was an open case file on the Disciples, he told me, going back a few years.

“They’re a pretty strong presence, the Springfield-Hartford corridor, out in the Berkshires, too,” Dugan said. “A while back DEA and the state cops ran an operation against them, shut down a lot of their traffic, busted some cookers, but the gang bounced back. That’s the trouble with speed. Doesn’t take much to set up a lab once you figure a way to mask the odors.”

“What about the recipe?”

Ingredients weren’t that hard to come by, he explained.

“Basic pharmaceutical supplies, ephedrine, phenylacetone, hydrochloric acid. Thing to look out for, it’s dangerous, cooking meth. You’re working with volatile materials, you can blow yourself up. And then there’s the fumes. That’s a giveaway, the smell of acetone and ammonia, like nail polish or cat urine, plus you got your toxic slurry, four or five pounds of waste for each pound of product. Two ways to go. You stake out an industrial area with a lot of smudge and smut, or you go out in the boonies where the neighbors don’t complain.”

“So it’s messy, and it stinks, and it’s an explosive mix,” I said. “Which makes it sound perfect for a crew of sociopathic losers like these outlaw bikers.”

I could hear Dugan sucking on his teeth. “Far be it from me to step on your toes, Jack, but the Disciples are a seriously mean outfit. How’d you fasten onto this?”

“Guy name of Chip McGill, over in Charlestown,” I told him. “I heard they were his new source for product.”

There was an even longer silence this time around.

I waited him out.

“You sure know how to pick ‘em,” he said at last. “You’re headed for a long walk off a short pier, you fish that water.”

“Care to give me a little more detail?”

“Okay. Chip McGill’s the type, he’s burning the candle at both ends. He’s a loose cannon, and sooner or later the Bunker Hill boys are going to take him out. I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t already turned up in the trunk of a parked car out in the long-term lot at Logan.”

Long-term parking at the airport was a favored method of putting a dead body on ice. It did double duty. First, the crime scene was stale by the time Homicide got to it, but there was a secondary benefit. A corpse left unattended swells with fluids and eventually bursts and putrefies. Nobody wants his family to see him like that. So it was an object lesson.

“Anyway, your little pal there, this McGill, he’s a bad apple, take my word for it,” Dugan went on. “He’s got a sheet going back to juvie, he’s done time for distribution, he’s been pulled in on assault, conspiracy, murder. Whether it stuck to him or not, we’re talking mainline hood here. He’s been on the radar a while. Major Crimes wants him bad “

“I don’t know as that’s really my lookout, Frank,” I said. “I just don’t want to accidentally stumble into a rat’s nest.”

“You will be, you try to put the arm on this chump.”

“Far as I know, McGill is in the background,” I said, “part of the scenery.”

“I think you’re horsing me around, but I guess it’s not for me to say,” he remarked. “My advice would be to walk away”

“I’m not out to bust the guy’s chops. All I want is a quiet word.”

“Chip McGill is a nut job, and a speed freak on top of it,” Dugan said. “Give him an excuse, he’ll whack you out.”

“Well, that’s not very encouraging,” I said.

“It’s not supposed to be. The point is, all you have to do is wait about six months, and he won’t be a problem.”