Strangled - Brian McGrory [153]
“Barney, Sammy,” he said into the phone. “Oh, did I wake you…How’s the island been…? You’re using sunscreen, I hope, on that fair skin of yours…Your wife ever ask after me…? Listen, I’m in the market for a favor and I need it now…You’re going to have to go over to the Back Bay post office…I’m sending a guy over there, name of Jack. He’s like my son, but not as good-looking. He needs to go inside…Huh…? What…? Yeah, inside the post office. He’s looking for something. Do whatever you can to help him out…Call me sometime from Nantucket. I want to see if you really can hear the waves from your porch.”
And that was that. I rapped the scratched tabletop twice with the side of my hand as I got up to go.
“Wait a minute,” Markowitz called out after me.
I turned around and he said, “What the hell do I get out of the deal?”
Good question. I replied, “You got the opportunity to do something really good.”
He shook his head in mock indignation, pulled the cigarette off his lip, and said, “What the hell good is that? You owe me, kid. You owe me.”
He was right, I did. As the old saying goes, when you’re looking for a pig, you don’t search the cosmetics counter at Saks. Or something like that.
I slipped out the door, from fetid air to fresh, snapped open the passenger door to my idling car, the dog still asleep in the back, and told Mongillo, “Back to the post office.”
And we were off, one more stop amid a long day in an awful week in an increasingly uncertain life. One way or another, I suspected it would be our last.
42
When my cell phone rang, I snapped it open so hard I almost snapped it apart. “Flynn here,” I said.
Mongillo was deftly steering my car over the Mystic-Tobin Bridge, the mostly darkened towers of Boston’s Financial District spread out in the near distance below. Huck was snoring in the backseat, oblivious, virtuously so, to all that was wrong in this world.
“Sweeney here.” Hank Sweeney, to be more precise. His voice, as always, was soft, velvety, and welcomed.
“How’s things?” I asked, my pulse slowing for the moment.
“Well, two goons, both newly hired employees of The New York Times, just picked up Elizabeth Riggs, escorted her to the airport, and are getting her out of this crazy town via a company-hired jet. So you should feel good about that.”
“I do.” At least I thought I did. I had to further process the fact that she was gone, though safe, before I could make that same declaration to myself.
“Which frees me up to spend a little more quality time with you,” Sweeney said. He paused, gave me that purring chuckle, and added, “Of course, anytime you and I spend together is quality time.”
“How about we begin anew in about five minutes, in front of the Back Bay post office. I need some help committing a felony — all toward a good cause.”
“Such a coincidence,” Hank replied. “I just happen to be feeling very felonious.” And like that, the line went dead.
Vinny Mongillo glided up to the front of the post office, a hulking brick building that sits on the corner of Stuart and Clarendon Streets in the shadows of the tallest building in Boston, the John Hancock Tower.
I said to him, “You don’t have to do this. You can watch the car, stay with the dog, and I’ll slip in there with Hank.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” he said. “By the end of this night, we’re going to know who killed my mother, one way or another, and I’m going to be front and center in bringing that information home.”
I wasn’t about to argue with that.
Hank was waiting outside, dressed in black, looking like little more than a silhouette. I told the dog to guard the car, though he didn’t so much as open an eye in acknowledgment. As Vinny and I joined Hank outside, my cell phone rang yet again.
“Flynn here.”
“I’m the guy who’s helping you.”
I couldn’t be so sure, especially since the car that at that precise moment was rolling slowly past on Stuart Street bore a striking resemblance to a vehicle parked two spaces behind us at the Pigpen. Thinking even more quickly than usual, I asked,