Dennis Lehane (Editor) - Boston Noir

But I kept looking at the water and kicked up the throttle some more.

It didn’t seem to take too long, and as we motored back to the docks of the Shamrock Fish & Tackle, Mandy turned to me and started talking, about her life in Seattle, about her Roger, and about how she was ready to start a new life now that she had this box. I tried to ignore her chatter as we moved toward the dock, and when I looked up at the small parking lot, I noticed there was an extra vehicle there.

A Packard, parked underneath a street lamp.

As we drew close to the docks, doors to the Packard opened up and two men with hats and topcoats, their hands in their coats, stepped out.

Mandy was still chattering.

I worked the throttle, slipped the engine into neutral, and then reversed. The engine made a clunk-whine noise as I backed out of the narrow channel leading into the docks, and Mandy was jostled. “What the-”

“Hold on,” I snapped, backing away even further. I shifted into neutral again, then forward, and finally sped away. Turning back, I saw the two guys return to the Packard and head out onto L Street. I immediately grabbed my flashlight and switched the engine off. We began drifting in the darkness.

Mandy gaped and asked, “Billy…what the hell is going on?”

“You tell me,” I countered.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Mandy…what’s in the box?”

“I told you,” she said, her voice rising. “Souvenirs! Letters! Photos! Stuff that means so much to me…”

“And the guys in the Packard? Who are they? Friends of Roger who want to giggle over old photos of him in the army?”

“I don’t know what you mean about-”

I pointed the flashlight in her face, flicked it on, startling her. I reached forward, snatched the damp box from her hands, sat back down. The boat rocked, a bit of spray hitting my arm.

“Hey!” she cried out, but now the box was in my lap.

I lowered the flashlight, seeing her face pursed and tight. “Let’s go over a few things,” I said. “You come into my office with a great tale, a great sob story. And you tell me you get hooked up with me because you just happened to run into one of the sleaziest in-the-bag cops on the Boston force, a guy who can afford a pricey vacation home on a New Hampshire lake on a cop’s salary. And right after you leave my office, a sweet girl, far, far away from home, you climb into somebody’s Packard. And now there’s a Packard waiting for you at dockside. Hell of a coincidence, eh? Not to mention the closer we got to shore, the more you blathered at me, like you were trying to distract me.”

She kept quiet, her hands now about her purse, firmly in her lap.

“Anything to say?” My client kept quiet. I held up the box. “What’s in here, Mandy?”

Nothing.

“Mandy?”

I set the box back in my lap, tore away at the tape and damp cardboard, and the top lifted off easy enough. There was damp brown paper in the box, and the sound of smaller boxes moving against each other. I turned the big box over a bit, shone the light in. Little yellow cardboard boxes, about the size of small toothpaste containers, all bundled together. There were scores of them. I shuddered, took a deep breath. I knew what they were.

“Morphine,” I said, looking her hard in the eye. “Morphine syrettes. Your guy…if there was a guy there, he wasn’t training as a radioman. He was training as a medic. And he was stealing this morphine to sell later, once the war was over. Am I right? Who the hell are you, anyway?”

My client said, “What difference does it make? Look, I had a job to do, to get that stuff off that island, easiest way possible, no fuss, no muss, and we did it. Okay? Get me to shore, you’ll get…a finder’s fee, a percentage.”

I shook the box, heard the smaller boxes rattle. “Worth a lot of money, isn’t it?”

She smiled. “You have no idea.”

“But it was stolen. During wartime.”

“So what?” Her voice now revealed a sharpness I hadn’t heard before. “Guys went to war, some got killed, some figured out a way to score, to make some bucks…and the guys I’m with, they figured it was time to look out for themselves, to set something up for later. So there you go. Nice deal all around. Don’t you want part of it, Billy? Huh?”

I shook the box again, fought to keep my voice even. “Ever hear of Bastogne?”

“Maybe, who knows, who cares.”

“I know, and I care. That’s where my brother was, in December 1944. Belgian town, surrounded by the Krauts. He took a chunk of shrapnel to the stomach. He was dying. Maybe he could have lived if he wasn’t in so much pain…but the medics, they were low on morphine. They could only use morphine on guys they thought might live. So my brother…no morphine…he died in agony. Hours it took for him to die, because the medics were short on morphine.”

Mandy said, “A great story, Billy. A very touching story. Look, you want a tissue or something?”

And moving quickly, she opened up her purse and took out a small, nickel-plated semiautomatic pistol.

“Sorry, Billy, but this is how it’s going to be. You’re going to give me back my box, you’re going to take me back to the dock, and if you’re a good boy, I’ll make sure only a leg or an arm gets broken. How’s that for a deal?”

I thought for a moment, now staring at a face I didn’t recognize, and said, “I’ve heard better.”

And I tossed the box and the morphine syrettes into the dark waters.

She screamed and shouted something, and I was moving quick, which was good, because she got off a shot that pounded over my head as I ducked and grabbed something at the bottom of the boat, tugging it free, then dropped overboard. The shock of the cold water almost made me open my mouth, but I was more or less used to it. I came up coughing, splashing, and my flashlight was still on the boat, still lit up, which made it easy for me to see what happened next.

The skiff was rocking and filling with water as Mandy moved to the rear, trying to get the engine started, I think, but with her added weight at the stern, it quickly swamped and flipped over, dumping her in. She screamed. She screamed again. “Billy! Please! I can’t swim! Please!”

I raised my hand, holding the drain plug to the rear of the skiff, and let it go.

She floundered some more. Splashing. Yelling. Coughing. It would be easy enough to get over there, calm her down, put her in the approved life-saving mode, my arm about her, to pull her safely to shore. So easy to do, for I could have easily found her in the darkness by following the splashes and yells.

The yells. I had heard later, from someone in my brother’s platoon, how much he had yelled toward the end.

I moved some, was able to gauge where she was, out there in the darkness.

And then I turned and swam in the other direction.

BY STEWART O’NAN

Brookline

Sometimes Boupha honestly found them. She thought it was a gift. Her father said she wasn’t so special-anybody could. He should know because it was his game; he’d been running it since he’d been driving a cab. After a while you developed an eye, like a hunter.

“American people don’t see anything,” he said. “People like us, we have to.”

He’d taught her well, as he never tired of reminding her. Late August, when the college kids moved in, she watched the park. Winter she cruised the potholed lots behind the apartments on Jersey. In spring the long flats of Beacon beyond Kenmore were littered with the dead-worth just as much, and less trouble, besides the smell. In her trunk she kept garbage bags and rubber gloves, an aerosol can of Oust.

Each season brought a new crop, that was the genius of it. Her father was the one who’d realized the possibilities. Now that he could no longer drive, Boupha used his badge, working twelve-hour shifts to pay his hospital bills. After all his talk about keeping her eyes open, he’d been going fifty on Storrow Drive in the rain when he rear-ended a stopped tow truck. His head bent the steering wheel. The wheel could be fixed but not her father. The doctors had saved his life so he could lie in a special bed and watch TV. “Boupha!” he called when he needed anything. “Boupha!” Their apartment wasn’t large enough to escape his voice. He’d had a sly sense of humor before the accident, a con man’s easy charm. Now her smallest mistake sent him into a rage. She hated leaving him alone because sometimes, for no reason, he screamed. The upstairs neighbors had complained.