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By Root 994 0

twenty-six-year-old girlfriend Debra Davis. Debra had been brought to the house a year earlier because Stevie was worried that she was trying to leave him for some guy she met on a vacation to Mexico. It’s open to debate exactly who strangled Debra that night in Mary’s basement. Stevie said Jimmy did it, but Jimmy told me Stevie kissed her on the forehead and told her she was going to a better place. Where she went was to a grave on the Quincy side of the Neponset Bridge where the train goes over the bridge and where the two of them buried her at low tide.

I never met Debra, but it’s public knowledge that she was knock-dead gorgeous. And seventeen when she started to date the forty-plus Stevie. I blame her mother for Debra’s death. What kind of a mother lets her teenage daughter date a man that age? Especially a man like Stevie. If I had a teenage daughter and a forty-year-old guy showed up at my door, he’d have a problem. He’d be going in the hole.

After Debra got killed, Stevie convinced Jimmy to go on a vacation to Mexico with him. Jimmy told me he didn’t realize till he got there that it wasn’t a vacation. It was a pilgrimage. Stevie only wanted to trace Debra’s footsteps during her trip so he could find the guy she planned to dump him for. And kill him. Jimmy was grateful they never found the guy. I should have been grateful that Jimmy hadn’t involved me in that murder. Guess he felt killing a beautiful girl wasn’t the best way to initiate me into murder. But Halloran’s killing was.

That May night at Stevie’s parents’ house, Jimmy and Stevie were still discussing Halloran’s murder. Stevie was occasionally laughing, and Jimmy was maybe a little more excited than usual, but he was still pretty much his typical calm self. Never mentioning the guy in the back seat of the Tow Truck, Jimmy told Stevie how the gun had stayed on semiautomatic. How much better it was to place the shots that way. How he made the U-turn and fired into the back of the head of the driver. How he didn’t realize who the driver was. How the guy’s head fucking exploded when he shot through the back window. How we had to go back and get the hubcap. All the while we were chowing down spaghetti with eggplant and veal parmesan.

Around ten, the three of us drove over to Castle Island and walked around. It was a beautiful night, but the two of them couldn’t stop talking about the murder. A little before midnight, Jimmy dropped off Stevie and took me back to my car, which was back on Third Street at the Mullins Club, and I drove home.

My wife and I watched some late news, which was the same recap about a gangland slaying. Pam had no idea that I was involved in that murder. She knew I was involved with Jim Bulger, but she knew no particulars about exactly what I did with him. I had no fear of being caught, but I was tired and knew I had to get up to work in the morning. I slept okay and got up early the next morning and went down to a breakfast place on K and Broadway. I got the newspaper, sat down in a booth, and ordered eggs, sunny-side-up, an English muffin to dunk in the yolk, orange juice, and coffee. I was reading the paper and eating when Jimmy Mantville came over to my table. Mantville, who was in his forties, five-nine, around 160 pounds, with curly brown hair and in great shape, sat down, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “We finally got him.”

I just looked at him and smiled, thinking, I know I was there, but I don’t remember seeing you. Unless you were the one in the ski mask. He kept talking about Halloran and what a piece of shit he was. How he was a bully who threw his weight around, intimidating people, just taking stuff and never paying for it, pounding on people for no reason. And I listened and continued eating my breakfast.

That night, I was waiting for Jimmy to tell me to get the Tow Truck out of the garage and bring it down to the mechanic so he could fix the odometer. But since I hadn’t heard from Jimmy about the car, I left it there. It came out that evening that Halloran had given a dying declaration that Jimmy Flynn had